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Coming To Terms With Being Asian American

Why it took me 25 years to come to terms with being asian american.

It was the first time that someone had encapsulated my entire personhood into one word: “Asian.”

Culture has a way of connecting us from the things we have in common to our differences. For #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth we created a space for our voices to be heard and to defy (or embrace) the stereotypes that are placed on Asian Americans. We asked a few Asian Pacific American R29 staffers what their favorite thing about their culture is and discovered that the strings that attach us so closely with our culture are also associated with the memories we make with our families. The act of gathering and creating food brings us together (and something we still defer back to when we're feeling a bit homesick). Comment below with what about your culture brings you ✨joy✨. #APAHM #AcknowledgeIsPower #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth A post shared by Refinery29 (@refinery29) on May 19, 2017 at 10:03am PDT

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What does it mean to be Asian American?

The label encompasses an entire continent of different cultural roots. Does it speak to a shared experience?

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The label “Asian American” is almost comically flattening.

It consists of people from more than 50 ethnic groups, all with different cultures, languages, religions, and their own sets of historic and contemporary international conflicts. It includes newly arrived migrants and Asians who have been on American soil for multiple generations. Depending on visa types, immigration status, and class, there are vast differences even among those from the same country. In fact, the income gaps between some Asian American groups are among the largest of any ethnic category in the nation. Yet these differences are rarely explored and discussed.

With the recent rise in anti-Asian attacks, however, Asian Americans have found themselves in a rare moment in the national spotlight. For many, it has led to a renewed sense of solidarity as well as confusion about what the Asian American label means or if there really is a unifying experience attached to it.

It also inspired Vox to post a survey asking Asian Americans to write in and tell us how they’re feeling right now. The rise in violence — especially the shootings at three spas in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent — haunted the responses. One major theme emerged: Why did it take such an extreme act of violence to get America to care about its Asian communities?

“It frustrates me that the anti-Asian sentiments popularized by Trump had to be escalated to media-worthy violence and mass shootings in order to be elevated to mainstream discourse,” one person wrote from California.

“We’re trending today, but I bet we’ll be forgotten by next week or month,” wrote another from Michigan.

Other persistent issues emerged from our survey, too. Many responded that they didn’t quite know how to talk about cultural identity or racism with their parents or their children. The experience of growing up in non-diverse areas versus immigrant- or minority-dense enclaves — and how different it felt when moving from one area to another — also kept coming up. People with roots in South and Southeast Asian cultures wondered how they fit into an ethnic category so commonly associated with East Asians. Many questioned what the label Asian American really means and what purpose it serves in the larger American conversation around race.

In a series of stories publishing throughout this month, we will explore some of these questions and shared experiences, in a time when many Asian Americans are experiencing a sense of alienation not only from the nation at large, but also from the label “Asian American” itself.

The pitfalls — and promise — of the term “Asian American”

The many Asian Americas

by Karen Turner

In many Asian American families, racism is rarely discussed

by Rachel Ramirez

An illustration of the author looking in a TV screen and seeing the face of Lane Kim from “The Gilmore Girls.”

Seeing myself — and Asian American defiance — in Gilmore Girls’ Lane Kim

by Sanjena Sathian

The Asian American wealth gap, explained in a comic

by Lok Siu and Jamie Noguchi

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The Difficulty of Being a Perfect Asian American

College admissions makes people do strange things. This was one of the takeaways of the Varsity Blues scandal , in 2019, which uncovered an admissions consultant and a network of coaches and administrators who helped wealthy and famous families essentially bribe their way into selective colleges. The scandal seemed to be the twisted, if logical, end point of all the credential-stacking and résumé-padding that has become part of the process. Yet there was something reassuring about the scandal, too: the conclusion that the admissions system is rigid enough that people with means, even Hollywood A-listers, would feel the desperation to game it. They may have believed that their children were entitled to a place at a prestigious school. But they couldn’t breeze right in. By some measures, it is twice as hard to get into élite colleges and universities than it was twenty years ago. Their desperation was warranted.

These anxieties about status are acutely felt among a cohort for whom going to college can seem a foregone conclusion. Asian Americans are often held up as a “model minority,” a group whose presence on campuses like Harvard or M.I.T., where forty per cent of incoming first-years self-identify as Asian American, far outpaces their percentage of the U.S. population. The figure of the model minority emerged in the fifties, a reflection of Cold War-era policies that were designed to attract highly educated immigrants from Asia. Over time, this stereotype ossified. American meritocracy held up the immigrant as proof that its rules were fair, and many high achievers were flattered to play along. Even though many of the gains for Asian Americans could be explained through policy—and even as studies showed how entire swaths of the community were left behind in poverty—the experience of being Asian in America has been rigidly defined by a framework of success and failure. As the scholar erin Khuê Ninh argues in “ Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities ,” it’s a framework that has been internalized, even by those who resist it.

Ninh’s fascinating book tells the stories of scammers, grifters, and impostors—Asian Americans following the high-pressure, expectation-heavy paths that can lead down darker alleys of faux accomplishment. There is Azia Kim, who masqueraded as a Stanford undergrad for months, even persuading two students to allow her to share a dorm room. Elizabeth Okazaki did something similar there, posing as a graduate student, attending class, and sleeping at a campus lab. Unlike the students caught up in the Varsity Blues scandal, these young people gave exhausting performances that weren’t going to result in a diploma or job. And, in the case of Jennifer Pan, who spent years tricking her parents into believing that she was attending the University of Toronto, the subterfuge resulted in tragedy. In 2010, she hired hitmen to murder them.

What compelled these impostors? To what extent were their actions driven by a need to keep up an illusion of excellence? Ninh, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explores these stories not to rationalize them but to point out how they suggest a mood, a limited set of emotional possibilities for Asian Americans. “What if what seem to be outlandish and outlier behaviors are instead depressingly Asian American?” Ninh writes. Being a model minority, she argues, doesn’t require one to believe in the myth. Ninh asserts that a relationship to high achievement is “coded into one’s programming” as an Asian American, and that “its litmus test is whether an Asian American feels pride or shame by those standards.” Whether you are Amy Chua, extolling the virtues of being a “ tiger parent ,” or someone making fun of Chua, you are perpetuating the success-or-bust framework. A joking dismissal doesn’t debunk the stereotype so much as it signals the impossibility of living outside of it.

Ninh offers compelling evidence that adherents to the model-minority myth come “from an implausible multiplicity of life chances and immigration histories.” She cites the scholars Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, who found that Southeast Asian refugees and wealthy, cosmopolitan transplants from China alike were “keenly aware” of stereotypes around Asian achievement. Lee and Zhou write that “for no other [racial] group is the success frame defined as getting straight A’s, gaining admission into an elite university, getting a graduate degree, and entering” into a coveted profession; in contrast, other groups balance grades with an investment in classroom behavior or how well they fit in with others. Ninh cites a 1998 study of perceptions of Asian Americans, based on interviews conducted with seven hundred college students of all races. A sense of Asian Americans as somehow exemplary permeated this student body; notably, the Asian Americans who took part in the interviews perceived themselves to be “more prepared, motivated, and more likely to have higher career success than whites,” even though their actual grades didn’t reflect any superiority.

Of all deceits, Ninh wonders if there is “something quaintly bookish, faintly charming about the academic grifter.” What drew Kim, Okazaki, Pan, and others to lie wasn’t a predictably ascendant path. Pretending to be students was a holding pattern, perhaps until a better answer presented itself. As Ninh points out, “The shortest route to mad bling does not run through four years of coursework. Money, then, would not appear to be the primary driver for our scammers— status is, arguably, and self-identity.”

Ninh feels enough sympathy for her subjects to probe their ambitions, their potential, the unnoticed mental-health struggles that led these people to take such immense risks. “Even when we have come to know our social formation as harmful to us,” she writes, “a life worth wanting may still be trapped in its terms.” The scammers and grifters might be viewed as people who allowed the expectations of Asian American identity to metastasize into something perilous. Ninh’s book is at its best when she seems to level with her subjects, to read them against their contexts: high-pressure parents, suburban milieus where value is doled out in how many colleges you get into, a national myth where you are both an undifferentiated mass and living proof of the American Dream. It’s a lot of work to pretend you are perfect—even more so when you know it is an illusion. Studies show that Asian Americans are the racial group who are least likely to seek help for mental illness, with much of it remaining undiagnosed. In 2018, Christine Yano and Neal Adolph Akatsuka published “ Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words ,” a collection of reflections from Harvard undergraduates. The achievements of these students aside—these were young people who, by traditional metrics, had done well—it was striking how each one navigated expectations of success and feelings of invisibility. Many lamented how the quest for excellence came to feel like a trap, ultimately leaving them unfulfilled. Even a drive to pursue unconventional paths, like art or writing, was cast as a rebellion against STEM stereotyping, not an expression of authentic desire.

“Passing for Perfect” is a tricky, unpredictable book, toggling between broad social analyses and sensational outliers, with close readings of reportage and court documents alongside Ninh’s bemused, occasionally exasperated commentary. Her shifting tones convey what it feels like to live inside a stereotype—to realize that even reasoned disavowals will never make it go away. She wonders whether it is possible to tunnel your way free from an imposed identity you know to be unhealthy and false. Stereotypes winnow down our imaginations or make us feel inadequate in the present; they also stifle a vision for the future, frustrating us, as our attempts to deny them only make them grow stronger.

The challenge, Ninh acknowledges, is to talk about success in terms that don’t merely reify the myth of the model minority. The starting point is to imagine other models of teaching, assessing, or assigning value. For the individual, resisting the myth requires more than merely becoming a “bad Asian”—for example, by rejecting the stereotype that Asians are good at math and violin by opting for art and football. Her book ends with a consideration of “Better Luck Tomorrow,” a film, from 2002, that drew on elements of the 1992 killing of Stuart Tay, a teen-ager from Orange County. Tay was killed by five students from a competitive, affluent high school. Tay and his eventual killers—four of whom were Asian American—were plotting a robbery, and his conspirators became convinced that he was going to betray them. Three of Tay’s killers were honor-roll students, leading the press to refer to the event as the “honor roll murder.”

In the movie version, the culprits’ murderous success burnishes the model-minority image; they excel at their studies as well as their criminal dalliances. As the movie ends, it is possible to believe they got away with it. But, in one of the most harrowing parts of “Passing for Perfect,” Ninh discusses the movie with two of Tay’s killers, Kirn Young Kim, who was paroled in 2012 and is now a prison-reform activist, and Robert Chan, who remains incarcerated. They lament that the characters in the film essentially win, rather than, in Ninh’s words, pull up short and offer “a cold, hard look at what all the work is for.” She notes that Chan has spent his time in prison unlearning the anger and “hypermasculinity” that defined his high-pressure teen years. And yet, in his mother’s home, a framed letter hangs on her bedroom wall. It is an invitation from the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California to interview for admission.

From the distance of middle age, the pressure to achieve looks like a race toward a false horizon. Of course, this isn’t how it’s experienced. Debbie Lum’s recent documentary, “Try Harder!,” offers an absorbing exploration of the pressures internalized by today’s high-school students. It chronicles a year at Lowell High School , a public magnet school in San Francisco that was, at the time Lum was filming, roughly fifty per cent Asian American. (Up until recently, students had to test into Lowell. As a result of a 2021 change to the school’s admissions, the demographic is expected to shift.)

Lowell is one of the top public schools in California, and therefore the nation—the type of place where even those with astronomical G.P.A.s and perfect SATs feel intense worry about their futures. The type of place where a kid who rallies his wallflower friends at the school dance compares himself to an enzyme.

Students talk about a “war on two fronts,” the competitive environment of the school itself and the pressure they feel from their families. For many, the only way to cope is to joke about how impossible it is to truly measure up. As “Try Harder!” begins, there’s a whimsical quirk to Lum’s storytelling. A charismatic Chinese American student named Ian cracks that he is “not even close to the best of the best.” He is self-effacing and funny. Everyone starts at Lowell dreaming of Stanford, he explains. By sophomore year, the Stanford hoodies are relegated to the closet, and expectations grow more realistic: the U.C.s. By junior year, he says, kids settle for Occidental, a “West Coast private college that’s not that hard to get into.”

