Mind Forms

Series: Hemi & Pona discuss Asian Americans on PBS.

This series is a recorded conversation between two friends learning the history that we were never taught.

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Check me out lying about not liking family sitcoms when I actually love Malcolm in the Middle. I also grew up watching Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I even like family cartoons like The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and Bob’s Burgers. I think when I said that, what I really meant was that it’s not my top favorite type of TV now as an adult, even though I still enjoy watching the ones that I grew up with. Now as an adult, I don’t really get excited when I see that a new family sitcom is coming out!

We’ve enjoyed every episode so far, and this one was no exception! We joked about how it’s only the super impressive people who get featured, rather than average everyday humans like us, so recording this was almost like an opportunity to share our average everyday family stories. And we were very excited to remark that the series seemed to be progressing in time, since that means we can look forward to events that happened during our lifetime.

We also loved that the documentary acknowledged Asian American victory in Hawaii coming to the detriment of the Indigenous people there. We live for these kinds of nuances!

The book that we both have on our radar: The Making of Asian America – ERIKA LEE

This episode was recorded in December 2022.

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Series: Hemi & Pona discuss Asian Americans on PBS.

This series is a recorded conversation between two friends learning the history that we were never taught.

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Welcome to Episode 2 of Hemi & Pona discuss Asian Americans on PBS.

For a rationale on why we are doing this, see previous episodes.

The internment of Japanese Americans was definitely not new to me before watching this episode, but it is always good to see it from other angles. It really shows how in-dept Asian American history is, and how much of a shame it isn’t more widely taught. There are a multitude of stories out there. It would take lifetimes to tell them all, and they definitely all wouldn’t fit into a textbook.

The way that this horrible moment in history was portrayed in the documentary really brought to life the complexities of the human experience. That’s why it’s important that we hear stories from different perspectives, even if they’re about the same event. That’s why it’s important that Asian American representation isn’t limited to a handful of stories, since there is no way that a handful of stories could represent the entire population of Asian Americans.

Though we often learn about the history of an event through a general retelling of what happened, it was really cool to focus on the Uno family and their unique experiences. It was like putting a zoom magnifying glass on an old black and white photo and having it transform into living, breathing, color.

This episode was recorded in November 2022.

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Series: Hemi & Pona discuss Asian Americans on PBS.

This series is a recorded conversation between two friends learning the history that we were never taught.

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Hemi and Pona pre-watched the first episode of the documentary Asian Americans on PBS before discussing it together.

Link to the documentary: https://asianamericanedu.org/streaming.html

Afong Moy, the first known Chinese woman in America.

Check out Claire Jean Kim‘s work.

Why are we doing this?

Hemi and I have talked at length about how Asian American history was never taught to us in school. Both of us discovered it as adults, and realized that there is an entire wealth of insight that we can gain from knowing this history as Asian Americans settlers living and working on land stolen from Indigenous peoples.

The most difficult part of this exercise for me was being able to come up with cohesive thoughts on the spot without having written anything down first, and also without much time to process the material. I already knew some of the content going in, but neither Hemi nor I are historians or scholars on the subject, and so though we may have some prior knowledge, we don’t have in-depth analysis. We are everyday humans talking about issues that matter to us and using this documentary as a resource to learn more.

What I struggled to communicate near the beginning of the recording is that sometimes history can be presented in such a dry way. I really enjoy the work of historians who can make stories from the past come alive and help those of us who are living today understand a historical figure’s thoughts, feelings, and hopes in the context of their time, but also linking it to what that might look like in the present. Although, I know that it is not always possible if there are no documents or reliable sources from that time period.

I am careful not to judge the actions of those of the past because they literally did not have the same resources, access to information, societal progress, or political situation as I currently do. So what I was trying to communicate was that I would have liked it to attempt to dive deeper into the human aspects of the situation instead of simply focusing on the facts. 

Upon listening back on this recording, I felt a sense of incompletion that I felt while recording it. This feeling that there is so much more to everything that we are talking about than we can possibly fit into a single conversation, or even a whole course on the subject matter. I acknowledge that we did not address all that there is to address, which is largely what makes history so fascinating. Hemi and I are both extremely grateful to be able to make time to engage meaningfully with this content together.

This episode was recorded in October 2022.

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Series: Hemi & Pona discuss Asian Americans on PBS.

This series is a recorded conversation between two friends learning the history that we were never taught.

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In Episode 0 of this series, Hemi and I discuss how we found the documentary Asian Americans on PBS while we were perusing The Asian American Education Project website.

We are on a personal mission to learn the Asian American history that we were never taught in school. We both value education and lifelong learning. We’re never too old to be students and we love that we have each other for accountability and also to have discussions.

We loved this documentary, and we hope more people watch it as well!

Asian American history IS American history.

This episode was recorded in tandem with Episode 3.

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