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[soft music playing]
[man 1] A lot of America is never going to see me
as American.
[woman] We don't have a universal language.
We don't have a universal religion,
universal identity.
[man 2] I don't understand why
"Asian Pacific Islander" is a thing.
[music ends]
Who are you?
How do you see yourself?
What is your identity?
Is it as an Asian American?
Is it as a Canadian?
Is it as an American?
And I'd like to say that there's some sort of holistic thing
that is like none of it or all of it.
I think so much of my understanding of the world,
consciously and unconsciously,
absolutely has been
being an Asian woman
in a white society.
I think so much of...
the struggle
and the understanding
has been about probably that identity first.
[solemn music playing]
The real battle is a deeply interior one.
But I think you have to move through those kind of
more visible battles
that someone is gonna ask you
to do another accent,
to look a certain way, that, that, that,
and then you'll have to slay the interior dragon.
So when I started really understanding that,
that's basically where you start caring less.
["Fame" plays]
♪ Fame! I'm gonna live forever ♪
[Sandra Oh] I was so profoundly affected
and influenced by the television show Fame.
That seemed to be like, "Oh, there's a place
where this thing that these kids are doing
that I feel that I wanna do."
But the growth of me actually then finding
the community of people who have come
from a similar background and who look the same
has been, I would say, a slow one.
When there was a few of us, it was so spread out.
It was the kind of thing of like,
"Dan's in Hawaii... Hawaii... Hawaii..."
Off doing his work over there.
John Cho was doing his work over there... over there...
over there.
There could not be more than one of us.
But it was...
feeling alone
because the system makes it that way.
[solemn music resumes]
It's your perspective.
Every room you're in,
you can learn something,
even if it is a place that doesn't want you.
In some ways, those rooms are the best learning vehicles.
How do you exist
in a room that doesn't want you
or doesn't respect you?
It was a different time.
The fact that half of the cast of Grey's Anatomy
weren't white,
that was a thing. And it was almost like...
"Shh..." [chuckles] "Let's just not talk about it.
Let's just do it and see if we can get away with it.
Oh, my gosh. It's a hit."
That's that feeling that I know
what I think and hope is an old feeling.
It's a feeling of where I come from, which is just like,
"Let's just try and sneak it in,
let no one notice, and we might have an existence."
Right? I really hope, and I see
and I still hope,
that that kind of thinking has passed.
Now I'm only interested in telling stories
where the characters have that cultural dimension.
That's not just like, "Hey, I'm just gonna walk around
eating kimchi and talking about, you know, Korean filmmaking,"
I don't know, you know? That's not the point, right?
But it is about then opening that dimension
where it used to be closed. Why?
Because it was, at that time, more palatable
in a very mainstream white storytelling.
White actors cannot possibly be asked,
"So what is it like to be a white actor
at 20?
At 30?
At 40?
And at 50?"
They can't possibly be asked, but I think they should be.
The thing with the American name.
I didn't know you can pick one.
Nobody gave me the memo.
I didn't know that you could change your name like that.
So many of my Asian friends,
Hmong friends especially, did that.
I would have been like, you know, Optimus Prime
or something like that, would've been something cool.
I had to be stuck with Yia.
[soft music playing]
"Yia" in our native tongue in Hmong literally means
iron skillet or wok.
Hmong kids thought it was funny and would be like,
"Hey, where's the Yia? Not that one, but that one."
My youngest brother's name is Gong Hmong
which literally translates to "blessing of God."
He gets "blessing of God," and I'm a pan.
I was born in a refugee camp in northern Thailand
called Ban Vinai.
I came to the United States
when I was like four and a half.
I grew up in a small town
in central Wisconsin,
predominantly white.
And then there was like the Vang family.
I did not want to be Hmong.
I lived two different lives growing up.
The word "meekah" is the Hmong word for "American."
I live my meekah life at school,
then I live my Hmong life at home.
My biggest thing was assimilating.
Even my father said to us,
"I want you to read books. I want you to watch TV."
He didn't want us to have that Hmong or Asian accent.
