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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

Asian and Pacific Islander Population in... Volume: PC80-2-1E Section 1
Lili'Uokalani (by Ru Hasegawa Lowe)
Political participation of Asian America... (by Lien, Pei-te)
Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (by Liliuokalani)

As of 2014, The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were about 20.3 million American residents who were Asian or mixed with Asian, as well as an additional 1.5 million Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders. The celebration was chosen to be in May to honor both the first immigration of Japanese to the United States, in May 1843, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, in May 1869, by mostly Chinese immigrants.

According to the official Asian/Pacific American Heritage website, the rather broad term Asian/Pacific includes all of the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, and Easter Island). It’s a much more diverse group than many might realize.

This month celebrates diverse histories and heritages as well as the birth of new stories. Many Asian/Pacific Americans have brought over their cultures and traditions; but, within the new context of the United States and particularly in areas of occupied territory with scars of post-colonialism, a salad bowl culture has been created. While some have argued against this type of multiculturalism and in favor of one unifying, melting pot of American culture which would promote American identity, others maintain an awareness and promotion of cultural tolerance, an idea predicated on the idea that the adherence to differences ultimately engenders a stronger sense of unity.

The story for Pacific Islanders is quite different than the story of most Asian Americans. Native Hawaiians in particular wrestle not with bringing their cultures into America, but with keeping their own cultures alive under the dominion of American culture. Hawaii, once a sovereign nation, is now occupied land that was made the 50th state of the United States after an illegal overthrow in 1893. This story is told by the last reigning monarch of Hawaii, Queen Lili’uokalani, in her book Hawaii’s Story. Further details are provided in The Passing of Lili’uokalani by William C. Hodges, Jr.

Celebrating these many diverse Asian/Pacific American cultures means continuing to extricate public thought from ideas that cultural critic and literary theoretician Edward Said discussed in his seminal work on post-colonialism, Orientalism. Said discusses how Western intellectuals up until his time had categorized and otherized all non-Western countries in a way that only served to affirm European identity and dominion, and did nothing to objectively study and express the lives of any non-European nations. This stifled expression, knowledge, the overall spread of their heritage, and instead promoted false stereotypes and generalizations.

As far as Asian American/Pacific literature goes, it hardly existed before the 1970s. Asian American as a literary category was only recognized in the late 1960s. Since then, many important and highly talented Asian American voices have emerged such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Wing Tek Lum, Frank Chin, Amy Tan, and more recent writers such as Celeste Ng, Brandon Shimoda, Jenny Zhang, Don Mee Choi, and R. Zamora Linmark to only name a few.

More reading on the history of Asian/Pacific Americans can be found in Asian and Pacific Islander Population in the United States: 1980, and Political Participation of Asian Americans in the early 1990s.

By Thad Higa