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In collaboration with The Conscious Kid, AAPI Storytime with Padma Lakshmi reading Always Anjali by Sheetal Sheth and Jessica Blank

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Take a look at the "Sneak Peak" on this website.  This book is wonderfully illustrated and the text is rhythmic.

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To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key.

DOUBLY HAPPY:ABCs for ABCs

Doubly Happy: ABCs for ABCs is a playfully visual book, written in rhyme, of everyday objects from Chinese culture. Abacus to zongzi, the informative book appeals to all ages. It's nostalgic, affirming and above all, happy. Buy one for yourself. It will make a nice addition to your coffee table books. Or, double up and gift one to a friend or school library.

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Hardcover, 7 x 7 inch square

36 pages

$19.95

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"...this book inspires ABCs to celebrate and explore their double heritage, and encourages readers to discover where their culture has been and how to make it their own moving forward."

Thank you for your creativity and this joyful, meaningful book for the world - brings pride to being American and Chinese.

...makes my think more deeply and also celebrate the intertwining of cultures that makes up me.

G A L L E R Y & C U S T O M D E S I G N E D " C A R D S "

Invitations, greetings and more - made with love to bring a smile and brighten the day.

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To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. DOUBLY HAPPY:ABCs for ABCs Doubly Happy: ABCs for ABCs is a playfully visual book, written in rhyme, of everyday objects from Chinese culture. Abacus to zongzi, the informative book appeals to all ages.

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In collaboration with The Conscious Kid and Wong Fu Productions, AAPI voices read alouds.

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Free workshops on how to help end harassment.

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Check out our book, written by the Right To Be team, for you.

Order a copy of our first book, I've Got Your Back: The Indispensable Guide to Stopping Harassment When You See It by Emily May and Jorge Arteaga. I've Got Your Back will take you through the 5Ds of bystander intervention: Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay, and Direct, with each chapter diving deeply into how to put these 5Ds in action - whether you witness harassment in public, online, or at work.

I've Got Your Back is an invaluable resource in creating a new vision for our communities - one where we stand up for our neighbors, and our neighbors stand up for us.

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harassment training requirements by state

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Right To Be is empowering everyone to create a world without harassment and filled with humanity.

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Donate to help educate

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The Conscious Kid is an education, research and policy organization that supports families and educators in taking action to disrupt racism, inequity and bias

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Cameron House has helped the Chinese Community for decades in San Francisco Chinatown. It is not only a resource but a part of SF Chinatown's history.

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We're on a Mission

To empower generations of Chinese-American individuals and their families to fully participate in and contribute positively toward a healthy society. We put our Christian faith into action to help people learn, heal, and thrive.

Founded in 1874, Cameron House has a unique place in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, where we have served the changing needs of individuals and families in the community for generations.

Our Roots are Deep

1874 - Occidental Mission Home for Girls

Founded in 1874 by the Presbyterian Church as the Occidental Mission Home for Girls, the home's initial purpose was to intervene on behalf of vulnerable young Asian immigrants. Forbidden from legally entering the United States by the Chinese Exclusion Act, these girls and women were smuggled into the country and sold as commodities in what came to be known as the "Yellow Slave Trade".

Sold into slavery, often by their own families, and trapped into bogus "contracts" that made it impossible to buy their freedom, many thousands of immigrant women died as prostitutes and domestic servants in San Francisco.

The Occidental Mission Home for Girls, the "Home" as it was known then, rescued these girls and taught them skills and faith.

1895 - Donaldina Cameron

At the tender age of 23, Donaldina arrived at the Occidental Mission Home for Girls as a sewing teacher. Two years later, without any prior experience, she became the superintendent. Little did she realize that the next forty years would find her dashing through alleys and across rooftops to save thousands of Chinese girls from indentured servitude and human trafficking. Although her life was threatened by those whose profits were hampered by her success, she continued rescuing and educating the girls victimized by violence and abuse.

A great challenge for the Home came on April 18th, 1906, when the great San Francisco earthquake and fire woke the girls in the early morning. Although the Home withstood the initial shaking, it was ultimately destroyed by dynamite as the city attempted to stop the fire from spreading. Donaldina and all the girls found safety in the East Bay while the Home was rebuilt in the same location at 920 Sacramento Street, where it still stands today.

Donaldina retired from the Home in 1934, and in 1942 it was renamed the Donaldina Cameron House. By the time of her death in 1968, Donaldina had become a "national icon" and is credited with helping 3,000 girls escape brutal enslavement.

1940's - Chinatown Families

With the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and the falling numbers of girls being rescued throughout the late 1930s, the needs of the Chinatown community were changing. In response to the growing number of families needing support and a safe place away from the racism of greater San Francisco, Cameron House began expanding its services to offer faith-based programs for youth in addition to social services for women.

Continuing Mission - Adapting to the needs of Chinese American Families

The mission of Cameron House services has evolved over the years resulting in the comprehensive family service organization it is today. Cameron House serves the needs of low-income and immigrant Asian youth and families in San Francisco. . Thanks to thousands of faithful volunteers, devoted staff, committed Board members, and enthusiastic supporters like you, Cameron House provides a wide variety of programs to Asian youth and families. As part of Donaldina's heritage, we are proud to offer services like: counseling; domestic violence intervention; food distribution; adult ESL and computer classes; support groups; youth afterschool and summer programs; sports, arts, and camping experiences; leadership development; and volunteer opportunities. Today we serve over 1,000 low-income immigrant children and families.

Faith Statement

Rooted in the Christian faith and our Presbyterian heritage, we believe that God calls us to be an empowering presence in the community. We provide a safe place, are a trusted friend and advocate, meet people where they are, and walk with them as they fulfill their lives. We are a resource for people to explore faith and spirituality, and we believe and share Christian principles:

Our work is a manifestation of God's love-we demonstrate God's loving kindness through our service and stewardship.

All people are welcomed. Every person is worthy of love and respect and will be treated as such.

We promote justice for all.

Values Statement

Our values guide our behavior toward each other and the people we serve. They embrace our demonstration of God's love through acts of kindness and sensitivity in all that we do and say:

Community. We value our shared legacy with the Chinese immigrant community, with the Cameron House community, and our partnerships in the greater community.

Authenticity. We are honest and genuine; we respectfully speak the truth with compassion and loving kindness that affirms and enriches each individual and our community as a whole.

Servant leadership. Our leadership approach is geared to advancing the common good. In order to lead, we must also follow, contribute as peers, and serve in our communities.

Accountability. We hold ourselves and each other accountable in the work we do and the communities we serve. We evaluate, learn and apply the knowledge gained to strengthen our impact and advance our mission.

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To empower generations of Chinese-American individuals and their families to fully participate in and contribute positively toward a healthy society. We put our Christian faith into action to help people learn, heal, and thrive. Founded in 1874, Cameron House has a unique place in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, where we have served the changing needs of individuals and families in the community for generations.

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Below you'll find resources that have been gathered to help individuals educate others, take action, donate, and more.

Anti-Asian racism and violent attacks on Asian elderly have only increased in recent months. Since COVID-19 became news in the United States, hate speech and violence against the AAPI community has run rampant. In February 2021, attacks, particularly on elderly Asian Americans, have spiked. Unfortunately, many of these incidents are not being reported and are invisible to major media outlets. We hope to change this by offering the following resources with our community. Please join us in taking action whether it's by educating yourself and others around you or donating to non-profit organizations.

Statistics

40% of U.S. adults believe "it has become more common for people to express racist views toward Asians since the pandemic began" (Source: Pew Research) More than 1,800 racist incidents against Asian Americans were reported between March and May of 2020, according to a United Nations Report (Source: CBS News) Stop AAPI Hate National Report (March 19, 2020 - February 28, 2021) has received a staggering 3,795 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents. (Source: Stop AAPI Hate)

newest updates

"...He was pretty much fed up, and kind of at [the] end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did," Capt Jay Baker of the Cherokee County sheriff's office. (Source: The Hill)

This "bad day" ended the lives of 8 individuals and permanently changed the lives of their families.
Say their names. Share their stories.

soon chung park, 74
suncha kim, 69
yong ae yue, 63
hyun jung grant, 51
xiaojie tan, 49
delaina yaun, 33
daoyou feng, 44
paul andre michels, 54

(Source: The washington post)

News articles

Resources to educate

allyship

Donate

Report an Incident

mental health

Petitions

social media

More action

Corporate Statements

Made by haapi erg | flexport
( Made with Carrd )

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Anti-Asian racism and violent attacks on Asian elderly have only increased in recent months. Since COVID-19 became news in the United States, hate speech and violence against the AAPI community has run rampant. In February 2021, attacks, particularly on elderly Asian Americans, have spiked. Unfortunately, many of these

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Recommendations on children's books and activities

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The Making of Asian America: A History - Erika Lee
Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans - Jean Pfaelzer
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown - Nayan Shah
The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority - Ellen D. Wu
We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation -  Jeff Chang
Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear  - John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats
The Karma of Brown Folk - Vijay Prashad
Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong
The Myth of the Model Minority - Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White - Frank Wu
Different Mirror: A History Of Multicultural America - Ronald Takaki

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Origin of Everything | Why Do We Say "Asian American" Not "Oriental"? | Season 1 | Episode 35

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Why do Americans no longer use the word "Oriental"?

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Although many Americans would prefer to forget about the Vietnam conflict, many of today's controversial issues stem from that era. One of these issues is the increased Southeast Asian refugee population in the U.S.

One of the major problems refugees face upon their arrival to this country is conflict with the US medical system. This conflict arises from misunderstanding and mistrust from both health professionals and refugee patients. With refugee children, misunderstandings can escalate. A more comprehensive understanding of Southeast Asian peoples and their cultures, especially their views regarding illness, can help make this transition much easier both for refugees and health care providers.

Background

The Hmong, the largest of the hill tribes of Laos, are considered Laotian nationals but very much separate from the lowland Laotians. Originally river farmers from the southern portion of China, the Hmong fled the advances of the Han invaders to their north. They migrated to the mountains of southeastern Asia, settling in the present-day countries of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The Chinese labeled them Miao, which means "barbarians". In Laos they are called Meo, with basically the same translation and connotation. These Southeast Asian people use the term Hmong (also spelled h'Mong), which means "free man," as their real and preferred name.

A minority among the lowland Lao, the Hmong have fiercely struggled to maintain their independence and ethnic culture. They are aided, in part, by the extreme geographical isolation of the Laotian mountains and jungle in which they had established their homeland. The Hmong largely worked as farmers, utilizing the slash-and-burn method. Their primary cash crop, opium, was encouraged by both the Laotian and French regimes. In 1971, under pressure from the US, the Laotian government declared opium cultivation and sale to be illegal. Their previous pattern of subsistence farming had been barely adequate simply for survival before; with this change in their economy in 1972, survival had, for some Hmong, become nearly impossible. Many of the farmers continue to deal illegally in the supply side of the opium market simply because they have no other choice.

During the Indochina war the country of Laos held an officially neutral position. The Hmong, however, fought of both sides in this political struggle. The Communist faction of Laos, the Pathet Lao, was aided by the USSR and China, supported by the North Vietnamese. The US-backed, pro-Western Royal Lao government recruited Hmong General Vang Pao's guerrilla army, which included the largest part of the Hmong population, to fight the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese. The 1975 Pathet Lao victory cost the Hmong an estimated 30,000 lives, approximately 10 percent of their total population. The position for the surviving US-allied Hmong was politically very sensitive because of the role they had played against the Pathet Lao. Not anticipating defeat, the US government had no provisions for evacuating the stranded Hmong. From 1975 on, the Hmong fled Los for Thailand.

Since the mid-1980s, a large portion of Hmong refugees have immigrated to the US. In the relocation process, efforts are made to keep the nuclear family intact, but not necessarily the extended family. Because the Hmong give such importance to the extended family, many "secondary" migrations have occurred in order to reunite that extended family. Socially, the Hmong practice a patrilineal clan system. All of the people are divided into social groups referred to as clans, of which there are approximately 20 in their entire population. All of the clan share the same last name. These secondary migrations have led to several "impacted communities." Most US cities have been unable to handle the physical, financial and psychological ramifications of this sudden, large influx of refugees. More than 15,000 Hmong live in Fresno, California, today. This is believed to be the largest clustering of Hmong outside of Asia. It is on my experiences as a nurse in Fresno that I base my observations.

One of the most difficult areas of assimilation for the Hmong has been within the US health system. This article will first examine the traditional Hmong health system and then relate it to that of the US. The rest of the article will focus on the pediatric Hmong population.

The Traditional Hmong Health System

The Hmong view illness as a supernatural event, caused by spirits, called tlan. These animistic beliefs cloud their conception and perception of illness and also give "validation" to many of their cultural practices.

The Hmong spiritual world is composed of several tlan. One is the txi neng, or the shaman spirit. The txi neng is thought to give a severely ill person the ability to serve as an intermediary between the spirit world and the physical world, and thus survive the illness. After being trained by the spirit and a senior shaman, that person becomes a shaman (also called tu-ua-neng or trix neeb). The shaman can ten diagnose and treat villagers' illnesses, using magical powers to summon benevolent spirits.

Another form of tlan is the body spirit, which consists of three basic types: ancestors, dead friends and animals. If a person passes out, the good body spirits can escape. If a shaman cannot restore the good spirits to the body in time, the Hmong believe the person will die. A string, sometimes containing gold or silver charms, is tied to a bay's neck, hands, feet and/or waist at birth. This works as a promoter of good health, keeping the good spirits in and the bad spirits out. These strings are tied in position during a ceremony known as Baa and should not be removed.

Sometimes the body spirits are believed to cause illness because they want an animal sacrifice. If the correct animal is sacrificed, the victim will recover.

Following is a description of a traditional shaman treatment.

The "cure" varies little regardless of the disease. A tuua-neng pays a house call. He chants with the ardor and the exaggerated gestures common to faith healer anywhere. All the while a black mask over his head closes out this world.

Jangling a ring of noisemakers with a clippety-clopp rhythm, he "rides off on a horse" to find the soul. Along the way the tu-ua-neng gathers a posse of friendly spirits; one of these may bring field glasses, another an airplane. The villains may be lurking at the bottom of a pond, in the clouds, or far beyond China.

Once the spirit doctor meets them, excited haggling ensues. Leaping, dancing, sweating, he is driven by a trance that defies exhaustion. Tirelessly he bargains for the captive. Finally, the spirits demand a sacrifice - a pig if the family, can afford it, a chicken if not.

An assistant dispatches a chicken or pig and burns paper "spirit money" on the carcass. With luck the homeward journey from the vale of the spirits requires only another hour or so, long enough to cook the sacrifice.

Family, friends, and tu-ua-neng then sit down to a pork or chicken dinner, hoping the patient will recover. More and more the patient does, partly because on family altars you will now often find bottles of antibiotics among the holy artifacts. It would be a foolish tu-ua-neng who turned his back on such powerful allies.

Another type of healer is the kws tshuaj, who uses nonspiritual methods - herbs and plants - to cure the sick. These healers practice from personal choice, not "divine appointment." Therefore, a shaman could choose to learn kws tshuaj, but a kws tshuaj could not choose to become a shaman.

The Hmong view illness in terms of symptomatology, that is, through pain, weakness, fever, coldness in extremities, injury, change in color or anything else that is out of the ordinary. Once a person is diagnosed as being ill, the observers then have to decide the cause of the illness. The chosen treat-medicine, or a combination of both. Western medicine is often in the form of drugs; many pharmaceuticals available only by prescription in the US are readily available over the counter in Indochina. If all else should fail, the patient might be taken to a hospital, although this is a fairly uncommon occurrence.

