Business and civil rights groups in California are demanding action after a recent surge of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area left one person dead and others badly injured. The brazen, mostly daylight assaults have rattled nerves in communities ahead of Friday’s Lunar New Year holiday. Just last week in […]
Growing up, Adrian Chang spent a lot of time in his grandfather’s Chinese apothecary in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The small shop on Washington and Waverly streets, Superior Trading, closed two years ago, but Chang recalls the floor-to-ceiling drawers holding dried cicadas, twigs, berries, tangerine peels and even seahorses. “My mom would always say I should […]
When chef Eric Sze wakes up in New York City, he often watches video clips of his friends in Taiwan singing karaoke via Instagram. “It’s always the first thing I see in the morning,” Sze, co-founder of the Taiwanese restaurant 886, told NBC Asian America. “Nothing like starting your day with a fresh dose of […]
This story was produced with support from the Asian American Journalists Assn. and AARP, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. Before the coronavirus pandemic, June Bai’s weeks were filled with a diverse range of activities she looked forward to doing. Bai, 69, enjoyed […]
Ken Lum, a Canadian-Chinese artist, has written a letter to his late mother in which he apologises for the contempt he felt as a child in Vancouver for his Chinese roots and her cultural practices. “I so regret kicking up such a fuss whenever you wanted to go and see a Chinese opera in Chinatown. […]
When mental health activist Shivani Nishar was in middle school, she began experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Growing up in what she describes as the “white suburban fairytale” of Palo Alto, California, Nishar, whose parents immigrated to the United States from India, found it difficult to fit in. “I didn’t have a lot of […]
When her Charlestown nail salon closed under the governor’s orders last spring to stifle the spread of coronavirus, Amy Nguyen, a nail technician, was out of work and on unemployment for the first time in her life. A single mother of two, Nguyen, who emigrated to Boston from Vietnam 18 years ago, was embarrassed at […]
Like everyone else, I charge my phone on my nightstand. Within minutes of waking, I reach for it and from the cozy warmth of my bed, I check my personal emails, respond to texts, look through my news alerts, dawdle over Instagram, and scroll through Facebook to see what’s been going on in my sphere […]
For years, Sharad Acharya’s frequent hikes in the mountains outside Denver would leave him short of breath. But a real wake-up call came three years ago when he suddenly struggled to breathe while walking through an airport. An electrocardiogram revealed that Acharya, a Nepali American from Broomfield, Colo., had an irregular heartbeat on top of […]
The experiences of Asian Americans in the United States have been marked by a basic contradiction.1 At 20 million strong—nearly 6 percent of the US population—they are a powerful economic force: nearly two million Asian American–owned small businesses generate $700 billion in annual GDP and employ around 3.5 million people.2 Asian Americans have been part of the country’s […]