Top Quotes: “Asian American Histories of the United States” — Catherine Ceniza Choy
Introduction
“Rob Bonta became California’s first Filipino-American state legislator when he was elected to the 18th Assembly district in 2012. In 2021, Gov. Newsom chose Bonta to be CA’s attorney general, making Bonta the first Asian American man in this position.”
“In 2021, Steve Yeun became the first Asian American to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actor category for the movie Minari, about a Korean immigrant family seeking to settle in rural Arkansas. Writer and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Sympathizer in 2016, and then, in 2020, became the first Asian American to join the Pulitzer Prize Board in the board’s 103-year history.”
“As we celebrate these breakthroughs, we remain targets of hate. How did we get here?
In this book, I reckon with this question by emphasizing three interconnected themes in Asian American histories of the United States: violence, erasure, and resistance.”
“Unknowingly, an individual’s creative force of resistance sparks imaginative thinking and resilience beyond themselves and across generations. For example, Chinese detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station sought to express their isolation and anger by carving poems on the barrack walls beginning in the 1910s. This creative spark lives on in the more recent performances of Within These Walls by the Lenora Lee Dance Company. In 2017, the performance took place inside and around the Angel Island Immigration Station, its choreography creating time and space for healing and compassion in the year commemorating the 135th anniversary of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.”
“In the twenty-first century, the numbers of refugees from Burma and Bhutan, fleeing political and social persecution and discrimination in their home countries, dramatically increased. They composed the two largest refugee groups arriving in the United States in 2011. Many have resettled in the American South.”
The 19th Century
“In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan colonized Hokkaido and Okinawa.”
“Asian Americans protested medical scapegoating because at stake was not solely their livelihood, but also their lives. Once they were labeled as filthy, immoral, and disease-prone, they became regarded as less than human and subject to harassment and violence. Key historical examples go back to the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1871, a mob of over five hundred people lynched seventeen Chinese immigrant men in the Chinese Massacre of Los Angeles. Local newspaper editorials condemning Chinese immigrants as immoral and inferior contributed to the brutality of these attacks. In the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre in Wyoming, at least twenty-eight Chinese workers were killed, their homes and bunkhouses set on fire. Economic and social tensions pitted white immigrants — mostly Irish, Scandinavian, English, and Welsh — against the Chinese. Writer Tom Rea notes, “Although they worked side by side every day, whites and Chinese spoke separate languages and lived separate lives. They knew very little about each other. This made it possible for each race to think of the other, somehow, as not entirely human.” These events were not exceptional. In 1885 and 1886, over 168 communities in the US West expelled their Chinese residents, united in their vehemence that “the Chinese must go.”
Although the anti-Chinese movement in the Pacific Northwest was not as intense as California’s, five days after the Rock Springs Massacre, a group of armed white men and several Native American men entered a Chinese camp in Squak Valley (now Issaquah in Washington State) and riddled their tents with bullets. Laborer Gong Heng was asleep in his tent when the shooting began. He described the attack: “So many shot fired it sounded all same [as] China New Year.” Three Chinese men died and several more were seriously wounded.
In Oregon and Washington Territory, a surplus of jobs lessened economic competition between white and Chinese residents. Chinese had been working in the lumber and railroad industries in Tacoma since the early 1870s. However, their more established presence did not protect them from intimidation and expulsion. In November 1885, several hundred white men armed with pistols and clubs rounded up Chinese, ordering them to “pack up and leave town by 1 p.m. or face unspoken consequences.”
In the early twentieth century, the majority of Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos worked in the agricultural, railroad, and lumber industries in the US West, and much of the animosity that they faced was linked to working-class labor competition. In 1907, a mob of five hundred white working men expelled South Asian migrant workers from Bellingham, Washington. They broke windows, threw rocks, and indiscriminately beat people. An angry mob of white workers threatened Korean laborers with physical violence in Hemet Valley, California, in 1913. Anti-Filipino riots took place in Exeter and Watsonville, California, in the 1920s and 1930s. In Exeter, white mobs roamed through Filipino agricultural labor camps, beating the laborers, smashing cars, and burning down bunkhouses. In Watsonville, sexual as well as economic competition erupted in violence over Filipino men dancing with white women in taxi dance halls, resulting in the death of Fermin Tobera. White mobs roamed Watsonville’s streets, beating or shooting Filipinos on sight.”
“Even after all the Japanese were taken away to concentration camps, other Orientals were subject to all kinds of violence. They were afraid to go out at night; many were beaten even during the day. Their cars were wrecked. The tires were slashed, the radios and batteries removed. Some friends driving on the highways were stopped and their cars were overturned. It was a bad time for all of us.”
Today
“I was not seen by the employee at my local post office where I have been a regular customer for over 20 years. After patiently waiting as she pointed to others behind me for nearly 45 minutes, I approached the desk when she prompted me to take several steps backwards in a very hostile tone. She had not requested [that of] any of the prior customers that had gone ahead of me, and they were also all non-Asians. The sting of her racism and coldness towards me made me feel less than and, frankly, dehumanized.”
“In the center’s first national report, covering the period from March 19 to August 5, 2020, these trends included a gendered dimension. Women reported discrimination 2.4 times more than men.”
Filipinx Nurses
“Despite their significant presence in US hospitals, Filipino nurses have been invisible in American culture even in television medical dramas. Some of the most popular TV dramas, such as ER, were based on public inner-city hospitals that were precisely the institutions recruiting nurses from the Philippines beginning in the 1960s. In 2018, the irony was not lost on Emmy Awards co-host Michael Che, who observed: “TV has always had a diversity problem. I mean, can you believe that they did 15 seasons of ER without one Filipino nurse? Have you been to a hospital?”
Learning about the history of Filipino nurse migration to the United States is a way to resist their invisibility by acknowledging their long-standing presence. After the US annexation of the Philippines in 1898, benevolent assimilation policies led to the establishment of an Americanized training hospital system in the Philippines.
American nurses trained Filipino nursing students in courses, such as practical nursing, the use of pharmaceuticals, and bacteriology, that followed a US professional nursing curriculum. Furthermore, Filipino nurse graduates had to demonstrate fluency in the English language in order to obtain Philippine nursing licensure.”
