Asian Americans

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.

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.

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.”

Connie Yu’s family story in the U.S. almost ended at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where her grandmother was detained for over a year, separated from her American-born children. In an atmosphere of nativism and hate, exclusionary laws have made Asians the nation’s first “undocumented immigrants.” Yet those who manage to stay, build families and communities in America.

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.