Thank you to Amy Tran for the introduction and to the Eastside AAPI Heritage Committee for putting this together. I had a prepared speech. I'm going to set it aside.
My parents have been in Crossroads for thirty-nine years. Their accounting practice shares a wall with a dentist's office. Most of their clients still pay in cash. When I was eight my dad let me sit in the back and label folders for a quarter each. I made twelve dollars one Saturday and thought I had cracked the economy.
Our community has been here for generations. We're not new. We're not a trend. We deserve more than a hashtag in May. We deserve hate-crime data that tracks us correctly, because the current category structure undercounts us by half. We deserve in-language services in clinics and schools. And we deserve to be the ones in the room when somebody decides what AAPI Heritage Month means.
The state of Washington is going to invest in our community this year because it should have been doing it all along. I'll send the bill numbers around next week. Tonight, eat. The dumplings are from Din Tai Fung. The boba is from Sharetea. Both of which I have called my district office during the workday on more than one occasion.
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