If I can talk like them, if I can act like them,
if I know all the pop culture references like them,
then they won't be able to laugh at me.
They won't think I'm weird. They won't think I'm different.
I wanted to make sure that when I was at school,
my meekah friends, my white friends,
my American friends, knew that I'm American.
I'm one of you guys.
These were my friends,
and they would actually take my face
and they would take my eyes
and they would open them a little wider.
And they would even ask me, "Can you see better now?
Can you see better now?"
And I just thought that's what friends did,
and I would laugh, and I'm like, "I think so."
Imagine being an eight-year-old kid,
your mom gives you lunch to take to school.
She worked really hard to make sure that her boy
was taken care of.
[deep exhale] The only way that she knew how was to cook.
And when you go to lunch, you get these kids
who made fun of you and said your food stank
and they didn't want you near them.
You know what I did? I threw my food away
so that I could just be friends. So I can be cool.
And I would come home and I would lie to her, saying,
"Oh, yep, I ate everything."
So that's like
eight-, nine-year-old Yia, right?
And you fast forward, like, 30 years
and feeling shame for, like, that kid
who didn't know, you know?
[soft music playing]
If I could go back and tell that kid,
what I would say is like, "Dude, don't worry.
In like 20 years, they're gonna try
to Asian-splain everything back to you
about how great fish sauce is
and they discovered oyster sauce or even, like,
'Oh, yeah, like, I have Siracha in my house,' you know."
You know, my white friends, my meekah friends
who now will say,
"Oh, yeah, like, I ate this thing and it had like,
you know, shrimp paste in it and it was like really good."
And you're just like, "Yeah, bro, we call that
a Tuesday at our house," you know.
Growing up, if there was a big celebration or parties
in the backyard,
all the dudes all had a cutting board
and they had a big cleaver knife.
So you just hand-chop everything
and then you would stuff and make sausages inside
with the aunties and the moms and the grandmas,
and they would help make the rice or the noodles,
or they're wrapping, frying stuff.
All the boys hung out by the grill area.
And my dad had the tong
and he handed the tong over to me.
You train your whole life for this, for this moment,
to be able to be like the meat flipper by the grill.
And I remember coming in, I was like, "Mom, Mom!"
Like, "I smell like Dad." I had like...
like that wood burnt, you know, kind of fire smell on me
and I thought I was so cool.
My American friends, my white friends,
I didn't talk to them about that.
I ran away from this calling.
My dad had a really, really bad accident.
This is my hero, you gotta realize.
This guy fought a war and he survived.
He got us to this country.
And I thought to myself, "Man, if Dad dies,
everything about him,
his legacy goes with him."
And that day changed the way I thought about Hmong food
and I thought about what it means to be Hmong.
For me, I feel that my part
is to remember the story in the food that we eat.
There's something about it that rejuvenates my soul
when I eat it.
There's something about Hmong mustard green
braised with pork neck bones
and that beautiful collision of spice,
that bite from the mustard green and the fattiness from the pork,
and the moment that you touch it with your lips.
And if you are a Hmong kid,
you know that taste.
You know, there's something beautiful
about the fresh Hmong cucumber
that I get to bite into.
And every time I do and it bursts in my mouth,
I'm taken back to being a ten-year-old boy
sitting by my grandma.
She's slicing that cucumber for me, fresh from the garden.
And when I realize that that's who I am
and that's a part of me,
I wanna share that with people.
[soft music continues]
You look at the sacrifices
of the ones that come before you,
and then you take that
and then you keep moving forward with that.
One day, you have to sacrifice for the next generation
so that it can grow.
That's what it means to be Hmong.
I ran so far that it was like a circle.
I ran back to it.
And that's what I love about being Hmong.
And that's why if anybody wants to talk to me about it,
let's do it. Let's go.
[music fades]
[upbeat music plays]
I think if you talk to my parents, they would say that
I talked back a lot
and that I was really a bossy child.
In Vietnamese, the greatest compliment
that you could give a daughter is "hiu tao,"
which is to be obedient.
I have never been hiu tao.
I really reject the idea that the AAPI community is quiet.
