Searching for the PI in AAPI

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You must have been redirected here from the "Where Are the Islanders? Searching for the PI in AAPI" poster presentation! This website was designed by Cat Tang as a complement to the poster presentation.

Here you will be able to find additional information and resources about the poster topic.

About

AAPI stands for "Asian American & Pacific Islander."

This is a broad term meant to encapsulate all who identify as Asian American or Pacific Islander.

This term, and others like it, is a government-created classification. The communities being grouped by such classification in fact use various names to refer to themselves and may disagree upon the appropriateness of an aggregate classification. Groupings are inherently political and part of "a dynamic, continuing process of self-determination and self-identification." (Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence << read more about defining identities, ethnicities, and regional groupings here)

Who are Pacific Islanders?

Pacific Islanders are the indigenous inhabitants of the islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world, covering approximately 33% of the Earth’s total surface, and contains approximately 30,000 islands divided between the Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia regions (Pacific RISA). The Pacific Islands include over a dozen countries and territories spanning an area four times the size of the continental United States (United States Institute of Peace).

The Pacific Islanders in Communications (PIC) define themselves as "[some]one whose ancestors were the indigenous people of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia and Australia."

Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Australia are also collectively known as Oceania.

"Polynesia includes Hawaii (Native Hawaiian), Samoa (Samoan), American Samoa (Samoan), Tokelau (Tokelauan), Tahiti (Tahitian), and Tonga (Tongan).

Micronesia includes Guam (Guamanian or Chamorro), Mariana Islands (Mariana Islander), Saipan (Saipanese), Palau (Palauan), Yap (Yapanese), Chuuk (Chuukese), Pohnpei (Pohnpeian), Kosrae (Kosraean), Marshall Islands (Marshallese), and Kiribati (I-Kiribat).

Melanesia includes Fiji (Fijian), Papau New Guinea (Papua New Guinean), Solomon Islands (Solomon Islander), and Vanuatu (Ni-Vanuatu)." (CSU San Marcos)

Note that the terms "Pacific," "Polynesia," "Micronesia," and "Melanesia" were invented by Europeans.

"Pacific Ocean" (Mar Pacifico, meaning "peaceful sea" in Spanish/Portuguese) was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the 16th century. Indigenous people have their own names for the ocean, including "Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa" (Maori), "Moana" (Tonga, Samoa, Hawaii), and "Marawa" (Kiribati). (Davies, Pacific Islander Network)

European explorers grouped the islands into the three aforementioned regions based on observable characteristics. Polynesia was named first, meaning "many islands" and initially referring to all of the islands in the Pacific Ocean. Later the region was divided further into "Melanesia," referring to the dark skin of the islands' inhabitants, and "Micronesia," referring to the tiny size of the islands in the region. (The Asian American Education Project << read more about the history of the Pacific Islands' colonization here)

(USA Facts, 2025)

Other Names

Increasingly, Pacific Islanders prefer to be known as "Pasifika" and refer to themselves as such.

"As she grew up and carved out a life in Washington state, Malie Chanel remembers filling out forms and applications and having to identify herself as Asian, or at best, Asian Pacific Islander.

The thing was, as a Samoan American, she wasn’t Asian and certainly didn’t feel that way. Asian Americans didn’t consider her such, even though much of larger society considered her to be.

'It really destroys who you are as your Indigenous self,' said Chanel, elder services director for the Pacific Islander Community Association of Washington in Federal Way. 'It’s an honor to call myself Pasifika.'

The growing use of the term 'Pasifika' reflects a push within the community to recognize Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders as distinct from Asian Americans." (Ramirez, USA Today)

Brandon Fuamatu, development manager for United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance (UTOPIA), notes:

"It encompasses us as people of the Pacific... It’s not a perfect word; it won’t be adopted by every single Pacific Islander culture. We’re constantly trying to figure out ways to connect to each other that don’t erase the differences we have that are unique.”

Less commonly, you may also hear Pacific Islanders referred to as "Oceanic peoples."

The Display

teen AAPI display_VID20240518160130.mp4

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Background

In 2024, I volunteered to create a display for AAPI Heritage Month (May) in the library I had begun newly working at. As a Chinese-American, I feel strongly about seeing myself and other people of color represented in spaces such as publishing and libraries, where we have historically been underrepresented, and I was disappointed to know that had I not volunteered to create the display, there would have been no acknowledgement of AAPI Heritage Month within the library. As it was, my display was relegated to a small bookshelf at the back of the library in the teen area, while the large main display area next to the main entrance was designated as a Star Wars Day (May the "Fourth" Be With You) display.

Unfortunately, as I began to explore the collection and curate materials for the display, I ran into another problem, which became the subject of this presentation. This was that our young adult (teen) fiction collection had a limited amount of titles written by AAPI authors or featuring AAPI characters. In fact, we had no young adult titles written by Pacific Islander authors or featuring Pacific Islander characters.