“The predominance of Filipino nurses in US hospitals was catalyzed by three big changes in the United States during the 1960s. First, the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 resulted in an increased need for nurses; second, the women’s and civil rights movements resulted in new job opportunities for American women; and third, a more equitable immigration policy, called the Hart-Celler Act, was passed in 1965.”
“Meanwhile, in the Philippines, high rates of domestic unemployment and political instability pushed Filipino nurses overseas. The devaluation of the Philippine peso against the US dollar made the United States an especially attractive destination. By the early 1970s, a Filipino nurse in the Philippines needed to work twelve years to earn what she could make in the United States in one year. This economic disparity would only worsen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”
“In the mid-1990s, Woodbine Healthcare Center in Gladstone, Missouri, petitioned the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to hire Filipino nurses in its nursing home with the promise that it would employ them as registered nurses pay them the same wages as American nurses. However, the Filipino nurses ended up working as nursing aides, and Woodbine paid them about six dollars an hour less than their US counterparts. Two Filipino nurses filed discrimination charges with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and, in 1999, Woodbine agreed to pay $2.1 million to the nurses and their attorneys.
Problems regarding language have occurred when the use of English in the workplace conflicts with the desire of Filipino nurse migrants to speak Filipino languages during work breaks and other noncritical work situations. In 2010, a group of sixty-nine Filipino nurses and medical staff members at the Delano Regional Medical Center shared a $975,000 settlement in a lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. The Filipino nurses claimed that they were targeted to speak “English only” unlike other bilingual employees and described the workplace language policy as a source of embar-rassment, shame, and harassment. Although the medical center insisted that it did nothing wrong, it had to conduct anti-discrimination training under the terms of the settlement.
The predominant way Filipino nurses have responded to their challenges has been by organizing. Gina Macalino, an RN and California Nurses Association board member, observed, “There is a misconception that Filipino nurses are hard to organize. But if you go to any strike or any action where Filipinos work, the majority of the people you’ll see on the line are Filipinos.” A recent study led by scholar Jennifer Nazareno supported Macalino’s point. It found that a higher proportion of Philippines-trained RNs reported being part of a labor union or collective bargaining unit than their white US-trained counterparts.”
The Vietnam War and Diaspora
“Another troubling outcome is the marginalization of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees in US history. Their histories have been rendered invisible in large part because even though US military actions in Cambodia and Laos were part of the Vietnam War, they were covert.
Although Cambodia’s head of state, Prince Sihanouk, tried to maintain the country’s neutrality by severing ties with the United States in 1965, his policies allowed Vietnamese communists to use border areas and the port of Sihanoukville as supply routes. The United States bombed eighty-three sites in Cambodia between 1965 and 1969. In 1969, the bombing escalated. A covert US Strategic Air Command tactical bombing campaign of suspected communist base camps and supply zones involved carpet-bombing by US B-52s. The purpose of carpet-bombing, also known as “saturation bombing,” is to inflict damage in every part of a targeted area just as a carpet covers every part of a floor. Although a 1970 coup put in place a Cambodian government that supported the United States, the bombing campaign continued until 1973, pushing Vietnamese communists deeper into Cambodia, and radicalizing more Cambodians against their government. An estimated 250,000 Cambodians lost their lives. This destruction and devastation, combined with the withdrawal of US soldiers from South Vietnam, contributed to the fall of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, to communist forces, and the rise of the extremist government of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge attempted to create a classless society made up of rural agricultural workers by destroying culture and traditions. The regime’s leaders called this idea “Year Zero” and put it into practice by shutting down schools and universities, evacuating people from cities and moving them to rural areas, separating children from their parents and placing them in labor camps, abolishing money, and banning music. Professionals and educated persons were considered enemies of the state.
Religious and ethnic minorities were singled out for persecution. Under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, Cambodians endured forced labor, starvation, disease, and mass executions, after which the sites of these atrocities became popularly know as the “killing fields.” The Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million people in a country that had a population of approximately 7 million in early 1975.
The concealment of US military involvement in Laos is crystallized in the historical labels of the US “Secret War” in Laos and the US Central Intelligence Agency’s sponsorship of a “Secret Army” of forty thousand of the country’s Hmong hill tribesmen, a diasporic people and ethnic group. The “Secret War” and “Secret Army” were part of a broader US military effort to support the Royal Lao Government against the communist Pathet Lao army. The effort was an attempt to interdict traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a military supply route that ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam, sending weapons, ammunition, and other supplies from communist-led North Vietnam to supporters in South Vietnam.”
“Other first-person accounts describe a myriad of traumatic experiences, including individuals leaving only with the clothes they were wearing and being unable to tell family and friends about their escapes, witnessing the deaths of family members en route, encountering pirates in the Gulf of Thailand who robbed and brutalized them. The refugees with American contacts and who had fled via airlifts were considered to be the lucky ones. But this mode of escape was also perilous. In 1975, the first flight of Operation Babylift — the mass evacuation of orphans from South Vietnam to the United States and other countries — crash-landed and many on board died. The refugees who fled via land and sea sometimes encountered unwelcoming authorities in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, which were the main countries of first asylum before their resettlement in the United States and other countries. Those refugees who were able to join these refugee camps further endured long and difficult waiting periods.
The wide range of these experiences is often conceptualized as three migration waves, each taking place within a specific political context and having a distinctive socioeconomic composition. Beginning in 1975, the first wave’s 130,000 refugees consisted of primarily South Vietnamese military personnel and their relatives. Many of them were well educated and spoke English. They had experience living in urban areas and had worked directly with Americans.
The second wave of refugees began arriving in 1978. It was a much larger group and socioeconomically more diverse than the first wave. Many were uneducated, poorer, and spoke little English. They hailed from rural areas. The Vietnamese refugees of this wave who fled by sea became popularly known as “boat people,” although critics decry this label because it simplifies them as pitiful and obscures their heroic will to live. The second wave was also more ethnically diverse. It included ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese, but also a large number of lowland Lao and highland Hmong. Many were Buddhists and animists, in contrast to the significant Catholic population of the first wave.
