This weekend, I spent half my Saturday reading essays from high school students applying for some scholarships being handed out by the National Association of Asian American Professionals. I was invited, along with about 20 others to be on this judging panel to award $2500 to four outstanding applicants. And one of the essay questions was "How would you increase the visibility of Asian Americans?"

As I read through essay after essay, favoring the ones that actually said they were going to do something about increasing visibility as opposed to those who simply stated HOW it could be done without really committing to any personal action on their part, two questions kept popping into my head.

1. Should we do it together or do it apart?

A lot of these kids' suggestions involved "banding together" or "uniting" with other Asian Americans to build "solidarity", "a stronger voice" or "a larger presence." But for almost 50 years now, we've had these APA organizations, some with memberships in the thousands, but for some reason we still don't have enough visibility. And when I think about which Asian Americans ARE visible, it's the ones who are standing outside of our Asian communities and making their mark on "mainstream" America. The Bobby Jindals, the Michelle Kwans and, yes, the William Hungs. Each one of these individuals has raised Asian American visibility as much if not more than any one of these APA organizations with their thousands of members. And they didn't do it by sticking with their own, but by going out ON their own.

I don't deny that there is strength in numbers. But there's something admirable about "the power of one."

As a group, we'll probably never command the same obvious mass numbers of African Americans and Latinos in this country. And by isolating ourselves within our own communities, we do nothing to help the rest of America see and get to know us. But outside of our participation in these groups, most of us DO lead our daily lives among the mainstream. I think the trick is to fight our "Asian" tendencies to not draw attention to ourselves and instead make some noise, rock the boat and strive for greatness. Like the Bobby Jindals, the Michelle Kwans, but please tone down the William Hung in you.

Now for the second question:

2. How will we know when we've increased our visibility enough?

I come from a marketing background and one of the things you always need to do on any marketing plan is to measure your results. Now I've been volunteering with APA organizations for almost 2 decades now and almost all of them have "raising awareness" as part of their goal. But when is enough enough? Depending on who you talk to, Asians make up 9% - 10% of this country's population, but I don't see many statistics on how many Asian Americans are in the media (in front or behind the camera). Or how many are in government, or how many are in corporate America. And even if their were, would 10% be enough? Or would we want to exceed the representative number of 10%. We probably do so anyway in the medical, science and technology fields, in convenience store, restaurant and small hotel ownership. And we're probably way under-represented in competitive sports especially NASCAR and professional wrestling. (Not necessarily a bad thing)

But the bottomline is, if we're going to expend as much effort and resources as we do on "raising our visibility" shouldn't we be keeping track of the results by some measurable standard? If not, then, as we say in marketing, "we're just throwing our money away."

So maybe we need to put together a panel from APA organizations across the country and together list ALL the areas and industries we want to actually raise our visibility in. A quota system if you like. Basing it on the total number of people working in those fields, we can come up with a representative number for each of them. Maybe 10,000 doctors, 15,000 engineers. We should also include the less popular occupations, like 1000 plumbers, or 500 window washers. But I draw the line at professional wrestling.

This is a reprint of an article that appeared in Asians in America Magazine.