Lum follows a few students through their days, which are dizzying. Lowell seems a challenging place to distinguish oneself. A physics teacher implores the students to give up their fetish for prestige, pointing out that “you are not too good for Santa Cruz, or Riverside, or even Merced,” which are often perceived to be among the U.C. system’s lesser schools. There’s no way to win. On one hand, they must excel in their local rat race. On the other, Lowell doesn’t send as many students to schools like Stanford or Harvard as you might think. The students—and at least one teacher—suspect that, for top colleges, Lowell seems too “stereotypically Asian,” a monolith of “A.P.-guzzling grade grubbers,” bereft of the well-rounded superstars who make admissions officers happy.

At times, “Try Harder!” hints at these larger stories, from the alleged prejudices that top-tier colleges harbor against the perceived machinelike excellence of Asian applicants to the racial politics of San Francisco to the uneven distribution of resources that produce élite public schools like Lowell. In February, local voters recalled three members of the city’s Board of Education, in part to protest their role in a 2021 decision to diversify Lowell by replacing its merit-based admissions system with a lottery. The recall campaign was driven by Asian American voters—many of whom presumably have little interest in following Ninh’s call to rethink paradigms of success. As one parent told the Times , education has “been ingrained in Chinese culture for thousands and thousands of years.”

Lum focusses on these pressures as they trickle down to the students, which makes for a compelling set of dramas. One of the film’s stars is an African American student named Rachael, whose sweet, aggressive modesty leads her to underestimate her own capabilities. There’s a Taiwanese American kid named Alvan who seems happiest in his dance class—only his parents would never understand. His highest and lowest moments alike are commemorated with a dab . These are all students who, in Ninh’s words, “pass for perfect.” The occasional shots of students staring off into the distance convey more than they are capable of articulating as teen-agers.

As the year wears on, they begin to feel the effects of the grind. There’s less energy for all-night study sessions; the tense, feigned smile of the after-school job is harder to maintain. Students begin wondering why they worked so hard in the first place. I want to say that I felt a familiar sense of fear as the admissions letters began rolling in, but, even though I attended a competitive Bay Area high school full of Asian kids, it was nothing like this. There was less to do, yet more possible futures to imagine. “Try Harder!” slowly shifts genres from comedy to horror. You almost stop caring whether anyone will get into their dream school, because you already recognize that we should be encouraging students to dream of something other than school. Yet you desperately want them to get in, for it is the only horizon they have ever known.

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A History of the First Asians in the Americas Became Personal

Historian Diego Javier Luis plumbed the far corners of archives to unearth the stories of Filipinos and others who came to colonial Mexico starting in the 1500s

When most people in the U.S. think about Asian immigrants coming to the Americas, they often picture immigrants from China coming in the 1800s. The story, though, is much more complicated—and interesting.

As Diego Javier Luis, assistant professor of history, describes in his new book The First Asians in the Americas , the full story starts with Spanish galleon ships traveling back and forth from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila in the Philippines in the mid-1500s, trading silver from the Americas for silks and other trade goods from Asia.

But it wasn’t only goods. People from Asia, from as far afield as Gujarat in India to the Philippines, including some from China and Japan, came to colonial Mexico, many of them enslaved, some free. They were the first Asians in the Americas, and slowly fanned out across the continents.

He delved deep into archives held in Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, and the U.S. to find the stories of those individuals and groups. He had learned Mandarin while working in Xian, China, for a few years after college, and learned Spanish as an adult—languages that came in handy for his research.

For Luis, who grew up in Nashville, the story was in some ways personal, too. His paternal grandfather was Chinese, and he has Afro-Cuban as well as Ashkenazi Jewish roots.

Tufts Now recently talked to Luis to learn more about his personal connection to his research, and how as a historian he found sources on people who are usually hidden in the archives.

How did your family history play into your interest in the experience of the first Asians in the Americas?

On my dad’s side of the family, we come originally from China and from West Africa, and from the Canary Islands and Spain. There was a meeting of these three family strands in Cuba.

“It’s a Latin American story—we can’t understand what diasporic Asian American or Latino experiences in the U.S. are without thinking about Latin America,” says Diego Javier Luis. “It’s all interconnected.” Photo: Jodi Hilton

My Chinese grandfather came to Cuba directly during the early 20th century. We don’t know exactly when, perhaps in the 1920s or 1930s. We also know that his grandfather had already been coming and going to and from Cuba. There’s a long history of the Chinese in Cuba during the period of indenture, starting when the transatlantic slave trade was ending in the 1800s.

There was a massive convergence of people coming to the Caribbean and South America to work. In Cuba, they’d work alongside enslaved and recently liberated Afro-Caribbean people. From 1847 to 1874, 120,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba as indentured laborers, and we think the grandfather of my grandfather was likely one of them.

Where did your paternal grandmother come from?

She is the daughter of a man who fought during the wars of independence against Spain—a socially mobile Black man named Ventura Santos Santos, who moved to Havana from a small town called Caibarién. My grandparents met in Havana, and then my Chinese grandfather convinced my grandmother to come with him to New York City, to the Lower East Side near Canal Street in Chinatown. He had a laundromat there, and that’s where they had my dad and his brother.

It is very much a global story, and it is complicated because growing up in Nashville, I didn’t know what any of that meant. I only knew that I looked different from my other classmates, and they didn’t know how to categorize me, either. I was mostly just “Mexican” to the people in that environment.

I later lived in China for a while, traveled to Cuba, and it took a while to really understand what it meant to be someone who has connections to those places, even if that connection is more ancestral than something that’s lived in my own life.

And then there’s my mom’s side of the family, which is from Vermont and has roots in the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora by way of Lithuania. That’s a whole other thing to come to terms with.

How did you decide to focus your doctoral research, and this new book, on the first Asians in the Americas?

Part of it was coming from this personal journey of not really knowing what it meant to have a family history that connected these places—to make some coherence out of something that’s very fragmented. I think a lot of mixed people discover that there is no way really to put everything into perfect harmony. You have to accept the fragmentation of it.

“There was a sense of not aloneness. You see that you’re not the first one to be dealing with some of those issues of identity.” Diego Javier Luis Share on Twitter

Another reason was to broaden how we think about Asians coming to North and South America, not just the U.S. I think for a very long time, the canon of Asian American history and studies was geographically focused mostly on the West Coast of the U.S. It’s very much an East Asian dominated story.

Cover of the book The First Asians in the Americas

What’s remarkable about this early period is that the people who are showing up in colonial Mexico, free and enslaved, are from all over Asia, mostly people from the Philippines and the Bay of Bengal area and elsewhere in South Asia. There are also smaller concentrations from Japan, Korea, China, and other places in Southeast Asia.

It is an extraordinarily diverse movement, and it gets us thinking about the geography of diaspora in different ways—they’re going to Mexico and dispersing outwards. Many end up in South America, some end up going up and down what’s now the U.S. West Coast, but it’s really not a U.S. story at all.

It’s a Latin American story—we can’t understand what diasporic Asian American or Latino experiences in the U.S. are without thinking about Latin America. It’s all interconnected. I hope the book promotes this kind of hemispheric thinking and makes people think more broadly about the diversity of diaspora.

Did the research and writing of the book change or inform how you feel about your identity?

One of the major takeaways for me was that I’m not the only one who has felt out of place, out of time. I grew up in Nashville but was connected to these other sites and was being misread from an ethnic perspective and had to go through some kind of self-fashioning to be legible to other people.

I was really interested to see how these folks, who were the first Asians in the 16th and 17th centuries to be living in a very different kind of society in the Americas, were dealing with similar kinds of questions. There was a sense of not aloneness. You see that you’re not the first one to be dealing with some of those issues of identity.

“What’s remarkable about this early period is that the people who are showing up in colonial Mexico, free and enslaved, are from all over Asia, mostly people from the Philippines and the Bay of Bengal area and elsewhere in South Asia.” Diego Javier Luis Share on Twitter

It is complicated, because I don’t share any family history with the people that I study, but at the same time, I did feel a kind of personal connection to their stories. That helped me form this kind of connection that can also inform how I approach those histories in my scholarly work.

History is what’s written down, and there is very little in the records about marginalized people—certainly in the 1500s and 1600s. How did you find sources for Asians coming in these very early days to Mexico for your book?

It takes rigorous archival work. If you read any of the canonical texts about the colonial period in Latin America, there’s going to be very, very little that speaks to this history. But we see people showing up in the legal record—they were getting married, baptized, applying for licenses. They show up in accounting records, criminal cases, inquisition cases.

Let’s say for Acapulco, an important port town in this history, where many Asian people are entering the Americas, it meant flipping through every single page of the accounting records for this port for a 40- or 50-year span. And at least 95% of those records have nothing to do with the history of these people.

I did a manual word scan of the documents to pick up where these people show up. Some of it is learning the words that were used to refer to the people that I’m studying—that’s a whole process, too, because those categories are so variable and contingent.

It’s really searching for a needle in the haystack. But when you find these little nuggets of gold, it’s a celebration.

In the book, you include a 15-page appendix that lists all the crew members of a Spanish galleon that made the journey from Manila to Acapulco in 1751—and hundreds were Filipinos and other people from Asia. It’s an amazing amount of down-in-the-details work to make your point about Asians coming to Mexico so early.

What makes those records difficult is that they were part of an 800- to 1,000-page document, and this is a small sliver of that. Other scholars have looked at some of these documents, but I haven’t seen that exact roster appear anywhere else.

A lot of the work that’s been done on the Spanish galleon trade between Mexico and Manila is of an economic nature, using shipping records to show how globally connected the world’s economies were during the early modern period—China to Mexico, to Spain, to the Philippines. It is a remarkable story, but one of the repercussions has been losing sight of the people who were on those boats. My study is framed as trying to find the Asian people who were on those ships.

Portrait of Kendra Field standing in front of a stone wall. She is guiding a team creating a public database of all enslaved people of African descent in the U.S. from the 1500s to 1865, for the 10 Million Names project

Recovering Family History for Millions of African Americans

The Long History of Xenophobia in America

Charting a Course from Asia to Latin America

The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Published: 10 June 2020
Volume 45 , pages 636–646, ( 2020 )

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In this essay, we review how the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic that began in the United States in early 2020 has elevated the risks of Asian Americans to hate crimes and Asian American businesses to vandalism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the incidents of negative bias and microaggressions against Asian Americans have also increased. COVID-19 is directly linked to China, not just in terms of the origins of the disease, but also in the coverage of it. Because Asian Americans have historically been viewed as perpetually foreign no matter how long they have lived in the United States, we posit that it has been relatively easy for people to treat Chinese or Asian Americans as the physical embodiment of foreignness and disease. We examine the historical antecedents that link Asian Americans to infectious diseases. Finally, we contemplate the possibility that these experiences will lead to a reinvigoration of a panethnic Asian American identity and social movement.

Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality

LGBTQ Stigma

Intergenerational communication about historical trauma in asian american families.

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Introduction

COVID-19 (or the coronavirus) is a global pandemic that has affected the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people. At the time we write this, there have been over four million cases across over 200 countries worldwide (Pettersson, Manley, & Hern, 2020 ) . Moreover, pervasive stay-at-home orders and calls for social distancing, as well as the disruptions to every facet of our lives make it difficult to overstate the importance of COVID-19. As the beginning of the outbreak has been traced to China (and Wuhan in particular), both in the United States and elsewhere, people who are Chinese or seen as East Asian have become associated with this contagious disease. Early reports in the United States were often accompanied by stock photos of Asians in masks (Burton, 2020 ; Walker, 2020 ). Many of the first reports labeled the disease as the “Wuhan Virus,” or “Chinese Virus,” and the Trump administration has also used these terms (Levenson, 2020 ; Maitra, 2020 ; Marquardt & Hansler, 2020 ; Rogers, Jakes, & Swanson, 2020 ; Schwartz, 2020 ). News media coverage in the United States focused on the hygiene of the seafood market in Wuhan and wild animal consumption as a possible cause of coronavirus (Gomera, 2020 ; Mackenzie & Smith, 2020 ). Memes and jokes about bats and China flooded social media, including posts by our peers online. These reports provide the American public a straightforward narrative that focuses on China as the origin of COVID-19.

