CROWD: On strike, shut it down!
MAN: There's a strike going on here!
GORDON: It felt like the world was about to explode.
DAN: Retuning Vietnam veterans were telling us the truth about
what was going on.
SCOTT: How do theseatrocities get to be committed?
BRENDA: It felt great to be a part of this incredible
ground-swell that was just enveloping the country.
LAUREEN: We wanted to start a school of ethnic studies to
tell the true histories of the people who contributed and
built this country.
EDILLOR: Filipino's were here, and we made a difference.
ALEX: They create the United Farm Workers and
they became, in a sense,
the west coast civil rights movement.
If a lot of people put their mind to it, they can win.
MAN: It was the first time the voices of Asian people in
our generation were coming out.
NOBUKO: It was like a genie coming out of the bottle,
you couldn't put us back in.
♪
MAN: One, two, three,
testing, testing, one, two, three.
NARRATOR: In the 1960s, Asian Americans are looking
at the world through a new lens.
Everything is in upheaval.
And anything is possible.
As the children of immigrants,Asians are trying to
understand their role in America's history.
They are claiming their voice.
In the fields, on college campuses,
and in the public square.
No one can imagine where thesestruggles will take them.
♪
NARRATOR: California's Central Valley.
One of the richest agricultural regions of the
United States and home to some of its poorest workers.
It is here where Asian Americans spark a farm labor
movement that will galvanize the world.
For Alex Fabros, this story begins with World War II when
his family immigrates from the Philippines.
Like many new arrivals,
they rely on farm work to make ends meet.
FABROS: The family came to California in 1948,
so my father's in the military,
but on the weekends my dad would work out in the fields
just to earn extra money so he could buy a house in Salinas.
Then in 1950, he buys a home in a part of Salinas where
Asians are not allowed to own homes.
And they tell them, we don't want you in this neighborhood.
After we moved in, they would take stones and
they'd break our windows.
My mother had brand new rose bushes.
They would come in and they tie ropes around
the rose bushes,
and they do wheelie's on the lawn.
There was this kid that had this dog and he'd sic
that dog on me.
I'm about six years old and I'm running as fast as I can.
This dog is barking at my heels.
It's a German Shepherd.
So my father went around the neighborhood.
He had a pistol and he banged the doors and said
the fight's between you and me and not my family.
And nobody bothered us after my father did that.
Years later I enrolled in a local junior college,
but I basically flunked out.
My father said, you're going to go work on your
grandfather's farm until you decide exactly what it is that
you want to do.
You've got to learn what life really is like on the outside.
So I became a migrant farm worker in Delano, California.
NARRATOR: Alex joins the army of farm laborers
that crisscross California harvesting crops.
Working long hours for low wages,
they're not protected by labor laws and can be
fired at any time.
FABROS: You get up at 4:00 in the morning.
You're hoeing, you're bent over,
it's cold, it's wet out there.
But these guys are working hard for $1.25 cents an hour.
These are really old Filipino men.
We called them Manongs.
Manongs is a term of respect that we give to people who are
older than us.
In the evenings, these old men would sit outside and
they'd tell stories about what it was like to
grow up in California in the 1930s.
They'd say, "Junior, go back to school.
Become something, become someone," you know,
"Don't end up like us."
NARRATOR: Very few Filipino women were able to
immigrate to the US,
and Filipino men were barred from marrying white women.
As a result, an entire generation is forced to live
out their lives as bachelors deprived of family.
But there are some exceptions.
LORRAINE: I'm half Filipino and half Mexican.
My father met my mother working in the fields and
he didn't speak Spanish and she didn't speak English.
And so my father learned how to speak Spanish
so that he could get to know her.
Had my father not met my mother,
he would have been like the Manongs.
I was born in a labor camp.
It's a mile and a half from Delano.
It was a two bedroom, barrack, bunk house.
There were seven of us and then my mom and dad.
The bathroom was out back,
which we shared with two other families.
So you get to know your neighbors well.
Working in the fields you work in the fields from
when you're a child.
There were no labor laws set that prevents parents bringing
their children to work.
It gives them one less thing to worry about if your
children are out there working with you.
FABROS: Lot of Filipino men wanted me to become the person
they could not become.
They're telling me, we'll save money for you
to go to college.
All these old men had that dream of having us young kids
out of the field, not to go through what they did
for the last 20, 30 years.
NARRATOR: By the mid 1960s,
working conditions have gone from bad to worse.
