Asian Americans

South Asians began arriving in significant numbers during the late 1800s. Most were men who settled in communities of color and faced segregation and laws against intermarriage with whites. Many formed multiracial families like Moksad Ali, a Bengali Muslim trader, who married an African American woman, Ella Blackman. Together they navigated race in an era of anti-Asian exclusion and Jim Crow.

Jerry Yang was part of the Asian American 1.5 generation, who were born in Asia but immigrated to the U.S. as children. With their bicultural experience and networks, he and other Asian immigrant entrepreneurs helped to establish Silicon Valley as the center of the global tech industry.

They were young men with dreams who began their lives in America building the Transcontinental Railroad. They blasted through mountains of granite and endured brutal conditions to lay tracks that connected the Pacific to the Atlantic. Some, like Lee Wong Sang, became forebearers of Asian American families that thrive to this day.

Laureen Chew grew up the sheltered daughter of immigrant parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown. But when she enrolled at San Francisco State College in 1968, it was a stunning awakening. The campus was afire with new ideas and a growing movement for ethnic studies and educational equity.

What is the meaning of loyalty when you look like the enemy? Satsuki Ina was born in a prison camp during World War II. Her family was among 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens, who were forced from their homes on the west coast and incarcerated without due process or a trial. When her parent’s loyalty was questioned, the family was torn apart.

Laureen Chew joined the Third World Liberation Front to fight for ethnic studies and educational equity. In 1968, they mounted the longest campus strike in U.S. history. Laureen and a generation of young Asian Americans, many who were first-generation college students, were forever changed.

In the lead up to WWII, Korean Americans were united by loyalty to America and resistance to Japanese rule of their homeland. Susan Ahn Cuddy was the US-born daughter of Dosan Ahn Chang-ho, a legendary community leader who died while imprisoned by Japan. She vowed to join the war effort and became the first Asian American woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy, and its first female gunnery officer.

Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Personal histories and new academic research will cast a fresh lens on U.S. history and the role Asian Americans have played in it.

Asians Americans have fought for the U.S. military since the War of 1812. During the Vietnam conflict, thousands served. But many, like Mike Nakayama, soon discovered that their fellow GI’s looked at them and saw the face of the enemy.

Annie Tan uncovers a dark moment in her family's history that has inspired her and many other Asian American activists to get involved and raise their voices.

Across the bay from San Francisco State University, where students launched a historic strike for ethnic studies in 1968, Thanh Tran is the graduation speaker in his own Asian American studies class. ROOTS: Restoring Our Original True Selves is a program at San Quentin prison that addresses intergenerational trauma under the motto: “If you know history, you know yourself.”

Tereza Lee was a promising young pianist who grew up with a secret. Her family was undocumented, and they feared that if discovered the family could be separated and face deportation. When a U.S. Senator heard her story, he introduced the 2001 DREAM Act, a bipartisan bill to provide a pathway to legal status for undocumented youth who immigrated as children. Tereza was the first “dreamer.”