She was a whirlwind swirling into the hotel lobby. "Hi, you're Loni Ding, I'm Christine Choy, these your bags?"--singlehandedly grabbing all my stuff and whipping out of there. That was 20 years ago, in 1980, our first East/West meeting organizing a national Conference in San Francisco to create NAATA.

We hadn't even seen each other's work yet. We were the hard core group of independent film-makers. From the East Coast--Christine with NY Newsreel; David Liu, independent producer; Danny Yung and Peter Chow with NY Asian CineVision; Stephen Ning, independent, with his moving FRECKLED RICE (we lost Stephen to an embolism), and Jim Yee with a multi-service Asian Community Center and Rebop (WGBH) in Boston. And on the West Coast, Steve Tatsukawa (how could we lose him too to an embolism) and Duane Kubo from LA's Visual Communications. Up north, Elaine Kim in one sitting wrote all the one page summaries of each Asian American group's history in America, and Louise Lo, Spencer Nakasako and I put together the founding Conference of 75-85 invited participants. It was hosted and housed on the UC Berkeley campus, and not everybody was ready for co-ed living in a college dorm.

But we all agreed the high point was the late night screenings at which we discovered each other's work, and especially the great free home-made Asian gourmet snacks and meals catered by a student volunteer. She understood the basic thing: eating good food together helps make us into one big happy rice ball. Surely this is an Asian thing -- like when you go to a new town, and on your last day there, at the last possible moment, you finally make the phone call promised:

"Yes, yes, mom, I'll call when I get there, and introduce myself to Uncle so-and-so..."

And what does Uncle S/S say?

"Where are you? Did you eat yet? We're just sitting down, come over right now!"

The arriving conferees hardly knew each other, but immediately acted like we were joined at the shoulder, assembling the thick Conference packets at the last minute, from late nite into dawn. We had to get it done, but more importantly, we were united intuitively in improvising how together we were for the eyes of the visiting CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) funders. At that time CPB was already seriously ambivalent about whether they should allow "still another minority consortium" to come into being. CPB was changing, and we had to move fast, to make it happen. "This Summer of 1980"(we were advised) "... or never". I remember handing some brochure pages to a CPB manager who good-naturedly joined the assembly line.

Twenty years later it's now time to try for that unity again. Can we work with NAATA to build a functioning Asian American media community out of our amazing talents, diversity and range of creative genres?
• small supportive affinity groups who regularly meet to view, seriously discuss and help carry out each other's work;
• imaginative partnerships to do media projects with visual or performing artists, community groups and/or political mobilizations, etc.

Locally and regionally doing this face-to-face, and nationally/intergalactically via the internet. At the WTO in Seattle they proclaimed, "Teamsters and Turtles...together at last". Planned...detailed...democratic...bold...joyful... gutsy... forgiving....successful! How about us? After 30 years doing media what do I personally still want? I 'm happy if my work can walk right into the hearts and brains of people--leaving behind understandings to ponder ...revealing experiences of people no longer strangers. And maybe more than that, I want my work to serve social justice.