The Manongs reach a tipping point,
and are willing to put their jobs and lives on the
line to establish a union.
FABROS: We didn't have medical benefits.
When one of our guys falls down and he gets hurt.
Someone's got to cover his benefits.
We didn't have a health plan.
When these guys get old, we want to have a pension plan.
EDILLOR: Larry Itliong was president of the
Agricultural Workers OrganizingCommittee known as AWOC.
Summer of '65 he began to talk about organizing,
improving the working conditions and
increasing the salaries.
LARRY: We feel that we farm workers should have an
organization of our own.
FABROS: One of the thingsthat most people forget is
that it was the Filipinos in September, 1965
who started the grape strike, not the Mexicans.
(overlapping chatter)
EDILLOR: The strike happened mainly because of
Larry Itliong's will and determination.
He was a trained labor leader.
He was not a polished speaker.
LORRAINE: I was 13 years old the day that my family
went out on strike.
I remember we were working, when my father says,
"Come on, we're leaving."
I said, "We're leaving?
It's 10:00 in the morning."
So we left.
LARRY: To go on strike,you suffer a lot of hardship.
Maybe you'll get hungry,
maybe you're going to lose your car,
maybe you're going to lose your house.
LORRAINE: And Iremember leaving the field and
seeing the strikers, so the Filipinos.
NARRATOR: But the Filipinos face a dilemma.
As they strike for a union, the farmers bring in Mexican
workers to replace them.
FABROS: It's one of the things I learned that
the farmers like to do.
They liked to pit the Mexicans against the Filipinos.
You're going to be fighting for the same pot of gold.
NARRATOR: Many Mexican laborers have already joined
the National Farm Workers Association,
led by the charismatic Cesar Chavez.
FABROS: I remember meeting at the Filipino community
hall in Delano.
All the labor contractors were there.
A lot of the farm workers were there and
you're trying to decide,
"Are we end the strike or are we going to negotiate
with the Mexicans to join us?"
Then Larry Itliong, he gets up and says,
"I'm going to go talk to the Mexicans."
LORRAINE: When the strike happens,
Cesar Chavez wasn't really quite ready.
But Cesar also knew that if theydidn't join Filipinos then,
then it would never happen.
NARRATOR: Larry approachesCesar Chavez and his colleague
Dolores Huerta, another powerful organizer.
DELORES: Come on out, brothers.We are waiting for you.
NARRATOR: As one of AWOC's cofounders,
her relationship with Larry and the Filipinos goes back years.
FABROS: And then a couple ofdays later we're at this church.
They're talking about the strike.
They're discussing,
"Should we go on strike or not go on strike?"
Now all of a sudden it says "huelga."
I said, "What the heck's 'huelga'?"
Because I thought they were saying hell no.
They said, "No, It means strike.
We're going on strike."
So the Mexicans joined us.
LARRY: We are your brothers and sisters over here.
Come on. Come on out!
FABROS: They take the Mexican labor movement and the
Filipino labor movement,
they create the United Farm Workers.
LORRAINE: They really pushed that the workers eat together,
they have meetings together,
that they were at picket lines together.
It was only because they become one union,
that they were able to win the strike.
EDILLOR: Larry knew that his style was not good PR.
He's aggressive.
He wore his emotions on his sleeve.
He needed Cesar's charisma, his ability to speak.
CHAVEZ: Was going to be built by farm workers.
It's going to be for farm workers.
EDILLOR: Whereas Larrywanted to get down and dirty,
he wanted to work out in the fields.
FABROS: Delano became more than a farm labor dispute.
It became, in a sense, the West coast civil rights
movement for people of color.
All of a sudden people started equating what's happening in
Delano to the black civil rightsmovement on the East coast.
You started having these politicians coming out there.
You have Robert Kennedy calling hearings as to why the
white growers are not going to get people of color these
benefits that they're asking for.
Not only are you boycotting in Delano,
now you're sending groups and college students and people
who believe in a labor union and equal rights to do a
secondary grape strike.
Now they're boycotting in New York.
They're boycotting in Montreal, in Canada.
They're boycotting in Europe.
They're boycotting California grapes.
LARRY: The strike and boycott against grapes will continue.
LORRAINE: It took five years to finally get the growers
to sign a contract.
MAN: Boycott grapes! Boycott grapes!
LORRAINE: Growers couldn't sell their products and so
they had to sign.
MAN: Larry Itliong, what do you have to say about seeing
grapes at the stores after all this time?
