Partner Nicholas V. Chen participated in a session titled “Conducting Business Across Cultures” for the Asia-Pacific Americans (“APA”) Program during the 2010 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is an international exposition of living cultural heritage annually produced outdoors on the National Mall of the United States in Washington, D.C., by the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
The Festival takes place for two weeks every summer overlapping the Fourth of July holiday. It is an educational presentation that features community-based cultural exemplars. Free to the public, like other Smithsonian museums, each Festival typically draws more than one million visitors.
The APA program brings together people from diverse communities to highlight the breadth of traditions practiced by APA cultures, and make connections not only to each other, but to the broader communities in which they live, work, and play. Through interactions with theater, music, and dance performances; language and calligraphy traditions; martial arts, healing arts, and ritual arts; crafts and foodways demonstrations; sports and games presentations; and children’s activities, Festival visitors will learn about APA identity, history, and culture, and discover shared and integrated traditions among APAs.