In this paper, we review current patterns of hate crimes, microaggressions, and other negative responses against Asian individuals and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. These hate crimes and bias incidents occur in the landscape of American racism in which Asian Americans are seen as the embodiment of China and potential carriers of COVID-19, regardless of their ethnicity or generational status. We believe that Asian Americans not only are not “honorary whites,” but their very status as Americans is, at best, precarious, and at worst, in doubt during the COVID-19 crisis. We suggest that what we witness today is an extension of the history of Asians in the United States and that this experience may lead to the reemergence of a vibrant panethnic Asian American identity.

Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans During COVID-19

As of early May 2020, there have been over 1.8 million individuals who have tested positive for and over 105,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States alone and the numbers are growing rapidly every day (“Cases in the U.S.,” 2020 ). Although researchers have traced cases of the virus in the United States to travelers from Europe (Gonzalez-Reiche et al., 2020 ) and to travelers within the United States (Fauver et al., 2020 ), some members of the general public regard Asian Americans with suspicion and as carriers of the disease. On April 28th, 2020, NBC News reported that 30% of Americans have personally witnessed someone blaming Asians for the coronavirus (Ellerbeck, 2020 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the negative perceptions of Asian Americans that have long been prevalent in American society. Many individuals in the United States see the virus as foreign and condemn phenotypically Asian bodies as the spreaders of the virus (Ellerbeck, 2020 ). Consistent with Claire Jean Kim’s theory on racial triangulation (Kim, 1999 ) and the concept of Asians as perpetual foreigners (Ancheta, 2006 ; Saito, 1997 ; Tuan, 1998 ; E. D. Wu, 2015 ) , we posit that during COVID-19, the racial positionality of Asian Americans as foreign and Other persists, and that this pernicious designation may be a threat to the safety and mental health of Asian Americans. They are not only at risk of exposure to COVID-19, but they must contend with the additional risk of victimization, which may increase their anxiety. Historically, from the late 19th through the mid twentieth century, popular culture and news media portrayed Asians in America as the “Yellow Peril,” which symbolized the Western fear of uncivilized, nonwhite Asian invasion and domination (Okihiro, 2014 ; Saito, 1997 ) . It is possible that the perceived threat of the Yellow Peril has reemerged in the time of COVID-19.

The spread of the coronavirus and the increased severity of the pandemic has caused fear and panic for most Americans, as COVID-19 has brought about physical restrictions and financial hardships. So far, forty-two states have issued stay-at-home orders, which has resulted in 95% of the American population facing restrictions that impact their daily lives (Woodward, 2020 ). Novel efforts to end the pandemic across the states have led businesses to shut down. As a result, more than 30 million people in the United States have filed for unemployment since the onset of the coronavirus crisis (Gura, 2020 ). Because this virus has been identified as foreign, for some individuals, their feelings have been expressed as xenophobia, prejudice, and violence against Asian Americans. These negative perceptions and actions have gained traction due to the unprecedented impact COVID-19 has on people’s lives, and institutions such as UC Berkeley have even normalized these reactions (Chiu, 2020 ). However, racism and xenophobia are not a “natural” reaction to the threat of the virus; rather, we speculate that the historical legacies of whiteness and citizenship have produced these reactions, where many individuals may interpret Asian Americans as foreign and presenting a higher risk of transmission of the disease.

Already, the FBI has issued a warning that due to COVID-19, there may be increased hate crimes against Asian Americans, because “a portion of the US public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations” (Margolin, 2020 ). News reports, police departments, and community organizations have been documenting these incidents. Evidence suggests that the FBI’s warning was warranted. Based on reporting from Stop AAPI Hate , in the one-month period from March 19th to April 23rd, there were nearly 1500 alleged instances of anti-Asian bias (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ). The reported incidents have been concentrated in New York and California, with 42% of the reports hailing from California and 17% of reports from New York, but Asian Americans in 45 states across the nation have reported incidents (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ).

Reports of Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents

There have been a large number of physical assaults against Asian Americans and ethnically Asian individuals in the United States directly related to COVID-19. While the majority of Americans are sheltering-in-place and staying at home, 80% of the self-reported anti-Asian incidents have taken place outside people’s private residences, in grocery stores, local businesses, and public places (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ). We suggest that these hate crimes and other incidents of bias have historical roots that have placed Asians outside the boundaries of whiteness and American citizenship. In addition, we believe that the current COVID-19 crisis draws attention to ongoing racial issues and provides a lens through which to challenge the notion of America as a post-racial society (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ).

One of the incidents under investigation as a hate crime includes the attempted murder of a Burmese-American family at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas (Yam, 2020a ). The suspect said that he stabbed the father, a four-year-old child, and a two-year-old child because he “thought the family was Chinese, and infecting people with coronavirus” (Yam, 2020a ). Police are investigating numerous other physical incidents including attacks with acid (Moore & Cassady, 2020 ), an umbrella (Madani, 2020 ), and a log (Kang, 2020 ). There have been a number of physical altercations at bus stops (Bensimon, 2020 ; Madani, 2020 ), subway stations (Parnell, 2020 ), convenience stores (Oliveira, 2020 ), and on the street (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ; Sheldon, 2020 ). Asian Americans are also reporting physical threats being made against them (Driscoll, 2020 ; Parascandola, 2020 ). Based on Stop AAPI Hate statistics, 127 Asian Americans filed reports of physical assaults in four weeks (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ), and it is likely that other Asians have not reported their experiences out of fear or concern about the legal process.

In addition to the physical attacks and threats against Asian Americans, individuals have also filed reports of vandalism and property damage targeted at Asian businesses. One Korean restaurant in New York City had the graffiti “stop eating dogs” written on its window (Adams, 2020 ). Perpetrators have also made explicit references to COVID-19 in their vandalism, where phrases such as “take the corona back you ch*nk” (Goodell & Mann, 2020 ), and “watch out for corona” (Wang, 2020 ) have been documented on Asian-owned restaurants. Some of these incidents were not reported to the police and therefore will not be investigated as hate crimes, as business owners reasoned that it would be difficult to track the vandals (Adams, 2020 ; Buscher, 2020 ). These incidents of vandalism demonstrate the association some people make between Asian American businesses and COVID-19.

Beyond the narrow definition of the incidents that can be classified as punishable hate crimes, Asian Americans have also documented a large number of alleged bias and hate incidents. Stop AAPI Hate reports indicate that 70% of coronavirus discrimination against Asian Americans has involved verbal harassment, with over 1000 incidents of verbal harassment reported in just four weeks (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ). In addition, there have been over 90 reports of Asian Americans being coughed or spat on. One prevalent theme in the verbal incidents is the linking of Asian bodies to COVID-19, where the aggressors are purportedly calling Asians “coronavirus,” “Chinese virus,” or “diseased,” and telling them that they should “be quarantined,” or “go back to China” (ADL 2020 ). In all of these incidents, the perpetrators consistently use anti-Asian racial slurs (Buscher, 2020 ; Goodell & Mann, 2020 ; Sheldon, 2020 ). This hateful language that targets all Asians (and not just Chinese Americans) demonstrates the racialization of Asian Americans.

The threat of a global pandemic to people’s everyday lives is something that most Americans have not experienced before. However, the act of interpreting the current national crisis as an external threat and ascribing this danger to Chinese bodies and more broadly Asian bodies should not surprise scholars of Asian Americans. In fact, this deeply-rooted cognitive association of Asian Americans to Asia and to disease has a long history. Hence, we examine the phenomenon of xenophobia against Asian Americans in the context of historical racial dynamics in the United States.

The Color Line and the Positionality of Asian Americans

Race has been posited as a socio-historical concept, and while many race scholars in the United States have focused on the black/white binary, others have documented how Asian Americans have also been racialized over time (Omi & Winant, 2014 ). These scholars have examined how the racialization of Asian Americans has developed in relation to African Americans and white Americans (Bonilla-Silva, 2004 ; Kim, 1999 ). One of the dominant stereotypes of Asian Americans is that they are perpetual foreigners , where individuals directly link phenotypical Asian ethnic appearance with foreignness, regardless of Asian immigrant or generational status (Ancheta, 2006 ; Tuan, 1998 ; F. H. Wu, 2002 ). This stereotype is longstanding in American history and has forcefully re-emerged during the COVID-19 crisis. The perception of an Asian-looking person as simultaneously Chinese, Asian, and foreign underscores how this racial categorization affects all Asian Americans. Thus, we suggest that the concept of Asian American panethnicity (Okamoto & Mora, 2014 ) may be particularly applicable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The legacy of white supremacy equates white bodies with purity and innocence, while nonwhite bodies are designated as unclean, uncivilized, and dangerous. White supremacy and its tactic of othering Asian bodies has been a consistent recurrence over earlier pandemics. Dating back to the nineteenth century, the bubonic plague was framed as a “racial disease” which only Asian bodies could be infected by whereas white bodies were seen as immune (Randall, 2019 ). In 1899, Honolulu officials quarantined and burned Chinatown as a precaution against the bubonic plague (Mohr, 2004 ). In 1900, San Francisco authorities quarantined Chinatown residents, and regulated food and people in and out of Chinatown, believing that the unclean food and Asian people were the cause of the epidemic (Shah, 2001 ; Trauner, 1978 ). The history of the Yellow Peril has continued throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in the embodied perceptions of Asian immigrants as the spreaders of disease (Molina, 2006 ).

More recently, during the 2003 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic, the discourse in the United States focused on Chinatown as the epicenter of the disease (Eichelberger, 2007 ). Studies suggest that 14 % of Americans reported avoiding Asian businesses and Asian Americans experienced increased threat and anxiety during SARS (Blendon, Benson, DesRoches, Raleigh, & Taylor-Clark, 2004 ). We suspect the negative impact of COVID-19 on Asian Americans has been far greater than the impact of SARS. In New York City’s Chinatown, restaurants suffered immediately after the first reports of COVID-19, as some restaurants and businesses experienced up to an 85% drop in profits for the two months prior to March 16th, 2020 – far before any stay-at-home orders were given (Roberts, 2020 ). When moral panic arises, foreign bodies, typically the undesirable and “un-American” yellow bodies, may be seen as a threat that can harm pure white bodies.

The cycle of elevated risk, followed by fearing and blaming what is foreign is not just limited to disease outbreaks, but also occurs during economic downturns. In 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two men who blamed him for the influx of Japanese cars into the United States auto market. Vincent Chin was attacked with racial slurs and specifically targeted because of his race. Although Chin was Chinese American, in the minds of these two men, he represented the downturn of the auto industry in Detroit and the increased imports of Japanese automobiles (Choy & Tajima-Pena, 1987 ).

Similarly, after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, retaliatory aggressions were not limited to attacks against Arabs or Muslims (Perry, 2003 ). Violence and hatred against the perceived enemy resulted in incidents targeting Sikhs, second and third generation Indian Americans, and even Lebanese and Greeks (Perry, 2003 ). More recently, the hate crime murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian immigrant falsely assumed to be an Iranian terrorist and told “get out of my country” before being shot to death, illustrates the association between racialized perceptions of threat and incidents of violence (Fuchs 2018 ). With the COVID-19 pandemic, violent attacks and racial discrimination against Asian Americans have emerged as non-Asian Americans look for someone or something Asian to blame for their anger and fear about illness, economic insecurity, and stay-at-home orders.

Fear and the Mental Health of Asian Americans

The current perceptions of China and more broadly East Asia as both economic and public health threats have made Chinese and East Asians in America fearful for their own safety. Some Asian Americans have made efforts to hide their Asian identity or assert their status as American in an attempt to prevent hate crime attacks (Buscher, 2020 ; Tang, 2020 ). While this tactic may be effective on the individual level, it does not modify the positionality of Asian bodies during COVID-19. The attempt to distinguish Asian Americans from Asians who are foreign nationals misses the fact that in the United States, being Asians and being foreign are inextricably bound together.