LARRY: Well I think that's it's great and thanks to the
co-op store that have been supporting the grape boycott
to help bring about justice, and dignity,
and help the farm workers.
FABROS: Working in the fields, that's where I realized that
if a lot of people put their mind to it,
they can win.
I left field working behind me completely,
but I never left the memories of these guys.
My decision to leave was made for me,
not because I wanted to leave,
but because I had received my draft notice.
NARRATOR: Alex Fabros ships out for Vietnam,
one of thousands of Asian Americans who will serve in
the most polarizing and disruptive global event
of the 1960s.
REPORTER: In South Vietnam, the seemingly endless war
against the communists is once again in the forefront
of world attention.
REPORTER 2: As of today, there are 507,000
American troops in Vietnam.
FABROS: I had a lot of nightmares about Vietnam,
that I don't want to talk about.
NARRATOR: This is the fourth war the United States
has fought in Asia in only 60 years.
As in Korea, the country's perceived enemy is communism.
Many Asian Americans are forced to confront their
racial identity in a whole new light.
SCOTT: I was pretty wild in high school.
I used to get in a lot of trouble.
I decided, you know, I need to get out of LA.
So I joined the Marine Corps.
The idea of Vietnam didn't even cross my mind.
I was 18.
At that age, I didn't think past a week in front of me.
MARINE: Right face!
SCOTT: Soon as I got to boot camp,
the drill instructors told us,
you know all you guys in this platoon are probably
going to end up in Vietnam and half you aren't
going to make it back.
MIKE: When I decided to enlist,
it was not, uh, deeply thought out.
When I went to boot camp, we had to line up on these
yellow footprints in single file and
they instructed us to go tallest to shortest.
Four drill instructors pulled out the two biggest
guys in the front and they beat them.
Beat them down, kicked them, they were bleeding.
I was thinking, "What the f...
"What have I done?"
I mean, this is, like, a big mistake.
During one of these classes, my drill instructor says,
"Private Nakayama stand up."
Stood up at attention and he goes, "Turn around."
So I turned around and he goes,
"All right everybody.
This is what a gook looks like.You remember this,
because they're going to come after you."
SCOTT: I arrived in Vietnam in October of 1967.
I was stationed at Khe Sanh and Hill 881
Tet offensive of 1968.
It was the biggest battle of the war.
REPORTER: The pressure atKhe Sanh has lasted a week now.
A bad week for the marines here.
A week in which they've suffered under the guns of the
North Vietnamese in these surroundings hills.
SCOTT: The hill I was on, 881, we had 100% casualty rate.
That means out of the 400 Marines initially stationed on
the hill, 400 Marines were either killed or wounded in
the three months I was there.
(gunfire)
Not a fun place to be.
MIKE: We would go out for 30 to 60 days into the jungle.
We're trying to draw out the North Vietnamese army
into battles.
I was 11 months there and we had set up a perimeter
next to a hill.
Boom. We got hit with rockets.
I got hit from a grenade explosion in my shoulder.
And I'm thinking, "I'm going to die here."
I got taken off the helicopter on the stretcher.
The treatment tables are in the back.
There's doctors and they're treating people.
They treated him, they treated him.
They left me and I was the last one.
I said, "Hey man. When you guys are going
to treat me?"
And he says, "Oh you should have told us
you were American.
We thought you was a gook."
NARRATOR: Asian American women also serve in Vietnam.
Lily Adams is Chinese Italian from the Bronx.
When she tells her father she's enlisted in the Army,
it's the first time she sees him cry.
LILY: I was in nursing school.
An army nurse recruiter came to visit our school once.
And she made it sound prettygood because it would pay for my
last year of nursing school.
I would have some money in my pocket.
I got orders for Vietnam.
I was 20.
It was the town of Cu-Chi and we had built a
giant military base.
We were told it was the busiest hospital in Vietnam.
My first day, it's this guy that said,
"Well, I'm Doctor so-and-so.
And we could, like, kind of, pair up,
spend some 12 months together."
And uh....
I, I, I basically worked to contain my anger.
And I said, "Thank you very much.
That's very nice of you, but I'm not interested."
That was my first day.
I was mistaken for a Vietnamese prostitute.
If I wanted to walk around the compound,
I had to be in uniform.
Even when I was in uniform, sometimes these guys would ask
me if I wanted to do whatever for so much money.
♪
I was afraid of American GI's because they
really believed that we were there for them.
I had to be vigilant, very vigilant,
on base, off base or whatever.