Entering the US Health System

The Hmong refugee is understandably confused by the difference between traditional Hmong health Practices and those of the US medical system. On observer described the Hmong plight as follows: "The have jumped 2,000 years in a matter of a few days. It's like cryogenics and they've awakened from a days. It's like cryogenics and they've awakened from a deep sleep for centuries".

The Hmong who enters the us medical system often does so only when all traditional curing methods fail. At this point, the patient is usually extremely ill, sometimes critically. This emergency health care entry reflects the pattern practiced in their homeland. Their extreme geographical isolation during pre-refugee times prevented them from regularly seeking more sophisticated medical care, which was available only - if at all - in the more urban communities. A family member usually had to be close to death before the arduous trip could even be considered or justified by the clan. This learned behavior about when to enter the health system has persisted in the US, even though the element of geographical isolation has been removed.

Apart from the spiritual dimension, other cultural differences make Southeast Asians more reluctant to enter the US medical system. The intense cultural shock of relocation, for one, serves to further confuse the Hmong. They lose their sense of socioeconomic identity. The significant language barrier sometimes seems nearly impossible to overcome. The typical Hmong is very shy, conditioned by Hmong culture to remain closed, not revealing fears and anxieties.

Overview of Hmong Health Problems

Once in the US system, the Hmong refugees still have many obstacles to overcome. Chronic malnutrition, previous poor health and lack of medical care all serve to intensify their illnesses. Preventive medicine is virtually unheard of within the Hmong culture in Laos. Immunizations are seldom up to date, if even administered at all. Anemia is prevalent, mostly due to poor diet and parasitic infections Lactose intolerance has been documented. Parasitic disease is endemic with a high prevalence for Plasmodium species, Giardia lambia, Clonorchis sinensis and Paragoniumus westernani. Due to antibiotic overuse and abuse, a number of these organisms often become resistant to the more commonly used antibiotic overuse and abuse, a number of these organisms often become resistant to the more commonly used antibiotics. Scabies and lice are also quite common. Respiratory conditions include pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (an often threatening fungal infection) and tuberculosis, which is more of a public health threat than a truly dangerous threat than a truly dangerous threat to an individual. Hepatitis, which is also common in Indochina, is also considered mostly along the lines of communicability and the need for infection control.

Lifestyle Differences

The Many lifestyle differences in the US give rise to significant difficulties for the Hmong people. One involves the mechanization and industrialization of the more advanced technology found here. The typical Hmong has never seen a stove or refrigerator and has no idea of how or why to use them; perishable foods often spoil sitting beside an empty refrigerator. Many foods are not indigenous to Laos - for example, frozen goods - and when eaten after incorrect storage or preparation can cause illness. Not understanding potential hazards, Southeast Asians sometimes grill with open stoves on the wooden floors in their home, risking carbon monoxide poisoning and fire.

The attitude of the Southeast Asian refugees toward their children reveals another cultural difference. Because of the high infant and child mortality - morbidity rates in Laos, large families were necessary; therefore Hmong did not practice birth control. With the more advanced medical treatment available in the US, the Hmong mortality rate has declined significantly. With such large families, living conditions can become extremely crowded, increasing the chances of exposure to and communicability of disease within the clan.

Socially, too, US and Hmong cultural taboos differ. For example, tousling a child's hair is absolutely forbidden. Hmong consider the head sacred because the soul of the individual lives there. Patting the head could startle the soul out of the body.

Other Hmong cultural traditions can lead to cultural misunderstanding and even charges of child neglect or abuse in the US - both of which have been documented. The first involves the preference of Southeast Asians for flat heads posteriorly. The infant is placed supine, propped with pillows on either side of the head and/or body to keep the head posteriorly flush to the floor or surface. Continual pressure does yield a flat head, but the position of the pillows also prohibits free sideways or rolling movements, which can delay development. The flat head findings and significant developmental delay have provided the basis for questions concerning neglect.

Another Hmong custom, called "coin rubbing", has actually led to several charges of child abuse. This traditional method of healing, also known as Cao Gio, or "coining," is administered to the area where the illness is manifested. For example, for a chest cold, oil is spread on the back and chest with cotton swabs. The skin is then massaged until it is warm. A spoon or coin is stroked firmly up and down on the oiled skin until it is bruised. Pinching the skin is another method sometimes practiced. Another dermal therapy is called "cupping'; heat is injected into a cup which is then placed on a part of the skin; suction adheres the cup firmly in place, producing a symmetrical bruise when it is removed. A fourth traditional skin therapy is moxabustion. A plant called moxa is set afire; the flaming plant is then placed directly against the skin. Sometimes, a cigarette is used. Each of these four dermabrasive techniques can be used as treatment for "wind illnesses," manifested by symptoms of cold, flu or headache. These techniques allow the toxins or excess energy or "wind" to escape. The following story provides an example of the tragic consequences of misinterpretation of these healing techniques.

An oft repeated story in the Southeast Asian community is one of a well-educated Vietnamese man who was placed in jail for child abuse. This man had practiced coin rubbing to help relieve the fever of his child. The child's fever was not relieved so the father brought the child to the hospital, where he was accused of child abuse. The man was so embarrassed that people had thought he had beaten his child that he killed himself while in jail.

Health care professionals need to take special care to ascertain if any of these four dermabrasive practices are being used to heal the Southeast Asian child before child protective services is notified. The ecchmoses, or blotches, caused by coin rubbing, cupping and pinching can be identified by their symmetry and well-defined borders, as well as their location: the markings are generally located at the site of the disease. Although moxabustion presents more of a challenge in identification, is should be considered.

Yet another potential child abuse charge relates to a skin condition, but one that is a normal skin pigmentation for noncaucasian children: rather large black-and-blue spots on the feet and/or buttocks. These spots usually disappear within a few years of birth. However, they have been mistaken for signs of physical trauma to children.

Hmong Misconceptions of US Health Practices

* Fear of Drawing Blood and Other Invasive Procedures. Because a hole is being established into the body, the Hmong believe the good spirits can escape, causing death.

* Shots and Medicinal Cures. Due to the ease in obtaining over-the-counter medications in Laos, Southeast Asians have become accustomed to the availability of drugs. They expect a prescription with a doctor visit. The overuse of antibiotics has also led to drug-resistant organisms, causing less acute disease pathology to take on increased severity in these patients.

* Surgery. The Hmong have a widespread fear of mutilation. They believe the soul also could leave the body through any surgical incision, which could lead to death. They view almost any invasive procedure as having long-lasting and multiple effects. This fear extends itself to a person even after death. For this reason, few Asians will consent to an autopsy.

Case Studies

These three short case studies involve actual incidents with patients I have cared for as a pediatric intensive care nurse. These incidents illustrate US and Hmong cultural differences and misconceptions.

* Premature Baby. A newborn infant of Hmong parentage was admitted to our neonatal intensive care unit. This child had many congenital defects, including anacephaly, extensive facial abnormalities and other internal defects. The child had been transferred to our facility by our staff. Before leaving the referring hospitals, then nurse talked with the father concerning his child. He listened politely to all of her explanations, then quietly said, "Baby no good; throw away." The child was kept comfortable in our institution and died within 24 hours of admission. The incident illustrates that Hmong value and quality of life above quantity. The father's answer might sound harsh and callous, but it is also valid. We did allow the baby to die, but in a way we considered culturally acceptable by our standards.

* Balloon Incident. Paramedics were dispatched to a residence to transport a six-year-old poisoning victim. When they arrived, they found a large Hmong family with no English speakers. The paramedics found a child close to the age of the supposed victim and began their assessment. Ten minutes passed before an English-speaking neighbor arrived. The parents had sat by passively while the paramedics examined the wrong child. Due to the language barrier, Southeast Asian passive behavior and their respect for authority figures, a tragedy occurred. The patient was not a six-year-old but a six-month-old. The father had held him in his arms, with a blanket covering him. The baby, who had been given a balloon to play with and had put it in his mouth, choked on it and suffocated to death. This child could probably not have been saved, but the incident tragically illuminates language and cultural barriers.

* Anti-Birth Control. A child was admitted to our intensive care unit with a diagnosis of respiratory distress. I recognized the parents from a previous admission; another child of theirs had been a patient in our unit and had, in fact, died there. The parents had not mentioned this to the emergency room doctor when he questioned them concerning this child. This family carries an inherited muscular wasting disease known as Werdnig Hoffman Syndrome. The father had insisted with the previous child, and still did in this instance, that his babies got this disease from the birth control pills his wife was taking. He had not allowed her to take them since the death of the first baby. They have 11 children alive currently; five others had died. The mother probably has at least 15 more childbearing years left.

Conclusion

Of the many differences between the US and Hmong cultures, those between the two health systems are critical ones. Having an increased awareness of the Hmong historical and cultural heritage can aid the health professional in understanding the situation of the Hmong within the US health system. In many situations, a combination of therapies from both cultures can easily be used if the client so desires. This "partnership" of methods should be encouraged and should not be used only in exceptional cases. Sensitivity to other cultures and their traditional value system is critical in health care. If one can bypass one's own ethnocentricity, caring for anyone who is culturally different can be a positive experience. Attempts are being made in this direction with the creation of a new health field called transcultural medicine and nursing. The transcultural model stresses compromise, emphasizing the patient's own culture without insisting he or she fit into ours because ours is the "right" one. The understanding and acceptance of the cultural values and traditions of a population is crucial in effectively caring for that patient as a whole person.

Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.

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Although many Americans would prefer to forget about the Vietnam conflict, many of today's controversial issues stem from that era. One of these issues is the increased Southeast Asian refugee population in the U.S. One of the major problems refugees face upon their arrival to this country is conflict with the US medical system.

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Be sure to listen to the very end!
https://www.sonofpaper.com/

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Son of Paper - "Foghorns" (A Spoken Word Visual)

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A children's book to fight Anti-Asian Racism

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Welcome and thanks for visiting our site! The purpose of this book is to provide a resource to help generate meaningful discussions between adults and children about anti-Asian racism. An incident involving anti-Asian racism is directly introduced in the story of this book. The book is available now free to download!

We really loved reading Young, Proud and Sungjee because it tells the story of Asian kids who look like us who are bravely standing up against racism and bullying during the pandemic. More than that, they are educating other kids about how they can courageously stand up too.

Alexandra Yao, 8

Justin Yao, 6

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Welcome and thanks for visiting our site! The purpose of this book is to provide a resource to help generate meaningful discussions between adults and children about anti-Asian racism. An incident involving anti-Asian racism is directly introduced in the story of this book. The book is available now free to download!

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‘I Shouted For Help, But Nobody Helped Me’: Asian Americans Are Under Attack

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The Proudest Blue [READ ALOUD] by Ibtihaj Muhammad

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Possible activities to go with this book.
https://www.theclassroombookshelf.com/2021/02/encourage-self-love-with-eyes-that-kiss-in-the-corners/

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Virtual B&N Storytime: Joanna Ho reads EYES THAT KISS IN THE CORNERS

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I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype | Canwen Xu | TEDxBoise

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Food and cooking is one way Asians express their love.

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Racism Against Filipinos in American History • Human Zoos Documentary

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How Did We Get Here? by The Amber Ruffin Show

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How Did We Get Here? by The Amber Ruffin Show

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Violence Against Asian-Americans Isn't New, but It Is Growing | The Amber Ruffin Show

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Anti-Asian Hate Hearing: Daniel Dae Kim testifies I NewsNOW from FOX

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Take a virtual tour, watch videos, learn...

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From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station in California functioned as a Detention Center for people immigrating to the United States through the West Coast. Many of the people that passed through Angel Island came from Asia but also South America, Russia, Mexico, Australia, and Canada. Hundreds of inscriptions mark the walls of the former Immigration Station Detention Center including poems, names, dates, and images. Inscribed by detainees, the writing on the wall provides insight into the lives of those detained on the Island. The Angel Island Immigraiton Station is one of only two National Historic Landmarks in the United States focused on Asian and Asian American history.

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From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station in California functioned as a Detention Center for people immigrating to the United States through the West Coast. Many of the people that passed through Angel Island came from Asia but also South America, Russia, Mexico, Australia, and Canada.

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As a child, I was given a boy's name. Ours was a family of three girls, but my parents wanted to honor my paternal grandfather. I was their last child, so I wound up with his name.

For years, my name, Te-Ping, has made me feel incredibly conspicuous. Growing up in California, I learned to hate introducing myself, because so few people could ever pronounce my name.

Tee-ping, they'd say. Tuh-ping, they'd say. My cheeks would burn, and I'd feel stiffly uncomfortable, like a searching spotlight moving over a crowd had suddenly fixed on me. In Chinese, the name sounds gently affectionate and lilting to my ears. The Te means virtue. Ping means peace.

But, in English, the letters looked clumsy to me on a page, awkward and off-balance. At restaurants and in coffee shops, I grew used to giving out a fake name. It was easier than hearing someone stumble over mine.

And yet my parents were proud of the name, proud of what it stood for. They were Americans, but they hadn't left their heritage behind. Our family tradition of names dates back centuries, to the Song dynasty, with every generation's name taking a different character from a poem Ming-Chong-Shu (ph), and, in my generation's case, Te.

why would they throw that away for a Jessica or a Molly, a name that had no meaning to them?

I now understand. We name ourselves to honor our forbearers who carried us here, a beloved grandmother, a so-and-so III. We anchor ourselves that way. We acknowledge the soil we're made from.

History is precious. It doesn't survive unless you choose to embrace it. For so many years, my name has felt like a flag that's stuck out bristling from any form or name tag. But that's OK. It's a name that's made me think hard about identity.

In that way, it's helped make me who I am, even when it's uncomfortable. I recently had a son, and we gave him a Chinese name, too. His name means joy. It didn't occur to me to do it any other way. There's strength in saying that, yes, you're here, we're here.

So what if the tongue stumbles? This is where we come from, and these are our names.

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Why you should be proud of your ethnic name

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Filmed before the Georgia shootings, writer Te-Ping Chen shares with us her "Humble Opinion" that people with ethic names must embrace them instead of shying away. Chen, who says she was given a "boy's name" at birth, looks back on how it crafted her life.

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The 1907 episode in a seaside timber town in Washington came to be known as the Bellingham Riots. Really, though, there were no riots. There was a pogrom.

At the time, the U.S. was suffering through deep economic distress, a panic-filled recession that had begun the year before. Angry anti-immigrant sentiment was ascendant. And hundreds of Sikh men who had traveled from India to Bellingham to toil in the lumber mills paid the price.

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Some 500 white men, many of them members of the local Asiatic Exclusion League, descended on the Sikhs and other South Asians, routing them from the bunkhouses where they roomed and chasing them into the streets. Within hours, the entire Sikh population of Bellingham had fled, frantically piling onto trains and boats in search of some sort of refuge. Many had been physically battered.

I knew nothing about this incident until I visited Washington state this spring and met with members of the Sikh community there. For them, it was easy to draw at least some parallels between that century-old ugliness and recent events. Immigrants were again being demonized. Lost jobs were fueling white working-class despair and resentment. Hate crimes were reported to be up. Yelling, "Get out of my country!" a gunman had shot two Indian software engineers in an Applebee's restaurant in Kansas. Closer to home, in Kent, a suburb of Seattle, a man had shot a Sikh in an apparent hate crime.

A few weeks after the shooting, on a gray March day, I met Hira Singh Bhullar at a café in Kent. "The shooting happened four or five blocks from here," he said, gesturing in the direction of the crime scene with his finger.

Bhullar, who works in the IT department at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, was shaken. He'd lived for a time in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He never felt entirely safe there, always worried that somebody would accost or attack him.