After World War II, news media and local organizations encouraged Chinese Americans to distinguish themselves from the Japanese, and similarly encouraged Japanese Americans to show their Americanness and patriotism to gain acceptance by the white majority (E. D. Wu, 2015 ). Muslim and Sikh Americans displayed American flags after 9/11 to show that they were not a threat to the United States, and more recently there has been a movement to celebrate Sikh Captain America (Ishisaka, 2018 ). Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggested that Asian Americans fight against racism by wearing red white and blue and prominently displaying their Americanness (Yang, 2020 ). In many of these situations, these strategies did not directly address the problems of racism and xenophobia – they simply shifted the blame towards another group.

Disease does not differentiate among people based on skin color or national origin, yet many Asian Americans have suffered from discrimination and hatred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the threat of the virus is real for all Americans, Asian Americans bear the additional burden of feeling unsafe and vulnerable to attack by others. The link between COVID-19 and hate crimes and bias incidents against Asian Americans is indicative of the widespread racial sentiments which continue to be prominent in American society. While some scholars have gone as far as to regard Asian Americans as “honorary whites” (Tuan, 1998 ), the current COVID-19 crisis has made markedly clear this is an illusion, at best. There are a number of reasons why the racial dynamics of anti-Asian crimes during COVID-19 should be examined more closely.

First, the majority of incidents and attacks have occurred in diverse metropolitan areas such as New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles. These are spaces that most Americans have traditionally regarded as more liberal and tolerant of difference than other parts of the United States. In New York City alone, from the start of the COVID-19 outbreak through April 2020, the NYPD’s hate crime task force has investigated fourteen cases where all the victims were Asian and targeted due to coronavirus discrimination (NYPD, 2020 ). The remarks of a Kansas governor that said his town was safe “because it had only a few Chinese residents” (Lefler & Heying 2020 ) offers one explanation for the high concentration of racial incidents in large cities with sizable Asian populations, but we think that this is not sufficient in explaining the data so far. Future research should track racial bias and hate crimes more systematically in order to further our understanding of how demography and urbanicity influence these incidents.

Second, these hate crimes have increased the anxiety of Asian Americans during already uncertain times, with many fearful for their physical safety when running everyday errands (Tavernise & Oppel Jr., 2020 ). Asian Americans are now self-conscious about “coughing while Asian” (Aratani, 2020 ), and concerned about being targeted for hate crimes (Liu, 2020 ; Wong, 2020 ). There is evidence to suggest that Asian Americans under-report crimes (Allport, 1993 ), and some recent immigrants may lack an understanding of the legal system and process of reporting crimes, particularly in the case of hate crimes. Therefore, scholars should take additional care to document and analyze these incidents and their effects on Asian American communities across the United States.

The possible upward trend of anti-Asian bias incidents and hate crimes is indicative of the growth of white nationalism and xenophobia. The image of a disease carrier with respect to COVID-19 is bound in Asian bodies and includes assumptions about race, ethnicity, and citizenship. As Vincent Chin, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the Burmese-American family, and many others have shown us, the level of fungibility in terms of how Asian ethnicities are perceived can be deadly. It does not matter if the person is from China, of Chinese origin, or simply looks Asian – the perpetrators of this violence see all of these bodies as foreign and threatening. While there have been numerous instances of anti-Asian bias and crime, there have not been similarly patterned anti-European tourist incidents or an avoidance of Italian restaurants, suggesting that COVID-19 illuminates the particular racialization of disease that extends beyond this virus, and further back in American history.

Already there has been substantial news coverage of these anti-Asian crimes, which suggests that people are paying attention to this issue, and police departments are actively investigating many of these incidents. Activists and community organizations have started online campaigns such as #washthehate and #hateisavirus to combat anti-Asian racism during this time. The BBC has documented 120 distinct news articles covering alleged incidents of discrimination since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Cheung, Feng, & Deng, 2020 ). In addition, the Chinese for Affirmative Action and Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council have created a platform where individuals can record incidents of racism and coronavirus discrimination. The reporting of hate crimes during COVID-19 is superior to the reports of these types of incidents during the SARS outbreak (Leung Coleman, 2020 ; Washer, 2004 ). Although the federal government response has been limited compared to the hate crime prevention initiatives after 9/11 and SARS, in May 2020, the Commission on Civil Rights agreed to take on the demands proposed by a group of Democratic Senators in a letter requesting a stronger response to the anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination during COVID-19 (Campbell & Ellerbeck, 2020 ; Yam, 2020b ).

Similar to the murder of Vincent Chin, which served to ignite an Asian American activist movement, we hypothesize that the racial incidents against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic may encourage the political mobilization of a panethnic Asian American movement. At the same time, we believe that the incidents that are classified as “hate crimes” and “bias incidents” based on legal definitions do not fully capture the extent or pervasiveness of racist and xenophobic thoughts against Asian Americans. We encourage future scholars to more closely examine the culturally embedded racial logics that lead to these incidents, rather than focusing solely on the incidents themselves as the object of analysis. The hate crimes against Asians in the time of COVID-19 highlight the ways that Asian Americans continue to be viewed as foreign and suspect. This may be an additional burden on Asian Americans beyond the anxiety, economic instability, and the risk of illness all Americans have experienced during COVID-19.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the MacMillan Center, and the Council for East Asia at Yale University. We are also grateful for the support of the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-LAB-2250002).

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Tessler, H., Choi, M. & Kao, G. The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Am J Crim Just 45 , 636–646 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09541-5

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Being & Becoming: Asian In America

How have Asian American artists explored the unspoken tensions between the past and present—and made visible new possibilities for the future?

Being & Becoming: Asian In America Stephanie Hueon Tung SUMMER 2023

Being & Becoming: Asian in America

Stephanie Hueon Tung

In the summer of 1953, Charles Wong’s photo-essay “1952 / The Year of the Dragon” was published in the fifth issue of Aperture. The impetus for Wong’s piece—a carefully designed sequence of photography and poetry—was an extortion scheme that had plagued the immigrant community in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The perpetrators peppered vulnerable immigrants with fake notices about kidnapped family members in China. Cut off from communication by the Communist Revolution, many of the scheme’s victims opted to pay an expensive ransom, while others made the difficult decision to forsake their loved ones to imagined captors. The themes of Wong’s work—immigrant displacement, vulnerability, memory, and intergenerational trauma—reveal wounds of the Asian American immigrant experience that feel no less raw today. Wong’s piece might be read as a statement about the impossible choices and pain of forgetting that building a new life in this country continually demands.

As guest editor of this issue of Aperture, I have found solace and inspiration, throughout my research, in seeing how generations of artists have used the medium of photography to grapple with questions of visibility, belonging, and what it means to be Asian American, lust as there is no single point where Asian American experience converges, photography produced by Asian American image makers encompasses disparate ways of viewing the world—and demands to be approached as such. But to seek connection and coherence among these perspectives is to acknowledge a shared story of immigration to the United States that relates to a long legacy of exclusionary policies and struggles for recognition and citizenship. Being and becoming Asian in America is an unfixed, constantly evolving, and expansive process, and photography plays an essential role in envisioning it.

Since the first Asian immigrants arrived in America in the mid-nineteenth century, social visibility has conferred vulnerability. Our modern-day system of passport controls was based upon nineteenth-century forms of visual policing developed specifically to regulate the movement of Chinese and Japanese bodies, the first national methods of biometric identification to utilize photography. Falling under the gaze of the camera was an experience shared by most Asian immigrants, not primarily as a hobby of self-documentation or leisure but as a bureaucratic fact of racialized surveillance and policing.

Under the threat of deportation or detention, many early immigrants opted for self-effacement and erasure as strategies for survival. A daguerreotype from 1850s California that shows a young, working-class Chinese woman cradling a picture of an absent loved one in her hand is a rare exception. The dearth of historical photographs portraying Asian men and women at ease speaks to contested ideas of place, identity, and belonging that continue to shape our collective image of the United States.

The author Ocean Vuong once identified a generational divide in the aspirations of Asian Americans. To paraphrase Vuong, first-generation immigrants saw life in America as such a privilege that they were content to put their heads down, work, fade into the background, and live a quiet life— so much so that they expected their children to do the same.

Generations of artists have used photography to grapple with questions of visibility and what it means to be Asian American.

But with the second generation, there came a desire to be seen. A great paradox for these children of immigrants, many of whom seek agency and self-expression through art, was that they betrayed their parents in order to subversively fulfill their parents’ dreams.

For this younger generation of artists and immigrants, the desire for visibility is about more than individual self-fulfillment. It arises from a want to understand a past that continues to act on us and forms part of who we are but remains unspoken and closed off from view. This phantom pain of forgetting creates its own particular sense of loss—so clearly articulated in Wong’s piece—that marks where immigrant hopes intersect with intergenerational melancholy. Whether one arrived generations ago or today, being Asian American requires coming to terms with absences, omissions, and silences, as well as with the complications of human choices that entail various acts of abandonment. It involves negotiating the in-betweenness of here and there, past and future, breaks of language and culture — or, as the creators of the recent film Everything Everywhere All at Once imagine it, multiverses that can fracture a sense of self across infinite chains of unrealized possibilities.

This issue of Aperture explores the myriad ways in which Asian American image makers have approached questions of visibility and belonging on their own terms. They create works that reveal the full complexity and diversity of stories that make the experience of being Asian in America. They creatively navigate the tension between being seen and unseen as strategies of survival, play, and reclamation, from the pursuit of anonymity or effacement during times of exclusion to self-fashioning and commemoration. And in the spirit of the late photographer and activist Corky Lee, they are working toward what he called “photographic justice” by exploring areas of hope, celebration, and connection alongside doubt, uncertainty, and sorrow across generations. What comes into view in these pages is not a single story or image but a kaleidoscopic refracting of shared patterns and impressions that is connected to the specifics of an evolving Asian American identity and its potential.

This issue provides an opportunity to discover generative ways of seeing that are rooted in connection and empathy.

How might we acknowledge the invisible wounds of US warfare and imperialism in Asia? Artists have employed diverse approaches to reflect the trauma inscribed on our bodies and psyches, from landscape to portraiture, abstraction, and conceptual practices. Toyo Miyatake’s photographs show the mundane highs and lows of Japanese Americans’ daily lives while interned during World War II at the Manzanar concentration camp in California. They are testaments to the resilience of a community and the ways in which art perseveres even in the darkest hours. In reenactments ofVietnam War battles, An-My Le draws on the landscape tradition to investigate how history seeps into the present. Yong Soon Min explores the emotional terrain of displacement in self-portraiture that marks the body as a repository for personal and national histories. And while both Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Stephanie Syjuco turn to archives for source material, their projects pursue different ends: Matthew’s animations collapse time by merging immigrant family photographs from different generations in an act of suturing or repair; Syjuco calls attention to the evidence gathered to quantify, categorize, and understand the Philippines in order to question the unseen power structures still embedded in national archives and museums today.

Family is central to the stories of Asian American lives, but what new visions of our loved ones—what entirely different multiverses, of what could have been and what is possible for the future—might emerge from the push-pull of picture making?

In the early 1960s, the Low family in New York City used cut and paste to create an ideal world in which family members separated by immigration policies are reunited in one image.

In the same vein, Leonard Suryajaya’s theatrical tableaux and Guanyu Xu’s layered domestic spaces are filled with symbols of hope, history, and affection. From the vibrant, dignified portraits taken at May’s Photo Studio in the early to mid-twentieth century to Michael fang’s wryly observant photographs of his suburban family in the 1970s and the haunting series Half SelfPortraits made collaboratively by Tommy Kha and his mother in the beginning of this century, photography acts as a prism, allowing us to glimpse the dazzling humor, ambitions, desires, and regrets of our expanded families and ourselves.

