Asian Americans by Renee Tajima-Peña (review)

This five-part PBS documentary series on the history of Asians in the United States will become an essential part of the curriculum for ethnic studies and American history courses from high school to higher education. The team behind Asian Americans has produced a lively history combining archival footage, family stories, animations, and interviews with scholars, journalists, artists, descendants, and history-makers themselves. The series' engagement with knowledge is expository and fact-based, departing from the archival poetics of Loni Ding's documemoir approach in Ancestors in the Americas or the experimental approaches to truth and memory in Richard Fung's Dirty Laundry and Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy. Supplementing screenings with readings and discussions would help disentangle the contradictions and implicit values presented by the narrative.

Its five episodes run approximately fifty-five minutes each and are organized chronologically. Episode one, "Breaking Ground," covers the nineteenth century to pre-World War II, and emphasizes that Asian migration to the United States in this period was driven by a demand for labor. It begins not with the construction of the transcontinental railroad, but with U.S. colonial expansion into the Philippines. The Igorots at the St. Louis World's Fair Philippine exhibition are not portrayed as sad, unidentified victims here, but hustling ancestors with their own goals. The episode follows a multilingual young man named Antero as he puts his language skills to use and pursues a transnational life between the United States and the Philippines.

The episode then transitions to Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad and the racism and cruelty they faced as they became a threat to the white American workforce. This presents the opportunity to discuss the Chinese Exclusion Act, birthright citizenship in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and racial prerequisite cases such as United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. The remainder of this jam-packed episode addresses the "second generation"—the children born of these nineteenth-century immigrants, who want to assert their Americanness, play baseball, and be in the movies.

Episode two, "A Question of Loyalty," focuses on World War II, the Japanese American incarceration, and Asian American communities' varied responses. In particular, it follows the war's impact on the children of the Japanese American Uno family. One son, Buddy, feeling scorned by his country of birth, starts to investigate the appeal of Japanese imperial ambitions. He eventually travels to Japan to join its army news corps, while other members of his family move in and out of concentration camps across the United States. The episode follows the divided loyalties in the Uno family, as well as the pain and silence that covered up their story for several generations.

Refreshingly, the episode refuses Asian American World War II history as simply Japanese American history. It also touches upon Japanese imperialism in Korea and Manchuria, which allied Korean and Chinese nationalists with the United States, and considers the impact of enlisting in the U.S. military for Chinese and Filipino Americans. By way of closing, the episode connects the legacy of the internment to descendants' contemporary activism against the ongoing incarceration of Mexican and Central American migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Episode three, "Good Americans," addresses Asian American communities' reactions to the Cold War and the growth of the model minority stereotype after World War II. Asian American soldiers, having fought for democracy and freedom against fascism abroad, now expect equality at home. The episode notes how both racist policy and racist sentiment prevent integration from becoming a material reality. This impact is worsened by the Red Scare, when any Chinese Americans who contradicted the official U.S. position on China or who were simply contributing to Chinese diaspora newspapers came under FBI scrutiny.

The story then shifts focus to Hawai'i and Hawaiian statehood to celebrate it as a platform from which the first Asian American members of Congress gain a foothold. The episode follows the careers of Hawaiian-born Representative Patsy Mink...