It's such a stereotype
and it plays along with the model minority myth.
There are plenty of activists that are Asian American
throughout history.
They just don't get the history books
talking about them.
My grandma was a freedom fighter
against the French in Vietnam.
You know, I come from this line of people who talk back.
My name is Amanda Nguyen.
I never thought that I'd be made to suffer a greater injustice
than what I went through on the day that I was raped.
I studied astrophysics at Harvard,
and during my last semester, I was raped.
I remember walking out of the hospital
after my rape kit procedure was done,
having never more fully understood
the definition of lonely than at that moment.
I was handed a taxi voucher
to go back to the dorm room where I was raped.
It was only after my ordeal that I discovered firsthand
the ways in which rape survivors are continually revictimized.
When I found out that my rape kit
could be destroyed at six months,
even though the statute of limitations is 15 years,
I felt like I was betrayed
by America's criminal justice system.
I realized I had a choice:
accept the injustice
or take change into my own hands.
And so, I decided to rewrite the law.
The law that I wrote is called
the Sexual Assault Survivor Bill of Rights.
Part of it is to save a rape kit.
Another right is the right to your patient medical record.
Another right is the right to your own police report.
Before they were enshrined,
they were being denied to survivors
all across the United States.
When we passed the federal law,
I remember going to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
I just screamed as loud as I could,
and I just felt like a curse broke.
For me, that was my justice.
That's what justice felt like.
[soft ambient music plays]
My love of space started even before I was born.
My family were boat refugees from Vietnam,
and they used celestial navigation
to find their way to freedom.
My mother left with three other family members,
her younger sister, Number 11,
her brother, Number 3, and the son of Number 2.
And as they were swimming and they got to the boat,
there were these machine guns,
and the Viet Cong had spotted them.
My mom turned to Number 3 and said,
"We got to go. It's do or die."
They made it to international waters.
And then because it was a storm,
the boat was sinking.
A big boat came and rescued them.
They threw over a rope.
A literal lifeline.
She tells me that you just put one hand in front of the next.
One foot in front of the next.
When people ask me how I decided to take on
the United States government or the United Nations,
I think about how she had to evade these guards,
machine guns, climb a rope in a storm,
and I have to just send an email to a senator.
When I spoke up about my rape, it was highly stigmatic.
Friends, loved ones said,
"Hey, I don't think you should do this,"
including, of course, other people
who share my identity as young Asian women.
And I understand where that comes from.
So I don't fault anyone for feeling like
the cost-benefit analysis of their survival
depends on their silence.
I want people to know that
the most powerful tool that we have is our voice.
I've never regretted it.
[music ends]
[DJ Rekha] I have three best days of my life.
The first best day is the day I met my partner.
Aww... sappy, sappy, true.
The second-best day is SummerStage.
The best day of my musical life.
The third best day is when I got parking in my garage
after 14 years.
That's some New York shit.
[upbeat music plays]
What do I identify as?
It depends where I am and who's asking,
'cause identity is shifting.
I definitely identify as a DJ, as an artist, as a curator.
I think identity's like...
a slippery slope as I--
as I partake in this project.
My parents had what I call an outlaw love marriage
in the late '60s in India.
They were partition babies,
so they were born in what's now Pakistan.
And then moved to England
and then we moved to the States right before my fifth birthday.
What did my parents want me to be?
I know one thing. When I started deejaying,
they didn't want me to do that.
[laughs]
They definitely didn't want me to do that shit. No.
[upbeat party music plays]
My mom went to England.
There was this one song that was really big.
So she brought a cassette back for me,
Malkit Singh, Up Front, was the album.
There's another song there that I really like.
One of the lines is, "We're not gonna dance
to the white man's disco," which is, you know, poetic.
[Bhangra music playing]
My idea for my 16th birthday is I wanted to do a Bhangra party
and I wanted everyone to wear Indian clothes.
I was the opposite of, like, self-hating.
I was like the other side.
And that was literally in our basement.
When I started deejaying, I was very involved
in community activism more than anything.
I was part of a group that was originally formed
around the wave of violence that happened in Jersey City
in the late '80s
perpetrated by a group claiming themselves
to be the "Dotbusters."