Reconciling this yearning to be seen—to find meaning, be acknowledged, and, finally, belong—with the habits of opacity is part of the process of being and becoming Asian in America. It has taken me time to realize that there is agency and subjectivity in both positions. That there are emotions that cannot be expressed or articulated but are deeply felt. Photography has the ability to help us navigate what we choose to bring to the surface and what we hold back. It can address losses that are difficult to name by making visible, with attention and respect, the actions and concerns of previous generations. Perhaps it is this fundamental act of care that will aid us in moving from personal experience to greater collective action and solidarity.

It is my hope that this issue provides an opportunity to discover generative ways of seeing that are rooted in connection and empathy. It is through the work of artists that we can change our perceptions of the past and heal generational wounds. In seeing one another and recognizing the beauty and creativity of these endeavors, we take part in a project of reclaiming agency and humanity.

Charles Wong is now over a hundred years old and still living with his partner, the photographer Irene Poon, in San Francisco. It has been seventy years since his photo-essay was published in Aperture. The two don’t have cell phones or email, but Wong sent a handwritten note on the occasion of this issue: “This is a brave project, and is heading into the 2024 elections. We are with you.”

Stephanie Hueon Tung is the Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum.

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Asian American Communities and Racism in the USA Essay

Multiculturalism is one of the main problems of the USA. Being inhabited by many nationalities and ethnical groups, it is obvious that national minorities are going to face a number of problems. Speaking about Asian American communities in the USA, they face a number of difficulties on the basis of racial differences. Fighting for personal rights, Asian American communities face crucial race relation issues in the contemporary period. Los Angeles Riots/Civil Unrest was one of the largest issues in the Asian American communities. There were a lot of factors which led to the mentioned above Los Angeles Riots/Civil Unrest. Being oppressed by the white Americans, much attention should also be paid to the consequences of racial conflict. Reading Helen Zia’s “To Market, to Market, New York Style” and “Lost and Found in L.A.”, it is possible to see through the author’s experience how Asian Americans were pressed at the financial aspects. Being oppressed by the administration, Asian Americans were limited in their business. Moreover, racial prejudice, Tropic market incidents as well as the Apple market incidents were directed at making sure that Asian Americans would leave the USA (Zia 88).

Many conflicts appeared between African Americans and Asian Americans, therefore, the latter appeared between two powers, white Americans and African Americans that added to the reasons for the Los Angeles Riots/Civil Unrest (Zia 101). The most appealing cases discussed in the book are those devoted to murders of Rodney King and Vincent Chan. The court proclaimed that the police officers were not guilty. Such decision made Asian Americans to act. Elaine H. Kim in the article “Home is where the Han is: A Korean American Perspective in the Los Angeles Upheavals” says that the main reason for Los Angeles Riots was “the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experience of oppression” (Kim 80). Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s video Wet Sand: Voice from LA Ten Years Later points to the same reasons of the riot. Asian Americans were tired of constant pressure and discrimination, therefore, they stopped being afraid and went at the streets. Elaine H. Kim and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s ideas are very similar in relation to the reasons of riots. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson in his documentary video states that mass media did not highlighted the information about the riots correctly. Many Americans considered Asian community as the minority which does not even deserve attention due to their reputation.

Reading a dialogue between anthropologist Louisa Schein and filmmaker/activist Va-Megn Thoj in “Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident” it should be stated that racial perceptions as well as racial prejudice negatively affected Hmong Americans. Being a part of Asian American group, Hmong Americans were considered as the lower layer of population. Taking one case which occurred with a young student in a bathroom, Americans dared to think that all members of Hmong community are the same. So, having considered the case when a Hmong girl gave birth to child in a bathroom and killed a child there, Americans preferred to believe that all members of Hmong community are the same. Having negative attitude in relation Asian Americans in general, people began to mock with the tragedy having used “Asian character with a stereotypical Asian Accent” who “firs of all use a tragic history involving a teenage woman killing a baby… And then denigrating the Hmong community and the Hmong culture and having this racial caricature on the show” (Schein and Thoj 434). Is such the only in the world? Of course this is not. There are a lot of cases which may shock a society, however, American situations are not so spread and they are not involved into such discussions. The situation is about the race. Thinking about Asian community, Americans do not think about people, the situation discussed in the article and the case considered in the video are the specific examples which led the Asian community to riots. People just wanted to release from constant pressure.

Watching the video Desi: South Asians in New York and reading Sunaina Maira’s “Youth Culture, Citizenship, and Globalization: South Asian Muslim Youth in the United States after September 11 th” it is possible to elaborate on the diversity of the South Asian American population and on racial misperceptions which overlook these differences. After the 11 th of September most South Asians with Muslim religious considerations were considered as terrorists. These people were heavily beaten and assaulted in various ways. There was a feeling that Americans assured themselves that somebody had to pay and they did all possible to make South Asians do it. The problem of racial discrimination and ethical difficulties rose. South Asians, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans were followed under the “War on Terror” policy. It is essential to remember that after 9/11 “Muslim families began experiencing the ‘disappearance’ of their husbands, brothers, and sons, and many families ended up leaving the country after indefinite separations and loss of the means of family support” (Maira 335). These events encouraged Hindus, Syrian Christians, Sikhs, South Asian Jewish, and Muslims unite and support each other. Thus, trying to limit the number of South Asian Americans on the territory of New York, American government increased the ties between cultural and religious traditions of discriminated nation ( Desi ).

According to Gary Okihiro, “When and Where I Enter” Asian Americans were also pressed. No matter where they wanted to enter, the doors were closed before them. No matter where Asian Americans referred to they were considered as minorities and not many white Americans wanted to assist them. Black-white issues are just the parts of the discrimination and pressure. There are a lot of other minorities in the USA who appear under pressure. Black-white issues are just the oldest, however, Asian Americans also have to struggle for their independence and free activities on the territory of the USA. African Americans have their problematic with Americans while the problems of Asian Americans are different. Therefore, speaking about ethnical problems in the USA black-white conflict should be considered as one of the parts of the issue. Okihiro says that “African American men bore the stigma of race, but African American women bore the stigma of race and gender” (Okihiro 5). Additionally, Asian Americans also experienced “barriers to full membership” (Okihiro 5). Angelo N. Ancheta in “Neither Black nor White” says that Asian Americans are considered as something intermediate between white and black. The problem is that all legal acts and norms were related to black-white opposition, therefore, when some freedoms were provided they did not touch Asian Americans and this problem was essential for many Asian Americans.

Coming to the USA, Asian citizens want to become as close to the American culture as possible with the purpose to become the deserving citizens of their new home. Those who have an opportunity to assimilate with American nation have more chances to get jobs, however, coming out of Helen Zia’s experience, those who managed to learn language, operated it in an appropriate way and received good education had chances to find their place in American society, however, in most cases they were told that China citizens cannot be accepted for a job. Helen Zia says that having assimilated, many Asian Americans feel guilty for their actions, they feel that they betrayed their native country and it may cause a number of difficulties. Helen Zia writes that “the State Department had a policy that no persons of Chinese descent should work at the China desk, no matter how many generations removed from the ancestral bones. This would protect America in case some genetic compulsion twisted [Asian] allegiance to China” (Zia 141). This is a law which encourages Asian Americans to work in the USA, to struggle for social justice, engage in forms of resistance, and participate in electoral politics. Asian Americans have to become as close to the US native citizens as possible for them to forget abut their native country. Why does this matter for the USA? Paying salary for people, government wants to be sure that this money remain in the country, that people spend their money for food and other needs in the USA and do not send all their money to their native countries.

As a result, Asian Americans have to complete many particular procedures in order to become legal citizens of the USA. It results in many cases of illegal presence of Asian Americas on the territory of the USA. Helen Zia remembers, “Taxi drivers had no health insurance, no benefits-only traffics jams, air pollution and demanding passengers. Their work is a virtual sweatshop on wheels, the most dangerous job in the country” (Zia 202). Not to become such a taxi driver people have to start working legally and for this they are to be socially active. This is very important for American government. American government wanted others to be interested in making the USA more important for Asian Americans than their native counties. Some people assimilated to such extend that they were more devoted to the USA than to Asian countries, however, it did not mean that they had an opportunity to be equaled to white Americans. Discrimination at the workplace still was a part of Asian American life, no matter whether they took part in social life of the country or not.

Filipino Americans are the group of Asian Americans. Being distinguished, Filipino Americans create a separate subgroup due to the peculiarities of their culture. Filipino American and Asian American hip hop culture contribute to historical awareness of the USA. It is essential to state that the USA is a multicultural country and the role of Filipino Americans and Asian Americans as well as African Americans is great. The culture of the USA consists of the cultures of the nations which inhabit it. Filipino American and Asian American hip hop culture is not just the songs and dance. This is a specific vision of the world. Presenting hip hop songs as the part of the vision of the life, Filipino Americans and Asian Americans contribute to the political, social and economical problems. Raising urgent problems, Filipino Americans and Asian Americans contribute to the present social issues. Thus, hip hop culture in most cases raises the problems of violence, racial discrimination, social instability, economic crisis, political failures etc. Filipino American and Asian American hip hop culture contribute to the historical awareness of Americans as in most cases racial discrimination and other social instabilities are poorly highlighted in press. Remembering Los Angeles Riots and other cases of social instability in the society, if the reason for civil unrest were minorities, the problem was tried to be depressed without particular announcement of the issues. Only hip hop culture through songs and vision of life were able to deliver the information to the society.

According to Glenn Omatsu’s “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements to liberation: Asian American activism from 1960s to the 1990s”, Asian Americans live in the environment of poverty, racism, hyper-capitalism and neo-conservatism. One of the main peculiarities of this article is that Asian Americans struggled for liberation of all people, but they failed to create a particular strategy (Omatsu 109). Speaking about prisons, the author of the article referred to poverty as one of the main economical conditions people had to live into. Then, racism is described. Asian Americans could not call themselves free until they were pressed by the prejudices in relation to ethnical origin. Social injustice also existed in American society. It was important to check the opportunities offered for ethnical minorities and to the while Americans. There has never been equality. Even now when the whole word speaks about democratic and free from prejudices American society, the problem of glass ceiling still remains. Environmental degradation imprisoned minorities in the USA (Omatsu 109). People in many cases refused to get better positions, they refused to work harder as they were satisfied with what they had.

Vijay Prashad in “Crafting Solidarities” and Mari Matsuda in “We will not be used: Are Asian Americans the racial bourgeoisie?” speak about internal differences which create particular complication of the way of Asian American group to form coalitions in order to work together. The se authors agree with Omatsu about the degradation of some parts of Asian Americans. However, the problem of degradation stands higher. Having common roots appears to be not enough for Asian American community to unite for common good, “the solidarities that must be crafter to combat our oppressive present must be alert to the desire among South Asian migrants to set themselves apart” (Prashad 551). Mari Matsuda calls Asian Americans “racial bourgeoisie” expressing the fear that in case Americans consider them as it is, hey are seen to the world as “small merchants, the middle class, and the baby capitalists” (Matsuda 558), in other words those who have no opportunity to make decisions and those who flow in the direction chosen by others. Therefore, it may be concluded that there are a lot of problems facing Asian Americans in the American society. Being socially, politically, and economically dependant from this new home, Asian Americans are to perform a number of activities which make them forget about their home. However, the attitude of the American society to them still remains prejudiced that causes a number of problems.

Works Cited

Ancheta, Angelo N. “Neither Black nor White.” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 21-35. Print.

Desi: South Asians in New York . Prod. Alan Glazen and Shebana Coelho. San Francisco: Center for Asian American Media, 2000. DVD.

Kim, Elaine H. “Home is Where the Han is: A Korean American Perspective in the Los Angeles Upheavals.” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 80-99. Print.

Louisa, Schein and Va-Megn Thoj. “Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident.” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 423-454. Print.

Maira, Sunaina. “Youth Culture, Citizenship, and Globalization: South Asian Muslim Youth in the United States After September 11 th .” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 333-354. Print.

Matsuda, Mari. “We will not be used: Are Asian Americans the racial bourgeoisie?” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 558-565. Print.

Okihiro, Gary Y. “When and Where I Enter.” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 3-21. Print.