But Bhullar had never felt threatened in Washington. Sure, some racists had posted mean comments on his Facebook page when he ran for the Kent City Council. Still, he didn't take that kind of internet obnoxiousness too seriously. Now, though, things seemed different. He worried about what seemed to him to be a metastasizing meanness towards immigrants and members of minority religions.

Persecution is something Sikhs know well. Their faith began with the teachings of Guru Nanak, born to a peasant family in 1469 in the Punjab region of South Asia, an area that stretches from eastern Pakistan to the northwest edge of India. Nanak's message was decidedly oppositional, challenging the authority of the region's two dominant religions, Hinduism and Islam; some scholars compare Nanak's spiritual revolution to Christianity's protestant reformation, which was unfolding in Europe at the same time.

Equality - between man and woman, preacher and congregant, ruler and serf, high-born and the untouchable - was central to Nanak's theology. What has developed over the past 500 years is a monotheistic faith with a heavy emphasis on social justice. Sikh temples, or gurdwaras, make a point of feeding anyone who needs a meal.

Of course, not everyone appreciated his teachings. Early Sikh gurus, or prophets, were tortured to death by the region's rulers.

There are an estimated 500,000 Sikhs living in the U.S., many in New York and California. In recent years, Yuba City, California, a small city in the middle of the Sacramento Valley, has become a major hub for Sikhs - Yuba City's annual Nagar Kirtan parade, a key holy event, draws as many as 150,000 people from around the world.

In the U.S., Sikhs are a frequent target for xenophobes and haters. They are often immigrants or the children of immigrants. They tend to have brown skin. And their garb and personal grooming practices set them apart. Following the directives of the gurus, observant male Sikhs do not cut their hair - ever - and many keep their locks covered by a turban whenever they leave the house. They also typically refrain from shaving, often growing robust beards.

Initially, the look was intended to distinguish Sikhs from the adherents of other religions. But in America, the bulk of the populace knows little to nothing about Sikhism, so they see a person with a turban and assume he's a Hindu or a Muslim.

For a multitude of reasons, there are no credible statistics regarding the number of hate crimes directed at Sikhs each year. But it is not hard to appreciate the very real fact of those crimes. Talk to a member of the faith. They'll likely know of an incident. They for sure will know of their history of victimization. They might have a personal connection that explains the threat they feel at this moment.

I spent time with three of them in recent months. I also researched the life of the American man who murdered six Sikhs at a temple in Wisconsin. What follows are four profiles, stories of hurt and worry and resilience.

The Driver

Dead Man at the Wheel

Inderjit Singh Mukker probably works harder than you do. The 54-year-old wrenches himself out of bed while the world is still wrapped in darkness, at 3 a.m., for a few moments of prayer and meditation before he climbs into a sleek black sedan and starts driving. And driving.

Working as a limousine driver, Mukker typically logs 12 or more hours behind the steering wheel each day, navigating Chicago's cratered and traffic-clogged roadways. By the end of the week he'll have spent at least 60 hours in the car.

"This is not a good job at all. You are working, working, working," says Mukker, a slight man with oversized eyeglasses and a dark turban. During the course of our conversation, he speaks in clipped, punchy sentences, the remnants of his native Punjabi tinging his words. "I'm killing myself. My back hurts, my shoulder hurts." It's difficult, he notes, to get a healthy meal when you're trapped in traffic for half of your life.

Driving while wearing a turban can also be hazardous.

In 2010, two men assaulted a Sikh cab driver in West Sacramento, California, breaking an orbital bone in his face and fracturing a bone in his spinal column. The men, one of whom was eventually convicted of hate crimes charges, tauntingly called the victim "Osama bin Laden" as they punched him.

A similar crime occurred two years later in Washington, leaving a Sikh taxi driver hospitalized for more than a week with severe kidney injuries. According to a trial brief filed by prosecutors, the attacker, who was drunk, wrestled the driver to the ground and stomped on his stomach repeatedly. The 50-year-old victim began vomiting, possibly due to a concussion.

"Motherfucker, what are you doing here?" screamed the assailant. "Why did you come to my country?" The attacker, who pleaded guilty, told police he assaulted the driver "because he is a towel head."

A New York City cabbie, Harkirat Singh, was battered earlier this year by a group of intoxicated passengers who punched him and tore his turban off his head. "Ali Baba, fuck you!" they shouted, according to the driver, who was an interviewed by a local newspaper.

Like so many immigrants in the livery business, Mukker once harbored dreams of doing something bigger, better. In India, he earned a master's degree in agronomy from Khalsa College and figured he'd go on to a career in agribusiness. But then, in 1988, he moved to Chicago in hopes of improving his economic fortunes.

Equipped with only a rudimentary command of English when he stepped off the plane in the U.S., Mukker quickly discovered that his job prospects were extremely limited - the only gig he could find was driving. Since then it's been cabs, Uber and now limos.

Mukker has tried other things. For a few years he ran a catering company specializing in Indian meals, but he eventually grew weary of it. Then there was the lawn care business. "It was my own company called United Grass and Lawn Care Service. I had a good number of clients in high-end neighborhoods," he recalls.

But just as the business was starting to take off, Mukker decided to shutter it. This was after 9/11 and he was afraid that people would think he was a jihadi and assault him, or send the cops rushing to stop a potential terror incident by arresting him. His wife, a registered nurse, was worried as well.

At first, when he tells me this, I'm baffled. I wonder if he's making some kind of joke I don't comprehend - how could anybody mistake a lawnmower for a weapon of mass destruction?

Mukker is patient with me. The lawnmower wasn't the problem, he explains. It was the chemicals. He was a swarthy man with an accent and a turban hauling around sizable quantities of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides; ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer, has been used as an explosive by guerrilla bomb makers since at least the 1970s. "I was worried about my safety. It was tough out there," he says.

So he drove.

On a September evening in 2015, he was driving in a personal capacity, picking up food from an Indian grocery store near his home in Darien, Illinois, a comfortable suburb about 20 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.

Mukker was sitting in his Prius at a stoplight when a male teenager in another car started yelling at him. "Bin Laden," screamed the young man, "go back to your own country!" When traffic started moving, the teen swerved and cut off Mukker, who stopped his car and rolled down the window.

"He came out from the car and started punching me," recalls Mukker. "He kept on punching me like he was doing boxing or something."

The blows broke his right cheekbone, damaged both of his eyes, and rendered him unconscious. When Mukker regained consciousness, his mind felt foggy. His eyesight was cloudy. In a photo taken at the hospital, a huge purple hematoma stretches across one cheek, a bandage is taped over the other. Blood is splattered all over his white shirt. "The bruises healed after a month or two, but my vision took a long time to recover. I went to the eye doctor for three different appointments," he says.

Unable to see clearly, it would be six months before Mukker could return to driving full time. Depression set in. He fell behind on his bills and nearly lost his home to foreclosure. Members of the Sikh community took up donations to help out Mukker and his family, who were stuck with $4,890 in medical costs.

It could have been worse. Just ask Maan Singh Khalsa, a Sikh from Richmond, California, who was brutalized in a roadway altercation late last year. Khalsa's ordeal started when a Ford F-150 full of oil refinery workers pulled up alongside him at a traffic light. One of the men in the truck hurled a beer can at Khalsa, a 41-year-old IT specialist. Harassment quickly turned to violence, with a pair of men beating Khalsa, yanking his turban from his head and hacking off his hair with a knife.

In the course of the attack, Khalsa's teeth were knocked loose and his pinky was cut. Doctors had to amputate the injured finger after it developed a virulent infection.

Before the attack, "I was so carefree. I considered myself an American like everyone else," he said during a court hearing in May. "I had never worried about being the victim of prejudice. I enjoyed my life fully." Now fear had infected Khalsa. He had trouble leaving the house, found himself treating all strangers as potential aggressors.

Pleading guilty to aggravated assault and hate crimes charges, both assailants received three-year terms in state prison.

In Mukker's case, the teen, who was prosecuted as a juvenile, was sentenced to 200 hours of community service, monetary restitution - the monthly checks are going to repay Mukker's medical costs - and counseling.

"I did not expect this would happen to me in my own backyard while I was driving my own private Prius," says Mukker. "This kid," he pauses for a second, "he was out of his mind."

I first interviewed Mukker in his living room in Darien, as he sat beneath a large painting of the Guru Nanak, who founded Sikhism during the 15th century. The conversation was emotionally heavy, but for Mukker it was good day. He had just paid off all the debts that had accrued in the months after the crime, a milestone that gave him reason to smile.

Later I met with him again, hoping to ask a few more questions. This time his mood was gloomy.

A few days earlier, he'd been driving a seven-seat SUV when he picked up a group of young women at a convention of medical professionals. Some of the women started smoking marijuana in the car. He shut that down.

Enraged, one of the women began slinging insults. "Go back to your country," she snapped. "This is not your country."

When we spoke, Mukker was still feeling dejected over the incident. He seemed tired. Tired of people calling him towel head or diaper head or terrorist. He was tired of people telling him he wasn't an American, even though he's a U.S. citizen and has lived in Illinois for more than half his life.

He said he'd decided to take a different approach to his job. Mukker told me he would drive like "a dead person."

By that he meant he wouldn't chat with his passengers or get upset when they verbally abused him. From now on he'd smother all of his emotions, make himself as cold as a corpse.

Because insults and slurs can't hurt the already dead.

The Advocate

Taking a Stand

Before the towers of the World Trade Center had even come down, five or six Sikhs scattered across the country arranged a conference call. None of them had ever met. None were activists.

But somehow they'd found each other and they were all deeply worried that the days ahead would bring a wave of violence and harassment directed at Sikhs. They figured that people distraught over the terrorist attacks would strike out at Sikhs in the mistaken belief that they were Muslims, and thus, in the eyes of aggressors, potential jihadists. A simple plan emerged: They'd form a group to collect reports of hate crimes against Sikhs and aid the abused.

They called the group the Sikh Coalition, and today, Harsimran Kaur is an attorney with the nonprofit advocacy group. Educated at George Washington University Law School, Kaur is cerebral, dynamic and, more than 15 years after the 9/11 conference call, very busy.

"We definitely saw an increase from about August of 2016 to the election in November," Kaur said of reports of crimes against Sikhs during a presidential campaign often dominated by talk of immigration bans and border walls and violently eradicating terrorism.

"Then it was quiet," she said. "And then, since the inauguration, we have seen an uptick in hate crimes against Sikhs."

To cite one recent example: Somebody spray-painted "KKK" on a Mercedes owned by a Sikh in Vacaville, California, and set it ablaze, totally destroying the vehicle.

While the coalition is a small outfit - the group had a $1.6 million budget in 2015, the most recent year for which tax records are available - it has become a highly effective defender of civil rights. Kaur, 42, who serves as the group's legal director, works from an office in her home in the Chicago area.

When the coalition receives a report of a potential hate crime, Kaur and her team quickly launch their own investigation. What are the circumstances surrounding the incident? Does the story make sense? Are there any injuries? Was the alleged victim targeted because of their Sikh identity?

If Kaur decides to take on the case, the coalition will reach out to local law enforcement to make sure police or sheriff's deputies have all the facts. She'll give them some basic information about the Sikh faith, let them know that Sikhs are not Hindus, not Muslims. Explain that the turban isn't just a fashion statement - it's a crucial display of religious devotion for many male Sikhs. And Kaur will ask the detectives the key question: Are you investigating this as a possible hate crime?

"Dealing with law enforcement and prosecutors can be difficult," she adds. "A lot of times we'll see police officers who just don't know how to investigate. Or don't recognize that if somebody has been assaulted and they've been called 'Bin Laden' or 'terrorist,' that is evidence of a hate crime."

In that sense, she says, she's seen some improvement since 9/11 - there seems to be a growing awareness of hate crimes within law enforcement circles - but there are still plenty of police officers who lack the training or inclination to respond effectively to the offenses.

In 2001, the conference call had barely ended before the fears expressed on it were realized. By the evening of Sept. 11, young men armed with baseball bats were beating an elderly Sikh man in Queens. The following days were worse. A man infuriated by 9/11 decided to drive to a Chevron gas station in Arizona and murder the owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, shooting him with a .380-caliber handgun. By way of explanation, the killer told police, "I'm a patriot and an American." Teenage arsonists set afire a gurdwara in upstate New York. The beatings piled up, one after another.

In those early days it wasn't unusual for Sikh men to choose to stay indoors, rather than risk physical harm in the outside world. Others, fearful for their lives, took off their turbans, a painful and humiliating act that contravened the basic tenets of the faith. Outside of the Sikh community, few are aware of this hidden history, as many of the stories from those days weren't covered by the media.

The coalition, then, wasn't sure it would hold together under the load and the stress.

"For the first few years things were shaky. It wasn't clear where the money was going to come from," says Jasmit Singh, a founding member who served on the coalition's board from 2001 through 2011.

Today, Kaur tells me, there are still "spikes of hate violence after other terrorist attacks." Or, she adds, after politicians make "xenophobic or Islamophobic statements in the press. That tends to also foment hate violence."

Those targeted are often elderly. In 2013, 82-year-old Piara Singh was attacked outside a gurdwara in Fresno, California. The assailant, who later pleaded guilty to a hate crime charge, bludgeoned him with a steel pipe, inflicting head injuries, broken ribs and lacerations of the lung - trauma so serious that Piara Singh slipped into a coma for two days. Last May, two young men in the same city attacked 68-year-old Amrik Singh Bal, thinking for some reason that he was a Muslim extremist or ISIS member just hanging out on a California street. After punching him, they intentionally ran him over with a car, an act captured on surveillance video.

Kaur and the coalition are not alone in the violence they see or the work they do. Other advocacy groups like United Sikhs and the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) often engage in similar efforts in the aftermath of hate crimes.

Many Sikhs "feel frustrated at the difficulty in convincing police to categorize even obvious hate incidents as such," says Jaideep Singh, research director at SALDEF. "Another elder was just found murdered in Fresno this week- floating in a drainage canal." He points to lingering systemic problems - law enforcement officers who lack adequate training, police departments that fail to track hate crimes and report them to the FBI - that need to be addressed.

When Jaideep Singh surveyed 525 Sikhs in the Seattle area about their experiences, he heard about "an awful lot of small, everyday slights" that don't appear in official hate crimes stats.

The legal defense fund and the coalition went to the media after a Sikh man was assaulted while driving a public bus in Los Angeles in 2015. The assailant called the victim a "suicide bomber" and "terrorist" while punching him. Still, the county sheriff's department initially classified the matter as a simple misdemeanor assault. Kaur and company had a good story - investigating deputies somehow overlooking key facts in an ugly case - and the local media ran a string of reports on the crime. The sheriff's department went back and re-examined the case, and in March 2016, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office added a hate crime charge, a move that exposed the attacker to a longer potential prison term.

The case hasn't yet gone to trial.

Kaur says prosecutors sometimes "acknowledge that there is evidence of a hate crime but are reluctant to file charges because it's very hard to get a hate crime conviction."

She continues,"hate crimes require prosecutors to not only prove that an assault has occurred, but also prove that the assault was motivated by bias - and that's very, very difficult." In many cases, she says, even "if you do prove that a hate crime occurred, it may not add additional penalties."

The challenges were on display in 2005, when five men stood trial for allegedly brutalizing and verbally abusing a Sikh community leader outside a New York restaurant. The coalition and other Sikh organizations had urged Queens County prosecutors to use Article 485 of the state penal code, a tough, well-crafted law that bolsters the penalties for those convicted. In the end, though, only two of the five men were found guilty on hate crimes charges.

When talking to Kaur, she stresses that these cases are about more than simply meting out punishment. She doesn't necessarily advocate for more jail time for defendants. Often, she asks for community service, education, some sort of reconciliation between the aggressor and the abused.

