Asian American and Pacific Islander Life and Culture Digital Display

Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that delivers a bold, fresh perspective on a history that matters today, more than ever. As America becomes more diverse, and more divided while facing unimaginable challenges, how do we move forward together? Told through intimate personal stories, the series will cast a new lens on U.S. history and the ongoing role that Asian Americans have played.

When we think of Asian America, Cleveland is not the first place that comes to mind for most people. In Good Luck Soup, filmmaker Matthew Hashiguchi shows us why this often overlooked part of the country is as important as others in understanding the Asian American story. The journey for the Hashiguchi family begins with Matthew's grandmother, Eva, who moved to the Cleveland area following her family's internment during World War II. Though she and many other Japanese Americans were invited to the area, assimilating, working and living there was an ongoing struggle. These obstacles did not end with Eva and her generation. Eva's three children grew up in Cleveland's black and white neighborhoods in the 60s and 70s and also found it difficult to fit in. For filmmaker himself, the inability to fit in created a struggle with his own racial and cultural identity, and in Good Luck Soup Matthew takes us on a personal journey to uncover and understand his racial identity while growing up mixed race in white suburbia.

Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai, has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai Nai herself. To assure her happiness, they gather under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding, uniting family members scattered among new homes abroad. As Billi navigates a minefield of family expectations and proprieties, she finds there's a lot to celebrate.

A native New Yorker Rachel Chu accompanies her longtime boyfriend, Nick Young, to his best friend's wedding in Singapore. Excited about visiting Asia for the first time but nervous about meeting Nick's family, Rachel is unprepared to learn that Nick has neglected to mention a few key details about his life. It turns out that he is not only the scion of one of the country's wealthiest families but also one of its most sought-after bachelors.

The American-born son of Indian immigrants feels pulled between his ethnic heritage and his desire to assimilate, especially after becoming involved with two very different women.

Disconnected from her single mother and bored at school, she struggles to find her way in a strange land of new faces, only to encounter a strange age of new feelings. Aimie's sole meaningful connection is to her best and only friend Tran, a Korean boy a few steps ahead of her on the path to assimilation. But as Aimie's feelings for Tran grow in complexity and depth, her sole source of comfort and stability begins to cause her unease. On the threshold of maturity, Aimie struggles to find a place outside herself where past and future connect, and a place within herself where love and friendship don't cancel each other out.

We need to talk about the rise of anti-Asian hate and attacks. Join Eugene for an in-depth conversation about the complex, often untold story of the Asian American community, the unique struggles they face, and find out how you can help #StopAsianHate​.

A documentary about unknown, self-taught 81-year-old artist Frank Wong who has spent the past four decades recreating his fading memories by building romantic, extraordinarily detailed miniature models of the San Francisco Chinatown rooms of his youth. This film takes the journey of one individual and maps it to a rapidly changing urban neighborhood from 1940s to present day.

A meditation on memory, community, and preserving one's own legacy, Frank's three-dimensional miniature dioramas become rare portals into a historic neighborhood and a window to the artist's filtered and romanticized memories and emotional struggles. In his bargain with immortality, Frank announces plans to cremate his exquisite works with him upon his death in order to 'live inside them forever' in his afterlife.

Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri's family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri's family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting.

Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past - especially a past that exists outside traditional historic accounts - Tajiri blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family's house removed from its site. Throughout, she surveys the impact of images (real images, desired images made real, and unrealized dream images).

A filmmaker explores the life of her great-aunt, Jane Chung, an actress who made a career for herself at a time when Asian Americans faced widespread racism in Hollywood. Working mostly in small parts and as an extra, Jane's fifty-year career reflects many of the struggles and triumphs of the Asian Americans working in the entertainment industry. Jane had parts in over fifty films and TV shows including Chinatown, When Harry Met Sally, M*A*S*H, and I Love Lucy, but much of her work is uncredited. The filmmaker brings together multiple generations of her family, and mines the film archive for evidence of her great-aunt, to provide a portrait of the real person beyond the often stereotypical roles and bit parts that constituted her screen presence.