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.
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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