We started raising money by throwing parties.
Those things were inextricably linked for me,
creating space, holding community,
and deejaying.
[Bhangra music resumes]
The association of Bhangra music
when I was starting deejaying was,
it is lower class people
who are working class, who are cab drivers,
who are not professionals.
They listen to that music. They're from Punjab.
I wanted to create a space that I was like,
"No, we're gonna go all in.
We're gonna play like, the real shit."
[Bhangra music continues]
The idea around Basement Bhangra was like,
"I wanna play this music. I love hip-hop.
Let's just play it."
It took a minute, but it caught.
People really got it.
By the summer of the second year,
the line was down the block.
Seven o'clock doors and then the dance lesson,
the Basement Bhangra dance lesson.
Don't do like...
cobra moves when you're dancing
like there's a snake charmer happening. Not cool.
At midnight, it's like, crazy.
It's wall to wall.
At the end, I just want as many people to dance as possible.
That's what I'm going for.
I think so much about
the music projects of Basement Bhangra
and how they could only have happened in New York.
It became even more important after 9/11,
especially a lot of Sikh men, bearded, turbaned.
Post-9/11, a lot of bad shit was happening to our communities.
We did an event 9/20,
nine days after 9/11, which we were like,
"Should we do it? Should we not?"
Of course, the club owner was like,
"'Raker,' you just got to do it." [laughs]
And that's when I learned
the lesson of you always do the party.
The party must go on.
That's when it really clicked that this was not just a party,
it was a space.
I like working with up-and-coming artists,
learning from them and them learning from me.
And there's just like a lot more
South Asians making music.
And it's exciting.
Some of it's shit, and some of it has a lot of possibility.
When we walk through a door, it is our responsibility
to bring other people through that door.
Like, I think it's great that South Asians are
getting successful in certain kinds of visible ways,
but it's like, what space are we taking up?
We can't just be excited 'cause, like, somebody's
in office or something.
And that blanket excitement around power,
it's shitty, you know.
And they need to be critical of that.
We have to speak up for oppression against all people.
[jazz music playing]
[Connie Chung] When I first started working
in television news,
I looked around me and all I saw
were white men.
They were my bosses, they were my colleagues,
my competitors, the people I interviewed.
All white men.
Anytime I walked into a newsroom,
I was a lone wolf.
I decided that I, too, would be a white male.
I literally took on all of their behavior,
bravado, decided I was entitled,
and I had a potty mouth.
I had oh, such a potty mouth.
And it was so unbecoming
because here I was, a little lotus blossom
with these foul words coming out of my mouth.
Anytime they'd throw something at me
that was either racist or sexist,
I'd throw it right back at them
in a racist, sexist way.
My boss said, "Tell them why I hired you,"
and I said, "Because you like the way I do your shirts."
And he thought that was the funniest thing
he had ever heard in his life,
and he kept, "Tell 'em, tell 'em."
He kept making me repeat it.
And I thought to myself, "Why the heck did I say that?
Am I nuts?"
And, uh, that was just my M.O.
It was my way of dealing with the sexist pigs and racist pigs.
Sorry.
[soft piano music playing]
My parents were born in China,
and I have four older sisters all born in China,
but I'm the only one born in the United States.
And I was another girl. [chuckles]
I was born and raised in Washington, D.C.
When I was born, my father called
from the hospital and said, "It's another girl.
You find a name for her."
My sisters looked through movie magazines.
So they said, "We're gonna flip
and that will be the name."
And they went flip,
and it was an actress named
Constance Moore.
So I became Constance, but everybody called me Connie.
When my mother came to the United States,
she couldn't read or write English
and she couldn't read or write Chinese.
I basically, at the age of eight or nine,
taught her how to read.
I used my Golden Books,
all my little kid books,
and I helped her learn her signature
so that she could get her citizenship.
But it was really, really hard for her.
My four older sisters were bossy screaming meemies.
All they did was yap, yap, yap.
And I was like this quiet, timid, shy person
who never opened my mouth.
My family was shocked that I went into television news.
