Our Stories
Our Stories
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“Fire on Gold Mountain,” an original comic created by Ava Jinying Salzman.
Ava says, “I made this short comic with snippets of my own family’s stories and experiences as Chinese Americans in California in the hopes that it will educate and bring an overlooked history to life.”
Below are four revolutionary Asian and Pacific Islanders
Check out more stories here.
Anna May Wong (Wong Liu Tsong), the first Asian-American movie star, was born in Los Angeles and grew up near Chinatown. She and her family were no strangers to racism. "Wong described their experience as follows, “we tried to walk unconcernedly home from school, always with a larger and larger crowd of our tormentors around us shouting, ‘ch*nk, ch*nk, Chinaman. ch*nk, ch*nk, Chinaman.’ Yanking our ‘pigtails’ as they called our straight black braids of hair. Pushing us off the sidewalk into the street. Pinching us. Slapping us…every day was one of torture for us."
Beginning at 14 years old, with a dream of starring in film, she was casted in a movie as an extra, which led to "more prominent roles that typecast her as “exotic” and a “temptress”—perpetuating stereotypes of Asian women."
She persevered to pursue the lead role in O-Lan, a story surrounded with Chinese characters but was only offered the supporting role of a "scheming girl", another negative stereotype. A white actress played the Chinese lead in Brown face.
Due to experiencing racism in Hollywood, she immigrated to Europe and had more success as a stage actress.
Haunani-Kay Trask is an educator, author, poet and filmmaker. She was born in 1949 in Hawaiʻi and advocates for Hawaiʻi to become free and independent, leading protests.
While studying at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago, "she made the connection to the symbiotic relationship that racism and capitalism share, and how the system exploits marginalized communities across the globe."
Trask has written many books, founded the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi, produced First Friday, and "awarded the Angela Y. Davis Prize for her work in education, activism and the arts."
* "Sexual violence trigger warning"
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. portrayed Vietnamese women as "sexually-charged prostitutes, desperately seeking U.S. soldiers for green cards to 'escape' from communism. When in reality, U.S. servicemen often violently sexually assaulted, raped and brutalized Vietnamese women.
"What is rarely told are the stories of the women who, while facing paralyzing traumas as war tore through their land, chose to stand up and fight against an imperial oppressor."
Thousands of North Vietnamese women joined the Viet Cong "in active combat, shot down U.S. military airplanes, laid boobytraps, were spies, drove trucks and managed the Ho Chi Minh Trail" to push out the U.S. government.
Yellow Pearl was an Asian-American folk group in the 1960s and 1970s, among many Asian American poets, filmmakers, and musicians who spread their message of "civil rights, racial solidarity and Asian American visibility and empowerment" through art.
Chris Kando Iijima, Charlie Chin and Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto founded the group: Yellow Pearl in New York City and wrote songs about their experience in the USA as Asian Americans.
"Their album, A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, touched on themes of identity struggle, along with racial solidarity amongst oppressed peoples. The song, Somos Asiaticos (We are Asians) was written and performed in Spanish to show unity with the Latino communities in NYC, highlighting the common struggles between peoples of color in the United States. ...Yellow Pearl was the radical voice of a generation."
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