Focus on America

Aruna Rao, stands by a statue of Hindu god Ganesha

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in the United States...  Chinese-American photographer Corky Lee remembers a photo he saw as a teenager. It had been taken in 1869, just moments after the final spike was driven into the transcontinental railroad connecting the eastern United States to the West for the first time. Something was wrong.

“I didn’t see any Chinese in the photograph,” Lee said. He even bought a magnifying glass to take a better look, “but I still couldn’t see any Chinese. They didn’t have any Chinese at the celebration.”

More than 10,000 Chinese had worked on the railroad “under the most dangerous conditions, handling explosives used to blast through the Sierra Nevada mountains,” notes a website sponsored by the American Anthropological Association, but “Chinese railroad workers present at the site were deliberately excluded from the photograph.”

Today, a national historic site in Promontory Point, Utah, offers visitors a chance to walk to the Chinese Arch, a natural limestone formation dedicated to the memory of those Chinese workers, and a website discusses their role in the building of the railroad.

Lee hopes that Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, which is celebrated in the United States each May, plus an exhibition on Asian Pacific Americans at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Folklife Festival in Washington this summer, will help the public become more aware of the contributions made by the 15.5 million U.S. residents (5 percent of the population) who claim Asian heritage.

There definitely is some catching up to do, Lee said. It’s not well known, for instance, that Chinese fought on both sides during the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). Another forgotten group is the Filipinos who aided American troops in World War II; more than 200,000 fought, but a 1946 law denied or limited their service-related benefits and veterans’ status. (The 2009 economic stimulus law provides a one-time payment to the 15,000 Filipino veterans still living.)

It’s also not well known, said Lee, that a Japanese-American secretary of transportation — Norman Mineta — took a stand against racial profiling of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mineta, who spent time as a boy in an internment camp during World War II, sent a letter to all U.S. airlines forbidding them from practicing racial profiling or subjecting Middle Eastern or Muslim passengers to a heightened degree of pre-flight scrutiny, stating that such discrimination is illegal.

A GROWING BENEFIT TO AMERICAN SOCIETY

C.N. Le, creator of the website Asian Nation, points out that Asians are “one of the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group (in terms of percentage increase) in the U.S.” More Asians are moving out of traditional enclaves in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York and settling in suburbs and smaller cities in the South and Midwest, he states.

“This introduces more Americans to elements of Asian and Asian-American culture,” said Le, who emigrated from Vietnam as a boy and now teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “They can see firsthand that these residents and small businesses are part of the community and are helping strengthen their communities.”

Le said he hopes the exhibitions on Asian Pacific Americans at the National Folklife Festival in late June and early July will offer a broad look at the role of people of Asian descent in America’s history and culture as well as portraits of individuals “who are contributing to everyday life in American society.” One such person he admires is Edward Tom, principal of the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics in New York City, a school for minority and underprivileged students that is praised for its academic rigor.

He said there are three Asian Americans in President Obama’s Cabinet — Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, and Secretary of Veteran Affairs Eric Shinseki. Obama also has restored a dormant White House initiative that establishes a commission that will work to improve the quality of life and economic opportunities for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY

Lee said that on May 2 he will be taking photographs at the 31st Annual Asian/Pacific American Festival in New York’s Union Square Park, as he has done every year. Throughout his career he has documented the Asian-American experience.

“If I’m called upon to photograph something else, I will,” he said, “but given a choice between photographing an azalea festival or a dragon-boat race, I’ll probably pick the dragon-boat race.”

More information is available from the Census Bureau’s Facts for Features on Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month and the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program. Also see “Landmark Exhibit on Race Asks ‘Are We So Different?’”

Corky Lee’s photography can be seen on VisualizAsian.com. He is based in New York.

By Louise Fenner
Washington