By the early 1990s, Southeast Asian refugee flows to the United States declined as formal refugee admissions programs, such as the Orderly Departure Program, ended. A third wave of Southeast Asians entered the United States primarily as immigrants utilizing the family reunification provisions of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. It also included thousands of Vietnamese Amerasians (children born of US servicemen and Vietnamese women) as well as political prisoners. In the early twenty-first century, new immigration and new generations born in the United States have significantly contributed to Vietnamese American growth and diversity. According to the Pew Research Center, the Vietnamese American population grew by 78 percent between 2000 and 2019.”
“Refugees with less education struggled to learn a new language and make a living wage. Xang Mao Xiong arrived in the United States from Laos in 1978. In an oral history, he explained, “I did not even know the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when I first came, yet I was required to find a job to support my family.” The English language was so different compared to the Hmong language, and adults struggled to learn what seemed to come easily to their children. Xiong continued:
One problem I have had in learning English is that after I learned what one word means, I got all confused when I found that another word had the same meaning. For example, good, nice, beautiful, perfect have similar meanings. In Hmong, different words have different meanings. American English is very hard for us adults to learn. It is easy for our children, but not for us.”
“In the 1980s and early 1990s, anti-Southeast Asian violence took place across the United States. A 1993 issue of the CAAAV Voice, the newsletter of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, reported that Southeast Asians were bearing the brunt of anti-Asian violence.
The story highlighted intense campaigns of violence against Southeast Asians in the Boston area that included efforts to drive them out of Dorchester in 1983 and 1987; multiple cases of arson targeting Cambodians in Revere; the 1985 beating death of a Cambodian man, Bun Vong, on his way home to Lowell; and the 1987 drowning death of a teenage Cambodian boy, Vandy Phong, after being pushed into a canal lock. The story also spotlighted two horrific cases of anti-Asian violence in 1989. Before they pistol-whipped and killed Chinese American student Jim Loo in Raleigh, North Carolina, Robert and Lloyd Piche told Loo and his Vietnamese friends, “We had enough of you gooks in Vietnam.” In Stockton, California, Patrick Edward Purdy, who had been obsessed with the Vietnam War, killed five children — four from Cambodia and one from Vietnam — in a shooting rampage at Cleveland Elementary School. According to the CAAAV Voice, “the non-acceptance of the American defeat in Vietnam plays a large part in the hostility towards Southeast Asians,” despite the fact that the Southeast Asian refugees in the United States had been American allies.
The poverty and violence of tough American neighborhoods and the helplessness of their parents and other elders pushed a number of Southeast Asian youths in the United States toward gangs for protection and a different kind of kinship. Some of these youths who are now adults have been deported or face deportation to their Southeast Asian nations of birth, even though they have completed their US prison sentences. According to the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, two thousand Southeast Asian Americans have been deported from the United States since 1998. Roughly fifteen thousand currently live with a final order of removal, and about 80 percent of those removal orders are based on past convictions. Most of these cases involve Southeast Asian Americans who came to the US as infants and toddlers, fleeing Southeast Asia as refugees with their families. Their deportations surged after 1996, when Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which enable the deportation of noncitizens for certain crimes, even if they were committed before the passage of the law.
Many of the Southeast Asian Americans who have been deported or are facing deportation are legal permanent residents. They face deportation for minor, nonviolent crimes, as in the case of Saroun Khan. He was about four years old when he and his parents arrived in Philadelphia in 1984. His parents did not speak any English. Khan felt as though he and his brother had to fend for themselves while in poverty. Khan’s crime was to take an unlocked car for a joyride, an offense for which he had served time in prison. Yet, under immigration law, it is considered an “aggravated felony” and subject to deportation. In 2020, federal immigration agents arrested and detained him, putting him on track for deportation to a country that he hardly remembers. Thus, violence persists for Southeast Asian Americans in the United States: as a young Southeast Asian person coming of age in Philadelphia in the 1980s, Khan had been bullied and robbed; now violence comes in the form of more recent government policies that engender fear.”
“Ted Ngoy fled with his wife by military plane as Cambodia fell to communist forces. In California, he worked multiple jobs as a church custodian and gas station attendant until, one day, he tasted a donut, which he savored. It had reminded him of a Cambodian treat, nom kong. This discovery led to work at a Winchell’s donut shop and eventually to Ngoy owning his own store. It sparked what would become Cambodian predominance in California’s donut industry, what might be called a “pink box” revolution.
Ngoy went on to buy dozens of donut stores that he then leased to other Cambodian refugee families. Even with limited English proficiency, Cambodian refugees could make a living from operating a donut shop. Communication with customers could be limited to basic elements, like prices and the names of different donut types and flavors such as chocolate frosted and cinnamon twist. Ngoy used pink boxes to package donuts because it cost less than the traditional white boxes used by Winchell’s and other donut shops. The pink box has since become the standard visual cue for a box of donuts in the United States.”
“[They] were inspired to write about their experiences as Lao Americans raised in the American Midwest. Little Laos on the Prairie foregrounds the journeys of the people of the Laotian diaspora, who have been “layered beneath larger Asian nation narratives that are more commonplace to the public.” It calls for “words and stories written by us, and for us. Included, as well, are those that want to listen and learn. But don’t interrupt us. It’s our turn. We’re getting Laod.””
Refugees
“The 1980 Refugee Act adopted United Nations conventions and protocols that defined “refugee” person with a well-founded fear of persecution. It funded a new Office of US Coordinator for Refugee Affairs and an Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Refugee Act also raised the annual ceiling for refugees from 17,400 to 50,000 and created a process for reviewing and adjusting this ceiling.
After passage of the act in 1980, US refugee admissions exceeded 200,000, then declined to 159,000 the following year, and ranged between 40,000 and 130,000 over the next thirty-five years, with the exception of the two years after the 9/11 attacks. The ceiling declined significantly under President Donald Trump, who set it at 15,000 – the lowest refugee ceiling in forty years-in 2020. In May 2021, President Joe Biden revised the ceiling to 62,500.”