"You know it's absolutely imperative that as a society we take a stand against hate violence. Hate crimes undermine the fabric of our country. They're an assault, not only on an individual, but on an entire community and they degrade our democracy. They undermine the American dream and they make us all feel less safe."

The Gunman

A Skinhead in the Temple

When they hauled Wade Page's body to the morgue, he'd already been dead for about seven hours.

A doctor with the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's Office scrutinized Page's corpse closely. The dead man was 40. White. A little over 6 feet tall, exactly 212 pounds. His hair was shorn down to the scalp. Then there were the tattoos, lots of them, and they were encoded with secret messages.

On the back of his right hand, in large Old English script, was the letter "W." On his left was "P." White Power.

The number 88 was tattooed on one shoulder. It meant Heil Hitler. The letter H is the eighth in the alphabet.

Page had a different number inked on his other arm: 14. For white supremacists like Page, 14 holds special significance. It goes back to a man named David Lane, who led a terror group called The Order, which in 1984 assassinated Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg in Denver. While in prison, Lane drafted a 14-word slogan meant to inspire his fellow racist revolutionaries: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

Page took his racism seriously, and on Aug. 5, 2012, he did his part on behalf of the 14 words.

He massacred six people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin; Page died during a gun battle with police in the parking lot of the gurdwara.

The magnitude of the crime spurred a massive investigation by the FBI and its Domestic Terrorism Operations Unit, which worked in concert with local police from multiple jurisdictions. Telling reporters that "in this country, regardless of what we look like, where we come from, who we worship, we are all one people," former President Obama ordered flags at government buildings to be flown at half-staff in remembrance of the victims.

Page grew up in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, and does not seem to have had a particularly happy childhood. When he was 13, his mother died, and one friend told the FBI that Page never totally recovered from the loss.

After high school, he joined the U.S. Army and wound up in a PSYOP battalion at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne Division. PSYOP is psychological operations or psychological warfare, which includes the creation of propaganda meant to persuade enemy soldiers and hostile civilians to switch their allegiances and rally behind American troops. "WIN THE MIND, WIN THE DAY" is the motto of Page's former battalion.

Today it's hard to determine when, precisely, Page became attracted to Nazism and white supremacist ideologies. It's not clear why this particularly virulent brand of racism appealed to him. But his racist beliefs were definitely on display during his days at Fort Bragg. Former soldiers told FBI agents that Page, who rose to the rank of sergeant, was open about his extremist views; one remembered him getting drunk and singing Nazi marching songs.

He became a member of the Hammerskin Nation, one of the oldest active Nazi skinhead gangs, which was founded in Dallas and now has chapters around the world. The Hammerskins, who do not admit women, have a signature hand gesture - first the member performs a stiff-arm Nazi salute, then he clenches his fists and crosses his forearms, mimicking the group's logo, a pair of interlocking claw hammers. The group, which has written by-laws but does not appear to have any formal leadership structure, grew out of the punk rock subculture of the 1980s - you could say the Hammerskins were the despised bastard children of the punk scene, which was generally inclusive and anti-racist.

A capable musician, Page lent his skills on guitar and bass to a string of skinhead bands, which generally played stripped down three-chord punk rock accompanied by bloody imagery and aggressive lyrics; the gravel-throated vocalist for one of Page's bands, called Definite Hate, pledged to "get rid of them/the enemies of the white race" in a typical song. Amazon, through its affiliate marketplace, still sells CDs by at least one of Page's bands - the cover art features a Confederate flag and a noose hanging from a tree. One of Page's old friends told the FBI that he wrote lyrics celebrating the "genocide of other races."

Page spent some time on Stormfront.org, the white power web forum, promoting "hate rock" gigs, including a 2012 St. Patrick's Day event in Richmond, Virginia. Using the email address [email protected] , he kept in touch with his racist buddies around the country.

Like many skinheads, Page had a strong affinity for alcohol. He "liked to drink Jack Daniels," said one ex-service member when questioned by investigators. Another former colleague said Page would "consume a liter and a half of Jim Beam every other day." Several people described him as a "functioning alcoholic."

Actually, the opposite was true. Page's drinking made a mess of his life, starting with his military career. After showing up for duty smelling of booze, Page was ousted from the Army in 1998. That humiliation led to a peripatetic existence that saw him bouncing from town to town and job to job. There was a stint crashing on the couch of a fellow Nazi skinhead in Southern California. A gig back in Colorado working as a technician at a Honda motorcycle dealership. A $7.50-an-hour job in the parts department at a Harley-Davidson shop in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The owners of the Harley shop fired Page after he had an "outburst" at a female employee that left the woman fearing for her safety.

For a time, he worked as a big rig truck driver in North Carolina. That ended when Page got arrested for drunk driving and lost his driver's license. Without a job, his financial woes mounted quickly. Page lost his home to foreclosure and his car to the repo man, and was forced to sell many of his possessions, including his guns, to survive.

In the fall of 2011, he managed to pull together the money to relocate to the Milwaukee area to move in with a girlfriend, someone he'd met through the skinhead scene. He got a job at Lucas-Millhaupt, a metal fabrication and welding supplies company with a large, fortress-like facility in Cudahy, a blue-collar town near the Milwaukee airport. But things fell apart again. Page and his girlfriend split. Perhaps more significant, he was excommunicated from the Hammerskins.

Page was kicked out for violating the gang's by-laws, says James Santelle, who, as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin at the time, helped lead the investigation into the massacre. FBI records show that shortly before the murders, Page got into a street fight with two other skinheads.

Page "became quiet and distant," one of his co-workers at Lucas-Millhaupt told the FBI. While he "did not mention any plans for destructive behavior," Page was clearly suffering from emotional distress, his days plagued by mood swings, his nights haunted by insomnia.

In an interview with investigators, Page's sister, who lived in Colorado, said his "demeanor had changed over the past year and he had become much more intense, as if he had lost his sense of humor and wit and perceived everything very literally."

Days before the massacre, Page donated a bunch of white power CDs to a thrift store. He went to a GameStop and sold his Xbox 360 console and headset, and three games for $112. Page headed to a gun shop and legally purchased a 9 mm pistol and three 19-bullet magazines.

On July 31, Page's landlord knocked on his door. Page was living in a small, second-floor apartment in a home that had been subdivided. The rent was late, the landlord told him. Page replied that he'd pay the rent on August 5 - the day of the murders.

For a white supremacist like Page, there are many potential targets in the Milwaukee area. Lots of synagogues. An African Methodist Episcopal Church on the north side of the city. At least three mosques. Why he chose the Sikh temple remains a mystery. Page didn't leave behind any sort of note.

After the terror attack, FBI agents fanned out across the country hunting for clues. They urgently wanted to know if any other white supremacists had helped Page plan and carry out the crime.

Over and over, Page's fellow skinheads denied any involvement. They voiced surprise and disbelief that he'd done something so horrible.

The following statements are typical. One skinhead, interviewed by agents five days after the killings, said he "was completely shocked when he heard of his fellow Hammerskin brother, Wade Michael Page, being involved in the killings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Hammerskins do not advocate this type of violence."

The skinhead told investigators he was "heartbroken over Page's death. Page was always a mellow guy and everybody is shocked over what has occurred." He added that he felt no grief for Page's victims.

Santelle, the former federal prosecutor, says the bureau found no evidence that anyone aided Page in his terror attack. But he believes the skinhead may have scoped out the temple prior to the shooting. "I wonder if he had been there before," he says, noting that Page "plainly moved with a certain amount of purposefulness" as he carried out the massacre.

At the Milwaukee County morgue, the doctor carefully studied Page's body and documented injuries. There was a gunshot wound to the abdomen. A small-caliber bullet had ripped through his gut, punching through his small bowel. That shot had been fired by one of the Oak Creek police officers responding to the attack.

But it was Page who loosed the fatal shot: He'd pointed his 9 mm pistol at the back of his head and squeezed the trigger.

The Son

Are You an Arab?

Harpreet Singh Saini has a memory from his first day at community college. One of his teachers at Milwaukee Area Technical College in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, asked Saini and his classmates to get acquainted by sharing tales from their summer vacations.

"It was very weird. Everybody had great stories," he recalls. "And mine was very sad."

One student had gone to Florida. Another went to Vegas. There was one guy who talked about the simple joys of sleeping late and lounging around all day.

Then it was Saini's turn. His story went something like this: One month earlier, Wade Page, a neo-Nazi skinhead, murdered his mom and five other people. The whole thing happened just a mile-and-a-half down the road, during prayer services at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, a blocky beige building topped by five gold-colored minarets.

"The room went completely silent," says Saini, who was 18 at the time.

His fellow students were kind and sympathetic, but Saini still couldn't shake the sense of otherness, that he was living a very different reality than his peers. It was a feeling he knew well.

Oak Creek, a small town located south of Milwaukee on the banks of Lake Michigan, is a mix of industrial plants, strip malls full of chain retailers and restaurants, and aging suburban tract homes. The population is 86.6 percent white, according to the most recent U.S. Census figures.

Saini and his family came to the U.S. in 2004. He grew up in Oak Creek, went to Oak Creek High School, home of the Knights. His mom, Paramjit Kaur, worked in a nearby town at a factory that manufactured syringes. His dad ran a convenience store in Milwaukee. "It was very hard to fit in," he says. "To be honest with you, I never really had any friends. I never went to prom. I was one of the students who decided not to take part in the school activities."

Now 23, Saini has little of the brashness or swagger often found in young men his age. Sometimes he stammers or hesitates a bit when speaking, like he's not entirely sure he should be talking. But when he tells me about his friendless days in school, the words flow forth smoothly. His tone is completely neutral, devoid of any sadness or anger, as if he's ordering a coffee at Starbucks.

He introduces me to a friend, a computer engineer. The woman, also a Sikh, had recently quit her well-compensated job at a prominent local company after six years. "I worked for somebody who was a very strong Trump supporter. He was open about not liking people of color, or immigrants. He would talk about how Indians smelled, how he didn't like them," she says, requesting anonymity in order to speak freely about the racial dynamics in Oak Creek. "That was the main reason I left."

For Saini, high school was pretty tortured. "I was constantly bullied. I mean, it was mostly like name calling and it got to the point where it got physical, as well." He remembers arguing with his mom, telling her that he wanted to bail on school, that he couldn't bear going any longer. She insisted that he earn his diploma.

Paramjit was the only woman killed at the temple. She was 41.

A remarkable thing happened after the massacre. Suddenly, people wanted to hear what the quiet outsider kid had to say. Saini penned an op-ed for The New York Times and appeared in a documentary film. Accompanied by his brother, Kamaljit, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Senators, my mother was our biggest fan, our biggest supporter," he said. "She was always there for us, she always had a smile on her face. But now she's gone. Because of a man who hated her because she wasn't his color? His religion?"

He continued, "I want to tell the gunman who took her from me: You may have been full of hate, but my mother was full of love."

Working with the Sikh Coalition, Saini sought to rectify what he saw as an absurd governmental oversight: the FBI's failure to track hate crimes against Sikhs. The bureau had long catalogued crimes targeting Jews, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims and adherents of several other faiths. But the FBI had no system for tracking attacks and abuse directed at Sikhs.

After years of pressure, the bureau in 2015 finally added crimes against Sikhs to the national hate crimes database. By the FBI's tally, there were six such offenses that year.

Saini and other Sikhs are skeptical of the data - "That's not an accurate number at all. It's much higher, much higher," he argues - which is pulled from police and sheriff's departments around the country and is known to be deeply flawed.

About 20 percent of the law enforcement agencies in the country don't submit statistics to the FBI, while many agencies that nominally participate in the program provide demonstrably erroneous data. And the database does not include any alleged hate crimes reported to federal agencies.

After three years in college, Saini dropped out. He'd been studying criminal justice with an eye toward becoming a police officer, but he says there didn't seem to be any openings for new officers in his area.

So he got a job at a gas station at a town outside of Oak Creek. He's learning the trade and hopes to own his own station in the future. The shifts can be grueling - at one point he offers to meet me for an interview when he gets off work at 11:30 p.m. Saini's got to be back at the station early the next day. No, I tell him, go home and get some rest.

He enjoys the work. But some of the customers seem wary of him. They want to know if he's an "Arab." Saini knows exactly what they're driving at.

They think he might be a terrorist.

A.C. Thompson covers criminal justice issues for ProPublica. His stories have helped lead to the exoneration of two innocent San Francisco men sentenced to life in prison and the prosecution of seven New Orleans police officers.

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The 1907 episode in a seaside timber town in Washington came to be known as the Bellingham Riots. Really, though, there were no riots. There was a pogrom. At the time, the U.S. was suffering through deep economic distress, a panic-filled recession that had begun the year before.

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Ugly History: Japanese American incarceration camps - Densho

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Reasons US became less racist....

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Asian Americans used to be portrayed as the villains. How did they become a "model minority"? (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites.

Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education. But according to a recent study by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger's research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.

[The real secret to Asian American success was not education]

How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained.

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, " The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

To combat racism, minorities in the United States have often attempted to portray themselves as upstanding citizens capable of assimilating into mainstream culture. Asian Americans were no different, Wu writes. Some, like the Chinese, sought respectability by promoting stories about their obedient children and their traditional family values. The Japanese pointed to their wartime service as proof of their shared Americanness.

African Americans in the 1940s made very similar appeals. But in the postwar moment, Wu argues, it was only convenient for political leaders to hear the Asian voices.

The model minority narrative may have started with Asian Americans, but it was quickly co-opted by white politicians who saw it as a tool to win allies in the Cold War. Discrimination was not a good look on the international stage. Embracing Asian Americans "provided a powerful means for the United States to proclaim itself a racial democracy and thereby credentialed to assume the leadership of the free world," Wu writes. Stories about Asian American success were turned into propaganda.

By the 1960s, anxieties about the civil right movement caused white Americans to further invest in positive portrayals of Asian Americans. The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to deny the demands of African Americans. As Wu describes in her book, both liberal and conservative politicians pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for black poverty. If Asians could find success within the system, politicians asked, why couldn't African Americans?

"The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship," she writes.

Recently, Wu and I chatted on the phone about her book and the model minority stereotype - how it was equal parts truth, propaganda and self-enforcing prophecy.

Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you started on this book?

WU: America in general has had very limited ways of thinking about Asian Americans. There are very few ways in which we exist in the popular imagination. In the mid- to late-19th century, all the way through the late 1940s and 1950s, Asians were thought of as "brown hordes" or as the "yellow peril." There was the sinister, weird, "Fu Manchu" stereotype.

Yet, by the middle of the 1960s, Asian Americans had undergone this really arresting racial makeover. Political leaders, journalists, social scientists - all these people in the public eye - seemed to suddenly be praising Asian Americans as so-called model minorities.

I thought that might be a very interesting question to try to unravel.

How did these earliest stereotypes - these very negative, nasty images - take root?

Asian Americans first started coming in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture. When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities where they started working in manufacturing.

At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn't doing that well in California. White American workers were very anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they saw these newcomers who seemed very different from them.

There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of portraying the "Orient" as unknowable and mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial capitalism and the undermining of workers' autonomy and freedom. They believed that the Chinese threatened American independence and threatened American freedom.

These ideas were particularly popular among the white working class at the time. The momentum started to build in the American West. There was the Workingmen's Party in California - one of their platforms was "The Chinese must go." That's how they rallied people. And they were very successful at it.

By 1882, Congress passed the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which was the first time a race- and class-based group - Chinese workers - were singled out by American immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion Acts restricted their entry into the United States and said they couldn't become naturalized citizens.

What's really striking is that in the 1890s, the federal government even mandated a Chinese registry. That sounds a lot like this issue of the Muslim registry today, right?