Omatsu, Glenn. “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements to liberation: Asian American activism from 1960s to the 1990s.” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 298-333. Print.

Prashad, Vijay. “Crafting Solidarities.” Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader . Ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. Biggleswade: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 540-558. Print.

Wet Sand: Voice from LA Ten Years Later . Prod. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson. San Francisco: Center for Asian American Media, 2008. DVD.

Zia, Helen. Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People . New Jersey: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Print.

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25 Documentaries To Watch About Asian American Life During AAPI Heritage Month

More than 22 million people living in the United States are categorized as Asian Americans, and they are by no means a monolith.

According to Pew Research, their origins can be traced back to more than 20 countries, each with its own distinct cultural practices and histories that have shaped their American experience.

While it is a challenge to grasp the full spectrum of what it means to be Asian in America, documentaries have been produced to give viewers a glimpse of how this growing population in the U.S. experiences life in a multitude of ways and through different historical lenses and generations, navigating discrimination and pivotal political events in the country.

Stacker compiled a list of 25 feature-length documentaries, organized by their release date, to watch that explore themes and tackle issues that continue to impact the lives of this changing population in the United States, including cultural identity, generational division, and racial discrimination, as well as social justice, healing, determination, and resilience.

Through these documentaries, you'll meet kids at a public school's award-winning theater program in New York's Chinatown, follow filmmakers traveling and collecting personal stories across the country, see adoptees returning to their birthplace, watch a basketball star dunking on national TV, and witness a family of lawyers challenging the American judicial system.

These aren't just Asian American stories; these are American stories.

Explore these documentaries to watch about Asian American life

Who killed vincent chin (1987).

- Directors: Christine Choy, Renee Tajima-Pena

- Runtime: 82 minutes

Violent attacks against Asian Americans have been part of the American landscape since Chinese immigrants first arrived in the mid-1800s, with the perpetrators of some of the most horrifying attacks - the Chinese Massacre of 1871 , for instance - walking free. More than a century later, that was still the case in Detroit.

Twenty-seven-year-old Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat in 1982 by white assailants, a father and his stepson, who eventually confessed to the crime and were charged with manslaughter (rather than murder)-but never served any time.

Through archival footage, interviews with those connected to the murder and the cases that followed, Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena's Oscar-nominated doc examines factors that may have led to the murder and weak sentencing and how Asian Americans (who formed the American Citizens for Justice) and other communities came together to demand justice for Chin in the first civil rights case in history to involve an Asian American.

Forbidden City, U.S.A. (1989)

- Director: Arthur Dong

- Runtime: 56 minutes

San Francisco has been home to generations of Chinese Americans, but what's not as widely known is there was a Chinese nightclub that opened in 1938 that broke all perceived stereotypes of what it meant to be Chinese. At Charlie Low's Forbidden City, dancers and singers performed nightly (some scantily clad) to packed houses, featuring stars such as the Bubble Dancer, the Chinese Fred Astaire, and Chinese Sally Rand. "Forbidden City, U.S.A." gives viewers a look at the lively Chinese-owned and operated nightclub scene of the 1940s and its importance to the community through interviews with those who frequented Forbidden City and tells the goings-on inside what one woman described as "a three-ring circus every day."

My America… or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997)

- Director: Renee Tajima-Peña

- Runtime: 87 minutes

Travel across the country with filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña in this Sundance Award-winning project profiling different Asian Americans who uncover buried histories - one such discovery involves the site of a former Japanese American concentration camp she visits with activist Yuri Kochiyama - to document the changing Asian American population, both in size and diversity.

It's an America vastly different from the one Tajima-Peña remembers decades ago on family vacations as a child, when they crossed different state lines without seeing another Asian.

Multihyphenate personality Victor Wong (known most for his acting work) inspired the film and is prominently featured, memorably sharing how he became a beatnik and befriended Jack Kerouac. Questions Wong poses in the doc: "What is an Asian American? Am I Asian? Or am I an American?"

First Person Plural (2000)

- Directors: Deann Borshay Liem, Jefferson Spady

- Runtime: 60 minutes

In this poignant documentary, Deann Borshay Liem reflects on her upbringing in a middle-class American family by white parents who adopted her from a South Korean orphanage when she was 8 years old and the motivation that led her to find her birth parents as an adult.

Her "American" childhood is shown through family photos and her father's film footage, one devoid of a Korean identity.

Early on, she reveals startling details about her adoption story (further explored in her 2010 documentary "In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee") and historical events in South Korea that led to a wave of transnational adoption.

Frank conversations with her American family members are also captured, leading up to and during the first meeting of both her families in South Korea. The documentary brought attention to the complex issues of transnational and transracial adoption - loss of language, culture, and birth name, among them, as well as adoptees feeling torn between cultures and families.

Saigon, U.S.A. (2004)

- Directors: Lindsey Jang, Robert C. Winn

- Runtime: 57 minutes

"We are all these things that other Americans are… but we are also refugees" is a sentiment expressed in the opening of the documentary set in Little Saigon, a neighborhood in Orange County, California, home to the largest population of Vietnamese Americans in the country and the biggest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam.

" Saigon, U.S.A. " recounts the history of Vietnamese people fleeing the country to the U.S. through painful personal accounts and how their refugee status from a war-torn country has impacted their lives. It also examines the importance of the 53 days of protests in early 1999 in Little Saigon - sparked by a shopkeeper's public display of support for Ho Chi Minh - that made national headlines and divided the community.

Contrasting views from different generations are expressed about what freedom and being American mean to them in light of the man's demonstration of his First Amendment rights, but also how the event unexpectedly led the community to heal old wounds.

Grassroots Rising (2005)

- Director: Robert C. Winn

The struggle of Los Angeles' working-class immigrant communities for the American Dream is examined through the stories of workers fighting together for better pay, working conditions, and equal rights with such organizations as the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and Garment Worker Center.

Providing a better future for their kids was the motivation for many of the workers - day laborers, caregivers, garment, and restaurant workers - who spoke about the sacrifices that goal entailed, as well as how they were deceived by companies that brought them to the United States to work.

The words of artist Alison de la Cruz also give voice to their hopes, disappointments, and resilience, as the doc reveals the power of Asian American labor movements, past and present.

The Grace Lee Project (2005)

- Director: Grace Lee

- Runtime: 68 minutes

Growing up in Columbia, Missouri, there weren't many kids who looked like Lee, a uniqueness she'd come to embrace. But when she moved away, director Grace Lee discovered her name was ubiquitous: tens of thousands shared her name and primarily left positive impressions on acquaintances and colleagues.

In an effort to delve deeper (and hopefully find Graces who didn't fit that mold), the documentary follows the director as she launches an online project that connects her to hundreds of others who share her name.

In "The Grace Lee Project," viewers watch her travel across the country to meet them and learn their personal stories and motivations - including activist Grace Lee Boggs, who would be the subject of a future doc - in this extraordinary exploration of how Asian American women are perceived and see themselves.

Hollywood Chinese (2007)

- Runtime: 90 minutes

Being an actor of Asian descent in America has historically been (and continues to be) a career full of obstacles, with few roles to choose from-often as sidekicks, one-dimensional or stereotypical "exotic" beauties, perennial foreigners, or worse.

"Hollywood Chinese" shows how the Chinese have been depicted on the big screen, starting with the silent era, including how white actors performing in yellowface were the status quo and were even awarded Oscars for doing so.

Film clips and stills from numerous films are featured - starring such screen icons as Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and James Hong - and commentary from well-known actors of the day, along with other industry professionals who provide additional perspectives on the impact of Chinese in Hollywood and vice versa.

Somewhere Between (2011)

- Director: Linda Goldstein Knowlton

- Runtime: 88 minutes

See Asian American and transracial adoptee life through the stories of four teenagers who were adopted from China when they were young. At the time of the film's release, they were among the estimated 80,000 girls adopted from the country since 1989.

The documentary shows slices of their everyday lives in different parts of the U.S., offering their very personal takes on being adoptees from a different country raised in white families while also chronicling their journeys to their birthplace. What they share in common and what distinguishes the girls is revealed over the course of the film, as well as their hopes for the future during a pivotal time in their lives.

Filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton, who is white, was compelled to embark on this ambitious project partly because of her adopted Chinese daughter, Ruby. "How could I be there for her? I realized that I had the opportunity to explore my questions with many 'experts,'" she told Women in Hollywood . "I chose to follow four girls, trying to represent a diversity of experience and geography, and see what they had to say."

Uploaded: The Asian American Movement (2012)

- Director: Kane Diep

- Runtime: 75 minutes

Today, filmmaker Kane Diep is known for the viral video content he has produced, with such internet-friendly titles as "I Asked My Mom 11 Intimate Questions Before It's Too Late," "Short Guys Try Being Tall for the First Time," and "Asian Americans Recreate Iconic Magazine Covers."

A little over a decade ago, he was also responsible for creating an important time capsule about Asian American pop culture with " Uploaded: The Asian American Movement ," which features interviews with 60 Asian American creatives - from dancers and directors to content producers and cultural critics - who share their varied experiences.

The experiences covered in the project include being the token Asian in their respective industries, the limited "other" roles available to them (often stereotypical), the movies and TV shows that influenced them, and how digital platforms helped them reach global audiences on their own. You'll inevitably wonder as you listen to their stories, has much changed for Asian Americans in entertainment in the past decade?

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (2013)

Filmmaker Grace Lee Boggs paints a remarkable portrait in " American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs ," tracing the Boggs' involvement in radical movements for more than 70 years, beginning with meeting Black activists in Chicago and then in Detroit. Lee interviewed Boggs over the course of 10 years, following the spirited Boggs as she taught classes and visited with friends (often arguing with them). You'll even see the director giving Boggs a haircut. That's how personal this work is.

Within the first few minutes of the film, you'll be hooked on Boggs' voice. The activist recalls how she and her husband, Alabama native and author James Boggs, met and would become pivotal figures in the grassroots Black power movement during the 1960s that would include launching an all-Black political party. (The FBI had thick files on both of them.)

One of the scenes that stands out is when Boggs, then in her late 80s, passionately says while pounding her hands on the table, "I think that if we stick to those categories of race and class and gender, we are stuck."

Linsanity (2013)

- Director: Evan Jackson Leong

- Runtime: 89 minutes

150 Life Quotes: Hope, Inspiration, & Positivity

Basketball player Jeremy Lin's rise from relative obscurity to starting point guard for the New York Knicks was a story not even the most imaginative writer could have scripted: an Asian American NBA star? As one broadcaster said, "He just didn't fit the mold."

In "Linsanity," Lin shares how this widespread sentiment played out in his life, having been doubted as a player by staff whenever he visited gyms for practice and enduring a barrage of racist taunts and slurs as a point guard for Harvard - never knowing unexpected stardom would greet him on the other side.

For people who lived through "Linsanity" and those who have yet to hear his story, the documentary has all the spectacular footage that made him an international sensation and a source of Asian American pride. In the doc, Lin says, "I know God orchestrated this whole thing."

Still, interviews with family and his early coaches speak to Lin's determination and potential while acknowledging that the path to college ball - much less the NBA - for an Asian American had yet to be paved until his arrival.

9-Man (2014)

- Director: Ursula Liang

Sports and camaraderie are at the heart of this documentary, following teams of Chinese American men competing in the annual tournament of 9-Man, a form of volleyball played with nine players on each side of the net.

The streetball game first developed in China and became a pastime for early Chinese immigrant men in the U.S. wanting a respite from grueling, low-paying jobs in restaurants and laundromats; the pervasive anti-Chinese sentiment; and laws such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Decades later, the game is still a source of pride for Chinese American men committed to keeping the sport alive in parking lots and city streets across the country.

Essential Arrival: Michigan's Indian Immigrants in the 21st Century (2014)

- Director: Merajur Rahman Baruah

- Runtime: 61 minutes

In 2012, Indian immigrants accounted for approximately 14% of the immigrant population in the United States and tended to be highly educated and pursued work in the STEM and health care fields. But such data provides a limited, simplistic view of the growing population, as do the popular cultural images of Bollywood performers, the IT guys, and people wearing turbans or saris.