“lowa is home to some ten thousand Burmese refugees, and many do not speak English. As a result, the majority work in Iowas meatpacking plants, which pays higher than minimum wage without requiring English-language proficiency. In 2020, the community bore a disproportionate risk of contracting COVID-19 because, even though meatpacking plants had become hazardous workplaces for the transmission of the disease, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meat plants as essential infrastructure that must remain open.
In southeast Iowa’s Columbus Junction, a meatpacking town of 2,300, the ethnic Chin community has grown to become nearly 20 percent of the population. According to an low Public Radio news story by Kate Payne, at least 221 workers at one meatpacking plant there had tested positive for COVID-19, and two had died.”
Organizing
“During World War I, when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forcibly assembled and incarcerated in internment camps, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino Americans wore buttons identifying themselves. “I am Chinese” (or Korean or Filipino) was a short phrase that signaled what they were not. They were not Japanese Americans who were deemed enemies in their own country after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
“Some Asian American soldiers became antiwar activists after suffering firsthand this affront of being lumped together with North Vietnamese soldiers. Their superior officers used them as examples of what the enemy looked like, telling non-Asian American recruits, “We kill people who look like him!” Such racist abuse fueled their fears of being killed by fellow soldiers or being left behind by medevac teams. The horror of witnessing and participating in violence against people who bore a resemblance to their own families also took a psychological toll.
Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos’ backing of US military actions in Vietnam and American presidents’ continuing support of the Marcos regime, despite his dictatorial ambitions, motivated some Filipino American activists to work toward Philippine democracy as well as freedom from American racism.”
“November 6, 1968, at San Francisco State College was a watershed moment in United States history. It marked the beginning of the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) student strike, an action that would last five months and become the longest college strike in US history. The TWLF was a multiracial alliance of Black, Asian American, Latino, and American Indian students who demanded institutional change. Its constituent organizations included the Black Student Union, Latin American Student Organization, Mexican American Student Coalition, Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor, Asian American Political Alliance, and Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action. Their activism led to the establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies.”
“Frederick Douglass made his support for Chinese immigration clear:
“I have said that the Chinese will come, and have given some reasons why we may expect them in very large numbers in no very distant future. Do you ask if I would favor such immigrations? I answer, I would. Would you admit them as witnesses in our courts of law?” I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would.”
“Filipino and Black solidarity reemerged in the United States in the form of labor organizing in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925, trade unionist A. Philip Randolph and the Pullman porters organized and founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In the classic divide-and-conquer strategy, the Pullman Company hired Filipino train car attendants to disparage Black workers. Although the Brotherhood initially vilified Filipino “scabs,” historian Barbara M. Posadas has found that its policy shifted to recognize the common plight of minority workers. The Brotherhood welcomed Filipinos as members, declaring: “The only security of the Filipinos as well as the Negro Pullman porter is organizing as one common union.” Yet, recruiting Filipino attendants to join the union was a challenge. Some Filipinos rejected union membership as damaging and preferred to work with white society, while others doubted the Brotherhood’s ability and commitment to protect Filipino jobs. The integration and leadership of Filipinos in the union made a difference. Attendant Cipriano Samonte understood the need for organizing after having migrated from the Philippines to Hawaii and enduring harsh labor conditions on sugar plantations. Samonte led the organizing drive of the Filipino workers in Chicago, meeting with Filipinos on payday to talk about the importance of the union. After years of struggle, the Brotherhood was recognized as the union representing workers at the Pullman Company, signing its first contract in 1937. Samonte spent more than twenty-five years with the union, serving on the executive board of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ Chicago division and its grievance committee.”
“Hoshizaki recalled a moment of joy and respite at the assembly center when his Black neighbors, the Marshalls, traveled all the way to see him and his family, albeit through a fence, and to bring them apple pie à la mode. The Marshalls had a catering business and, decades later, Hoshizaki recalled with delight how they had skillfully baked the apple pie so as to create space between the crust and apple filling for the ice cream. “It was a real pleasure,” Hoshizaki said.
Hoshizaki was subsequently incarcerated at Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, where civil rights, antiwar, gay liberation, and AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born in 1943. In the 1960s, Kuromiya participated in restaurant sit-ins in Maryland to protest those establishments that refused to serve Blacks and was brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers in Selma as he was leading a group of high school students in a march to the state capitol building in Montgomery. Kuromiya developed a close friendship with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family. After King was assassinated in 1968, he helped care for King’s children at the family’s home.
In 1948, Cecilia Suyat needed a job to support herself in New York City after having moved away from her Filipino family and her childhood home in Hawaii. Suyat recalled that when she went to the employment office, “the clerk, she saw my dark skin, and she sent me to the national office of the NAACP.” Suyat became the secretary for Gloster B. Current, deputy executive director of the NAACP. She traveled to various cities where she attended conferences and took minutes. Like her fellow NAACP workers, she experienced being turned away from hotels, and credited local people who took them in: “We stayed in their private homes, and they. fed us and treated us like kings. Suyat played a role in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, typing and re-typing the NAACP’s legal briefs over a four-year period as it honed its arguments for the landmark case that ended legal segregation in public schools. In 1955, she married Thurgood Marshall, then a civil rights lawyer and widower, who in 1967 would become the first African American Supreme Court justice. They remained married until his death in 1993.”
“After moving to Harlem in 1960, human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama met Malcolm X, and their friendship transformed both of them. She was moved by his calls for Black liberation and began working with Black nationalist organizations in Harlem. As the FBI and police surveilled and repressed Black activists, Kochiyama dedicated herself to supporting political prisoners, “providing non-stop letter writing often at two or three in the morning, and linking the plight of imprisoned political activists to her own internment in Jerome, Arkansas, during World War I. In 1964, Malcolm X visited the Kochiyamas to meet Japanese hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) and journalists on a world peace tour. He also sent the Kochiyamas postcards from his travels to Africa and other parts of the world. One of them, mailed from Kuwait on September 27, 1964, read: “Still trying to travel and broaden my scope since I’ve learned what a mess can be made by narrow-minded people. Bro. Malcolm ×”
In February 1965, when Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, Yuri Kochiyama was there. She had been in the audience waiting to hear him address the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which he had recently founded. After the burst of gun-fire, she rushed to the stage, cradled his head on her lap, pleading with him to, stay alive. Although a photograph of Kochiyama comforting Malcolm X was published in Life magazine, there was no mention of her by name, and only in recent years has there been mention of an. Asian American in attendance at Malcolm’s final speech.”
