Annual Michelle Meow Year-End Celebration: Highlighting the Contributions of the LGBTQ+ AAPI Community

It's almost 2022, and it's time to gather together #IRL for our annual year-end Michelle Meow celebration.

Join us for a celebration of another successful year of "The Michelle Meow Show" at The Commonwealth Club of California. Enjoy some great speakers, food and wine, artwork and fun.

About the Speakers

César Cadabes is a Hawaii born and raised, San Francisco-based queer, Filipino-American solo performance artist and HIV/AIDS activist. He is also an Advisory Board member for the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District. Upon moving to San Francisco in the mid-1980s, César was soon involved in the local response to the AIDS epidemic, working as a front-line HIV prevention health educator at the West Bay Pilipino AIDS Education Project, The GAPA Community HIV Project and the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center (now the San Francisco Community Health Center). He also served as the executive director of Mālama Pono—Kaua`i AIDS Project. He currently coordinates events and communication for the UCSF Bay Area Center for AIDS Research and is a member of the San Francisco HIV Community Planning Council and the State of California Office of AIDS HIV Community Planning Group. He was also involved in one of the many artistic responses to the AIDS epidemic, as a volunteer for Love Like This Theater, a CDC-funded program of the Asian AIDS Project. 

As an artist, Cadabes recently premiered a workshop performance of his first full-length one-man show, “Not My First Pandemic,” at the Brava Theater, which he also performed at the 2021 United Solo Festival in New York. He has also presented works at the Resilience Archives’ Performing Visible Resilience, Bindlestiff Studio for the National Queer Arts Festival, and Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture Performing Arts Showcase. He is a 2021 artist-in-residence at the Queer Cultural Center and a recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission grant. He is currently the artistic director for the GLBTQ Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) Theatre, an intergenerational collective of emerging QTAPI artists. He has produced their work in collaboration with the Asian Art Museum, Bindlestiff Studio and the Asian Pacific Cultural Center.

Jacqueline Chiang is the creative voice behind J. Vivienne Art. Chiang is a contemporary abstract artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. She strives to create work that elicits emotion through her expression of colors and textures. Drawing on her experiences as a first-generation immigrant, she embraces the beauty in diversity of thought, experiences, and culture and uses movement and depth to capture these complexities in her art. All of her art is created using a combination of acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and ink with various textures on natural and synthetic surfaces. Her work can be found in businesses and private residences throughout the United States.

Anjali Rimi is a proud South Asian Canadian American woman of trans experience based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in India, blossomed in Canada, belonging in the United States. Rimi is the president and co-founder of America’s only trans-led, trans-centering South Asian Queer organization of Parivar Bay Area. Parivar Bay Area focuses on centering trans equity and economic justice within the South Asian Diaspora. Parivar's current initiative is SITAL, the largest pan-India grassroots initiative is saving Trans Hijra lives across 26 states, with more than 1 crore of funds disbursed. Rimi currently serves on the boards for The LGBT Asylum Project and San Francisco Pride and on the Trans Advisory Committee with the Office of Transgender Initiatives, San Francisco Mayor’s Office. She holds an MBA and works as a business development executive in the wine industry. Anjali helps companies cultivate trans LGB inclusive workplaces as a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) coach, working with leaders at every level across Fortune 500, corporate and nonprofit foundations.

Michelle MiJung Kim (she/her) is a queer immigrant Korean American woman writer, speaker, activist, and entrepreneur. She is the author of The Wake Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change. She is CEO and co-founder of Awaken, a leading provider of interactive equity and inclusion education programs facilitated by majority BIPOC educators, where she has consulted hundreds of organizations and top executives from Fortune 500, tech giants, nonprofits, and government agencies to spark meaningful change. Kim has been a lifelong social justice activist and has served on a variety of organizations such as the San Francisco LGBTQ Speakers Bureau, San Francisco Human Rights Commission’s Advisory Committee, LYRIC nonprofit’s Board of Directors, and Build Tech We Trust Coalition. She currently serves on the board of Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE). Her work has appeared on world-renowned platforms such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The New York Times, and NPR, and she has been named Medium’s Top Writer in Diversity three years in a row. She lives in Oakland, California.

Denise Huynh is the owner of Tay Ho Restaurant & Bar in Oakland, California. Huynh is a Vietnamese-American restaurateur with a zest for life and a passion to serve others. Born in Saigon and raised in Oakland, she was on a career path in marketing In the corporate world; however, her journey took a major turn when her aunt asked that she take over the family restaurant, Tay Ho in Oakland. In 2010, with a fierce loyalty to family (and love of food), Huynh agreed and was off on a new journey with her mother as head chef. TayHo was quickly recognized for its authentic Vietnamese flavor and unusual regional dishes. TayHo is a special place, beyond the outstanding food; you immediately feel a sense of home—customers, treated like long-lost family and friends, are fully embraced by Huynh’s warmth and generosity in her presence and stories.

Huynh is a force of nature with high energy and enthusiasm to make the world a better place. In the face of adversity and a worldwide pandemic, with the threat of having to close the doors of her family restaurant, she focused on her community. She sent food to local hospitals to feed the front line. She gained recognition for her resilience and servitude locally and nationally, featured on "Good Morning America," KGO And Wells Fargo. When Huynh isn’t at the restaurant, telling stories about her grandmother while eating Bánh Khọt, you may catch a glimpse of her cycling up Mount Diablo, power walking Lake Merritt or pausing with an extra long lens to capture a night bird, red shoulder Hawk or some other unique nature beauty.

NOTES

Thanks to Tay Ho Restaurant & Bar for providing food for our audience!

See more upcoming Michelle Meow Show programs at The Commonwealth Club, and audio and video from past programs.