SCOTT: When I was there, theVietnamese people would come up
and try to trade for stuff, you know.
Some of the Vietnamese people looked at me and said,
"Hey, you, same, same Vietnam,"
and for a minute I thought, "What are they talking about?"
Then I got it, you know,
"Hey, you look like me, and you're just like us."
We called them Gooks.
That's what I thought they were,
and then when he said that to me, then I thought,
"Well wait a minute, I must be a Gook also."
FABROS: I'm 22 years old. I'm a Sergeant.
I was assigned to a unit in Vietnam
that required translators.
♪
One day Sergeant C calls me up and says,
"Al, they think they've got a VC,
that they just captured in the village."
Well, we went out there and the Vietnamese security people
had already worked him over a little bit,
and I squatted down next to him,
so we were eye to eye, and I asked him in Vietnamese,
"Why are you fighting us?"
He looks right at me, right in my eyes.
"Why are you here? This is my country.
Why are you here?"
I think right at that moment I realized that,
"Okay, Alex, why are you here?"
GORDON: 1968 is a transformativeyear in American history,
specifically for Asian Americans.
Many of us were deeply affected by gruesome images of
death and destruction.
At the same time, there was upheaval in America,
cities were exploding and Dr. Martin Luther King
would be assassinated.
There were other killings, political murders.
It felt like the world was about to explode.
DAN: The younger generations started taking positions,
very strong on what was happening in Vietnam,
and it was because we had so many returning Vietnam
veterans who were telling us the truth about
what was going on.
REPORTER: The war in Vietnam,
the problems of race and the cities,
these are issues facing the citizens of the United States,
and they are issues vividly facing the students
on an urban campus.
NARRATOR: As the school year begins,
students are trying to make sense of a world
turned upside down.
At San Francisco State, a college with a mostly white
student body, young people of color question whether their
own education is failing them.
They demand more minority faculty and a curriculum that
reflects their lives andconcerns and they want it now.
Students like Dan Gonzales,
Penny Nakatsu and Laureen Chew,
all of them, 18 or 19 years old.
LAUREEN: I grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Growing up in Chinatown was a very nurturing experience.
You had a community that you interacted with
on a daily basis.
I was accepted into San Francisco State in 1966,
and that's only because my mom refused to have me
go away for college.
She thought the worst, like I would be some wayward woman
having free sex everywhere or something like that.
NARRATOR: Galvanized by the civil rights movement
and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
student activists organize to have more classes
in black history and culture.
HARE: We're trying to start a black studies,
a program at state college, and I think that it has the
greatest and last hope to solve the educational problems
of the black race.
DAN: The demand for black studies was influencing
Asian Americans.
We started reflecting on our, our own experiences.
And saying, "Yeah, you know, we need to have something like
that for ourselves."
MAN: For your information: Philippines refers to the
country, and Filipino refers to the people.
This is exactly what we want.
To study our Filipino culture and history.
LAUREEN: I was trying to figure out who I was,
and then I met this other Chinese girl who grew up in
South City and she was much more adventurous,
and she was the one that asked me to go to this meeting.
NARRATOR: Laureen joins the impromptu gatherings that are
springing up all over campus.
Black and Brown students call for solidarity
with the people of colonized Latin America,
Asia, and Africa,what they call the Third World.
MAN: This is the first time in the history of all
existing colleges in the United States that we have
dissolved class barriers between people of
the Third World.
LAUREEN: It was areal "A-ha" for me, saying like,
"Wow, you know, they're not Chinese,
but we have similar experiences,
in terms of thedominant culture not validating
who we are."
DAN: African Americans had been here for a long time.
Their civil rights movement was complemented by our
perspective, for example, on internment,
and the concentration camp experience of
Japanese Americans.
On the exclusion,almost a century long exclusion.
NARRATOR: In 1968 Alex Fabros is serving in the Marines,
but he has friends in college who are
confronting these issues.
FABROS: Our story was not taught in the classrooms.
The Chinese built the railroads.
Okay. That's it?
They didn't talk about the hardship.
They didn't talk about the exploitation.
They didn't talk about theFilipinos working in the fields.
They didn't talk about the farm labor strikes.
Total omission.
LAUREEN: That is what the
Third World Liberation Front was about.
To tell the true histories of the people who contributed and
built this country.
PENNY: History?
I never learned anything about the
history of Asian Americans,
or Japanese Americans, or camps.
That eventually led me to involve myself
in political activism.
