Secret Identities at ECAASU’09 at Rutgers University

   Wow.  First of all that is all I really have to say.  When we were invited to be guests and do a workshop at Ecaasu yesterday, I had no idea what I was in store for.  Now, I’ve spoken on my own at a few schools in the past…and figured this was going to be the same.  Only asian students though.

   Again….WOW.  How wrong I was.  This was like nothing I have ever experienced.  There was such a strong turnout and a HUGE gathering of asian american students in one place.  It was really…I mean it was really nice to see this.

Secret Identities Editors

   We were there to bring awareness to our project, Secret Identities.  We(Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow and myself) were taking preorders for the book thru the school store at Rutgers.  And with each preorder, we were giving a bookplate.  Which is essentially a large sticker that is used to put on the inside front cover of the book.  The bookplate was a pencil drawing I did of a few characters from the book.  And each bookplate each of the editors signed and I did a quick doodle on them.  

   So there were quite a few cool things that happened while we were out there.  First of all, I wanted to thank the ECAASU staff and volunteers for their hospitality.  They really made the event first rate for us.  We were even given a BODYGUARD.  haha

I think this was largely in part to having Parry Shen as one of the editors.  I know they weren’t worried about a mob of ppl swarming my punkass.

   The BIG strong guy is Dave, our bodyguard.  And he is one cool dude.  He is a Sergeant for the Police force of Toronto Canada.  And he can handle his liquor.  haha

   But we gave a workshop which consisted of about 50 students.  Where we broke the kids up into groups and had them work on creating a Asian American comic character and sketch them out.  Then they would present their story/character to the rest of the workshop.  After which, we would then all vote on our favorite one.  Then while the Q&A was going on, I would sketch out the winning character.  And we had a raffle within the workshop where the winner would win the sketch I drew.  It seriously went really really well.  I was impressed with how seriously the students took the exercise.  There was basically no goofing off.  

   After we did our workshop we had dinner.  And after that we were taking over to a large theatre where we were giving our Key Note speech.  This was the really amazing part of the day.  I mean…this was a nice place.  And it was HUGE.  These photos that Dave was good enough to take for me, will basically explain the day much better than I can.

   And finally…I just have to mention this since this has never happened to me before.  But we had our own dressing room backstage next to the Green Room.

This was totally funny to me.  As…I mean…I was already changed.  But it was nice to have a room just to keep my….hat in.

   Overall, this was an amazing experience.  I never even knew what ECAASU was until just a month ago.  And I really didn’t know what it was until just yesterday.

  Ok…I’m pretty exhausted.  Talk to you guys later.

-Jerry