My sisters literally said, "Our little Connie.
Imagine that, she's talking to millions of people.
Who would have thought that our little Connie..."
And I would go, "Uh, please."
The tragedy for my parents was that they had no boys.
In Chinese tradition, you have to have boys
because boys carry on the family name.
My father actually gave me the mission.
He wrote to me in a letter and said,
"Maybe you can carry on the family name."
Subconsciously, that's what I did.
One day, I got a call from a journalist, Connie Wang,
and she told me that she was named after me.
And I said, "What? Are you kidding?"
Her parents asked her,
"What name would you like to be called?
Because you're now in the United States."
And she was only like three or four
or something like that.
She saw me on television.
She said, "Either Connie or Elmo."
She discovered that there was this whole generation
of Asian girls who were named Connie.
Connie Wang decided that she would write a piece
for the opinion section of The New York Times
and it would be all about the Connies
that she discovered.
And the photo editor found a photographer
whose name was Connie Aramaki,
and she gathered all of these Connies,
and my tears just came down.
Every time I think about it, I start to cry.
It's an incredible legacy that I never knew existed.
Having all these Connies named after me
is out of this world.
Swimming has been part of my life
for as long as I can remember.
I don't remember a time in my life
when I wasn't in the water.
[light acoustic music playing]
Because I didn't present myself often in a very girly manner,
in the girls' bathroom or the girls' locker room,
I would be bullied for my appearance.
"You're not really a girl" or "You're like a disguised boy."
And so I would change in the car into my swimsuit.
Entering the women's locker room
with my shirt off and my swimsuit exposed
was sort of my ticket into the bathroom
without being bullied for not being "girl enough."
When I was thinking about gender identity and thinking,
"Gosh, maybe I'm not this woman that everybody says that I am,
maybe I'm a man," I thought, "Oh my God,
what am I gonna do about sports?
What am I gonna do about swimming?
How am I gonna keep being myself as an athlete
while trying to be myself as a trans person?"
I had still committed to swim for Harvard's swim team
and the women's swim team specifically
when I was done with treatment.
Coming out to my women's coach,
her response being a lot of,
"I don't know, but we're gonna figure it out."
And over the course of that year,
I actually was offered a spot on the men's team
because the men's coach said, "Well, if you identify as a man,
swim for me."
I was lucky to be met with this kind of support from my coaches
that allowed me to step into my full self
as a transgender man on the men's team.
In my process of coming out as trans,
I got sick of telling everybody one at a time.
So I made this big Facebook post where I said,
"Hey, everybody, I'm transgender.
Here's some information about what this means.
I'm gonna be swimming for the men's team."
So I told everybody this online.
I actually have three Korean grandparents.
My halmeoni, halabeoji, so my grandmother
and grandfather, my mom's parents.
I also have a great aunt, my keun-imo.
Halmeoni actually has a Facebook.
So before I hit "post," I blocked her on Facebook.
She has a couple of friends that are mutual with me.
So I said, "Hey, please don't tell Halmeoni yet.
I'm going to tell her, but I need to get there."
So then I spent about a month writing her a letter.
"Halmeoni, Halabeoji, Keun-imo,
I'm telling you this because I love you.
Because I respect you deeply
and because I want you in my life."
My mother and I were very afraid.
Maybe we'd never actually set foot in this house again.
And maybe she doesn't only disown me,
but she also disowns my mother.
So we sat down at the kitchen table.
I read them the letter,
I ended with "I love you,"
and then I waited.
My grandfather was the first to react,
and he started with this, like, slow old man clap.
[chuckles] And he goes, "So...
you come out of closet now."
I was stunned he had the phrase "coming out of the closet."
And he said, "Oh, congratulations."
My mom and I were absolutely
gobsmacked, don't know what to say.
Keun-imo, she gives me a squeeze on the hand
and she got up to make tea.
Her love had been communicated.
Halmeoni, again,
the person I'm the most worried about,
she's staring at me, she's got this really stern look
on her face, and she goes,
"I knew that.
You can be a boy, a brother," she says.
"You can be a man.
