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In honor of Asian American Heritage Month, I wanted to touch on Asian American History. I don’t know what you guys learned in K-12 education but the only events I learned was the Chinese Exclusion Act around the time of the gold rush and the Japanese American Internment camps.

The first known migrations of Asian descendants into the United States was in the mid 1800s to early 1900s. Majority of these individuals were males and contracted laborers to work on plantations. During the Gold Rush, Asian migrants moved to California to try to strike it rich with others. Then they transitioned to working on the Transcontinental Railroad.

In 1870, the Naturalization Act was passed; however, Asians were not eligible to become United States citizens. Asian communities, specifically Chinese communities, were destroyed by white Americans. It was not until the 1950s that all Asians were eligible to become naturalized citizens.

In 1871, there were anti-Chinese riots in California where mobs of white Americans killed and hung 20 Chinese individuals.

During all these events, many female Asian migrants started migrating to the United States to either reunite their families or for work. However, the United States’ Page Act of 1875 banned the migration of Asian females due to their immoral characteristics. It was argued at the federal level that Asian females were corrupting the white men and their “morals”. Only 7 years later in 1882, the United States put into place the Chinese Exclusion Act banning all Chinese males from migrating to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until after 1943.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor during War World II, the United States federal government put into action the Japanese American Internment camps. This was when the federal government forced all Japanese Americans to leave their homes and to be imprisoned in camps. Their homes, properties, businesses, etc were seized by other people. Those who were lucky enough to have loyal friends were able to obtain their homes and properties after they were released from the internment camps. It wasn’t until 1988 when the federal government issued an apology to the Japanese Americans and paid out $1.6 billion to all living internees.

In the early 20th century, there was a mass migration of Filipinos into the United States as a result of 1898 Treaty of Paris, when the Philippines became a territory of the United States. By 1904, the United States federal government had imported Filipinos of various ethnic backgrounds into the United States and displayed them at the human zoo in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

In 1905, the San Francisco Board of Education passed a policy segregating Asian students from their white peers.

After the end of the Korean War in 1953, there was a huge influx of Americans adopting South Korean children. Many of the children were either orphans where their parents died during the war OR they were the results of white soldiers having affairs with local South Korean women. At that time in history, mixed children were looked down upon within the South Korean society.

The United States dipped their toes into the Vietnam War and recruited ethnic minorities (Hmong, Mien, and Lao) from the country of Laos to participate in the Secret War verbally promising them safety if South Vietnam was to lose the war. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, many Southern Vietnamese, Hmong, Mien, and Lao individuals fled their homes and countries due to national prosecution from the communist governments due to siding with the United States. This created the influx of Southeast Asian refugees into the United States from 1976 to the early 1990s. Many of these individuals experienced racism and anti-Asian hate from other minority groups similar to the previous Asian groups before them.

Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten and killed by 2 white men in 1982. The 2 white men accused Vincent Chin of being Japanese and stealing their jobs. Though the white men were arrested and trialed, they walked away with minimal consequences.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were at least 6,000 reports of anti-Asian hate crimes that occurred nationally. The forms of anti-Asian hate crimes included but were not limited to verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault, civil rights violation, and online harassment. The crimes were committed by whites and other minority communities.

In March 2021, 6 Asian American women working in massage salons were gunned down by a white male in Atlanta, Georgia. The murderer claimed that he had a “sexual addiction” and sought out to eliminate his temptation.

To conclude, these events that I touched on were barely the tip of the iceberg regarding Asian American history. There are so many things that occurred in the Asian American community especially since there are so many Asian ethnicities and the different ethnic groups experienced different discriminations and prejudice at different times throughout the decades. However, I hope that this blog helped you gain more insight on the Asian American experience and to prompt you to do your own research on the history that has been erased from our textbooks and K-12 education.