A lot of what you're describing sounds familiar today - the economic anxiety bleeding into racial anxiety, the targeting of outsiders ...

Absolutely. There are a lot of resonances. What's happening today didn't spring out of nowhere - it has a very long history in the United States.

Can you describe some of these old stereotypes? I think that most people have some idea from old Hollywood movies, but it's just such a contrast to how Asians Americans are portrayed today.

The ways in which Americans thought about these "Orientals" hinged a lot on moral differences and on issues of gender, sexuality and family.

Many great historians and scholars have done work on this. The major groups that came before World War II were the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Koreans and Filipinos. There were both similarities and differences in how the groups were viewed, but generally they were thought to be threatening - significantly different in a negative sense.

For the most part, a lot of Asian immigrants weren't Christian, so that was suspect. American Chinatowns had a thriving vice economy, so gambling, prostitution and drugs became popularly associated with Asians. (Of course, some of the same white Americans who were criticizing Asians were also the ones participating in these activities.)

There was this idea of moral depravity. At the time, the Chinese and Filipinos and South Asians in America were mostly single, able-bodied young men, so that also raised a lot of eyebrows. It looked like they were sexually wayward.

If you look at old stereotypical imagery of Asians in political cartoons, the way they tend to be depicted is that they are not aligned with white, middle-class notions of respectable masculinity. There's the long hair, the flowing clothing that didn't quite look masculine yet didn't quite look feminine - or maybe it was something in-between, as some scholars have argued.

The women were also thought of as morally suspect - as prostitutes, sexually promiscuous, that kind of thing.

An important argument in your book is that Asians were complicit in the creation of the model minority myth. The way we talk about this issue today, it's as if the white majority imposed this stereotype on Asian communities - but your research shows that's not the case. How did it really get started?

Absolutely. That is a critical point to understand. The model minority myth as we see it today was mainly an unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asians Americans to be accepted and recognized as human beings. They wanted to be seen as American people who were worthy of respect and dignity.

At lot was at stake. At the time, Asians were living life under an exclusion regime that had many similarities to Jim Crow - not the same as Jim Crow, but certainly a cousin of Jim Crow. There was a whole matrix of laws and discriminatory practices.

By 1924, all immigration from Asia had been completely banned. Asians were considered under the law "aliens ineligible for citizenship." There were all these racial restrictions to citizenship under the law - and the last of these didn't fall until 1952.

Asian Americans tended to be restricted to segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools. They often did not have the kind of job prospects that white people had. They would be barred from certain kinds of employment either by law or by custom.

In 1937, a young U.S.-born Japanese-American man lamented that even if you went to college, you could only end up being a "professional carrot-washer." That was really true for a lot of people. They had very limited options for social mobility. And of course there was also violence - lynchings.

So for Asian Americans, one survival strategy was to portray themselves as "good Americans."

As you argue in your book, it became increasingly expedient for mainstream Americans to acknowledge, and even amplify, Asian attempts to gain respectability. What changed?

Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation was gearing up for global war. American leaders started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial discrimination policies. They were concerned it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people abroad. That really motivated American leaders and the American people to work on race relations.

During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China, who was America's Pacific ally.

With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers became really attentive to putting their best image out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts and minds in Asia.

Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United States took charge of reconstructing Japan in its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And because Japan became such an important ally, that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.

Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and minds in the Far East.

It wasn't just a geopolitical thing right? It seems that by the 1960s, there were other reasons for investing in this image of Asians as upstanding citizens, reasons that were closer to home.

Oh, absolutely. There were definitely domestic reasons for why the idea was appealing that Asians could be considered good American citizens capable of assimilating into American life.

In the 1950s, there were general concerns about maintaining the right kind of home life. There's this image of the perfect American family - a suburban household with a mom, a dad, two to three kids, a white picket fence. That was the ideal, but it wasn't always realized. There was a juvenile delinquency panic in the 1950s, a big scare over how the nation's youth were getting themselves into trouble.

The Chinatown leaders were really smart. They started to peddle stories about Chinese traditional family values and Confucian ethics. They claimed that Chinese children always listened to their elders, were unquestioningly obedient and never got into trouble because after school they would just go to Chinese school.

When I started digging, I found that this idea of this model Chinese family, with the perfect children who always just loved to study and who don't have time to get into trouble or date - started to circulate quite prominently in the 1950s. That speaks to America's anxieties about juvenile delinquency.

Also, since these stories were taking place in Chinatowns, it allowed Americans to claim that America had these remaining repositories of traditional Chinese values at a time when the Communist Chinese had completely dismantled them. So there's this other level where these stories are also anti-Communist - they are doing this other ideological work.

How true were these stories though? How much of this was racial propaganda, and how much of it was rooted in reality?

These are obviously very strategic stories. In 1956, the federal government started to crack down on illegal Chinese immigration, which was in part motivated by the Cold War. So partly, the conservative Chinatown leaders thought this model Chinese family story would do a lot to protect them. They thought this PR campaign would reorient the conversation away from "Communists are sneaking into our country" to "Hey, look at these squeaky-clean, well-behaved children."

From reading community newspapers in these Chinatowns, we know they also had a lot of concerns about juvenile delinquency. In fact, behind closed doors there were heated disagreements about what to do. One woman in particular - Rose Hum Lee, a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago - wrote lots of books and papers about the problems in Chinatown, and accused leaders of sweeping these problems under the rug.

There were Asian Americans then, as today, at the end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And that segment of the population tends to go unnoticed in these kinds of narratives.

It's interesting to compare the efforts of the Chinatown leaders to the parallel efforts of leaders in the African American civil rights movement, who also emphasized respectability - who wore their Sunday best on these marches where they were hosed down and attacked by dogs. What's stunning to me is the contrast. One group's story is amplified, and the other's is, well, almost denied.

I think the Japanese American experience also highlights some of this contrast. At the same time in the 1950s, you hear these stories about how the Japanese Americans dramatically recovered from the internment camps, how they accepted their fate. "After internment, many families were scattered across the country, but they took it as an opportunity to assimilate," that sort of thing.

Japanese Americans aren't perceived to be doing any kind of direct action, they weren't perceived to be protesting. A bad thing happened to them, and they moved on, and they were doing okay.

These stories were ideologically useful. They became a model for political cooperation. The ideas solidify in the 1950s. Americans had recast Asians into these citizens capable of assimilating - even if they still saw Asians as somewhat different from whites. And by the 1960s, what becomes important is that these socially mobile, assimilating, politically nonthreatening people were also decidedly not black.

That's really the key to all this. The work of the African American freedom movements had made white liberals and white conservatives very uncomfortable. Liberals were questioning whether integration could solve some the deeper problems of economic inequality. And by the late 1960s, conservatives were calling for increased law and order.

Across the political spectrum, people looked to Asian Americans - in this case, Japanese and Chinese Americans - as an example of a solution, as a template for other minority groups to follow: "Look how they ended up! They're doing just fine. And they did it all without political protests."

That isn't really true, by the way. Asian Americans did get political, but sometimes their efforts didn't get seen or recognized.

These stereotypes about Asian Americans being patriotic, having an orderly family, not having delinquency or crime - they became seen as the opposite of what "blackness" represented to many Americans at the time.

I would say it also costs the majority less to allow Asian Americans, who were still a very small part of the population, to let them play out this saga of upward mobility, rather than recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans during that same time.

I'm not saying somebody sat down and did a cost-benefit analysis. But in some ways, there seemed to be a big payoff for little risk. Even with the overturning of the exclusion laws, it's not like large numbers of Asians were coming into the United States at the time. Asian Americans at that time were still a pretty marginal part of the population.

As harmful as Asian exclusion was, I would agree that those structures were not as deep or pervasive as anti-black racism. It wouldn't do as much to change the overall social picture by allowing these small numbers of Asian Americans to move forward. It was easier to do, in some ways, because those exclusion structures were not as pervasive, and the consequences had not been as long-lasting as they had been for African Americans.

A really fascinating part of your book describes how these new Asian stereotypes shaped the Moynihan Report, which infamously blamed the plight of African Americans on "ghetto culture." I think that is a great example of how this model minority stereotype started to get used against others in the 1960s.

Daniel Moynihan, the author of that report, was a liberal trying to figure out how to solve this huge problem - the status of African Americans in American life.

If you look in the report, there's not really any mention of Asian Americans. But just a few months before the Moynihan Report came out in the summer of 1965, Moynihan was at a gathering with all these intellectuals and policymakers. They're talking about how Japanese and Chinese Americans were "rather astonishing" because they had thrown off this racial stigma. Moynihan points out that 25 years ago, Asians had been "colored." Then Moynihan says, "Am I wrong that they have ceased to be colored?"

That was a very striking and powerful moment to me.

I think a lot of people believe that the model minority stereotype came out of the huge surge of highly educated Asians who started coming to the United States after 1965. But as your book shows, I think, the causality actually runs the other way.

It's mutually reinforcing. At the time that the United States did this major immigration law overhaul in 1965, policymakers decided that the nation should select its immigrants based on how they could contribute to the economy (and also to reunify families). So what we start to see is people coming to the United States with these credentials and backgrounds and training, and they seem to confirm some of the ideas that are already there - that Asian Americans are model minorities.

My book stops in the late 1960s, but what I think has happened since then is that the model minority stereotype story has really shifted away from the original ideas of patriotism and anti-communism. We now fixate more on education. There's the image of the tiger mom focused on getting her kid into Harvard. That emphasis also speaks to a shift in the American economy, how upward mobility really depends on having a certain kind of educational training.

And the anxieties about Asians have never really gone away. Now they're portrayed as our global competitors. So underlying the praise there's also this fear.

Sometimes in America, it feels like there are only so many racial buckets that people can fall into. With increased immigration from South Asia and Southeast Asia, for instance, it seemed like lot of the newcomers were swept up into this model minority narrative.

What happened in 1965 is that we opened up the gates to large-scale immigration from places like Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. From Asia, you get large numbers of people coming from South Asia, the Philippines, Korea. Then by the 1970s, the United States is fighting a war in Southeast Asia, so you get this refugee migrant stream. And you're right, they're stepping into this predetermined racial landscape, these preconceived notions about how Asians are.

But as a historian, as someone who thinks about race in American life for a living, I also think that the "model minority" category has only a limited usefulness now in terms of our analysis. We talk about it as a common stereotype, but it doesn't explain the whole scope of Asian American life today - especially since 9/11, when you have communities of South Asians who are Muslims or Sikhs now being racially targeted or labeled as terrorists. So that has become another stereotype of Asians these days.

I think that underscores maybe the meta-narrative of your book - how we in America have always viewed ethnic and racial minorities through the lens of politics and geopolitics, right? In terms of international relations, in terms of what kind of image we want to project to the world, and in terms of what our national anxieties about other countries are.

Absolutely, that's the link. The model minority stereotype and the terrorist stereotype are related, I agree, in how they speak to the geopolitical anxieties of their times.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans

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Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites. Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education.

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THE SPLIT HORN is the sweeping story of a Hmong shaman and his family living in Appleton, Wisconsin. Documenting the 17-year journey of Paja Thao and his family from the mountains of Laos to the heartland of America, this poignant film shows a shaman's struggles to maintain his ancient traditions as his children embrace American culture.

The Hmong ("mung") are an Asian tribal culture. After fighting valiantly for the United States in the Vietnam War, many Hmong like the Thao family were forced to flee their homeland in Southeast Asia. Since 1975, over 200,000 Hmong refugees have resettled in the U.S.

top: Paja Thao in shamanic trance

Middle: Paja's daughter Chai

Bottom: Paja's son Koualy with daughter

For over 17 years since the family arrived in America, filmmaker Taggart Siegel has chronicled the intimate and private lives of Paja Thao, his wife and their 13 children. THE SPLIT HORN focuses on Paja, a shaman whose spiritual leadership plays a vital role in Appleton's Hmong community. He ministers to the physical and spiritual needs of friends and family with elaborate rituals that bridge the natural and spirit worlds. As his children grow up, however, they are losing touch with their father's ancient traditions. In a pivotal scene, Paja, wearing a black veil, dances on a wooden bench, shaking and chanting in an ecstatic trance. Across the room, three of his children lounge on the sofa, transfixed by The Simpsons and MTV, ignoring the ancient spirit battle played out by their father.

Chai, the shaman's 12-year-old daughter, is caught between the richly traditional world of her parents and the complicated life of a typical American teenager. As the film's narrator, Chai shows viewers the collision of cultures taking place in her house and in the Hmong-American community.

A year of sadness leads Paja to conduct a ceremony for his family during which he discovers that his own soul has strayed from his body. He spirals into a depression, unable to heal himself or others. The community, worried by Paja's depression, asks two shaman friends to lead a healing ceremony for him. The Thao children come together, putting aside their religious differences to support their father and mother. One of the older sons, Koualy, returns to Hmong tradition after 14 years and helps his father with the ceremony. Paja beams with joy and renewed strength.

THE SPLIT HORN, which can be watched in the Hmong language on SAP (Secondary Audio Program), captures the daily struggle of a family caught between two worlds and examines the intergenerational rift between immigrant parents desperate to maintain their ancient traditions while their children embrace American lifestyles.

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THE SPLIT HORN is the sweeping story of a Hmong shaman and his family living in Appleton, Wisconsin. Documenting the 17-year journey of Paja Thao and his family from the mountains of Laos to the heartland of America, this poignant film shows a shaman's struggles to maintain his ancient traditions as his children embrace American culture.

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Sikhs in America

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ViewFinder
Season 7 Episode 4 | 26m 46s |

The Sikh community is an important part of northern California's cultural tapestry, yet the Sikh religion and cultural traditions are not widely understood. This documentary captures Sikh social and family life, spiritual life, and economic and work life. Witness a beautiful Sunday service at a gurdwara, a Sikh wedding, the tying of a Sikh turban, and a look at the game Kabbadi.

Aired: 01/08/08

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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ViewFinder | Sikhs in America | Season 7 | Episode 4

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ViewFinder Season 7 Episode 4 | 26m 46s | The Sikh community is an important part of northern California's cultural tapestry, yet the Sikh religion and cultural traditions are not widely understood. This documentary captures Sikh social and family life, spiritual life, and economic and work life.

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Why We Should Have Seen It Coming-Trevor Noah

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Why We Should Have Seen It Coming-Trevor Noah

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Why We Should’ve Seen the Atlanta Shootings Coming | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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lisa ling: like open season on people who look like me

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Lisa Ling: Like open season on people who look like me, my parents and my children - CNN Video

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CNN's Lisa Ling talked to Erin Burnett about the shootings in the Atlanta area at massage parlors that left eight people dead - including six Asian women.

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Mien

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Iu-Mien History: From China to the U.S.
By Fahm Finh Saeteurn

An Early History
The early history of the Iu-Mien (Yao) is obscure and unclear. Much of it has been passed down through oral myths and legends, for few written historical records exist. The available records were written by the Han Chinese, and while they offer important glimpses into early Yao history, perhaps these records raise more questions than it answers.

The Yao have been traced to around 220 A.D. as belonging to one of many groups categorized under the term Nanman, which translates to southern barbarian. Nanman is one of two categories assigned to the people of the South, for those who lived in present-day Guangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, and eastern Guizhou. The actual first reference to the term "Yao" appeared during the Tang dynasty (618-906 A.D.) in the expression moyao, usually translated as "not subject to corvee labor." Many scholars have attempted to link this expression to the present-day Yao, implying that those historically not subject to compulsory labor are the Yao's direct ancestors. However, in an influential work on early Yao publications, Cushman convincingly argues that there is not enough evidence to support this link. The term moyao has only appeared in five sources, and there is no indication that it refers to a particular ethnic group. Furthermore, no one has been able to explain the shortening of moyao to Yao.