But daughters take care of their parents.
It is still your responsibility, Schuyler,
to take care of your parents."
Of course I agreed.
I even have those words, "bumo-hyodo,"
"take care of your parents"
tattooed in my grandmother's handwriting
beneath my mastectomy scar next to my heart.
It's my tribute to her
and all the strong womanhood that I come from.
My halmeoni, she is North Korean.
She walked from Pyongyang to Seoul to escape
right before the Korea was split into two Koreas.
She walked when she was 13 years old with her mother
over the oceans to raise my mother.
And so there's this deep value that I carry
and that tattoo is part of that symbol.
So when I was growing up,
I was frequently told a variety of very inappropriate comments
about my appearance.
"Mixed-race babies are the most beautiful."
"Oh, you're so exotic."
"Asian and white girls are the sexiest."
This was from adults around me, from peers.
It was from teachers.
Very fetishizing comments about my appearance
that wove in racism, misogyny.
And then I transitioned.
And now I'm read in the world as an Asian man.
It's a very different experience.
Now I feel that I just, like, don't exist.
I'm frequently told I am not man enough.
A lot of people see East Asian men as feminine
or submissive or weak.
They also see trans men in the same way.
My manhood is mine.
And if you don't see it or if you think
it is X, Y, and Z, that's okay.
You can think whatever you want about my manhood,
but I know who I am.
My racial identity and my trans identity
have really forced me to find that grounding on my own.
Now I see it as a bit of a superpower.
[music ends]
[soft, bright music playing]
[Kumail Nanjiani] To me, the most nervous I am in my life is
when someone comes up to me and says, "Hey,
I loved you in..."
And that pause between "in" and whatever they say
is the most nervous I've ever been.
Harold & Kumar, I get that.
That's like ten years before I started doing comedy.
And it happens to all those other guys too.
You know, it happens to Hasan.
It happens to Aziz. It happens to Kal.
It happens to Hari. It just happens to all of us.
And I always say the same line when someone says,
"Hey, I loved you in Big Bang Theory,"
I'm like, "No, that's the other one."
[laughs]
Yeah.
It has led to some awkward situations.
Yeah...
[scattered applause]
Hey, what's up, guys?
I started doing stand-up right after 9/11.
I just got an Xbox.
Whenever I got on stage,
I would feel that tension from the audience.
They're like, "Is he gonna mention it?
Is he gonna mention it?"
And I tried to not address it.
It just wasn't working. I had to address it.
I would get on stage and if I was doing
like a bar or something, you know, suddenly,
everyone's like a little tense, looking at me.
And I would go, "Hey, I'm from Pakistan.
We're the good guys."
That's what I would say.
"Where's Osama?"
I got that one a few times.
After the first two or three times it happened,
I was like, "Okay, these are not isolated incidents.
This is gonna keep happening,
so I need to come up with comeback lines
that I can just memorize."
People would call me "terrorist" on stage,
and I'd be like, "If I really am a terrorist,
do you wanna, like, pick a fight with me?"
"Where's Osama?" I'd be like, "I don't know.
I haven't seen him at the meetings
in a long time."
Someone says something to you,
you say something back,
and then suddenly, the audience explodes.
They love it. They love you.
I found out one of the levels in the new Call of Duty
-is called "Karachi." -[audience whoops]
Which is where I fucking grew up.
-[audience laughs] -That's weird for me.
They're like, "Your hometown is now a battlefield."
-[audience laughs] -"How many points can you get?"
For me, the negotiation of my identity
is still an ongoing project. I still don't know.
You know, if you asked how I identify myself,
I say Pakistani.
Wikipedia says Pakistani American.
I don't really know what that means.
So I don't feel fully Pakistani
because it's not my home anymore.
And I don't feel American because...
your membership in a group is based on the other members
seeing you as a member of that group.
And I understand that a lot of America
is never going to see me as American.
And so I don't feel American.
[soft, pensive music playing]
You have to come up with something
that's completely unique to you.
When I was a little kid,
I loved movies and TV.
Movies, TV, video games.
There was a long stretch in my life
where I watched a movie every single day.