“In May 2021, a survey commissioned by the nonprofit organization LAUNCH (Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change) found that 42 percent of people in the US could not name one well-known Asian American. Not one Asian American name.”
“Beginning in 2016, the letters in English have since been translated into twenty-six languages. A new set of letters was created in 2020 in response to demands for justice for George Floyd, Dreason Reed, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Both the 2016 and 2020 sets of letters include a South Asian American edition. “Dear family and friends,” begins the letter in the 2016 edition. “We need to talk.” It then makes direct connections between Black and South Asian American communities:
In fact, stereotypes directly impact members of our community as well. The media shows us as foreigners with thick accents. We get called names in schools and on the streets. Airport security stops us, and some of us are profiled as terrorists because of our clothes or our religion.
Sometimes, anti-Black racism also puts us in danger. In 2015, Sureshbhai Patel came to Alabama from India to care for his grandson. He was taking a walk outside when a White neighbor called 911 to report a suspicious “skinny Black guy” on the street. The police went on to assault Mr. Patel, who spoke little English. He was left partially paralyzed, spending months in the hospital. The police officer was never convicted of any wrongdoing, even though the entire incident was captured on video.”
“According to the College Board, only twenty-five US colleges and universities offer majors in Asian American studies.
The struggle for Asian American studies in the K-12 curriculum also continues. When history curricula include aspects of Asian American history, they typically devote only a few sentences to Chinese labor on the transcontinental railroad and Japanese American internment, if at all. In 2021, Illinois senator Ram Villivalam and Representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz introduced the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History, or TEACH, Act (HB 376). The act aims to present a more holistic picture of US history by adding Asian American history to the Illinois School Code beginning in the 2022–23 school year. Legislators in New York, Connecticut, and Wisconsin have introduced similar bills.
These efforts stem from the urgent need to address the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence since 2020. The frequently raised question — What can we do to stop this and move forward? — typically elicits responses such as participating in bystander training and donating time and money to Asian American organizations.”
“According to scholars Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sono Shah, one out of every seven Asian immigrants is undocumented. In the United States, there are approximately 1.7 million undocumented Asian immigrants, accounting for about 16 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country. The number of undocumented Asian immigrants has tripled since 2000.
The numerical caps of the post-1965 immigration system and increasing visa backlogs for both family-based and occupational preferences gave rise to this phenomenon. For example, by 1970, the waiting period for a “third preference” occupational visa — for skilled workers and professionals — was already thirteen months. In 1970, an immigration amendment allowed foreign workers to fill permanent positions in the United States through a temporary H-1 visa that migrants could receive in significantly less time.”
Work
“In the 1970s and 1980s, the labor and entrepreneurship of Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Nepali, Tibetan, and Latino immigrants and refugees transformed nail salons from an elite, luxury service to a more accessible, affordable one. In 1996, state licensing exams were translated into Vietnamese in some metropolitan areas, reflecting the predominance of this group.”
“According to Buck Gee and Denise Peck of the nonprofit Ascend Foundation, Asian success is an illusion. In their analysis of the leadership pipeline in the Bay Area technology sector from 2007 to 2015, they found that Asians were the largest cohort of professionals yet the least likely among all races to become managers and executives.
Furthermore, Asian women were the least likely among all other racial groups to become executives. They face a “double glass ceiling.””
Misc
“These include a spate of violence targeting South Asians in New Jersey in 1987. In September of that year, Navroze Mody was taunted and brutally beaten to death by a group of youths in Hoboken. Mody had just been promoted to a managerial role at Citicorp. A few days later, another Indian was beaten into a coma on a busy street corner in Jersey City Heights.
That same year, a note threatening to drive out the Indian community in Jersey City, penned by a hate group known as the Dotbusters, was published in a local paper. The group’s name refers to the bindi, or dot, that Indian women wear on their foreheads. The bindi has familial, social, and spiritual meanings. It can signify marriage, self-realization, and piety. Yet, in the midst of this violence, its meaning had tragically changed for Lalitha Masson, a gynecologist who had emigrated from India in 1966. Masson stopped wearing her bindi and opted for Western-style dress instead of her Indian saris. She hoped this would make her less of a target.”
“A closer look at growth rates, however, would shift our attention to North Dakota and South Dakota, which between 2000 and 2019 saw the fastest increases in Asian American populations. Indiana, Nevada, and North Carolina also saw significant growth.”
Interracial Relationships
“In the mid-1850s, a census official who walked the streets of lower New York encountered John Huston and his Irish wife, Margaret, at home with their two young daughters, Kate and Mary. Although Huston was a common Anglo-American name, John was born in China. He arrived in New York in 1829 and worked as a seaman. The Hustons were part of a pattern. The census taker found five apartments in one building, each occupied by a Chinese man married to an Irish woman. They included William Brown, a Chinese ship steward, who was married to Irishwoman Rebecca Brown. They had a six-year-old son, William, who, like Kate and Mary, was a native New Yorker.
Why did these Chinese men take on Western names? Tchen presents multiple possibilities. Their Anglo-Christian names may have stemmed from British influence after Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842. A British or American shipmaster might have given them these names as they sometimes did to Chinese crew members. Or, the men could have taken on these names as the result of the influence of Bible and English-language classes they took in American churches, such as the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which had a Chinese Mission. Furthermore, in Chinese culture, it was traditional to take on various names. Taking on a new Western name suggested a willingness to live and work with non-Chinese workers and neighbors. It performed the same function as intermarriage in that it signaled that they had intended to stay.”