Other historical references to the Yao point to "tribal uprisings." The first uprisings were reported during the rule of the Song emperor Renzong (1023-1064 AD), as due to either the Yao's refusal to pay taxes or their attempts to reclaim confiscated land. This portrayal of resistance is present in all records, and as pointed out by Litzinger, the Han's failure to assimilate the Yao into its cultural and political order was often blamed on the Yao's stupidity, backwardness, and stubbornness, and not on the administration's inadequacies.

The first major southward migration of the Yao to Vietnam is reported to occur between the 17th and 18th century. It wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th century that the Yao migrated into Laos, Burma, and Thailand. The cause of these migrations were reported as being due to Han encroachments, Yao's refusal to pay taxes, and the search for new land because of droughts.

An Origin Myth
A popular legend about Yao origin can be found on scrolls written in Chinese, called "King Ping's Charter." The legend tells of P'an Hu, a multi-colored dog who married a Chinese princess. According to the myth, the Chinese emperor King P'ing of the Ch'u Kingdom (528-516 B.C.) promised to give one of his daughters in marriage to anyone who could rid him of his enemy, King Kao. A multi-colored dog named P'an Hu succeeded, brought back King Kao's head, and married the princess, giving birth to six sons and six daughters. The twelve children are said to be the forefathers of the twelve Yao tribes.

After China
Many Yao settled in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Burma after their southward migration in the 17th through 20th centuries. For the purposes of this paper, the Iu-Mien of Laos and Thailand will be the focus and discussed more thoroughly. In Thailand and Laos, the Iu-Mien practiced slash and burn agriculture, also known as shifting cultivation, which involved moving to new land once every decade.

In the 1960's and 1970's, Laos got engulfed in the Vietnam War. When the United States intervened to support anti-communist forces in the early 1960's, they contracted for help from the hill tribes of Laos. Like many other hill tribes, the Iu-Mien got involved and engaged in guerrilla warfare, providing the United States with intelligence, surveillance, and armed manpower. When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and communist forces were victorious, the Iu-Mien began fleeing the new Pathet Lao government. More than seventy percent of the Iu-Mien population fled to Thailand, escaping through the jungle and across the Mekong. Once they arrived in Thailand, they were resettled in refugee camps. They received food and supplies from other nations and the United Nations Organization. After several years, the United States returned to fulfill their contract made with the ethnic minorities. They offered a refugee rescue program, which gave the Iu-Mien and other groups the choice to resettle in the United States.

Resettlement, Identity, and Links
The first significant group of Iu-Mien arrivals came during the late 1970's. After resettling, the Iu-Mien faced numerous obstacles. Moving from a non-industrial, slash and burn economy, to the industrialized, post-modern United States made adjustment extremely difficult. Problems existed in all areas, from language and customs to religion and power structures. Since their arrival, the Iu-Mien language has been slowly disappearing. A majority of third generation Iu-Mien are fluent in English but cannot converse in Mienh. Many Iu-Mien have abandoned the Taoist/Animist religion and converted to Christianity. Gender and power relations are in flux, as authority is no longer centered around the oldest male. Many changes have taken place during the last 25 years. It has been argued that "traditional" Iu-Mien culture will disappear in a matter of decades and ethnic identity will diminish.

While the claims are valid to a certain degree, there is hope. Numerous organizations are being formed to promote ethnic consciousness and education. The Iu-Mien are graduating from universities, starting their own businesses, entering diverse professions, and perhaps most importantly, are giving back to their communities.

Interestingly, ethnic identity is maintained and heightened in other ways. Tracing roots and history has been an important element in fostering an Iu-Mien identity. Since arriving in the United States, some Iu-Mien leaders have made contact with the Mien Yao of China, who number about 880,000 while the United States Iu-Mien number around 30,000. Videotapes are made of these adventures to the "homeland" and are sold and distributed throughout different Iu-Mien communities. A large number of Iu-Mien have revisited relatives in Thailand and Laos, and many keep in touch with relatives in other parts of the world, such as in France and Canada. Ethnic identity is also heightened due to new year celebrations. At new year celebrations, "traditional" culture is performed and played out both on and off-stage. Participants celebrate their "Mienhness" and in the process, create and maintain a shared ethnic identity.

Perhaps in the near future, when the Iu-Mien have had more time to adjust to life in the United States, Iu-Mien ethnic identity and awareness will become more important and stronger. This could lead to the possibility of establishing a pan-ethnic identity with the Iu-Mien throughout the world.

Bibliography
Barker, Judith C., and Kaochoy Saechao. "A Household Survey of Older Iu-Mien Refugees in Rural California." Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 12.2 (1997): 121-143.
Chao, Seng Fo. "The Iu-Mien and Their History." Crossroads 1.1 (1990): 25-32.
Goldman, Ann Yarwood. Lao Mien Embroidery: Migration and Change. Cheney: White Lotus, 1995.
Lemoine, Jacques. Yao Ceremonial Paintings. Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Co, 1982.
Litzingers, Ralph A. Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Litzingers, Ralph A. "Making Histories: Contending Conceptions of the Yao Past." In Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers. Stevan Harrell, ed. Pp. 117-139. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.
MacDonald, Jeffery L. Transnational Aspects of Iu-Mien Refugee Identity. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1997.
Millhollen, Barbara. Alienation of the Iu-Mien: A Hegelian Perspective. Diss. California State University Dominguez Hills, 1994.
Moore, Laurie Jo., et al. "Rheumatological Disorders and Somatization in U.S. Mien and Lao Refugees with Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Cross-Cultural Comparison." Transcultural Psychiatry 38.4 (2001): 481-505.
Moore-Howard, Patricia. Iu Mien: Tradition and Change. Sacramento: Sacramento City Unified School District, 1989.
Saetern, Moung Khoun. Iu Mien in America: Who We Are. Oakland: Graphic House Press, 1998.
Schliesinger, Joachim. Ethnic Groups of Thailand: Non-Tai-Speaking Peoples. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2000.
Srisavasdi, Boon Chuey. The Hill Tribes of Siam. Bangkok: Khun Aroon, 1963.
Walker, Anthony R. Farmers in the Hills: Upland Peoples of North Thailand. Taipei, Taiwan: Chinese Association for Folklore, 1981.
Waters, Tony. "Adaptation and migration among the Mien people of Southeast Asia." Ethnic Groups 8.2 (1990): 127-141.
Wong, Christine, and Fam Linh Saechao, eds. Quietly reborn: a literary journal by Iu Mien American youth. San Francisco: Pacific News Service, 2000.
Yeung, Bernice. "The Shaman's Apprentice." SFweekly.com. 5 September 2001. http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2001-09-05/feature.html/page1.html.

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An Early History The early history of the Iu-Mien (Yao) is obscure and unclear. Much of it has been passed down through oral myths and legends, for few written historical records exist. The available records were written by the Han Chinese, and while they offer important glimpses into early Yao history, perhaps these records raise more questions than it answers.

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17 Lynched-an account buried for 140 years

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17 Lynched-an account buried for 140 years

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Asian lynching...a part of US History

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Why I Love the Country That Once Betrayed Me-George Takei

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Why I Love the Country That Once Betrayed Me-George Takei

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Why I love a country that once betrayed me | George Takei

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Little Manila: Filipinos in California's Heartland - KVIE

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The Racism Virus: Anti-Asian Attacks Surge | NBC News NOW

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A five-part 1 hour series

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May 11 & 12 at 8PM Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that delivers a bold, fresh perspective on a history that matters today, more than ever. As America becomes more diverse, and more divided while

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Many immigrants like to settle in places that resemble the landscape and climate of their native land. So when immigrants from South Asia's fertile Punjab region began to move to the United States more than a century ago, it's not surprising that most of them found their way to Northern California's central Sacramento Valley. The valley's bountiful agricultural land and river systems may have reminded them of the land they left behind.

The Punjabi immigrants who sought their fortunes in the United States at the turn of the 20th century were predominantly Muslims and Sikhs. Early immigrants found jobs as railway construction workers or farm laborers. Planting, growing and harvesting crops came naturally to these native Punjabis.

The first Sikh temple, established in Stockton, California, in 1912, became a social hub where immigrants learned about employment opportunities throughout California's Central Valley.

Few of the early Punjabi immigrants brought their families with them, and some Punjabi men married local, often Mexican, women. Over the years, as U.S. immigration laws changed, increasing numbers of Punjabi families settled in the Sacramento Valley.

Shared cultures

Today, about 10,000 Sutter County and Yuba County residents are immigrants or descendants of the Punjabi immigrants. Most remain connected to the land, and Punjabi Americans are among California's most successful farmers.

Second- and third-generation Punjabi Americans and new arrivals now include doctors, dentists, lawyers, educators, retailers, engineers, bankers and public servants.

There is no "Little India" or "Little Pakistan" in Yuba City or nearby Marysville, no special clustering of ethnic restaurants and shops. Punjabis have long been integrated into the community, living among other Americans of wide-ranging ethnic and social backgrounds. It is not so much assimilation as sharing cultures.

At Walmart or Starbucks or on Plumas Street in Yuba City's restored downtown, men with full beards and distinctive turbans - traditional for observant Sikhs - are common sights, as are women wearing Punjabi salwar kameez or saris.

To fulfill foreign-language requirements, students at the local secondary schools can study Punjabi, as well as French or Spanish. There is Punjabi programming on local cable TV and radio. A domed Sikh temple, or gurdwara, stands on Tierra Buena Road, one of five gurdwaras in the area. Non-Sikhs are always welcome, and visitors on any day are offered a free meal, known as langar.

Since 1980, on the first Sunday in November the Tierra Buena Sikh temple celebrates the anniversary of the Guru Granth Sahib - the scripture of this 500-year-old monotheistic religion - with an annual parade that attracts 50,000 to 80,000 participants and spectators. In keeping with Sikh tradition, all are offered refreshment at the temple.

The Punjabi American Festival, held each year on the last Sunday in May, is organized by the Punjabi American Heritage Society, which was founded in 1993 to encourage cross-cultural understanding in the community. The festival is a secular celebration of Punjabi food, film, music and dance.

Sikh values are American values

Dr. Jasbir Kang came to Yuba City in 1991, after serving his medical residency at Chicago's Cook County Hospital. A highly regarded physician and a respected community member, he has made it his mission to help others better understand the Sikh religion and way of life, while celebrating the ideals and heritage of his adopted home.

"Sikh values are the same as American values; the concepts of justice and equality can be found throughout our holy scripture," Kang explains.

He and his wife, Sukhjit, want their three American-born children to have rich, multicultural experiences. Kang and like-minded community leaders created the Punjabi-American Heritage Society to acquaint other Americans with Punjabi culture.

Kang is a founder of the annual Punjabi American Festival. His other outreach efforts include writing, public speaking and producing educational videos.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he was a consultant for the independent documentary film Mistaken Identity: Discovering Sikhs (2004), which depicts American Sikhs' heritage and distinctive appearance. Since 1993, Kang and his brother Jasjit have produced a weekly local TV program, Apna Punjab, which interviews newsmakers in Punjabi and English.

Honored as Physician of the Year 2010 by the nonprofit Fremont-Rideout Foundation for his work in diabetes education and prevention, Dr. Kang extends his community service well beyond the Punjabi-American community, earning recognition from Sacramento-based public television station KVIE as a "local hero" in 2006.

Dr. Kang says he was drawn to America not only by the prospect of material success but because Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were his heroes. The United States exceeded his expectations: "I found justice and fairness. I have found human dignity. I found tolerance and love. I found generosity of spirit, a country that rewards hard work."

Giving back to the community

In Kiran Johl Black's orderly office are packages of walnuts bound for markets all over the world: Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Rim. Black is marketing manager for the Sacramento Valley Walnut Growers, a cooperative that processes and markets walnuts and is owned by local farmers, including her father.

Previously, she was political affairs manager for the California Farm Bureau Federation, and as a director in its national affairs and research division, she lobbied in Sacramento and Washington. It's a generational twist on the family business of agriculture. Black and her two younger sisters grew up on a family farm begun in the 1960s by her grandfather, whose operation now produces peaches, prunes and walnuts in three counties.

Her father, Sarb Johl, got his degree in engineering and electronics, but used his education to expand and diversify the business. He and Kiran's mother, Prabhjot, a schoolteacher, always emphasized academic achievement, leadership and community service and wanted her to become a doctor.

At the University of California, Davis, she began pre-med studies but, like her father, found growing things and "feeling the soil in your hands" far more appealing. She switched her major to crop science and management. "I waited a bit to tell my dad. But you have to do what you love," she explains.

Being U.S.-born and married to a non-Punjabi - who has joined the family business - Black is definitely bicultural, but points to what her two worlds importantly have in common.

"Culture is more than food, clothing and music, and is certainly more than ethnicity," she says. "It is the passing on of important values: a strong work ethic, constant learning, bettering yourself, giving back to the community."

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Many immigrants like to settle in places that resemble the landscape and climate of their native land. So when immigrants from South Asia's fertile Punjab region began to move to the United States more than a century ago, it's not surprising that most of them found their way to Northern California's central Sacramento Valley.

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One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era

Spring 2004, Vol. 36, No. 1

By Robert Barde

© 2004 by Robert Barde

Quok Shee, age twenty, endured nearly two years of detention on Angel Island. (Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, NARA Pacific Region [San Francisco])

Chew Hoy Quong and his "alleged wife," Quok Shee, crossed my path quite by accident, two among thousands of Chinese would-be immigrants who had tried to enter the United States in 1916. Their experience was one of hardship, tenacity, and sadness. It was unusual, and it was puzzling, for through it runs a thread of mystery.

Their story begins in the thirty-fourth year of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It is a tale now more than eighty years old. Today it seems dramatic; back then it surely passed unnoticed. No newspaper headlines, no memoirs. Only the public record remains, a folder of documents in which brief portions of their lives were written down, assembled, and preserved with bureaucratic thoroughness: Investigation Case File no. 15530/6-29 at the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region (San Francisco) in San Bruno, California.

Quok Shee's "investigation case file" is more than an inch thick, begun in September 1916 and not closed until August 1918. That startled me, for it meant that for almost two years Quok Shee had been held in detention at the Angel Island Immigration Station. As I leafed through her file, the dry and dated pages jumped to life. She had been repeatedly interrogated, denied access to a lawyer, plagued by depression, subjected to smallpox, isolated from a husband she scarcely knew yet who was her only contact in America, pulled this way and that. One hundred and fifty pages of legalistic maneuvering, inquisitorial interrogations, medical evaluations, intrigue, and court orders-all over the attempt of one little Chinese woman to enter the United States.

Her case was not ordinary, but then neither were the times, the place, nor the other characters. Scandal was not a stranger to Angel Island, populated by a spectacular assortment of honest and dishonest immigrants, officials faithful or corrupt, an ambitious investigator-knight errant, smugglers, lawyers of every stripe, racists, and do-gooders. Such a setting, with its rancid undertone of moral ambiguity, was part and parcel of enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its equally racist successors.

Here is the story of Quok Shee and her "alleged husband" (as the Immigration Service always referred to him), Chew Hoy Quong-or at least the part we can document. The official record is stored safely in the National Archives: their testimony, the memorandums of immigration officials, and the lawyers' appeals. If we listen carefully, we can imagine their voices, sense the times, and feel the dramas that once swirled around Angel Island.
Coming to America
In 1916, entering the United States was relatively easy for most would-be immigrants. Only in 1875 had the federal government begun to regulate immigration, prohibiting the entry of members of "loathsome classes" as undesirable immigrants. By 1916 the list of undesirables had grown to include those with all sorts of physical or mental defects that might prevent one from earning a living, paupers and those likely to become a public charge, contract laborers, assisted aliens, criminals, prostitutes "or females for any immoral purpose," persons with contagious diseases, felons, polygamists, anarchists, and the illiterate. And those debarred under provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The Chinese were the only race of people to be singled out by the United States for special treatment through immigration legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, was intended to end the arrival of Chinese laborers into the United States and to bar Chinese from naturalization. Only certain classes of Chinese were even allowed to enter the United States. They included merchants, teachers, consular officials, tourists, and the wives and children of such exempt individuals. Chinese residing in the United States before 1882 were also allowed to leave and return. The act was initially effective for ten years, but it was renewed once and then, in 1904, made permanent. It was finally repealed in 1943.

