Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Creating an event that would bring together the variety of Asian communities in Utah was no small feat. Utah Asian Festival founder Margaret Yee said launching the festival in 1977 was a small, grassroots effort.
"It was like planting a seed. We needed to be patient in getting people involved," Yee said. "As you can imagine, there were not many of us here at the time."
Festival organizers had their share of hiccups in those early years. Yee said it was difficult to find volunteers with the technical skills to pull off the performances, and Yee taught dances to the performers herself in the absence of a cultural dance school in the area. Cultural costumes for performers had to be mailed from an embassy in San Francisco, and only a handful of Asian countries were represented.
But 46 years later, the festival is the longest-running continuous event of its kind held this side of the Mississippi River. Yee said the festival now has hundreds of volunteers, and it represents over 40 Asian ethnic groups in Utah. In 2022, the event drew its largest crowd yet of over 20,000 people.
"The growth of the festival exploded last year thanks to an influx of younger volunteer organizers. They share the founders' unwavering commitment to uplifting our many cultures, but have brought with them novel technologies and ideas propelling the festival to new heights as a grand celebration for the entire state," Yee said. "My heart is full seeing the fruits of our labor still ripe after 46 years."
This year, the festival will be held Saturday, June 3, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Utah State Fairpark. Admission is free, but fairground parking is $15 (free UTA and GreenBike rides are also available).
The festival will feature two stages of live dance, music and cultural performances, ranging from Chinese lion dance to Filipino martial arts and K-pop dance numbers. Festival goers can also peruse over 30 food and beverage booths and over 60 marketplace vendors.
More information about the festival booths and schedule as well as transportation options is available on the festival website.
Building on tradition and welcoming new ideas
The festival organizers hope the event will connect recent immigrants and refugees to the historic diasporas in the region and will honor over 150 years of Asian American contributions and perseverance in Utah, from Chinese railroad workers who helped connect the West and Japanese families who were forcibly detained in the Topaz Internment Camp in Delta to refugees who came in the '70s from Southeast Asia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and other Asian countries.
"This celebration is important to us because we believe in the Utah that isn't celebrated enough. The Utah that is home to over 60,000 asylum-seekers and thousands more like myself, who have come from faraway lands but take pride in calling this place our refuge," first-time festival co-chair Gechlang Ear said in a statement. "Of course, we walk in the footsteps of giants. Thank you Auntie Margaret and all those who kept the flame of Pan-Asian unity in Utah going for decades, without whom we might have never found each other in the first place."
Although the festival builds on decades of hard work from community elders like Yee, a younger wave of organizers is making sure the festival grows with the state's Asian population. Yee plans to keep volunteering for the festival as long as she can, but she said it has been exciting to see how many young American Asians have gotten involved.
"They are energetic, active and innovative with new ideas to gain more community involvement," she said. "It gives me such a sense of pride and excitement knowing that our cultural traditions will be taught to future generations. It's so important to recognize and cherish each of our individual histories and this is one way of doing that."
For younger organizers like festival chairman Emilio Manuel Camu, a big part of their role has been introducing new ideas to the festival, such as drawing in more youth volunteers and opening up the festival to Asian-owned small businesses and restaurants rather than just nonprofits.
Finding community
Despite growing up in Utah, Camu didn't find out about the festival until he was a college student in 2012. Camu grew up in a predominantly white area of Utah to Filipino immigrant parents. The family tried to be involved in the Filipino community, but doing so was difficult because of how far they lived from other community members. It wasn't until college that Camu said he became more involved in the community. He invited individuals who are struggling to find that sense of community to reach out to him and other festival volunteers.
"The benefit is being part of such a vast support system where you don't have to explain who you are. You just are and you're a part of it," he said, adding that the invitation is extended to those who may not feel a strong connection to their Asian heritage, including those who are mixed race or adopted. "You have a home; you have community here."
Camu says the event is like a big Asian family reunion. He likened it to the Filipino concept of "bayanihan," which refers to a spirit of community and everyone having their own part and role to play.
"Our aunties and uncles, it's not that they just pass on their wisdom and their knowledge to us. But I think we really have created this family because we call each other nephew, aunt and uncle or like big sister and younger brother," he said. "We have all of these honorifics that we use within our communities, but now we're having a Filipino call a Korean 'uncle.' We're having a Nepali woman calling a Chinese woman 'auntie.'
"We're all just so embedded and interwoven into each other. It really is a friendship."