Star Wars and Star Trek and Gremlins and Ghostbusters
and Indiana Jones and all that stuff.
But I also watched a lot of Bollywood movies
and that sort of, uh,
depiction of the sort of strong, silent man
who doesn't ever get sad or feel fear,
like that's a big part of Bollywood movies, you know.
And so I really grew up sort of idolizing those things,
you know, being the stoic man who takes care of his family
and takes care of the bad guys and all that stuff.
And now realizing that, honestly,
that conception of manhood for me was very damaging.
You can't be sad and you can't be scared,
and that angry is the only manly emotion there is.
Now, when I go on stage, I wanna talk about how...
understanding how I'm feeling
and being able to express that is strength, you know.
Like, anger is not necessarily strength.
Saying "I'm scared of this" is also strength.
Now when I do stand-up,
I wanna be someone who looks like me
talking about that stuff, you know.
That even though I am successful and I'm very fortunate,
but I-I still have
these things inside me
that scare me.
[Madelyn Yu] So I came to the United States in the late '70s
and I went straight to Kansas City.
When I was flying from the Philippines,
the lady seated next to me said,
"You are my first Asian,"
and she said it in such a derogatory way.
So I retorted back and probably not respectfully, I said,
"You're my first stupid."
It was quiet all the way to Kansas City.
[soft, bright music playing]
In the '70s and in the '80s,
there was a huge nursing shortage.
Many administrators from all over the United States
would go to the Philippines and recruit in Manila
all the nurses that they could get.
What I would earn in 12 months
as a head nurse of the medical ICU
at the Philippine Heart Center,
I would already earn here in the U.S. just for one month.
And my story is no different from any other Filipino nurse
who would come here to look, as they say,
"for greener pastures,"
for a better opportunity for their families.
When I came to the United States,
I was 25.
I was leaving my husband behind
and my first-born baby.
He was only a few months old when I left.
[soft dramatic music plays]
I would send half of my salary back home every month.
I was so homesick.
I was very, very lonely.
There's a music back home called "Manila, Manila."
["Manila" by Hotdog plays]
Somebody played it during one of the Christmas parties
and I broke out crying like crazy.
My husband and the four children
joined me in the U.S.
and we settled in New Jersey.
And I retired in 2019
after serving as a nurse for 46 years.
We were planning to start my husband's retirement
in November 2020,
and we were going to travel the world.
Breaking news about the spreading coronavirus.
At least 19 deaths are now reported in the U.S.
-There are now... -[Madelyn] In March 2020,
after watching TV,
my husband dozed off as he usually does.
And then we FaceTime with our children
because we couldn't gather anymore,
and they were like, "Mom, he doesn't look good."
And that was the start of my nightmare.
He was admitted to the hospital where I worked.
A few more days to that,
my family called 911 again for me.
I had COVID too.
Who would take care of my husband
when he comes home?
I'm the nurse. I will take care of him,
so I have to live.
It was Holy Week and I do believe
in the power of prayers.
I felt lifted up on Good Friday.
On Sunday, Easter Sunday,
I saw a rainbow in front of my hospital window
and I said to myself, "I'm gonna live."
My husband was going into his third week
intubated in the ICU.
And the doctors would update me
that this medication was being put up,
this ventilator setting was being done,
and I understood them all.
Remember, I'm a critical care nurse.
And when they told me that a certain medication was added,
my heart fell.
I was able to hold his hand
for the last three hours of his life.
I had the priest bless him.
We prayed the rosary.
The children FaceTimed him.
And I whispered in his ears,
"It's okay to go, Daddy. It's okay."
[somber music plays]
So how do you move on?
I pray for him every day.
I visit him every week, bring him flowers.
And now I'm a happy grandma of six.
I go home to the Philippines to visit relatives,
do the medical mission.
And I always say in Tagalog,
"Ang hindi marunong sa pinanggalingan
ay hindi makarating sa paroroonan."
"If you do not look back at where you came from,
you can never reach your destination."
We have only one life to live.
Make a difference.
If you grow up poor, you're just more motivated to not be poor.