“Although Mexican Americans were “white” by law, their relationships with non-white men, including romantic ones, were generally more acceptable in county clerk offices and in everyday life. If a clerk decided not to issue a marriage license, couples went to another county, state, or even on the high seas for a ship captain’s ceremony. In her study of California’s Punjabi Mexican American community, scholar Karen Leonard traces a pattern of intermarriage that extended from El Paso and Canutillo in Texas to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to California’s Imperial Valley, where most of the Punjabi Mexican couples lived. Their labor in cotton fields as well as racial segregation brought them together. Mexican women played a major role in growing this community by arranging matches between relatives and friends and Punjabis.
These marriages produced many children, including stepchildren, and a multigenerational Punjabi Mexican American community emerged. Their histories are reflected in their children’s names, such as Maria Jesusita Singh, Jose Akbar Khan, and Armando Chand. Strong Mexican cultural influence came from mothers, aunts and grandmothers, godmothers, and other children, including older Spanish-speaking stepchildren who helped take care of the younger ones, and classmates, many of whom were Spanish speakers. According to Leonard, even in the present day, some in the Imperial Valley think of Singh as a Mexican American surname.
Although Punjabi culture may not have been as prominent in the children’s upbringing, it still mattered. The men taught their wives how to prepare Punjabi-style vegetables and chicken curry. Some took off their traditional turbans but kept the iron wrist bangles that symbolized their Sikh faith. Many did not teach their children Punjabi language in part because they considered their children to be American, but also because of their own intense work schedules in the agricultural fields.”
WWII
“The US Navy’s recruitment of Filipinos beginning in the early twentieth century facilitated Filipino migration to San Diego. Until 1998, San Diego was the site of the largest US naval base and the Naval Training Center. Approximately half of San Diego’s Filipino population has ties to the US Navy.”
“You cannot bring all your clothes, let alone furniture and other household items. Knowing this, some people come to your home looking for bargains. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston watches her mother break her heirloom china before giving it away to a bargain hunter. Her mother’s actions speak volumes: They cannot take everything away from me, from my family.
If you are a Japanese American undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, like Yoshiko Uchida, who was born and raised in Berkeley, you must leave your campus as well as your childhood home. Uchida cannot bring her pet collie, Laddie, to the horse stall that is the makeshift housing for her and her family at Tanforan Racetrack, which has been repurposed as an assembly center. In desperation, she sends a letter to the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, pleading: “I am one of the Japanese American students soon to be evacuated and have a male Scotch collie that can’t come with me. Can anyone give him a home? If interested, please call me immediately.””
“Humor, imagination, play, and beauty remind you that you are human. Internees hold a fly-catching contest and the winner “proudly” displays a gallon jug filled with 2,426 dead flies. They vie for the “honor” of being assigned to the stall once occupied by the legendary racing horse Seabiscuit. There is so much dust in this place that a young internee imagines “a mole digging his burrow” that is “ten feet up in the air.”
Some non-Japanese Asian Americans help you by looking out for your homes and your businesses. They include Filipino American Johnny Ibarra, who took over the farm of his former boss, Yoshio Ando, in the Santa Clara Valley near San Jose, California, charging a token sum to cover the property tax bill. In Whittier, California, the family of Korean American Mary Paik Lee looked after the property of a Japanese American family who were their neighbors. On Bainbridge Island, Washington, Filipino American employees Felix Narte and Elaulio Aquino did the same for the Kitamoto family farm until the family could reclaim it. However, others direct their hatred of Japan toward you and take advantage of your forced eviction and removal.”
“On December 18, 1944, in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, the US Supreme Court unanimously rules that the government cannot detain citizens who are loyal to the United States.
The announcement that internment camps will close within a year creates panic, anger, confusion, and anxiety at Tule Lake. Initially, less than two dozen internees apply to renounce their US citizenship. In the subsequent weeks, you may be one of the thousands who join them. The injustice of internment, coercion by Japanese nationalists, and parental pressure to keep families together create complex and divided loyalties that motivate renunciation. You had thought that renunciation of your US citizenship would give you and your family members more options for resettlement. But then you learn that Japan is losing the war. Now you and your family face the prospect of deportation to a devastated Japan. You did not fully understand the implications of your actions. You realize that you have made a grave mistake. The herculean efforts of lawyer Wayne Collins, who dedicates most of his career to defending Japanese Americans affected by the war, helps the majority get their citizenships restored. In some cases, this process takes over two decades.
By the war’s end, you are afraid of what awaits you outside the camps. If you are among those still left because you are elderly, have young children, or are unsure of how you will support yourself, you are forced out and issued twenty-five dollars. The West Coast has changed. Its population has grown. You may have no choice but to live in surplus army barracks supplied by the War Relocation Authority. They bear an eerie resemblance to the camps you had just left.”
“Within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan bombed and invaded the Philippines.”
“In 1941, third-generation Chinese American Maggie Gee withdrew from her studies at the University of California, Berkeley to work as an electrical draftswoman at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where she charted the electrical wiring for the repair of damaged submarines. The war provided her with an opportunity of fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a pilot like Amelia Earhart. She enrolled in flight school in Minden, Nevada, and became one of two Chinese American women in the Women Airforce Service Pilots. WASP transported military aircraft from one base to another within the United States and flew mock missions to train men about to go overseas for combat. Gee recalls that their passion for flying planes bonded the approximately 1,100 women pilots.”
“Asian American women were among the millions of women who worked in war-related industries during World War II. These work opportunities expanded Asian Americans’ sense of community. Maggie Gee’s forty-six-year-old mother, An Yoke Gee, worked at Kaiser Shipyards as a burner, cutting steel plate with a blowtorch. Maggie Gee characterized it as a “positive experience” for her mother: “She made non-Chinese friends for the first time, and it broadened her outlook on life. She was satisfied with being part of a Chinese community where she lived, but this allowed her to become part of a whole. Dorothy Eng remembered seeing many women from Oakland’s Chinatown going to and from work in the shipbuilding industry: “Matronly women who had never worked outside of their homes before got jobs as sweepers aboard ships.””
“In the context of US wartime alliances with China, the Philippines, and India, and Asian American participation in the war effort, the public’s perception of specific Asian American groups dramatically shifted. The characterization of Chinese Americans as a yellow peril personified by popular villains Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless shifted to that of “good Asians” in a “good war.” Filipinos, once represented as uncivilized savages, had become brothers in arms.””