Adding depth and nuance to these oversimplifications, producer-professor Arifaa Javed's project lets individuals of different generations in Michigan express who Indian Americans are by sharing their immigration stories, what matters to them, and the dreams they pursue, along with interviews with those from outside the community.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016)

- Director: Steve James

During the mortgage crisis of the late 2000s, a small, Chinese family-owned bank, Abacus Federal Savings Bank, became the focus of a criminal indictment threatening not only the family's livelihood but the lives of everyone the family served in New York's Chinatown community.

Despite the Abacus owners taking the proper actions to report and fire the loan officers who had committed fraud at their bank, the bank was treated far more harshly than larger banks, with far-reaching fraud schemes affecting thousands across the nation.

Here, we watch how the founder Thomas Sung and his three lawyer daughters (one of whom had worked in the district attorney's office) respond in this real-life David-and-Goliath legal tale of an immigrant family's bank that provided loans to an overlooked and underserved community when no one did.

The district attorney's unjust treatment of all parties of Chinese descent is particularly underscored-while other institutions were let off with fines-and how it affected people's view of the larger community and themselves.

Mixed Match (2016)

- Director: Jeff Chiba Stearns

- Runtime: 95 minutes

Asian Americans are the group with one of the lowest percentages of people on national donor registries, providing little hope for those of Asian descent suffering from life-threatening blood diseases of finding a match. The chances are bleaker for Asian Americans of mixed backgrounds looking for a donor.

In "Mixed Match," we hear the stories of hopeful patients, those on the donor registry who gave patients a chance at survival, and meet Athena Asklipiadis (who has Japanese and Greek heritage), the founder of Mixed Marrow, whose mission is to increase the number of multiethnic and minority bone marrow and blood cell donors.

The award-winning doc by Japanese Canadian filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns features not only those patients of Asian descent but those of other ethnicities as well while addressing how their multiracial identity is viewed differently because the treatment of their illnesses is intimately tied to it.

The Chinese Exclusion Act (2017)

- Directors: Ric Burns, Li-Shin Yu

- Runtime: 114 minutes

Most Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was. The federal law restricted Chinese workers from both entering the United States and prevented Chinese people already in the country from becoming American citizens. It was the first law in the United States government to prohibit immigration based on race or ethnicity-yet far from the last to single out Asian Americans .

The documentary delves into what factors led the act to become law (despite being unconstitutional), how it impacted American demographics, and who was considered American for decades.

Ulam: Main Dish (2018)

- Director: Alexandra Cuerdo

Until recently, Filipino cuisine got little love beyond the Filipino American community. "Ulam" was released as these chefs started to make headlines regularly.

In the film, Alexandra Cuerdo visits some of the most well-known chefs and restaurateurs to learn how they got their start in the culinary industry, what led them to serve their Filipino and Filipino-inspired dishes, and the support systems (including other FilAm chefs) that helped make their dream ventures possible. Count on seeing some behind-the-scenes cooking and many tantalizing dish shots that will have you craving Filipino food for your next meal.

Asian Americans (2020-present)

The must-watch five-part film series from PBS is one of the most comprehensive looks at Asian American history, detailing the arrival of early immigrants and the building of the country's railroads to leading farm labor movements, while also examining the laws that restricted where Asian Americans could live to whom they could marry. It's daunting to learn how much of this history has largely gone untold or taught in schools.

Throughout the docuseries, you'll begin to speculate why that's the case and how it affects the Asian American experience. The series also takes us to present-day America, where issues faced by previous generations (racial discrimination and hate crimes, among them) continue to loom. Still, it also celebrates the many figures from the community who have fought such injustices and other trailblazers who have made a place for themselves in different fields and industries.

Cane Fire (2020)

- Director: Anthony Banua-Simon

Kaua'i has served as the backdrop for Hollywood productions for ages, but its working-class residents and Indigenous communities were never the main attraction, nor were they historically represented in accurate or flattering ways. Sound familiar? Instead, they were constantly relegated to mere extra roles-including the filmmaker's Filipino great-grandfather - or worked behind the scenes while witnessing the destruction of their land and the erasure of their histories on screen.

Anthony Banua-Simon covers this in "Cane Fire" by setting off in search of lost footage of a film in which his great-grandfather appeared. Learn about the history of Hollywood on the island (and its exploitative practices) and how the industry impacted local agriculture and spawned a massive tourism industry through film clips and interviews with impacted locals, such as his family members and activists working to reclaim lands from developers.

Curtain Up! (2020)

- Directors: Kelly Ng, Hui Tong

- Runtime: 69 minutes

Follow a loveable and talented group of elementary school performers from PS 124 in New York's Chinatown as they prepare for their school's production of "Frozen" in Kelly Ng and Hui Tong's "Curtain Up!" The film showcases the kids' lively auditions and rehearsals with their supportive instructors leading up to opening night. Elsewhere, we meet generations of the kids' families in the comfort of their homes, including the comedic and tender interactions between them and the heartfelt conversations they have.

Throughout the doc, the kids' perspectives on the world and each other are especially memorable and as critical as they come, including this reflection by one of the fifth-grade stars: "I like being Asian because it's where I'm from. It's pretty weird, because, like, curriculum in Chinatown, why don't they teach about Chinese people? All they teach about is Christopher Columbus. … They don't show what kind of people we were back then."

The Donut King (2020)

- Director: Alice Gu

Cambodians own approximately 80% to 90% of the independently owned donut shops in Southern California. This is the story of how that came to be, and it begins with a Cambodian refugee, called "Uncle Ted," who built a donut empire. Getting his start learning the business in a Winchell's training program before starting his own chain, Ted Ngoy soon helped other refugees and family members own their own donut businesses. Ngoy also introduced the pink doughnut box that has become iconic in the Southland.

Betrayed: Surviving an American Concentration Camp (2022)

- Director: Rory Banyard

During World War II, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly placed in concentration camps. But only the Japanese living in the country were targeted: not the Italians, nor the Germans. " Betrayed " revisits that time in history through archival footage and interviews with families. The survivors talk about the many challenges their community faced prior to being placed in camps, what they endured, and the devastating losses of their civil rights, property, and businesses.

It was a traumatic experience that was difficult for generations of those incarcerated to discuss. "We were stripped of everything," one survivor says in the project, with another noting the trauma it caused families even afterward was "shut out of our life because it was horrible. It was more merciful to us to forget than to talk about it."

Giant Robot: Asian Pop Culture and Beyond (2022)

- Directors: Dennis Nishi, Dylan Robertson

When LA punk rockers Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong launched "Giant Robot," a 1994 zine-turned-full-color bimonthly magazine about "Asian pop culture and beyond," no one was covering it. "In the '90s being Japanese American wasn't cool, but it was cool to me," Nakamura said.

The publication would give ink to movements and celebrated figures of Asian descent when there was little (if any) Asian American representation in mainstream media. They would publish stories on Hong Kong cinema, Japanese American concentration camps, Asian subculture stars, and more, reaching audiences on a global scale and helping launch the careers of many artists and actors.

The film chronicles how it all came to be , in their words, with previously unseen video footage dating back to the mag's inception and insightful interviews with Takashi Murakami, Margaret Cho, James Jean, and Daniel Wu. As Wong says in the doc, "It feels good to see someone who looks like you" - and no one did it like "Giant Robot" did for Asians and Asian Americans.

Like a Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres (2022)

- Director: Suzanne Joe Kai

- Runtime: 99 mins

One of the most influential music journalists and editors of our time, and called by a colleague as "King of 'Tell Me More,'" Ben Fong-Torres interviewed numerous legendary musicians for Rolling Stone, including Marvin Gaye, the Doors' Jim Morrison, Elton John, and Steven Wonder.

In "Like a Rolling Stone," music fans will instantly be drawn to the archival video footage and interview recordings of such icons, but equally thrilling is getting a peek at his archives of hundreds of cassette tapes and seeing a master interviewer at work unearthing previously untold stories.

Among other interesting details revealed in the doc includes one such account of the origin of his name - created to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act, his father purchased a Filipino birth certificate to immigrate to the States as Ricardo Torres.

This story was originally published by Stacker and republished pursuant to a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

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25 Documentaries To Watch About Asian American Life During AAPI Heritage Month

Is writing about being an Asian-American a bad thing for college applications? Answered

I’ve done some research into affirmative action for colleges, but the case with Asian-Americans is particularly taboo. A lot of different sources say a lot of different things. Some places tell me not to check the box on the Common App that states your ethnicity, while others say race isn’t a big deal. Being Asian-American is an important part of me, but I don’t want it to ruin my college chances. I’m currently drafting a supplemental essay about my ethnicity and my struggles but I don’t know if it’ll come off to app readers as overdone. So do you think I should be low-key about my race on my college app to stand out more?

Earn karma by helping others:

Hi there! To answer your questions:

1. Not checking the ethnicity box generally has little impact on your application for Asians. Admissions officers will know your ethnicity by your last name, or your parents' last names, unless you're biracial and have a non-Asian last name, as do your parents.

2. Writing about your struggles with your ethnicity is a cliche essay topic, and it's especially recommended that Asian-Americans avoid this, as it will only draw further attention to their ethnicity when they already have a harder time getting into college. If this aspect of your identity is incredibly meaningful to you, you can still write about it, but you should try to do so in a way that is more unique.

For instance, rather than generally talking about your struggles, you might focus on one aspect of your Asian identity - a South Asian might discuss colorism in their community and their experience with that, for instance. You could also subvert expectations and use the cliche storyline, but then add a twist - i.e. "I struggled to fit in, felt torn between my cultures and languages, so that led to my passion for studying foreign languages, as there was no expectation for fluency in a language not tied to my culture, and that was freeing."

You might find this article helpful: https://blog.collegevine.com/cliche-college-essay-topics/

Hope this helps, and let me know if you have more questions!

The whole application is to showcase who you are as a person, so if your race is a very important part of who you are, write about it. One tip would just be to focus less on the struggles and more on how they affected you & how you grew from them. Hope this helps!

So depending on your name it will not matter what ethnicity you are if you have a blatant name.

As for an essay about being an AA I’m of the opinion of high risk high reward. Some AOs may not like it but others will love it. If you talk about struggles it may be cliche but as an AA I’m unsure. Ask yourself is the essay so unique no one else will have this essay? If so the AA may be a nice difference than the struggles of growing up in a Hispanic area as that is approaching cliche.

Hope this helps and please comment if you need clarification as I’d be happy to help clarify!

Sorry about this comment. I messed up while trying to answer this question, and for some reason, I cannot delete this comment.

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Children’s Books

Asian American Children Are Front and Center in a New Version of a Groundbreaking Work

Erika Lee and Christina Soontornvat’s “Made in Asian America” spotlights young people who defy erasure and make their own history.

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A color photograph shows the eighth grader Bryan Zhao, who has short black hair and wears glasses, answering questions from passers-by while standing in front of a three-panel cardboard tabletop display that illustrates his research on the lack of Asian American representation in the public school curriculum, the impact of anti-Asian hate crimes during the covid-19 pandemic and what he is doing to fight for his history.

By Paula Yoo

Paula Yoo is the author of the young adult books “From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial That Galvanized the Asian American Movement” and, out in May, “Rising From the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992. Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King and a City on Fire.”

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MADE IN ASIAN AMERICA: A History for Young People, by Erika Lee and Christina Soontornvat

I had never seen an Asian person in a book until my first-grade teacher read “The Five Chinese Brothers,” by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese, to our class. At recess, the other children stretched the corners of their eyes, imitating the illustrations. In high school, my social studies textbooks relegated the Chinese laborers who risked their lives to build the transcontinental railroad, and the 120,000 Japanese Americans illegally incarcerated during World War II, to impactless sidebars.

My early experiences of racism and erasure are not unique. Similar stories abound in the powerful “Made in Asian America: A History for Young People,” by the award-winning Chinese American historian Erika Lee and the acclaimed Thai American children’s book author Christina Soontornvat.

