The year started off with a bang in Las Vegas! Around 70 TACL program members gathered in Las Vegas for a weekend of bonding, resource sharing, personal development, and awareness. The theme for this convention was Cirque du TACL with a focus on understanding the diversity of identities, personalities, and beliefs in our community. We hope everyone who attended was able to learn something new and useful.

FRIDAY

Convention officially commenced Friday night with a happy hour at Velveteen Rabbit, a craft cocktail and beer bar situated in the heart of the Arts District in Downtown Las Vegas. With conversations humming throughout the night, we reconnected with old friends and met new ones over $4 punch, vintage decor, and dim Edison lighting. After happy hour, some groups went out to satisfy late night cravings (hello tacos and noodles), explore Fremont Street, and engage in other nighttime amusements (but nothing too crazy of course, since we had an early start the next day).

SATURDAY

Early morning starts mean early morning delicious breakfast. We had Taiwanese baozi (meat and veggie options) in addition to you tiao and soy milk. After a warm welcome from new TACL President, Wellington Tzou, we answered a series of survey questions to learn more about the demographics and background of attendees. Then we broke off into groups to play a tumultuous round of ninja. We remained in the same small groups and spent some time sharing stories of our families and our journeys in exploring Taiwanese/Asian American identities.

We then paused sessions for lunch and enjoyed Taiwanese bian dang.

Following lunch was the keynote by John Chiang, California’s 33rd State Treasurer. John gave an inspirational and candid talk on some of the challenges for our community, the “bamboo ceiling”, and what we need to do to overcome it. Many of us resonated with the idea that it is necessary to intentionally create more positions of leadership for Asian Americans and build partnerships with other communities to gain allies in that struggle. A huge thank you to John Chiang for taking time out of his schedule to fly out to Las Vegas on a Saturday to spend time with us.

The afternoon featured sessions that tackled more serious topics. First on the agenda was a discussion on the #MeToo movement. We separated out into small groups, broken out by gender, to discuss our feelings around the movement, how we can be better allies and supporters of the movement, and questions we had for the opposite gender. Then we shuffled up the groups to form new ones with at least two of each gender represented. We went around and asked each other the questions we prepared during the first group discussion. The second session of the afternoon focused on creating a more welcoming environment for LGBTQIA. We talked about words and phrases that are commonly said but are offensive to the LGBTQIA community. Then we shared some do’s and don’ts of fostering a more inclusive culture. From these two sessions, we were able to build awareness on how we can be more sensitive and inclusive in our organizational culture and programming.

Saturday night ended with a family style banquet dinner at Joyful House Chinese Cuisine. We enjoyed a 11 course meal featuring steamed fish, salt pepper fried pork chops, Peking duck, and more. Bellies full of delectable food, we had the perfect end of convention day 1.

SUNDAY

We had a later start on Sunday, beginning with a meet your counterpart session, where we split up by role and shared best practices over breakfast (fantuan!). The next session was on how we can better engage our alumni. As we gain more and more alumni over the years, how do we reach out and ensure that our alumni are connected? In groups, we discussed the importance of alumni engagement in our community, goals for engagement, and how we can achieve these goals.

After our morning sessions, we walked over to Container Park for a group photo and lunch. Sessions resumed after lunch with a session around understanding different personalities and motivational values. We took a quick motivational values assessment and split up into different personality groups. In our groups, we discussed how to better manage challenging relationships with people of different personality types and motivational value systems. As leaders of our programs, we interact with a diverse group of people where situations can lead to conflict, and the goal of this exercise was to help us learn how to better deal with these situations and mitigate them.

The last session of convention was the quietest card came ever! We split up into groups of 4 and received a deck of cards to play. Each group received a set of instructions on how to play the game, and they were given a few minutes to practice. Then the tournament began. The rules were that there could be no talking or writing words, however, we could make gestures and draw pictures. After playing for 5 minutes, each group tallied up scores. The winning person moved up to the next group, and the losing person moved down to the previous group. The tournament went on for 4 rounds, each time with the winner and loser migrating to a new group. But wait. There was a twist. Each group was given a different set of instructions at the very beginning. The instructions all had different rules and criteria for winning. The goal of the session was so we could learn about making assumptions, effective communication, and what happens when we are not utilizing the same rules.

After sessions ended, Wellington gave closing remarks and we exchanged gifts for Secret Santa. To close out the day and convention, we headed out to small group dinners. Options included AYCE sushi, Northern Thai cuisine, and Korean fusion.

Thank you to everyone who journeyed to Fabulous Las Vegas to attend convention. Until next time!