How effective were the Chinese Exclusion Acts at excluding the Chinese? For the last half of the 1870s, immigration from China had averaged less than nine thousand a year. In 1881, nearly twelve thousand Chinese were admitted into the United States; a year later the number swelled to forty thousand. And then the gates swung shut. In 1884, only ten Chinese were officially allowed to enter this country. The next year, twenty-six.

By 1916 the numbers had inched upward; a total of 1,762 ethnic Chinese were officially admitted as immigrants, about average for the decade. Still, the Chinese population of the United States was shrinking. In 1880, it had been over 105,000; by 1916 it had dwindled to around 65,000.

Chew Hoy Quong had first come to California as Congress was debating the Chinese Exclusion Act. He arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong in 1881 and immediately went to work in his uncle's store on Washington Street. When the uncle died in 1896, Chew inherited the business. Like many other merchants, he saw his store destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906. He told immigration authorities that he had run a company near Stockton until 1915, when he joined the Dr. Wong Him Company, a Chinatown firm dealing in herbs and medicines.

Having lived in the heart of the San Francisco Chinese community for nearly thirty years, Chew Hoy Quong probably knew the procedures for immigrating to the United States. He would have known that if Chinese merchants wanted to leave the country and re-enter, their firms were required to register with local authorities. The Dr. Wong Him Company had done so. On February 2, 1915, Chew joined the firm, investing a thousand dollars to buy out the share of one of the founding partners. As part owner of a legitimate business, he could now apply to the Immigration Service for a Form 431, which he did on March 25. When this was approved, he became entitled to leave the United States. More important, he became entitled to return- and to bring with him any wife or children he might have.

Carefully, Chew had laid the groundwork for the next, and perhaps last, big change in his life: to find a wife and get married. On May 15, 1915, at age fifty-five, he boarded the SS Manchuria for Hong Kong. He later testified that, using a go-between, he met a Hong Kong woman named Lee Shee who had a daughter whom she hoped to marry off: Quok Shee, age twenty.

Chew subsequently testified that on February 21, 1916, he and Quok Shee were married. We do not know when Chew told his bride that they would be going to Gan San ("Gold Mountain"-i.e., the United States). Perhaps her mother told her that the prospective husband resided in the United States. Or perhaps Quok Shee only found out after the wedding. But she had over five months to adjust and prepare for the future, five months during which she and Chew said they lived in rented space on the third floor of a Hong Kong building.

It was probably in June or July that Chew arranged for passage back to America on the Japanese ship Nippon Maru. Ship owners in the business of transporting immigrants clearly understood that should a passenger be turned back or delayed at the U.S. port of entry, the shipping line would incur additional costs-the immigrant's upkeep on Angel Island and, should the would-be immigrant be refused entry, the responsibility of transporting that person back to the country of origin.

Thus the Toyo Kisen Kaisha line, owner of the Nippon Maru, had an incentive to see that their passengers' documents-especially their evidence of good health-were in order. In Hong Kong, Quok Shee was taken to the TKK office, where she presented her photograph and obtained a certificate stating that she was free of hookworm and trachoma.

On August 3, 1916, the Nippon Maru sailed from Hong Kong, arriving in San Francisco on September 1. From the ship's passenger list, signed by Captain Nagano as required by American law, we know that she carried 188 passengers: 90 Japanese, 75 Chinese, and 23 others of various nationalities (mostly Europeans and Americans). Among the Chinese were Chew Hoy Quong and his wife of six months, Quok Shee. Quok Shee had crossed the Pacific, but in many ways her journey to America had just begun.
Arrival
For most non-Asian passengers, whether immigrants, returning citizens, or passengers in transit, passing through the port's health and immigration controls would have been done quickly. Visas were not necessary, and there were few formal requirements for entry. But for Chinese like Quok Shee and Chew Hoy Quong, the process was quite different. Along with the Nippon Maru' s other Chinese passengers hoping to enter the United States, they were taken to Angel Island, several miles away in San Francisco Bay.

Perhaps 300,000 persons passed through the Angel Island Immigration Station between 1910 and 1940. For Chinese, it was the principal place of entry into the United States. Perhaps 75 percent of the Chinese entering through San Francisco were detained there for some period. Compared to the tens of millions who passed through Ellis Island in New York, Angel Island was a small operation. But it figures large in the history and folklore of immigration to California, a very visible reminder of the ordeals of those who passed through it, and of the country's determined efforts to keep them out.

As an outpost of the Immigration Service, Angel Island led a short and rather unhappy life. It had long been considered unsatisfactory by the time it was closed, following a fire, in 1940. From the beginning it was a source of dissatisfaction for both immigrants and immigration officials. The island was assigned the role of enforcing the grossly unfair Chinese Exclusion acts, and that this was done in a callous manner only compounded the injury and resentment. Firsthand testimony-some carved into the very walls-of former detainees speaks of injuries physical and emotional. Quok Shee and her husband were about to enter that labyrinth.
"Twenty Questions," Played for Keeps
The next day, September 2, J. P. Hickey, acting assistant surgeon of the U.S. Public Health Service, examined Quok Shee. He would have found her to be four feet, nine inches tall, able to read and write, and without a penny to her name. He signed her "Medical Certificate of Release." One hurdle had been cleared, but the couple was still held in the island's detention center.

On September 5 Quok Shee and her "alleged husband" were interrogated by the Chinese Division of the United States Immigration Service. The interrogation was an expected-and dreaded-part of the entry process for most Asians. The standard interrogation always contained a minimum of fifteen to twenty questions; Chew was asked more than one hundred.

Chinese immigrants complained bitterly about the interrogations, whose unnerving, inquisitorial style were liable to trip up even the most honest immigrant. Immigration inspectors were convinced that many of the Chinese trying to enter as children or wives of resident Chinese were, in fact, fraudulent. These suspicions were not unfounded; many entering males were "paper sons" (i.e., fictitious sons), and there probably was a trade in women being brought in for "immoral purposes." Chew Hoy Quong would certainly have been aware of the interrogation that loomed before them, and surely he and his wife used the long trip from Hong Kong to prepare for it.

There were two initial interrogations: one for Quok Shee and a separate one for Chew Hoy Quong. Both were conducted by Inspector J. B. Warner (through interpreters) and stenographer H. F. Hewitt. Quok Shee's case file contains the verbatim transcripts of both interviews.

Whereabouts in Hong Kong did you marry this woman?
C: Number 20 Wah Hing Street-west.

How was the bedroom lighted?
C: From a window in the hall.
Q: The bedroom was lighted from a window in front of the building.

How was the parlor lighted?
C: From a window facing the street.
Q: From a window in front of the building.

How was the parlor furnished?
C: One table, two chairs, one mantel clock; that is all.
Q: Clock and round table, 4 chairs, American, one cuspidor and looking glass.

Did you ever visit your home village after you married this woman?
C: Yes. I went home once.
Q: Yes. A number of times. I don't remember how many times.

How long did you remain?
C: Altogether six days, that is, including the time it took to go back and forth.
Q: 10 some odd days-a number of times.

Have you any children who you claim as yours?
C: My blood brother, Chew Kai Quong, gave one of his sons to me, who I adopted. I now, at this age, will probably have no children and therefore he gave me this boy to look after the ancestral service at home. . . . My brother brought him to Hong Kong to bid me good bye before I left for the United States.

Did he visit your home?
C: Yes.

How long did he remain there?
C: They stayed in the same building during his visit, on the second floor-Sun Chung Co.
Q: I don't know. They never mentioned it.

Are you positive this woman is your wife?
C: Yes.

You were married according to the Chinese custom?
C: I was married according to the Chinese new custom.

What is the Chinese new custom?
C: Chinese custom except there is no worshipping.

Are you positive you are not bringing this woman to the United States for an immoral purpose
C: Yes.

Inspector Warner must have entertained some doubts about their story. Later that same day, he and stenographer Hewitt recalled Chew for further questioning. He was "cautioned to be careful in his answers."

I want to know how many times you visited your village after your marriage
Only once.

Are you positive of that?
I am positive I only made one trip. . . .

Were you away from your village at any other time?
No.

Are you positive of that?
I was in Macao; a friend of mine invited me to a celebration there, for two days, on two different occasions.

Were those the only times you were ever away from your wife?
Yes.

Later that day, Inspector Warner made a favorable recommendation: he, at least, was convinced, and Quok Shee was on her way to being admitted to the United States. Or so it seemed.
More Questions
In fact, the Immigration Service did not release Quok Shee. Chew Hoy Quong was already a legal resident and free to enter the country, which he did on September 5. But something was amiss, and Quok Shee remained in detention on Angel Island. More ominously, the Immigration Service wanted to talk to Chew again.

On September 13, Chew took the 8:45 a.m. steamer from pier 7 back to Angel Island. He and his wife were again subjected to extensive questioning: 115 questions were put to Chew, 65 to his "alleged wife." As before, they were questioned separately and given no chance to talk to each other. This time, the interrogation was conducted by "Law Officer" W. H. Wilkinson. Again, only the stenographer and an interpreter were present. The same questions were asked again and again, each time in a slightly different way, brusquely jumping back and forth. The point was to catch them out and "prove" that they were not husband and wife.

This time, the interrogations explored how the "alleged husband's" story diverged from that of his "alleged wife." Wilkinson's questions focused on three areas: Quok Shee's knowledge of the furnishings and other occupants of the building they inhabited in Hong Kong, Chew's visit(s) to his native village, and the matter of getting onto the ship in Hong Kong. For example:

What kind of a clock did you have in your parlor?
C: We had a metal case clock on the table in the parlor (indicates about six inches square).
Q: It was a large clock hanging on the wall . . . in the parlor. . . . Wooden.

Wilkinson was more than skeptical. After the interrogations, he wrote a "Memorandum for the Commissioner." In it, he emphasized the following discrepancies, in addition to the number of visits made by the alleged husband to his home village:

The husband and wife disagreed on the nature and number of occupants on the second floor of their Hong Kong building.

The husband said that their apartment on the third floor was on the top floor, while the wife stated that there were people living above her.

The husband testified that the apartment had a metal clock, while the wife said it was made of wood.

Chew's adopted son lived on the ground floor during his visit, but the wife never saw him.

The husband and wife disagreed about the number of men accompanying them from the house to the steamer (SS Nippon Maru).

Wilkinson's conclusions were brief but brutal: "In view of the fact that the above contradictory statements appear incompatible with the relationship claimed, I recommend that the applicant be denied admission."

Charles Meehan, inspector-in-charge of the Immigration Service's Chinese Division, immediately informed Quok Shee that she had been refused admission: a form letter was drawn up and read to her through interpreter Chin Jack. The next day, Commissioner White wrote to both Quok Shee and the Chinese consul general, informing them that her application to land had been denied. The brisk "Notice to Rejected Chinese Applicant, Under Rule 5" was thoughtfully printed in both English and Chinese. Quok Shee was advised that she had two days to launch an appeal.

Detail of letter denying Quok Shee admission to the United States. (Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, NARA Pacific Region [San Francisco]) image

Two days for a poor immigrant to get a lawyer? Who would take such a case? Had she known what lay in store for her, she might have resisted engaging one. She surely had no idea how long and how tortuous her struggle would be.
Enter the Lawyers
Quok Shee's being denied admission was a setback, but Chew Hoy Quong was not unprepared. As soon as he sensed that something was amiss-probably when he was called back for further questioning-he immediately engaged the services of the San Francisco legal firm of McGowan and Worley, well known as specialists in the problems of Chinese immigrants. There was also a whiff of the less-than-respectable about them. Alexander Worley had frequent run-ins with the Immigration Service and with the courts, and neither he nor George McGowan was shy about taking on unpopular cases.

These were competent lawyers, and it was not at all unusual for them to be defending Chinese clients. The Chinese in California had a long history of using American lawyers and the American legal process to fight the Chinese Exclusion Act and its various successors, as well as discriminatory local ordinances. They also launched many legal actions against specific instances of unfair application of the exclusion laws. In the first ten years of the Exclusion Acts, more than 7,000 legal appeals were filed by Chinese, and between 1891 and 1905, an additional 2,600. There was plenty of work, and no shortage of able and willing white lawyers to earn the fees.

McGowan took charge of Quok Shee's case and went right to work. On September 11, acting on behalf of Chew as the "alleged husband," he requested Quok Shee's records, including the report of the examining inspector and the review of the law officer. These, however, were withheld by the Immigration Service because "said report does not contain any evidence whatsoever." Eventually, this refusal would be used against the government, but its initial effect was to keep Quok Shee on Angel Island.

McGowan and Chew kept testing the government's resolve to exclude Quok Shee. On September 22 they filed a sworn affidavit in which Chew states his background as a law-abiding citizen, provides details on his marriage to Quok Shee and their stay in Hong Kong, and shows how discrepancies in their interrogation testimony could be easily explained.

The affidavit was forwarded to Commissioner White on September 23, along with two other documents: a request to interview Quok Shee and a nine-page "Application to Re-open Case: Misunderstanding of purport of questions propounded and mistake of effect of Chinese customs bearing upon competency and relevancy of certain inconsistencies on the face of the record."

McGowan tried to use to his clients' advantage existing notions of how alien and incomprehensible were the ways of the Chinese. He quoted at length from Things Chinese, a book first published in 1892, to demonstrate how Chinese customs are different from "civilized" ones, especially those that concern the status and treatment of women. In trying to explain discrepancies in their testimony, Quok Shee's lawyer argued that Chinese women were sheltered, uneducated, unworldly, and basically, incompetent: "Matters of this kind only go to show that too much has been expected in this examination of the testimony of this Chinese wife."

Commissioner White was not in the least persuaded. On September 26 he notified McGowan and Worley that their request to reopen the case was denied. Further, the request that Quok Shee be able to confer with her "alleged husband" and with her lawyer was also denied. The next day McGowan tried appealing to whatever sense of compassion the Immigration Service might have:

This applicant having been held incommunicado at your station since the 1st day of September, 1916, she having been kept separate, apart, and away from her husband during all of that time, the husband now desires to request that he be permitted to see, talk to, comfort and console his wife, who journeyed with him to this country on the same boat and to whom you have denied admission.

The Immigration Service was not in the compassion business. Permission was denied.

For McGowan and Worley, the next stage was to appeal to higher-ups in Washington: to the secretary of labor. On September 28, Commissioner White in San Francisco forwarded a copy of Quok Shee's file to Washington. In the dossier was all the Immigration Service's information on Quok Shee that had been shown to McGowan-and some that had not.

This administrative appeal, too, was rejected on November 21, 1916, when the secretary of labor ordered that Quok Shee be deported, "said deportation to take effect Saturday, the 25 day of November, 1916." It seemed that Quok Shee's attempt to enter the United States had failed and that, after three months in captivity on Angel Island, she would be forced to return to China.
An Alleged Wife: One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era, Part 2
Robert Barde is Deputy Director, Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Articles published in Prologue do not necessarily represent the views of NARA or of any other agency of the United States Government.

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One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era Spring 2004, Vol. 36, No. 1 By Robert Barde © 2004 by Robert Barde Quok Shee, age twenty, endured nearly two years of detention on Angel Island.

