By Chris Fuchs
Adam Kim, the executive vice president of the Korean American Association, one of the groups that comprises the Lunar New Year Parade 2001 committee, said the ex-presidents of the association met last week to decide on what course of action to take to stem the feuding. Soon after, Kim said, officials from the second coalition, the Lunar New Year Committee, agreed to unite and work with this year's coalition.
“I always said that if you have an internal problem, we should solve it internally instead of going out and looking like we're divided,” Kim said in an interview Friday.
Initially, the slightest hint of such internal rumblings had been well concealed by the two organizing committees. On Nov. 22, the chairman of Community Board 7, Adrian Joyce, and members of the Lunar New Year Parade 2000 committee held a news conference to announce the formation of this year's parade coalition. Present were members of the Flushing Chinese Business Association and the Korean American Association of Flushing, among others.
But then the feuding turned into public theater, finding its way into newspapers and onto Asian television stations. A second coalition, the Lunar New Year Parade (without the 2001 in its name), organized its own press conference a week later, charging that the chairman of Community Board 7 had appointed by fiat this year's committee and had done so to create, and widen, an ethnic rift in the Asian-American community. The committee also said Adrian Joyce should resign.
Now, nearly a month later, it seems as though the rhetoric has quieted.
The prospect of the parade's cancellation crystallized when the police received two separate parade permit requests, both for the same day, both for the same route, but both from two separate groups. The first filing was made by the Lunar New Year Committee Festival 2001 on Sept. 25, said Officer Robert Cahill of the 109th Precinct, and the second by the Lunar New Year Committee on Nov. 16. The police had said if the two coalitions did not reconcile their differences, a permit would not be issued and by default the parade would be canceled.
Neither group seemed eager to shoulder that burden. So during the last month, the Lunar New Year Parade 2001 committee, chaired by Fred Fu, the president of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, had taken a forceful role in keeping the Asian media informed about the parade goings-on, scheduling news conferences once a week, usually on Thursdays. Little news came out of those conferences other than that the committee was poised to take any measure to ensure that the parade was not cancelled, even if it involved forfeiting its own permit application in favor of the other committee's.
In years past, the parade has sometimes stirred the chauvinistic leanings of Asian Americans, in particular, of the Korean-, Chinese- and Taiwanese-Americans. From 1995, the first year of the parade, to 1997, the festival was billed as the “Chinese Lunar New Year Parade,” a name with which Korean-Americans took issue. So in 1998, in an effort to make the parade more inclusive, the organizers agreed to call it simply “The Lunar New Year Festival.” Koreans marched en masse for the first time.
