Honolulu Weekly

There’s a party going down this weekend at Loft, the Hotel Street hipster hangout-of-the-moment that’s also the current tenant at what was once Wo Fat, one of Chinatown’s most archetypal addresses. It’s the perfect setting, says artist/attorney/activist/party promoter Sonny Ganaden, for the benefit he and a handful of others are throwing on behalf of the Hawaii Immigrant Justice Center

“We wanted to do something in Chinatown, where a lot of the immigrant community resides,” Ganaden says. “We wanted to pay respect to them.” While the much remarked upon nightlife renaissance in east Chinatown has brought more people and more money to the neighborhood as a whole, Ganaden is hardly the first to note that “there’s kind of a disconnect between the population that lives in Chinatown and works there and the club scene. So we figured that since the Center serves that population, it’s better that we throw our event in that neighborhood than in some club down in Waikiki.”

Ganaden’s point is reflected in the evolution of the HIJC itself. Now in its 26th year of existence, the organization formerly known as Na Loio has a mission to “defend and advance the human rights of immigrants in Hawaii.” The Center has served a diverse population and, according to the group’s executive director, its primary function has long been to provide free legal services for immigrants, including citizenship applications, petitions for family reunification and for legal status for victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. It was relatively recently that the group began to notice some disturbing signs coming out of Honolulu’s immigrant Chinese population.

“We knew Chinese were the third-largest immigrant population,” Robin Kobayashi says, “but we weren’t seeing the expected corresponding level of domestic violence reports. That’s significant, because we’re the only ones who track these things…for example, when the prosecutor’s office wants to know what’s going on with domestic violence in immigrant communities, they look to us.” Kobayashi says that despite ethnic stereotypes, studies show that domestic violence occurs even in Asian communities at alarming levels. “But cultural barriers prevent reporting, and when you add in immigration, where people don’t know the language or the law, and don’t know what resources are available to them, the problem becomes much worse.”

The HIJC responded by assigning a case worker specifically to the Chinese community, to provide domestic violence-related services. “The number one weapon abusers use against their victims is the victim’s lack of legal status,” Kobayashi says. In the first year, reports increased 500 percent. Seeing the need for even more outreach, the Center began offering case management, which is essentially a full range of services including follow-up visits, assistance with temporary restraining orders and psychological counseling and other work. The following year, domestic violence reporting increased five-fold again. As more and more women saw their friends getting help, Kobayashi says, they began to speak out. “One client was married to her busband for a long time, many many years,” Kobayashi says. “She had suffered beatings and abuse for the entire marriage. When she came to us, she said, ‘I didn’t even know this was a crime.’”

Today, the HIJC is in dire straits, thanks to steep budget cuts. Kobayashi says state funding accounts for anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of her budget—this year, state support is slated to fall to zero. “We will have to cut up to 50 percent of our staff, and 50 percent of our services,” Kobayashi says.

That’s where Saturday’s event comes in. The Loft party is a fundraiser for the HIJC and its many critical programs, featuring a slate of local DJs—most of them from KTUH—and has drawn support, Ganaden says, from just about every organization at the University of Hawaii’s Richardson School of Law, from the LGBT organization Lambda to the arch-conservative Federalist Society. “It’s a testament to the work of the handful of students who have organized this,” he says, “taking a progressive stance and then globalizing it enough to get buy-in from everyone.”