“These changes contributed to the passage of landmark legislation. Chinese Exclusion Acts were repealed and US naturalization rights to Chinese granted. The passage of the Luce-Celler Act in 1946 allowed Filipinos and Asian Indians to become US citizens. The War Brides Act of 1945 and the Alien Fiancées and Fiancés Act of 1946 facilitated thousands of Chinese and Filipino women to enter the United States as new brides. Their migration resulted in the growth of Asian American families and more balanced gender ratios.
Yet, anti-Asian violence and racism persisted. Korean American Mary Paik Lee recalled that even after Japanese Americans were interned, other Asian Americans feared going outside. Some endured beatings even in broad daylight. Acts of vandalism destroyed their cars and other belongings. Segregation continued for Filipinos in Stockton’s movie theaters.”
“While enlistment demonstrated Asian American loyalty to the United States, Chinese and Filipino soldiers encountered great suspicion. When a group of Chinese American soldiers entered the town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, they were immediately surrounded by police, questioned, and detained until a white officer verified their documentation. Soldiers from the Second Filipino Infantry Regiment were refused service at a restaurant in Marysville located near their training camp in Northern California.
Filipinos in the United States who had joined the US military were eligible for GI Bill benefits, but like other veterans of color, they were barred by restrictive housing covenants from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. As scholar Dawn Bohulano Mabalon points out, receiving the “worst postwar benefit package” were the more than 250,000 Filipino veterans who had joined the USAFFE in the Philippines, including her father, Ernesto Mabalon. The Rescission Act of 1946 declared that their service “shall not be deemed to be or to have been service in the military or national forces of the United States or any component thereof for the purposes of any law of the United States conferring rights, privileges or benefits,” even though President Roosevelt had promised them full equity with other veterans. Mabalon’s father considered the Rescission Act a deep insult, and my Lolo characterized it as a “cruel law.””
“In June 1913, eleven Koreans from Riverside arrived in the small rural town of Hemet, California. Two ranchers had hired them to pick apricots in their orchard after they were unable to find enough workers locally. When the Koreans arrived in Hemet by train, an angry mob of over a hundred white men surrounded them, threatened them with physical violence, and ordered them to leave the town. They assumed the laborers were Japanese. When the ranchers later explained that the workers were Korean, it did not make a difference to the mob, who claimed that Hemet was “white man’s valley.””
“Scholar Lili Kim’s research spotlights the leadership of Maria Hwang in the Korean Women’s Relief Society, which was founded in Hawat’i in 1919. Hwang immigrated to Hawaii with her children, leaving her husband, who had a concubine, behind in Korea. She allegedly told her husband: “I can no longer live under these circumstances with you. I am taking our children to America and will shame you in the future. These children shall become educated and I shall become a wonderful person. You can remain as you are.””
“Christianity became a major religion in Korea in the nineteenth century as a result of American missionary efforts there as well as Koreans’ embrace of the religion and the educational mobility it offered to women and lower classes.”
“Initially confident of US support of the Filipino cause, nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo declared the independence of the Philippines on June 12, 1898, in Kawit, in the province of Cavite. In September 1898, a constitutional convention met in Malolos, the capital of the new republic. The Philippine Republic was officially inaugurated on January 23, 1899, with Emilio Aguinaldo as its new president. However, the United States did not recognize the new republic.
In February 1899, when Private William Grayson shot at a group of Filipino soldiers in Manila, it ignited the Philippine-American War. The war was brutal. Clashes between Americans and Filipinos on the island of Samar in the central region of the Philippines led to a Filipino guerrilla attack that killed forty-eight American soldiers. Brigadier General Jacob Smith ordered American soldiers to take no prisoners and to kill and burn, stating: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.” US interrogation tactics included the “water cure,” which is now known as waterboarding. The policy of concentrating civilians in camps led to malnutrition, overcrowding, and tainted water supplies. An estimated 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants died, and several hundred thousand Filipino civilians died from famine and disease as well as violence. A cruel irony is that the United States justified its possession of the Philippines through claims of bringing public health to the archipelago. Yet, the war resulted in a cholera epidemic that claimed 150,000 to 200,000 lives. The official years of the Philippine-American War are 1899–1902, but armed conflict continued between American forces and the Moro people in the southern Philippines in the early 1900s until the Battle of Bud Bagsak in 1913.
In the United States, the subject of colonizing the Philippines was highly controversial. The Anti-Imperialist League formed in 1898 to oppose US annexation of the Philippines for moral, racial, legal, and economic reasons. Prominent anti-imperialists included writer Mark Twain, scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, and activist Jane Addams.”
“At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, over a thousand people — Tinguians, Bagobos, Bontoc Igorots, Suyoc Igorots, Negritos, Mangyans, Visayans, and Moros, among other groups — were displayed in a “living exhibition.” The exposition celebrated US expansion westward and overseas. It rationalized US imperialism through its representation of Philippine indigenous peoples at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.
One of the fair’s most popular exhibits was the “Igorot Village” in the forty-seven-acre “Philippine Reservation.” In 2004, on the centennial of the St. Louis World’s Fair, Mia Abeya, whose Igorot grandfather was among those on display, reflected on the fair’s colonial narrative: “They brought them to the fair to show to the world that here are people who need our help. They need us to develop them. Look at how they dress themselves, look at how they dance, just look at how they live.” In this narrative, one of the key examples of native savagery was the Igorot practice of dog eating. Abeya noted that they did so occasionally for ceremonial purposes. However, Igorots were fed the animals daily to give fairgoers the opportunity to witness this practice. “They made them butcher dogs, which is really abusing the culture of the Igorots,” Abeya said,
The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 abolished virtually all Asian immigration to the United States, with one exception: Filipinos. As a result of US annexation, they became “US nationals,” which meant they could immigrate to the United States but were ineligible to become US citizens.”