What we wanted to see was an educational institution that
served the communities, served the people.
NARRATOR: Under the umbrella of the
Third World Liberation Front,
Asian, Latino, and Native American students,
as well as progressive whites,
join forces with the Black Student Union.
DAN: One of the major objectives was to start a
School of Ethnic Studies.
We called it Third WorldStudies that would have the same
status as other established schools on the campus.
NARRATOR: At first, theadministration seems open to a
School of Ethnic Studies, but students grow frustrated with
what they see as empty promises.
After months of inaction by the university,
the students call for a general strike on
November 6th, 1968.
CROWD: On strike, shut it down.
On strike, shut it down.
PENNY: The BSU-TWLF demands,
asks that a School of Third World Studies be
formed that was based on a concept of self-determination.
We asked for students and faculty members to boycott,
stop classes, stop business as usual.
LAUREEN: Our main thing on campus was to be disruptive,
to force the administration to be responsive to the demands.
NARRATOR: Laureen and others used a variety of
tactics to make their point.
They interrupt classes, form picket lines,
and broadcast their demands by loud speaker.
Their goal, to shut the school down.
LAUREEN: I was with one group where people picked up the
typewriter and threw it across the room,
and students got all freaked out and started running out of
the classroom, you know, because we were that
passionate to start a School of Ethnic Studies.
♪ No more pigs on our campus ♪
♪ The revolution has come ♪♪
NARRATOR: But behind the scenesstudents like Dan Gonzales
are doing the hard work of building a brand new
curriculum from scratch.
DAN: That was my major task,
understanding how to put the courses together.
The Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans,
Japanese Americans draftedtheir own curriculum proposals,
and then we all met together as Asian Americans
and talked about how we were going to start these courses.
PENNY: In those days the term Asian American didn't exist.
We were all Orientals.
1968, that was the first time that I heard the
term Asian Americans.
MAN: There's a strike going on here,
and that means that either you're on our side,
or you against us.
NARRATOR: No one anticipates the magnitude of the strike.
From the start, the police come in force to
shut down the protestors.
REAGAN: A little dissident group,
with their 15 non-negotiable demands,
you talk about negotiating.
I would call to your attention that the Black Student Union
has declared that their demands are non-negotiable.
NARRATOR: Soon afterward, the state of California
appoints a new president, S.I. Hayakawa,
an English professor at the college.
DAN: It was really clear to usthat he was being used because
he was a person of color, and if he could exercise his
authority and power in a manner that was consistent
with the Ronald Reagan way of dealing with campus upheaval,
he was going to be very useful.
REPORTER: The new president,
renowned as an expert in the meaning of language,
decided early in the day to face his critics.
The communication failure was obvious.
Hayakawa took that matter, and the sound truck wiring,
into his own hands.
MAN: Some of the militants have called you and Uncle Tom.
They say they thought that you would identify with the
minority groups, such as the Blacks.
What is your answer to them?
HAYAKAWA: Well, I'm the first Japanese Uncle Tom in history.
I think it's kind of an achievement.
LAUREEN: He forbade any rallies on campus,
that he threatened, "You can have a rally,
I'm going to arrest all of you."
And that was kind of like, a turning point.
PENNY: The rally was going to be called at 12 noon.
LAUREEN: I heard all these people outside
already saying the, "On strike, shut it down."
CROWD: On strike, shut it down.
On strike, shut it down.
On strike...
PENNY: It all happened really quickly.
I saw the police come running up with their batons in hand.
MAN: Go to your classes.
Disperse from the center of the campus.
LAUREEN: Suddenly, there was like a military movement.
The TAC squad on horses, they came out from the gym and
just like surrounded all of us.
(crowd chatter).
But then it just got all quiet,
and then at that point no one could get out.
The TAC squad just surrounded us.
We could not leave.
If you were in that circle, you are going to be arrested.
Al: There was over a thousand police,
dogs, horses, Paddy wagon.
We will fight the oppressor on our terms, not theirs.
MAN: This morning, they're going to arraign 10 at a time.
All of those who were arrested out at
San Francisco State College.
LAUREEN: I was not going to cop a plea.
I mean, my mother had a hissy fit.
"What are you doing, you know, getting arrested?
I have one child, whom I thought I raised and
spent money to go to a high end Catholic school.
You should be like a saint."
NARRATOR: Laureen and a few other demonstrators
argue their case in court.
But a jury sentences her to 20 days in prison.
LAUREEN: When I finally had to go to jail,
she was devastated.
