May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month

May 5, 2016 10:17 AM

Time to celebrate Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America! You can start here, a joint venture by several agencies, and continue below the fold.

- Exhibits and Collections for your perusal. (not included due to being very new: Tibetan Oral History Archive Project)

- PBS's Programming, with spotlights and stories about different Asian cultures in United States.

- NBC News' interviews with 50 Asian Americans working in the Obama Administration.

- NPR ponders the value of heritage months and their effects of those they celebrate.

- The official Census has a ton of numbers for Asian Americans from 2014.

random facts:
- Before ketchup was tomato-based, it had a long history originating in Asia.
- The youngest player to win a male Grand Slam singles title was Michael Chang at 17 years old.
- The first Asian American comic hero is The Green Turtle.

full disclosure: I work for the Library of Congress and was involved with putting on the site some of those collections

posted by numaner (4 comments total)

Rad! Thank you for posting! I've been clicking around the links randomly and already found some stuff about the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. I am planning a trip to Seattle this summer and had been thinking about posting an AskMe about Asian American/Japanese American cultural stuff to check out; this fits the bill!

I didn't actually even know it was APA Heritage Month, although I'm going to the Giants' Japanese Heritage Night next week, so I guess that explains that?

The NPR link about the value of heritage months is interesting. I work in children's book publishing and a few weeks ago we had an interesting discussion about choosing publication months for books about black history. There's a glut of these books in February (Black History Month) each year, and we talked about publishing them at other times, both to stand out from the competition and to avoid reinforcing the whole "February is the only time to focus on black history" narrative. But February is when bookstores do displays, when publications are looking to review these books, and so it becomes this self-perpetuating thing, which in my opinion is not great.

I find that in schools, most Asian cultural activities actually tend to be focused around the Lunar New Year, which means that there's at least one other place for these things to live. (The downside of that is that it's less inclusive since that's celebrated by a handful of East Asian cultures, but the upside of THAT is that it's more focused.)
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:00 AM on May 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

When I was in Grad School working in a "federal agency" as RA mumble many years ago; I was tasked to coordinate an Indian themed presentation as a part of APA-heritage month that year. Every year a different country was selected to be highlighted by the people with that heritage working there. That particular year it was India.

I coordinated a 2 hour presentation including a slide show presentation (wrote out the material for a better public speaker than me); some background music, got Instruments from the University Music department; got a menu together highlighting the foods from different parts of India (cooked it all ourselves for about 100 people); made all the other Indians wear traditional Indian dress (I had to threaten some of them :-)); and with the help of the other Desis in the place (about 6-7 Desis) we did a bang up job. After these many years, I am still proud of that. People who barely acknowledged a lowly RA; used to stop me and rave about that for as long as I worked there.
posted by indianbadger1 at 11:39 AM on May 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Not to toot my own horn (except, here I go . . .) the link to my website in my MeFi profile will take you to a blog full of stories about Chinese student immigrants to America from the turn of the last century. Many of them became Americans and all of them, in my opinion, enriched this country immensely.

This FPP is extremely relevant to my interests; thanks for posting it!! :-D
posted by chainsofreedom at 5:02 PM on May 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

You're welcome! This has been going on since 1992 but you don't hear much of a buzz about it outside of schools as much as other heritage months. And the most closely related previous FPP I could find was this one, which is tangentially because of the month. I'll be sure to check out your blog too!
posted by numaner at 6:54 AM on May 6, 2016