Findings

Out of the 100 books I identified as AAPI, East Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) made up a majority of the representation, at 78%.

South Asians (Desis) represented 14% of the collection, and Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian) made up the remaining 8%.

There were no books written by Pacific Islanders or about Pacific Islander characters.

Of the 100 books, 71 titles had a unique author. 17 authors had more than one title in the collection; in total, these authors' works composed 46% of the collection.

NOTES:

Just as people cannot be neatly categorized, some books proved challenging to categorize as well.
- - For example, Chloe and the Kaishao Boys by Mae Coyiuto features a Filipina-Chinese protagonist. Lunar New Year Love Story, written by Gene Luen Yang (Chinese) and illustrated by Leuyen Pham (Vietnamese), features a half-Vietnamese protagonist and a Korean protagonist.
  - In these cases of ambiguity, I categorized books where I felt they best fit, but of course, these categorizations could be disputed.
Books marked with stars are graphic novels. Every Falling Star by Sungju Lee was the sole nonfiction title included in the display.

Booklists

After I finished curating my display, dismayed by the lack of Southeast Asian representation and the complete absence of Pacific Islander voices, my next step was to conduct research to find additional titles by Southeast Asian/Pacific Islander authors (or about Southeast Asian/Pacific Islander characters) that could potentially be purchased and added to our collection.

Upon examining a number of booklists, I discovered that the disparity in representation was not isolated to my library but rather an industry-wide issue.

Why does this matter?

There is tremendous diversity across Asia. The region consists of more than 40 countries and far more ethnicities than countries. In addition, Asian diasporas are extremely large. Identity oversimplifications fail to capture the complete range of human diversity and lived experiences across disparate identity groups and individuals.

For example, mainland China alone spans about 3.7 million miles and is home to a population of over 1.4 billion people. Consequentially, Chinese people can be categorized into a number of subgroups, based on language spoken (Mandarin, Min, Hakka, Cantonese/Yue, etc), region (Beijing, Guangzhou, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong, etc), ethnic group (Han, Zhuang, Hui, Uyghur, Miao, Manchu, Tibetan, Mongol, etc), and more. This does not even account for the increased identity complexities of the Chinese diaspora living outside of the mainland. For example, the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence (API-GBV) states that "those of Chinese origin in Guatemala identify as Guatemalans" without referring to themselves as Chinese-Guatemalans; "hyphenated identities" (such as Chinese-American) are more common in the U.S.

Knowing this, does the identity term "Chinese" adequately capture the sheer number of people and range of lived experiences only briefly described above?

Similarly, given the sheer number of Pacific Islands, Pacific Islanders do not always think of themselves as an aggregate identity. Inhabitants from different islands have distinct identities. For example:

"Despite Kiribati and Fiji being somewhat close in geographical in proximity, there are as many differences in the culture as there are similarities. Kiribati is Micronesian and Fiji Melanesian. The countries have completely different dance, music, cooking methods, weaving and hair styles, and yet the importance of each of these cultural markers is held in the highest regard.

Looking back, the relationship formed with our Fijian friends began to form my identity of a Pacific Islander. A Pacific Islander that knew that in other Pacific Islanders, I could always find a village.

This part of my own identity feels like it is made up of two parts. Imagine a whole circle – symbolising myself as a Pacific Islander, but at the centre of that circle is a smaller core – my Kiribati identity." (Davies, Pacific Islander Network)

When Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are combined into one identity group, Pacific Islanders are placed at a disadvantage due to the smaller size of their community and their unique concerns. There were approximately 19.8 million Asians compared to 690 thousand Pacific Islanders living in the U.S. as of the 2020 Decennial Census.

Brandon Fuamatu, development manager for UTOPIA Washington, an organization serving queer and transgender Pacific Islanders in South King County, speaks about the disparity in funding received by organizations serving the AAPI community and in allocations for Asian Americans compared to Pacific Islanders: "The amount of funding that goes to AAPI groups is small, and the amount that goes to Pacific Islanders is even smaller. A lot of groups receive funding that is supposed to go to both, but there’s no NH/PI representation. Not to fault those groups, but it’s because of those terms that the funding is uneven. It’s an uphill battle.”

The COVID-19 pandemic also illustrated the disparity faced by the Pacific Islander community, as Pacific Islanders faced vastly higher mortality rates than most populations but had little data to demonstrate the crisis they faced, due to the combination of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into one identity group for research & reporting purposes. In June 2021, the National Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Policy Council, a group of state-based Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander coalition leaders advocating for community health and social justice, was one organization that responded to this issue by calling for the disaggregation of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander data from that of Asian American communities, describing the undertaking as one of their main priorities. (Ramirez, USA Today)

As my experience demonstrates, we see this disparity illustrated, too, in the realm of publishing and librarianship.

Thank you so much for reading about this important topic. Below, find more resources you can explore to support the Pacific Islander community.

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