She came and visited me in jail.
I was so scared of being there.
You know when I saw her, I just started to cry,
and then she did also.
You know, basically knowing that I shouldn't be there.
After I finished my 20 days,
for the first time I heard her say something
to defend me.
She said, "My daughter was not very smart,
but I'll say this.
She did not hurt anybody, and what she wanted to do
was to make a better world for people."
NARRATOR: The San Francisco State Strike is the
longest student strike in US history.
After five months, the administration finally agrees
to establish a School of Ethnic Studies.
The legacy of the strike defines a generation eager to
change society, and assert a new identity
as Asian Americans.
FABROS: It's just like the, the Filipinos and the Mexicans
getting together to form a labor union.
Asian-American encompasses everybody.
I thought wow that's something.
People are finally starting to realize that we wear
our race on our face.
NARRATOR: The Asian American movement bursts forth
across the country.
In New Jersey, Gordon Chang is one of
only five Asian students in his class at Princeton.
GORDON: It was the summer of 1969,
when I came back to the Bay area and met a lot
of the activists who had been at San Francisco State or
at UC Berkeley.
It was a stunning moment for those of us,
that we look at each other and all of a sudden
found that we had so much in common.
If we were to transform in society,
we had to move beyond the ivory tower gates,
and to go into where the everyday people lived.
BRENDA: When we moved to New York we were told,
"There's a budding Asian American movement.
You've got to really get involved in that."
JAN: You have to remember that there was not an
Asian American sense before and it was just
starting to gel.
The first thing we got involved with were these demonstrations.
GORDON: I remember my mother,
I told her about going in anti-war demonstrations,
and sharing with her my hope for a radical new world,
and she was very upset.
She was almost crying, and she said,
"This is their country.
They're just going to shoot you down."
And I said, "Well this is my country.
This is where I live andthis is what I feel I must do."
BRENDA: It felt great to be a part of this groundswell
of a movement that was just enveloping the country.
We were involved with Black, Asian,
White, Latinos, and that was incredible.
And then there's this duo, Chris and Joanne,
and they're singers, folk singers.
They sing about the Asian American experience.
LENNON: These are two young people that,
they call themselves "Yellow Pearl".
Their grandparents were Japanese, I guess,
and they're young singers called"Chris and Joanna"
and they're beautiful singers and they have a story
to tell, and they're going to come on down and do it.
Here they are, Yellow Pearl.
NOBUKO: Usually people know very little about Asians,
and this is a song about our movement,
about our people's plight in America.
♪ BOTH: We are the children of the migrant worker. ♪
♪ We are the offspring of the concentration camp. ♪
♪ Sons and daughters of the railroad builder who leave ♪
♪ their stamp on America. ♪♪
NOBUKO: It was a very powerful thing to be able to do that
for Asian Americans, for young people to be able to hear us
sing these words because we had never had our own song.
♪ BOTH: Sing a song for ourselves, ♪
♪ what have we got to lose.
♪ Sing a song for ourselves.
♪ We've got a right to choose. ♪♪
NOBUKO: And there's something about music that's
a visceral thing.
It's emotional. You can't do it in a speech.
You can't do it by reading a book.
(Taiko drumming)
♪
It was like a genie got me out of the bottle.
You couldn't put us back in.
You can't just have a leaflet,
you can't just have a demonstration.
The art gives flesh and blood to the politics.
People were drawing, people were making posters,
people were making films, people were writing,
people were doing poetry.
LAWSON: I told you so, oh yes.
You take your old name back, Chano.
I told you so, oh yes.
Chano.
GORDON: I really appreciate the visual art,
the poster art, but also the documentary film making that
was I think so important in helping craft an
Asian American identity.
♪
NARRATOR: Even as AsianAmerican culture is blossoming,
the war in Vietnam continues to rage.
Veterans returning home have to grapple with their
role in the conflict.
SCOTT: Coming home was the biggest cultural shock.
Especially during the '60s.
You kind of went from "Leave it to Beaver"
when I left, to the hippies
and the radical antiwar movement when you get back.
I started going to LA City College.
Since I was a Vietnam veteran,
and there weren't too many around,
that subject came up a lot.
"Hey you were in Vietnam.You know, you're Asian American.
You're a Marine Corps veteran.
What did you think about the war?"
MIKE: Before and during Ididn't have a concept of the
racist nature of the war.
Afterwards I was very aware.
It was such a traumatic and extreme experience I wanted to
be able to understand what happened.