“Students’ experiences of racial discrimination on the West Coast intensified their interest in Indian independence. Although some students came from middle-class families, their socioeconomic privilege did not protect them from racial discrimination. Restaurants refused to serve them. College student clubs denied them membership. Historian Joan Jensen notes that hotels and boardinghouses, including the YMCA, refused to take them in, and recounts the story of one student who spent a cold winter night in a Southern Pacific depot in Northern California after being turned away from a dozen hotels.”
“On November 1, 1913, the Ghadar Party launched its first newspaper, Ghadar, declaring that “today there begins in foreign lands, but in our country’s language, a war against the English Raj.”They printed several thousand issues in Urdu and Gurmukhi in their headquarters, the Yugantar Ashram (Advent of a New Age Ashram), on Hill Street in San Francisco. Members memorized over a thousand subscribers’ names to avoid creating a paper trail that could be used by the British government against them.”
“The history of the objectification of Asian American women is almost 150 years old. One key origin point is an 1875 immigration law known as the Page Act, which prohibited the transport of unfree laborers and women brought for “immoral purposes” to the United States. It created a system of enforcement that conflated Asian women’s migration with prostitution.”
“Scholar Kerry Abrams points out that this system treated Asian women differently from European women, as “American consuls in foreign ports had an obligation to screen Chinese and Japanese women before they even left their home countries, and refuse to grant them an immigration certificate if they suspected them of prostitution, a hurdle not imposed on immigrants from other ports, such as those in Europe.”
“The major exception to the 1924 Immigration Act was Philippine immigration, because Filipinos, as a result of US annexation of the Philippines, had the status of US nationals. However, the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 changed their status to alien and restricted their immigration to fifty persons per year.”
“Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood. After she was cast as an extra for The Red Lantern in 1919, she went on to appear in over sixty movies. Wong auditioned for lead roles, but she was consistently cast as a supporting character. In 1924, she created her own production company, Anna May Wong Productions, but it was short-lived. Anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriages influenced the creation of a 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which forbade the depiction of miscegenation. As a result, Wong was unable to land leading roles alongside white actors in romantic movies. Wong left Hollywood frustrated by these discriminatory barriers that circumscribed her career. Like other American artists of color in the early twentieth century, she moved to Europe, where she starred in many plays and films including her first talking film in 1930 called The Flame of Love.
In a 1933 interview, Wong reflected: “I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain — murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that.” She questioned why Chinese people and their culture could not be portrayed with dignity: “We have our own virtues. . . . Why do they never show these on the screen?”
Although Paramount Studios contacted Wong and promised her leading roles, upon her return, she was still asked to play one-dimensional Asian roles created by white Hollywood directors. At times, Wong refused stereotypical roles and inauthentic direction, such as when one director asked her to, use Japanese mannerisms to play a Chinese character. At other times, she agreed to play stereotypical roles in order to work with successful directors of, the period, such as Josef von Sternberg. She appeared in the 1932 von Sternberg film Shanghai Express, playing a Chinese prostitute alongside her friend Marlene Dietrich.
Who is playing whom?
Compounding this problem of objectification and marginalization on-screen was the centuries-old practice of “yellowface,” in which white actors play Asian or Asian American characters. The phenomenon involved white actors taping their eyelids in order to make their eyes appear slanted and wearing buck teeth and heavy makeup. The results were often so exaggerated that their appearances were incredulous and buffoonish. Yet, some of the most prominent American actors performed in yellowface on-screen. These include Katharine Hepburn, who played a Chinese woman, Jade Tan, in the 1944 film Dragon Seed; Marlon Brando, portraying Sakini, an Okinawan interpreter, in the 1956 film Teahouse of the August Moon; and Mickey Rooney, as Mr. Yunioshi, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).
According to scholar Josephine Lee, white actors in theater as well as in film portrayed Asian characters as “villainous despots, exotic curiosities, or comic fools.”Yellowface precluded Asian American actors from employment, further hampering the recognition of their talent on stage as well as on-screen.”
“In their 2018 study, scholars Shruti Mukkamala and Karen Suyemoto interviewed Asian American women about their experiences of discrimination through online open-ended surveys as well as in-person group interviews. Out of the 107 participants in the study, only four said they had never experienced discrimination. Mukkamala and Suyemoto identified six types of discrimination that illustrate how race and gender intersect in their lives. These types include being exoticized, objectified, and infantilized, for example, as “geisha girls” with a distinctive sexuality; seen as incapable of being or becoming leaders; perceived to be agreeable and unable to speak up or stand up for themselves; expected to look cute and small; rendered invisible; and assumed to be a service worker, such as a maid or nail salon worker.”
“In 1972, Patsy Mink also became the first Asian American to run for US president. A vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, she ran on an antiwar platform.”
“During her swearing-in ceremony in Washington, DC, in January 2021, Strickland donned a hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, in vibrant colors of red and blue. Strickland was born in South Korea.”
“On January 27, 2021, photographer Corky Lee died due to COVID-19 at seventy-three years old. The loss was deeply felt by so many in the Asian American community. For the past five decades, Lee had captured key moments of Asian American history, many of which sparked awareness and resistance against violence and injustice.
Among his most well-known photographs is a 1975 photo of Peter Yew with a bloody face as he is dragged away by police. According to writer and scholar Hua Hsu, “They had beaten him after he had tried to stop them from assaulting a teenager who’d been involved in a minor traffic incident.” The photo made the cover of the New York Post and catalyzed thousands of Chinatown residents to protest police brutality in their community. A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Lee went to a candlelight vigil in Central Park that raised awareness about the surge in harassment and violence against South Asian Americans, most notably Sikhs, who were being conflated with the terrorists. Lee’s photograph of a Sikh man wearing a red turban with a flag draped around his body garnered a New York state journalism award.”
“Corky Lee in 2014 on the 145th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion, gathered a group of Asian Americans, including the descendants of Chinese railroad laborers, at the same spot in Promontory Summit where, in 1869, the celebratory photograph had been taken without the Chinese workers. Herb Tam, curator and director of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America, noted that “the transcontinental railroad project was him trying to heal a big wound.” The group of Asian Americans included young and old, wearing contemporary as well as period clothing. They were smiling big. The joy was palpable. Lee took a photograph. He called these moments “photographic justice.””
