‘Asian Americans’ on PBS Examines Both Discrimination and Perseverance

A new PBS series is elevating the voices of the Asian American community and examining their impact on U.S. history. In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, PBS is premiering its new five-part series, Asian Americans, a documentary about the lives and history of Asian immigrants and their ancestors, and their importance in the history of our nation.

The first episode of Asian Americans begins with the story of new immigrants arriving to America, and follows their impact on a changing nation. “Breaking Ground” highlights the importance of Asian American labor in creating the railroads we know today, Asian American impact and representation in Hollywood, and their fight for equality that eventually took them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Asian Americans producer and Oscar-nominee Renee Tajima-Peña uses the series to delve into the Asian American experience throughout U.S. history. The series focuses on positive contributions as well as incidents of racism and discrimination, and uses personal histories to tell the stories from people who were there to experience them. The documentary focuses on World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights era and the turn of the 21st century. Each episode features new voices and stories from different generations, including Anna May Wong, Bruce Lee, Vincent Chin and more. The series is narrated by actors Daniel Dae Kim and Tamlyn Tomita.

“A lot of us in the Asian American film community have been wanting to make a series like this for decades,” Tajima-Peña told the Huffington Post. “Twenty-five years ago or something, I wrote a treatment of an Asian American history series.” Although she was finally able to put her series into action in 2012, she still faced skepticism from white executives, she told the outlet. After working for years to assemble a group to create the series with, Tajima-Peña landed a largely Asian American production team to help tell the documentary’s stories.

Tajima-Peña’s series is primarily about Asian American history, but she emphasized the importance of fighting racism and white supremacy and serving as allies to other communities. “If you’ve got two tumors, like if you have a stomach tumor and a lung tumor, you can’t just attack the stomach tumor and like, leave the one below — because it’s cancer,” she told the Huffington Post. “So for Asian Americans, it’s the cancer that we have to fight.”

The first episode of Asian Americans premieres tonight at 8/7c. Episode 2 also airs tonight, starting at 9/8c.