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Preserving the Vietnamese Culture in the Silicon Valley

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Preserving the Vietnamese Culture in the Silicon Valley

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Drive through East San Jose and you'll find a familiar American landscape: strip malls and franchises, highways and subdivisions. You could be almost anywhere, except for the occasional palm trees, the Diablo mountain range in the distance - and the increasing number of signs written in languages other than English. Because this part of northern California, particularly the few-mile stretch between Story Road and Tully Road, is the home of a thriving Vietnamese and Asian American community.

Like most stories about Vietnamese people in America, this one begins with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Thousands of refugees, fleeing persecution and reeducation camps, arrived in the United States via Camp Pendleton, in Southern California. The federal government tried to resettle refugees in towns across the country but enclaves formed in warm-weather areas: Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, and San Jose. The most famous Little Saigon is in Southern California's Orange County, but San Jose now boasts the greatest number of Vietnamese residents in any one city outside of Vietnam-estimated at more than 180,000 today. It makes sense that so many refugees were drawn to California, which was already home to many Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and South Indian immigrants and their descendants. While these cultures are all distinct, they shared some staple ingredients and, just as importantly, the understanding of what it means to be have emigrated from Asia. And it makes sense that in the 1980s many Vietnamese refugees headed toward the growing Silicon Valley, where a booming tech industry offered ample manufacturing jobs and opportunities for upward mobility into engineering fields.

Though a major tech hub and the largest city in Silicon Valley, San Jose has always been the less-visible cousin to San Francisco an hour or so north. It's sunnier and less expensive, with room for parking lots and gigantic malls. For immigrants, these aren't so much signs of suburbia as they are signs of space and possibility: places where real estate might be more accessible; places where families can grow.

Refugees leave their home countries because they have no other choice. They don't know where they will end up, just that they have to start over. In America, that starting over has always included the pressure to assimilate. The mere existence of immigrant communities can be seen as a refusal to do so: Instead of acculturating, they say, we are here, this is who we are, join us if you like. And if there's one thing that refugees and immigrants will never give up, it's their food culture.

Ethnic enclaves tend to grow around restaurants, groceries, and entrepreneurs, all looking for ways to fulfill cravings and provide reminders of home. In San Jose, the new Vietnamese community was bolstered by access to Asian markets in the area, that had already been established by other immigrant families from Asia. In this way, the Vietnamese community developed less as an enclave and more as an integrated, borderless part of the larger San Jose area.

One of the earliest businesses was Lee's Sandwiches, which sold banh mi out of a truck and eventually grew into a stand-alone shop. Other businesses grew, too: clothing and fabric stores, import stores, music and video stores where you could get tapes of Vietnamese singers and shows. But always, the focal point was food: Places to get pho, banh mi, banh xeo, com tam, cafe sua da, produce, and snacks became social spaces. Places for gathering were always places for eating.

It's probably fitting that the Vietnamese community in San Jose developed around shopping malls, which are nothing if not pragmatic. Lion Plaza on Tully Road, anchored by a giant Asian supermarket, took root in the early 1980s and became the heart of the community. Described by local paper San Jose Mercury News as "a place where no one makes a rendezvous, yet everyone comes," Lion Plaza was a space for people to meet and for the community to emerge through celebrations at Tet (Vietnamese New Year) and other holidays.

Today, over 40 years after the fall, the original refugees in San Jose are surrounded by children and grandchildren who were born in America, who know Vietnam through stories and culture rather than experience. This generational shift can be seen not only in political viewpoints - the elders have tended to vote Republican, driven by anti-communist beliefs; the twenty-somethings now, much less so - but also in the changing landscape of San Jose's Asian American community and Silicon Valley. The refugees of the past found work in restaurants, shops, and the early years of tech; many of their descendants are part of the changes driving that industry.

The malls reflect this contrast between generations. Lion Plaza remains old guard, old school. Vietnamese men still hang out and talk near the giant Lion Supermarket. A video store leaves its doors wide open, and Vietnamese songs blare out. Meanwhile, less than three miles away on Story Road, the Grand Century Mall, established in the 2000s, and the new Vietnam Town shopping area next door are all about the now, their architecture marked by a kind of Vegas-y, faux Tuscan look meant to signal affluence and aspiration. Alongside the restaurants are skincare salons and spas, jewelry stores, a plastic surgery center, a professional equipment karaoke store. The music blasting here is millennial. At the same time, shops like Tea Lyfe and Soyful Desserts bring a hipster element to this evolving mix.

Still, the generations coexist without competing. And in doing so they challenge preconceived ideas about authenticity, as what's "authentic" isn't necessarily found at a hole in the wall. San Jose's Vietnamese community is about embracing tradition and making things new at the same time. Like the rest of Silicon Valley, it's about growth. You can still find the produce and orchids and even Vietnamese videos, but you'll also see bubble tea shops and stores devoted entirely to cosmetics. Lee's Sandwiches is still around, but has grown into a banh mi chain. Pho Hoa, a restaurant that opened in 1983, has become an empire with over 60 locations around the world. Its home on Tully Road has granite countertops and pendant light fixtures. On the menu everything is outlined in English, and amidst more traditional options like the lemongrass pork chop, there's a kid's pho meal that comes with an organic juice box. The restaurant has even trademarked the phrase "Health Conscious Choice." Pho Hoa, the original, is the fulfillment of the American dream of prosperity.

It makes sense that such an empire would begin with pho, surely the most well-known Vietnamese dish in America. With a long-simmered beef broth as its foundation, classic pho contains multitudes - rice noodles, meat, onions, herbs, and spices - in styles particular not just to regions but to families. Beef is common, as is chicken pho, called pho ga. The noodle soup is a concept and a canvas, depending on where you are and who's doing the cooking. Lime, bean sprouts, hoisin, fresh herbs, and Sriracha all might be offered as garnishes, and now pho, traditionally a breakfast food, can be enjoyed at any time of day. The choice is the diner's.

You can find plenty of standout pho restaurants in San Jose, but pho is not the only soup of Vietnam. There's also bun bo Hue, a spicy beef noodle soup, or the crab-and-tomato noodle soup called bun rieu. Across the street from Lion Plaza, tucked into another shopping mall, the restaurant Cao Nguyen offers up a gorgeous canh chua, a sweet and sour soup with fish.

Food traditions from northern, central, and southern Vietnam all find representation in San Jose, and Vietnamese cuisine travels from the hearty and earthy to the delicate and light. Cao Nguyen's claypot catfish, intensely caramelized with fish sauce, represents the hearty. And banh xeo, a crispy crepe stuffed with shrimp and pork and served with leafy greens, is light. The crepe is a specialty at many places, and is known by cooks as being one of the more difficult dishes to get just right. In between there are more staples: com tam, or broken rice; lemongrass pork chops; turmeric fish; and fried cha gio egg rolls or fresh rice-paper-wrapped goi cuon rolls - and they all find beautiful iterations in this city.

If you're not in the mood for something savory, look out for tea and coffee and sweets, including iced coffee with condensed milk called cafe sua da; sugarcane juice, freshly squeezed out from sugarcane stalks; homemade waffles flavored with green pandan; and all manner of che - served warm as a dessert soup ( che troi nuoc) or chilled as a kind of parfait with layers that might include tapioca, bean paste, grass jelly, taro, and often topped with shaved ice or served warm.

Immigrants in America have always preserved their culture through food. Eventually, the rest of the country catches on. The earliest Vietnamese refugees remember Sriracha as an ingredient that white Americans looked upon as foreign, commercialized by a fellow refugee who opened the company in 1980, making hot sauce inspired by the flavors of Vietnam. Now the sauce is mainstream, tamed in mayonnaise even in fast-food chains. Is this a sign of progress, appropriation, assimilation? Depends on whom you ask. Immigrant communities exist in a space between the everyday and the "exotic," ordinary to those who live there and a source of fascination to those who do not. Some years ago in San Jose there was a heated debate about the attempt to brand the Story Road area as "Little Saigon;" some wanted it to be called "Saigon Business District" instead. Though Little Saigon eventually won, it's a designation that is more understood than commonly used.

Unlike Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York, the "Little Saigon" areas of San Jose are not known as a tourist destination, not even in the Bay Area. This is a community that goes about its business for the people who live there. The 2007 opening of San Jose's Viet Museum, the first of its kind in the United States, signaled how integral the Vietnamese population had become to the area. But that too is an under-the-radar destination. For this community, integration is as much about daily life as it is about looking ahead. The growth of the "Little Saigon" areas is steadfast, its boundaries unmarked. The same might be said about the greater San Jose area, which continues to climb in tech, in food, and in culture. America has always been shaped by its immigrants, and is never separate from its immigrant cultures. The expanding Vietnamese and Vietnamese American communities in San Jose are further evidence of that. And whether you go to Story Road or Tully Road or stop somewhere in between, there's no better way than to experience this than through food.■

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How America's Biggest Vietnamese Community Made a Home in San Jose | MOFAD City

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Drive through East San Jose and you'll find a familiar American landscape: strip malls and franchises, highways and subdivisions. You could be almost anywhere, except for the occasional palm trees, the Diablo mountain range in the distance - and the increasing number of signs written in languages other than English.

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As their father lay dying in a hospital bed in November 2000, Fahm Fong Saeyang and her siblings gathered to watch over him, listening to his final words about walking through the mountains in his home country of Thailand. The family's tradition on many occasions, both big and small, was to record everything on video. This was no exception. In DEATH OF A SHAMAN, Saeyang responded to her father's unsettled life and death by taking a reverse journey on film to examine the heartbreaking path he took from respectability to hopelessness-and from Southeast Asia to America-in a heartfelt personal mission to understand his tragic story.

In September 2000, Fahm Fong Saeyang had started working with producer/director Richard Hall at his company, Great Blue Productions. Shortly after starting there, she borrowed the company camera to begin filming sessions with her father, Yoon. Before his death, he had explained the ways of their Mien ancestors to her to record for posterity. It was a bonding experience for the father and daughter, who had experienced periods of estrangement over the years.

A shaman in Thailand, Yoon Saeyang had been respected and treasured by the Mien villagers for his knowledge and wisdom. But like many of the Mien people who found themselves in the path of the Vietnam War, he and his wife and young children had been driven out of their mountain village, then picked up and transplanted to America, to the plains of Kansas to live with an Amish family. From the time of his arrival in America, Yoon Fong Saeyang lost his way, falling victim to poverty, violence and a drug addiction that destroyed his family. What kind of man was he, really? And how could his daughter come to understand him?

DEATH OF A SHAMAN examines, often with painful honesty, how Fahm Saeyang's Mien immigrant family suffered through a 20-year ordeal of poverty, racism, jail and the murder of a family member. A chronicle of a darker side of the pursuit of the American dream that affected many of the 40,000 Mien who came from a primitive life in the mountains of Southeast Asia to the United States, the film is also a moving account of one daughter's need to understand her father's pain and desire to figure out what will placate his troubled spirit and her own.

Learn more about Mien history >>

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Independent Lens . DEATH OF A SHAMAN . The Film | PBS

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As their father lay dying in a hospital bed in November 2000, Fahm Fong Saeyang and her siblings gathered to watch over him, listening to his final words about walking through the mountains in his home country of Thailand. The family's tradition on many occasions, both big and small, was to record everything on video.

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Tien Fu Wu

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Due to her need for a Chinese translator, Cameron employed girls from the Mission House to act as her aides. When Wu was in her teens, Cameron's favorite aide, Leung Yuen Qui, contracted tuberculosis. Wu not only volunteered to nurse the gravely ill woman, but was witness to her death and the emotional devastation it caused Cameron. It was this that prompted Wu to step up to take Qui's place.

"I offered to help her in the work," Wu said later, "because I felt very sorry for her, realizing how terribly crushed she was over her co-worker's death." It was the beginning of a working relationship that would last both of their lifetimes and save the lives of thousands of trafficked girls and women.

Earning $5 a month, Wu translated for Cameron during court cases and helped supervise the Mission House. (According to Julia Flynn Siler's account of the period, The White Devil's Daughters, one staff member described Wu as a "a stern taskmaster... but she was very kind and fair... so the girls trusted her.") Most important of all, she accompanied Cameron on dangerous rescues, some of which took many months and intense investigation to orchestrate.

Wu's role was of vital importance, not just for the sake of her ability to translate, but also because she put the rescued girls at ease. Brothel and slave owners commonly spread fear of "White Devils" to stop the women in their possession from seeking help. Many of those girls believed they would be in even greater danger if taken into the charge of white people. Wu-sometimes pointing to her own scars as evidence of her understanding-was the only one who could truly reassure them they were safe.

In 1908, a booklet titled Dragon Stories was released by Oakland's Pacific Presbyterian Publishing Company, in an effort to draw attention to the good work being done by the Chinatown missionaries. In it, a character believed to be at least partially based on Tien Fuh Wu was written about as a brave and determined hero, "excited" and "eager for the fray." In the stories, she was presented as forcing her way into brothels, warmly reassuring young girls, and fearlessly getting them out of harm's way.

Wu's bravery cannot be overstated. Though everyone working at the Mission House received threats of violence for the work they were doing, Wu was targeted more than most because she herself was Chinese and therefore viewed as a traitor by the brothel owners in her midst. She was sent so many threats for doing rescue and interpretation work that, after each major rescue, Cameron would routinely stop her 4' 11" cohort from going out alone for weeks at a time.

One infamous and racist letter called Wu a prostitute, a "stinking sow," and threatened, "If God has eyes, he will certainly punish you. You have overreached yourself and in so doing, negroes, dogs and thunder will come after you."

Based on the history of the Mission House, if God's eyes were indeed watching over it, they offered nothing but protection. Though the building had to be reconstructed, not only did the organization survive the 1906 earthquake, everyone living and working there also survived the flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919. This despite most of the women in the home being struck down with the illness. Wu and the home's Assistant Superintendent, Ethel Higgins, are credited with nursing everyone back to health.

Today, the Mission House continues to provide invaluable services to the Chinatown community. It offers over a thousand low-income and immigrant Asian families assistance in the form of counseling, domestic violence intervention, food distribution, after-school and summer programs, adult classes and more. Though it was renamed Donaldina Cameron House in 1942, the original Mission House sign remains in brickwork over the main entrance.

By the 1930s, as Cameron readied herself for retirement, Wu took on even more responsibility, making public appearances to raise funds and awareness, while also dealing with the immigration woes of the women in their care. She also acted as a travel guardian for women who had testified against slave dealers. (They called her "Auntie Wu.") As if that weren't enough, she even vetted potential grooms for the girls, investigating both their morality and financial security to be sure that the women would be safe in their new homes. Wu herself turned down a multitude of suitors. "Men are very useful," she once said, "when it comes to moving furniture."

When Wu eventually retired in 1951, her beloved "Lo Mo" had long since settled on California Avenue in Palo Alto. Cameron offered Wu the cottage next door, and the two lived side-by-side until Cameron's death in 1968. Wu is said to have been at her mentor's side, reading from a Bible until the very end. When Wu passed away seven years later, she was buried next to her friend in Cameron's family plot at the Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Her small headstone belies the huge importance of the life she lived. It reads only: "Tien Fuh Wu 1886-1975."

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The Child Slave Who Helped Rescue Thousands of Women in Chinatown | KQED

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Due to her need for a Chinese translator, Cameron employed girls from the Mission House to act as her aides. When Wu was in her teens, Cameron's favorite aide, Leung Yuen Qui, contracted tuberculosis. Wu not only volunteered to nurse the gravely ill woman, but was witness to her death and the emotional devastation it caused Cameron.

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Voices: Who Is Vincent Chin? | NBC Asian America