Rise Quotes

“If you go to an “Asian American and Pacific Islander” event, you’re not going to see Samoans, you’re not going to see Tongans, you’re not going to see Māori. We’re half of the acronym, but not even close to half the representation. The Indigenous story is always washed away by the immigrant story. Americans are proud to say that “we’re a nation of immigrants,” but that’s also saying “f*ck the Indigenous people.” We’re proud to be mixed in Hawaii, but we need to acknowledge that that comes at the price of Indigenous people. We can support each other, but there’s a difference between inclusion and erasure.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“… the government is always ready to jump in if a pop culture emergency erupts.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“In the spring of 2002, popular clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch decided to, as they say, fuck around and find out. The company’s latest round of overpriced clothing included an assortment of Asian-themed novelty graphic T-shirts advertising fictional businesses. One of the designs, the one most people seem to remember, was for “Wong Brothers Laundry Service,” evoking stereotypically cheap Chinatown labor, bachelor societies, and Ancient Chinese Secrets.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“And contrary to the stereotype of quiet Asians, I could see that we like to fight. That we were in a fight to tell our own stories, to decide which images and narratives defined us. Decades of racist imagery, from Hollywood movies to political propaganda, informed by racism, colonialism, and conquest, have seeped their way into the consciousness of what the West views as “Asian.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“South Korea’s government and private industry have spent the last quarter-century collaborating to build this pop culture empire, in pursuit of a soft-power strategy that they’ve dubbed “Hallyu,” or the “Korean Wave.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“It’s safe to say that South Korea now has a reputation for being a place where cool stuff comes from. And yet, just 70 years ago—after the end of the Korean War—Korea was one of the poorest nations in the world.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“Some defenders of Chua, however, did point out that humming beneath the rage at Chua was a xenophobic fear of Chinese hegemony, as could be seen in some of the more patently racist reactions to the Wall Street Journal’s “extract” of the book, headlined “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Despite the controversy—or because of it—the book sold like New Year’s rice cakes.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“IN 1987, TIME published a cover story, titled “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids,” that stands as one of the earliest pop-culture eruptions of a new Asian stereotype: the Asian American (specifically, the East/ South Asian American) as academic overachiever.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“What the article didn’t acknowledge was that many East and South Asian Americans going through high school and college in the 1980s were children of the first wave of Asians to come to the U.S. after 1965, a disproportionate number of whom were hyper-educated superachievers themselves, because of the Hart-Celler Act’s preferences for immigrants capable of contributing to the scientific, medical, and engineering professions. (And meanwhile, the experiences of children of Asian immigrants who arrived through other channels, for example as refugees of war, did not match the stereotype.)”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“in 1941, the iconic periodical Life published an article called “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese” to prevent vigilantes from accidentally attacking Chinese “allies” as they went out to hunt “enemy” Japs, pointing out the “parchment yellow complexion” and “scant beard” of Chinese versus the “earthy yellow complexion” and “heavy beard” one would expect to see among Japanese.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“by the end of the Seventies, most Asians in America were recent immigrants, who naturally weren’t inclined to see themselves through the lens of being “Asian.” They thought of themselves first as members of their own specific ethnic communities, and second as aspirational Americans; the pan-ethnic organizing work of the Asian American pioneers of the Sixties made as little sense to them as it might to the relatives they’d left behind in Asia.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“In 1960 there were fewer than a million Asians in America, less than half of whom were foreign-born. By 1970, five years after Hart-Celler, the Asian American population had grown to 1.5 million, 55 percent foreign-born—and by 1980, it had more than doubled to 3.5 million, 71 percent of whom were foreign-born.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“just 100 immigrants per year were allowed in from each Asian country, with an overall cap of 2,000 per year from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“the Hart-Celler Act finally took a sledgehammer to the dam, eliminating racist nationality quotas and creating a set of preferences that prioritized family reunification—giving precedence to close relatives of existing U.S. citizens and legal residents—and professional skills and education. As a result, a stream of immigration began that quickly transformed Asian America from the smallest, slowest-growing minority in the United States into the fastest-rising population in the nation.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“the mid-Fifties, the first hairline crack appeared in the dam barring Asian immigration. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, finally abolished race-based restrictions against naturalization as a U.S. citizen, which had, since 1790, been limited to “free white persons of good character.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“swimming against a flood of social preconceptions, wartime propaganda, and government policies that targeted Asians in historically unique ways: Chinese were the first and only group to ever be federally prohibited from coming to the United States based on nationality. Japanese Americans were the first and only group to ever be mass incarcerated by the federal government without trial or evidence, solely on the basis of ethnicity. Indian Americans were the only group to be acknowledged as being “Caucasian” but nevertheless “not white,” and thus ineligible for citizenship. Filipino Americans made up the only group of veterans to fight under the U.S. flag without receiving the benefits promised them by the federal government.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“This wasn’t the first time Asians of different ethnicities had been classified as a single group: at various times before this moment, we’d been lumped together as “Mongoloids,” “Orientals,” “Asiatics,” and a variety of interchangeable slurs related to the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, and the things we eat (or are alleged to eat).”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“Ichioka, Gee, Ichioka’s brother Victor, Vicci Wong, Floyd Huen, and Richard Aoki—dubbed themselves the “Asian-American Political Alliance,” coining “Asian-American” in emulation of their Afro-American fellows”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“the weird fringes of antiquarianism, you’ll find people who claim that a Chinese admiral landed his fleet of ships on the East Coast of the United States in 1421; that Japanese fishermen “discovered” America in the 13th century; that wandering Buddhist monks floated to a place called “Fusang”—California, maybe!—in AD 499. And if you dive down into evolutionary anthropology, you’ll probably read about the Bering land bridge, crossed by ancient Asian migrants who trekked over from Siberia some 16,000 years ago and spread out all across what’s now America.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“If you go by the records that never seem to make it into textbooks, Asians have been in America since Filipino slaves jumped ship from Spanish galleons in Louisiana in the 1760s, where they built secret villages in the swamplands, hid from their kidnappers, fished to survive, and eventually, were recruited to defend a young America from a new British invasion in 1812.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“The project was already in development before I joined the division. I was at Touchstone Pictures in live action, and I had heard that they were doing Mulan, it was picking up heat, and they were interested in moving it beyond development. That was actually the reason why I went over to Disney Feature Animation. I was like, if they’re going to make Mulan, I have to be a part of it, because this isn’t going to happen again for 20 more years. And in fact, the next time there was a Chinese family in a global animated film, it was Abominable, 21 years later.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“American culture tends to see Asians as weak and in need of white people to come save us. That’s especially true in pop culture about the Vietnam War. The narrative is all about what Americans went through, using Vietnamese people and the setting of Vietnam as props and backdrop. There’s no concern over the interiority of the people who live there. Miss Saigon is the largest manifestation of this. It says, “You’re never going to be the hero. We cannot relate to you. You’re always going to just be the sidekick in our stories or a trigger for our feelings.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“Yellowface enables racist caricature—but it also denies Asian actors the opportunity to play Asian roles.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“While hate crimes in general decreased by 7 percent in 2020, targeted attacks on Asians increased by over 150 percent over the same period.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now