♪ GROUP: Bring em home. Bring our brothers home. ♪♪
SCOTT: The Winter Soldier Investigation was put on by
the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
They were trying to get the opinion of the veterans,
the people who actually fought in the war.
MIKE: It was a Holiday Inn with a large auditorium.
And there was tables set up in the front with about 15 chairs.
And then there was the audience.
So different groups of vets would go up and would talk
about what atrocities theyexperienced or participated in.
We were all the non-whites.
And they never asked us to participate.
So when it was almost over we just went up and took
over the tables and chairs and just started talking.
SCOTT: We all spoke and gave the perspective from
each individual.
How did these atrocities get to be committed?
They just don't happen.
There's the whole thing of how they tell you,
you know, the people over there aren't really people.
But they can't deny the testimony of all these dudes
in the room.
NIXON: We today have concluded an agreement to end
the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam.
REPORTER: Saigon, April the 30th 8:00.
The last American helicopter on the roof of the
American Embassy prepares to lift off the last of
the evacuees fleeing before the advancing communist army.
Tens of thousands of Vietnamese still struggle to
escape their homeland for a new life elsewhere.
They are always arriving, these so-called boat people.
Sometimes as many as a thousand in one day.
NARRATOR: The war in Vietnam is officially over
but its effects resonate for years to come.
A new generation of refugees from Southeast Asia
will soon enrich the American experience.
NGUYEN: Typically when it comes to war we believe that
it is the victors who write the history.
The Americans, for the most part,
have gotten to write the history of this war.
Americans can't completely re-write the past to say
they won the war,
but they've put themselves at the center of the story.
So, even if it's a tragedy, in which they lose,
they're the stars of the tragedy.
Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of
people who died were Southeast Asians.
I really don't remember much about Vietnam.
My memory really begins coming here to the United States
as a refugee.
My parents found an opportunity.
They opened a Vietnamese grocery store in downtown
San Jose on East Santa Clara Street,
which is the heart of the city.
My impression of San Jose is inseparable from the
experiences of being a refugee.
I remember, when I was around 10 or 11 years old,
walking down the street and seeing a sign
in another store window that said,
"Another American driven out of business
by the Vietnamese."
And I knew that this was directed at people
like my parents.
My parents worked 12 to 14 hour days in the store almost
every day of the year.
My parents were shot in that store on Christmas Eve...
So, for me...
that sign will stay with me because it was a sign that was
a story that was targeted at my parents and
everybody like us.
So I swore one day that I would have an opportunity to
re-write that sign, to write another story.
TRAN: I was born in 1974.
I was born in District 5, which is called Cholon.
It's like Chinatown in Vietnam.
Then my aunt, who had left in '78,
sponsored our family, so we left in '83.
Grew up in southern California, in Santa Ana.
I had no awareness that the war had just happened.
Probably because my parents protected us from all of that.
And my dad, though he had gone to re-education camps,
we didn't know much about that.
We didn't really talk much about that.
The only education I ever got from the Vietnam War was
"Apocalypse Now," "Deer Hunter," "Platoon."
NGUYEN: Hollywood made literally dozens of movies
about the war in Vietnam through the '70s and the '80s.
And they posed a real problem for me because
I was a war fanatic.
And identifying with American soldiers.
My problem was that they were fighting Vietnamese people.
So, to see movies like, "Apocalypse Now,"
when I was 10 or 11, and to watch Vietnamese people being
slaughtered, massacred,
or raped in the case of other films,
was really traumatic for me.
Coming to Berkeley as a student in the late 1980s was
really a transformative moment for me.
I remember when I was being arrested and cuffed.
I was thinking...
I was looking at the floor and I was thinking,
"God, this is what Berkeley's all about."
The first class I took there was Ronald Takaki's
Intro to Asian American Studies.
He had just published his book,
"Strangers from a Different Shore,"
which was the first major collective history
of Asian Americans.
Most of us, in this classroom,
had never heard of so many of the things
that he was lecturing about.
They were Asian American students back then.
Now they've become the Asian American Studies professors.
I remember them telling us,
"Well the '60s are going to happen again any moment now."
That was the 1990s.
We were convinced that that was going to happen.
They had committed their lives to academic knowledge
but also this idea of the necessity of
Asian American Studies as an activist practice.
And their classes were absolutely fundamental to me,
in terms of turning me into a scholar but also into
an Asian American.
NARRATOR: Ham Tran is also seeking to address the
unspoken trauma experienced by Vietnamese Americans.