Although this is the young person’s adaptation of Lee’s “The Making of Asian America,” the authors neither simplify nor sanitize Asian American history for their audience. In fact, they deepen our history by interweaving personal accounts of young people during pivotal events through the ages, as well as adding coverage of major upheavals that occurred after Lee’s original book was published in 2015.

In the introduction, we meet 17-year-old Christina Huang, who remembers her first-grade classmates taunting her on the school bus, and 12-year-old Bryan Zhao, whose white neighbor spat at him when he was 10, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as 18-year-old Soorya “Rio” Baliga and 17-year-old Russell Fan, who because their schools didn’t teach Asian American history felt they were being told, “You don’t matter.”

Lee and Soontornvat argue that Asian American history is routinely marginalized because, in the bigger picture, the villain is often America itself.

The authors explore four “racist justifications” that have shaped anti-Asian public policy for centuries: “Those people are inferior to us,” “Those people are dangerous,” “There are too many of them” and “This is for their own good.” They trace these justifications across time, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for instance, to the exploitation during the early 1900s of South Asian migrant workers from the Punjab region of what is now India and Pakistan, and from Bangladesh.

They also delve into more contemporary injustices, from the 1,600 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, to the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020.

And they make these events relatable. They look at the anti-Asian racism that surged in Michigan in 1982 after massive layoffs in the auto industry through the tragic killing of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old “all-American kid,” and the destruction of Koreatown during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising through the eyes of a Korean immigrant restaurant owner’s 11-year-old daughter, as media outlets sensationalize tensions between the Korean American and Black communities instead of investigating the systemic racism that exploited both underserved groups.

Lee and Soontornvat also tackle head-on issues that have sometimes been as divisive within the Asian American community as outside it, such as the “model minority” myth, which emerged when the 1965 Immigration Act flipped the script on Asian American stereotypes, replacing “exotic,” “dangerous” and “untrustworthy” with a “pretty picture” depicting “quiet and law-abiding” citizens who “worked hard to achieve their American Dreams.” What made this pretty picture ugly, the authors observe, was that “some used the model minority stereotype as an underhanded way to criticize other minorities, especially African Americans.”

Of course Asian American history is much more than its painful past, as Lee and Soontornvat remind readers by extolling the contributions of politicians, athletes, actors, artists and writers.

They also emphasize solidarity with other marginalized communities: Filipino and Mexican farm laborers striking together for fair wages in 1970; Yuri Kochiyama joining forces with Malcolm X during the civil rights movement; L.G.B.T.Q. activists like Dan Choi, a former Army lieutenant who served in Iraq, protesting the repressive “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that barred openly gay military personnel like himself from serving.

In addition, Lee and Soontornvat share their own stories, as children of immigrants who owned Asian American restaurants. By doing so, they’re modeling an act of defiance: the reclaiming of our erased backgrounds.

This defiance is reinforced at the end, when in 2021 Christina Huang, Bryan Zhao, Rio Baliga and Russell Fan testify before the Senate Education Committee on behalf of a bill requiring that Asian American and Pacific Islander history be taught in New Jersey schools. As a result of expressing their feelings of being “ignored, othered or unseen,” New Jersey joined Illinois, Colorado, Nevada, California, Oregon and Nebraska in mandating A.A.P.I. studies in the K-12 curriculum.

“Made in Asian America” isn’t just about the past. As its subtitle makes clear, it’s about the history being made right now by young people, inspired by the Asian Americans who came before them to ensure that our stories are not only heard, but also remembered.

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Asian Americans feel a lack of belonging and safety, national surveys find

Four in 5 Asian Americans don’t feel they truly belong in the United States, while more than half don’t feel safe in public places, a national survey found.

Such sentiments are stirred by discrimination, a continuing rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, lingering stereotypes and a lack of representation in prominent places, respondents said, with many reporting they felt unsafe or didn’t truly belong in places ranging from their schools and workplaces to their own neighborhoods.

“To live in a country where you don’t feel like you belong and don’t feel safe is really concerning,” said Norman Chen, CEO of The Asian American Foundation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization that commissioned the survey, taken earlier this year.

Current events contribute to stress

The foundation’s STAATUS Index report, its third annual survey examining American attitudes about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, gathered responses from 5,235 U.S. residents aged 16 and older.

“Over the last several years, there have definitely been a lot of world events contributing to stressors for the Asian American and Pacific Islander community,” said Janie Jun, director of strategic initiatives for the blended therapy program at Lyra Health, based in Burlingame, California. “Disparities across all minority groups has become apparent, and cultural and systemic barriers are coming more to light. What’s different is that the AAPI community is being more vocal about it.”

The survey found 78% of Asian American respondents felt unaccepted or that they didn't completely belong in U.S. society. More than 75% of Black and Latino respondents felt the same way, compared to 43% of white respondents. Such feelings were more acute among young and female Asian Americans.

About 3 in 5 cited discrimination as the main reason for not feeling they belonged, while 43% cited a lack of representation of people like themselves in positions of power.

'Long-lasting issues that need to be addressed'

The survey also found 52% of Asian Americans feel unsafe because of their race or ethnicity, just shy of the portion of Blacks (53%) who felt the same but more than the 47% of Latino respondents and 28% of whites who responded similarly.

Asian Americans felt least safe on public transportation (29%), followed by their own neighborhood (19%), at school (19%) and their workplace (17%).

Stop AAPI Hate, a San Francisco-based group formed in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to combat and gather data about anti-Asian hate, tallied more than 11,000 reports of such incidents between March 2020 and March 2022.

“The lack of a feeling of safety and belonging is not just something experienced during COVID and the previous (presidential) administration,” Chen said. “These are long-lasting issues that need to be addressed.”

The foundation’s findings echo those of a yearlong study conducted by New York’s Columbia University and Committee of 100, a nonprofit composed of prominent Chinese Americans. The “State of Chinese Americans” national survey of nearly 6,500 people found that while most Chinese Americans felt they were part of American society, they also felt marginalized.

About 75% said they had experienced racial discrimination in the past year, and more than half feared hate crimes or harassment. Nearly 1 in 10 said they’d been physically intimidated or assaulted, and 20% had experienced multiple instances of racial slurs or harassment in person or online.

Fear, loneliness can impact mental health

Feeling that one’s identity is unsupported or unencouraged can impact mental health, especially among the young, Chen said, noting that suicide is the leading cause of death for Asian Americans aged 15 to 24. Chen himself recalled that as a youngster growing up in Maryland, he wasn’t particularly vocal about his Asian American identity.

“Many people will tell you they’re not especially proud to be Asian American,” he said. “I just wanted to be like everybody else. To not really be able to celebrate who you are is really painful, especially growing up.”

The lack of safe, supportive spaces can lead to a lonely existence, Jun said. At the same time, barriers including language, a lack of culturally competent providers and cultural stigmas around seeking mental health services can prevent many from getting needed help.

“People feel obligated to hide their pain because they don’t want to burden family and friends,” she said. “That can lead to a downward spiral of fear and isolation, which can be detrimental to one’s quality of life.”

Chen cautioned that while many were buoyed by the Academy Award success of 2022’s “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once,” such results can be fleeting. He noted that the positivity generated by the 2018 romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians,” with its nonstereotypical story and all-Asian cast, was quashed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the hostility of the Trump administration.

"There was a nosedive in how people felt about the community,” he said. “Old stereotypes really linger in people’s minds, and it will take a whole generation to change that.”

Dig deeper:

Anti-Asian rhetoric only divides America
For Asian Americans, California shootings add to growing mental health crisis
District says teacher's racial, homophobic slurs can be a learning experience

Works by artists from Asian diaspora displayed at Huntington Town Hall

Artist Joan Kim Suzuki, left, Lucie Kwon, board president for the United Asian American Alliance, and artists Saadet Akyurek and Alicia Lam Taracido right, stand in Huntington Town Hall on Friday. Credit: Rick Kopstein

An art exhibit featuring artists from the Asian diaspora will be on display at Huntington Town Hall through May in celebration of Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

The exhibit of paintings, photos and woodworks will feature 14 women artists who range in age from 15 to 60 and represent countries including Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and beyond, said Joan Kim Suzuki, 34, of Plainview, who is the exhibit's curator.

Being seen, erasing stereotypes and reveling in being an artist are among reasons the for the show, organizers said.

Huntington Town is partnering with Long Island-based United Asian American Alliance, a nonprofit that was formed this year to advocate for the rights, empowerment and representation of Asian Americans.

Lucie Kwon, president of the alliance, said many talented Asian artists on Long Island have felt excluded because of language barriers, demands of family life or simply feeling unheard and unseen and not knowing where to get information.

She said an art show opens the door to opportunity.

“I thought it was a great way to let people in the community see their fellow Americans and the talents that they have who happen to be from the AAPI community,” said Kwon.

Below are some of the artists whose works will be featured.

"Blood Orange," a painting by Carina San Jose. Credit: United Asian American Alliance

Carina San Jose, 17, a Half Hollow Hills High School West senior, created her acrylic painting of three blood oranges as part of an assignment in her AP drawing class. Her series uses fruit as a symbol of love and romance.

“I’m very inspired by the emotion and historical usage of fruit as representations of emotions in paintings,” she said.

She said being part of the show is a unique opportunity because it allows Asian and Pacific Islander artists to be represented.

“It’s important to see myself represented in other people while also being a representative of my people," said San Jose, whose family is from the Philippines. "I didn’t get to see a lot of that growing up.”

"Neither … Nor," a painting by Jae Won Shim. Credit: United Asian American Alliance

Jae Won Shim said her acrylic painting “Neither ... nor” represents the dichotomy between how people see her and how she sees herself.

Her experience after moving to the United States from India in 2002 made her realize that people do not necessarily see her as an individual.

“I never thought of myself as a race, I thought of myself as a mom, an artist, and also Korean,” said Shim, 40, a Nesconset resident. “I wanted to illustrate that being Asian is not just one thing.”

The painting features a leopard surrounded by greenery and a bird of paradise flower. The leopard is painted yellow with black spots to represent both a black and patterned leopard.

“It has an ambiguous coat,” she said. “I wanted to illustrate the fact that if you are neither this nor that, even if you don’t fit someone’s preconceived ideas, you are still the same in essence as anyone else, and you should be represented.”

"Temizuya," a photo by Susan Tian. Credit: United Asian American Alliance

Susan Tian, 33, of Long Beach, submitted a photo of her daughter Leila, 5, and her son Jet, 3, at Sensoji Temple on a recent trip to Tokyo.

The photo, entitled Temizuya, shows Leila participating in a hand-washing ritual that typically takes place outside of a shrine or a temple in Shinto or Buddhist cultures, Tian said.

Leila was able to connect a similar cleansing tradition in Judaism that she is familiar with from her family's Chinese and Jewish background. Tian said she hopes the picture will inspire people to also look deeper to seek connections.

“I want them to wonder ‘Oh, what is that? What are they are doing?’” she said, referring to the title of her photo. “Maybe they will look it up and make a connection and see this is very similar to other cultures.”

She said the exhibit also contributes to breaking stereotypes about Asians.

“Art isn’t always the profession Asians are commonly associated with,” she said. “The exhibition highlights the immense talent within the Asian American community and showcases a diverse range of artistic expressions and perspectives.”

"By The River," a work by Joan Kim Suzuki. Credit: United Asian American Alliance

"By the River," by Joan Kim Suzuki, is a woodblock print on Japanese paper.

Kim Suzuki said her piece is what she imagines a peaceful, yet playful childhood in ancient Korea looked like.

“I always imagined that my ancestors spent their time like that, one with nature,” she said.

Her hope is that people come away feeling healed and educated after seeing her piece and also educated. Long Island, she said, has amazing artists who draw serene lighthouses and beaches, "but also people that have traveled the world and brought their experiences here and are contributing to the community."

The exhibit will be on display weekdays, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., through May 30 in the lobby of Town Hall. Identification is needed to enter the building.

Deborah Morris is a native Long Islander and covers the town of Huntington.

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