Though the Asian World Center is small and its participants humble, the organization has set very high goals for contributing to Creighton students’ education.
The Asian World Center (AWC) was founded by political-science professor Maorong Jiang in 2006. One of its main events, Asian Culture Week, has been going on since before the AWC was founded. This year the AWC held the 10th week-long event dedicated to educating people about eastern culture.
“Asian Culture Week started at the very beginning of 2005 as ‘Non-Western Culture Week,’” said Jiang. “[It] was sponsored through a grant donated by a very generous donor, Dan Semrad. He supported everything Asian, or non-western.
“We see so many eastern things in our country, in the west, and we also see so many western things in the east, in Asia. So I think this contribution on the part of Dan Semrad really goes ahead of time to breach the giant cultural countenance across the divide of the Pacific Ocean and we are very grateful and inspired by his spirit of getting people educated.”
According to Scott Jordan, a graduate student in the East-West Studies program and the executive assistant at the AWC, the point of Asian Culture Week is to expose people at Creighton to eastern culture in a variety of ways.
“Through a series of lectures and activities, artistic performances, different films or other activities, [we] try and bring Asian culture to Creighton,” Jordan said.
Asian Culture Week took place from Nov. 17-23. This year’s theme was “The World Is Broken, Now What? An East-West Conversation.”
“’The world is broken’ is a big theme because the modern world has brought on a lot of stresses and a lot of turbulences that [we’re all experiencing],” Jordan said. “I don’t think it’s a bold claim to say that there are things that are not working in this world.
“This year we wanted Asian Culture Week to kind of reflect the idea of a bridge between the east and west and we really want to not only just create a bridge but maintain a well-established bridge that connects these two worlds and gets them to come together. Bridges can look pretty, but they’re useless if you don’t actually cross them.”
Each day featured different speakers or activities such as movie presentations. The week culminated in a keynote address by law professor Patrick Borchers on the future of higher education. According to Jiang, this lecture connected with another main theme of the week, to focus on a future perspective rather than a historical one.
“The world is broken, now what? Let’s build a new history based on a futuristic view,” Jiang said. “I love history, but we cannot rely on history all the time. We have to look forward.”
Another topic during the week was on spirituality among the eastern and western cultures. The Rev. Richard Hauser, S.J., and business professor Vasant Raval both gave presentations on Nov. 20 in a series titled “Finding God in Troubled Time and Finding Soul in Work and Life.”
“Father Hauser presented first […] he kind of reflected on Christianity from the perspective of the east and identified basically the similarities between what the west has and what the east has, and essentially did some contrasts as well,” Raval said.
“I followed him and essentially laid out some rather unique characteristics of the east which I think people needed to know because in the audience we had hardly any who had a good understanding of the east. I kind of basically spoke from the perspective of the east, identifying the key distinctions, the key differentiations between what I believe is the western world and what the eastern metaphysics have to offer.”
Raval says the most important concept he wanted his audience to learn from his presentation was the importance of the ability to control one’s thoughts.
“Sometimes if we don’t control our thoughts, and allow our minds to get into everything, you’re going to find the rest of the actions can emerge from them,” Raval said. “To me, it seems like if you’re able to control your thoughts and stop some of them that tempt you to become self-centric, then you’re better off because prevention is much better than detection and correction and all the clean-up after that.”
Raval’s presentation was based on a book he co-authored with his wife, assistant professor Prafulla Raval, titled Finding Soul in Work and Life. He has previously given workshops on his book through the AWC and appeared on their radio show, “Tea Talk Asia,” which is hosted by Jordan.
Since 2011, the AWC has also collaborated with the Center for Global Nonkilling, founded by professor Glenn Paige at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Jiang serves as a member of the Governing Council for the Center for Global Nonkilling.
“The AWC advocates for one important thing, that is non-killing,” Jiang said. “We publish this book series with the Center for Global Non-Killing, we co-sponsor it. We advocate that the state should drop the vital means of violence, like jail, police, violent task-forces […] you advocate the wrong message for the people [when] you stop violence with violence.
“If the state and the government advocate peace as a means to solve the violence, even if some people may lose power and even if some people [may] die, in comparison to a major war affair that kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, [politically] and economically, I think it’s worth it to try.”
The Reinert Alumni-Memorial Library presented a display of the texts co-sponsored by the AWC and the Center for Global Nonkilling throughout the week.
Asian Culture Week is just one of many programs the AWC puts on throughout the year. According to Jiang, they have had more than 400 events since 2006, from distinguished lectures to art exhibitions. All of these events aim to educate people about Asian culture.
“I find that the western [world] has so much to contribute to us easterners, and that’s why I [came] to learn,” Jiang said. “The more I learn, the more I feel we have so [many] things in common and it would be wonderful if we could share the differences and see the commonality.”
Raval believes that understanding different cultures is becoming an important element to education on Creighton’s campus.
“It’s really important for people here to understand diversity and one way to look into the topic of diversity is through east-west connections,” Raval said. “Also the world has gone global, for example the business students, when they take a field trip to some foreign country, they need to understand why they behave the way they do and so I think the Asian World Center has a critical role to play [in this] and I would support that 100%.”
Jiang hopes to continue using the AWC to educate people not just on Asian culture, but new ideas and concepts that can benefit their western students and colleagues.
“The AWC is tiny, but we have a heart for the whole university,” Jiang said. “We just want to be an ordinary person doing a good thing, as so many other people do. That’s the beauty of our organization.”