He raises $1.5 million from his community to make
a film about the war from a Vietnamese point-of-view.
TRAN: Making "Journey From the Fall"
we had an opportunity to tell its peoples' story.
The people who were involved.
(speaking in native language).
TRAN: Action.
When we were casting I didn't want to cast actors.
I was looking for real people who had had experience,
within the community.
We saw, like, 600 something people.
People would come and then share their stories with us.
TRAN: My education was my audition process.
A lot of people telling me stories.
Hearing 500 stories within two weeks really just...
To some people I felt like they had been waiting years to
get this off their chest.
The woman who came tovisit the re-education camp,
to give the news to our main character,
she shared with us the day that she went to visit him and
how she slid her foot under the table and spoke with him.
The only way they had contact was through that.
It was such a beautiful moment.
I'm like, "Let's try to capture that on film."
NARRATOR: "Journey From the Fall"
is embraced by the Vietnamese American community and
considered a critical success.
Meanwhile Viet Thanh Nguyen is seeking a way to address
the legacy of the war.
NGUYEN: I wanted to confront what had been done to us.
I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an activist,
I wanted to be a scholar and
I didn't want to give up any of those kinds of things.
FRANK: Tonight our guest is the author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
NGUYEN: I wanted to write a novel that evoked the fall of
Saigon and the Vietnam War.
And to tell it from a perspective that
we hadn't seen before.
NARRATOR: In 2015, Viet isawarded the Pulitzer Prize for
"The Sympathizer", a darkly comedic tale about an
undercover communist agent whose loyalties are
split between Vietnam and the United States.
MEYERS: Viet Thanh Nguyen, everybody.
NGUYEN: All this success was made possible
by pioneering people.
FABROS: You got these young people,
all under probably age 21,
fighting to make change happen.
A lot of those people went on to become professionals.
Some became judges, some became lawyers,
a few became professors.
NARRATOR: Former student activists Dan Gonzales and
Laureen Chew become professors of
Asian American Studies at San Francisco State.
After retiring from the military Alex Fabros would
also study and teach Asian American history there.
50 years after the Third World Strike there
are now dozens of ethnic studies programs
across the country.
And Asian American Studies courses are taking root
in unexpected places.
Today, volunteers teach a weekly course to inmates at
San Quentin State Prison.
Students learn about Asian American history from
Exclusion, to Civil Rights, to the war in Southeast Asia.
The program's motto:
"If you know history, you know yourself."
On graduation day,
students are recognized for their achievements and
celebrate their gains.
(applause and cheers)
CHUNG: I give to you the graduating class of Roots
Super Cycle 5, cap 35.
Another person we want to celebrate today...
I'm going to bring Thanh Tran up to the stage here.
THANH: This entire ROOTS experience it's been nothing
but love, inclusivity,
and feeling like I finally have a family.
And that's tremendous.
My mother she's Vietnamese and black.
But the problem is I never got to know my mother because when
I was two years old I was placed into foster care.
And I lost more than just my mom, I lost my roots.
I lost my only connection to my roots in America,
because I had no other family here besides her.
I began to notice that it was more than
just the Asian struggle,
the Latinx and black struggle,
these were stories about what it meant to be human.
And that's what ROOTS taught me.
So I want to thank the team for seeing the humanity in me,
for seeing the humanity in our brothers,
for bringing ROOTS to us,dedicating your free time to us,
because for a lot ofus we didn't have a family,
we didn't have hope, and you give us that.
(applause)
NGUYEN: 1968, when Asian Americans came into being,
now that story's no longer new.
There should be a new story beyond that.
I'm committed to the new story.
A new generation will go off and do something that
I might find offensive, or I might disagree with,
or that I may just not understand.
That's fantastic.
That's a logical consequence of what we wanted to
do as a part of an Asian American movement,
to create a situation in which Asian Americans were
free to do anything they wanted.
REPORTER: The verdict stunned everyone,
four officers acquitted of beating Rodney King.
HELEN: Then all hell broke loose.
ERIKA: There was a consiousness that woke.
CROWD: We want justice!
ERIKA: But as much as tragedy is a part of our heritage,
so is possibility.
JERRY: We were one of the largest websites in the world.
It was really an incredible time.
VIET: To transform the system into something more
just for everyone.
That's the hope, from which,
the Asian American movement was born.
♪
NARRATOR: To order Asian Americans on DVD,
visit ShopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS
This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.