UCLA Culture Nights: Extended Educational Entertainment

UCLA isn't all about football and an overrated film school (come on, you have to admit that USC's is less selective and has produced more big names). Sure, it's also about fraternities, sororities, non-stop parties, beautiful girls, a coveted business school program, a faculty list of many Nobel laureates, and state-of-the-art research. You probably have already heard about all these characteristics that make UCLA the university that it is. But have you heard of Culture Nights?

Besides "University of California, Los Angeles," "UCLA" also stands for a number of things, like "Under Construction Like Always" and "University of Caucasians Lost Among Asians." Both are apt descriptions. Obviously, Asians are not the only ethnicities represented on the UCLA campus, but there is no Jewish Culture Night or African American Culture Night or Latin American Culture Night (if there is, then it's not widely publicized). There are Thai Culture Night, Vietnamese Culture Night, Korean Culture Night, Taiwanese Culture Night, Pilipino Culture Night, and a Culture Night for almost every other Asian ethnicity you can think of.

The former President of the Association of Chinese Americans (ACA), the largest undergraduate student group at UCLA as of 2004 and producers of one of UCLA's oldest Culture Nights, once said to me after visiting a university somewhere in the East Coast, "They have one Asian club there. It's called Asia. I think Asians [in California, at UCLA] are just club-happy."

He was joking, of course. Culture Nights are not unique to UCLA; they are all over the University of California system (maybe less so at Santa Barbara). California's a special place in that it has perhaps the most ethnically diverse population in the country. Culture Nights are more than a mere excuse for Asians to hang out with one another and form clubs. Much more than that.