When it snowed and we had snow days,
I would get my friends and be like, "We're shoveling."
We had a lawn mowing business.
I learned some magic and started doing magic shows.
All I have to do is shake it up a little...
blow it out,
and they're all tied together.
I had racked up hundreds of dollars
in library fines.
So I offered the library to do magic shows,
and I said, "All I want is you to wipe my fines."
[laughs] And they did that.
"Horrendous Haroon" was what they called me.
[gentle acoustic music plays]
On the day of my birth,
the Russians invaded Afghanistan.
I was there for three years.
My father was arrested
for supporting some of the resistance.
When he got out of prison six months later,
we decided we gotta get out of there.
The Mokhtarzadas were actually quite well-off.
The currency inflated
and so the Afghani wasn't worth anything.
It was a full wipeout.
When we came to America, we moved into
my mother's parents' two-bedroom apartment
in Maryland.
A family of six at the time, plus my grandparents.
I don't quite know how we fit.
We were packed in there.
We really couldn't afford kind of anything.
I definitely remember being on free lunch.
They would separate the kids before lunchtime.
They would call you over and check you off on a list.
When I moved to reduced lunch,
I was like, "Ooh, we are arriving."
[laughs] You know?
I grew up with an awareness
that my people
were going through extreme struggles.
My mother really drilled into us
that we were very fortunate
and you have to do what you can possibly do
because there's a million people who would trade places with you.
That definitely had a lot to do with my ambition.
When I was in high school,
I had interned for a marketing firm.
They had me learn how to build websites.
They were selling 'em for thousands of dollars
to these companies. And so I realized
every company and maybe every person
is gonna need a website.
What if we build something
that builds their websites?
And that's where the idea of Freewebs came from.
Having brothers who can code
is a very valuable thing.
I sort of roped them in and said,
"Guys, let's build this."
We started Webs right when I was a senior
at the University of Maryland.
We had to have physical machines,
the servers that everything ran on.
It moved from dorm to apartment to a closet.
One day, everything goes down. Every single thing goes down.
Hundred thousand websites
are sitting on this server and it won't boot.
We couldn't get that to boot, that's the end of the company.
Finally, we call Dell and Dell says, "Hey,
sometimes there can be dust that causes this problem.
Try opening it up, pulling out the cable,
blowing into it like a Nintendo cartridge or something,
and then reseeding it and then turning it back on."
We open it up, we pull out the cable, we blow...
blow into it, put it back,
turn it on,
and the whole thing came back up.
Right there was a fork in the universe.
One path would have been very, very different.
Our entire future hung in the balance,
suspended on a piece of dust.
So my parents, they didn't quite understand
the level of success that we were starting to have
until we told them how much we sold the company for
ten years after we started it.
We sold the company for almost 120 million dollars.
Me and my brothers were sitting around a computer
and we were just refreshing on our bank account.
Suddenly, a lot more zeros popped up.
That was when it really felt real.
Wow, my family is taken care of.
For our next start-up, I had realized
that this is a really annoying problem
that you cannot find
what subscriptions you're paying for.
And Truebill was born.
In the tech world,
there's a thing called a unicorn.
And a unicorn is a north of one billion-dollar thing.
We sold that company for almost 1.3 billion.
Wow, what am I gonna do with this
that will make me worthy of it coming my way?
I have now accomplished enough in my life,
I'm gonna speak my mind and I'm gonna create space
for the Muslim community to have a voice.
That's why I'm investing in independent journalism.
And that's why I've been trying to get
emergency malnutrition packets to Gaza.
And that's why I help fund and support
a school in Afghanistan for orphans.
And I try to call out people on Twitter
when I feel like they're not being honest
or they're spreading misinformation.
If I, after having all of this success in this country,
if I cannot speak these things, who is going to do it?
Who can?
[Tammy Duckworth] I remember being in the Army
as a young officer going through flight school.
The Army put up a picture of what the ideal Army officer
would look like,
and it was a square-jawed,
chiseled man,
blond with a buzzcut.
And I was like, I'm never gonna look like that.
[gentle, pensive music plays]
I was literally mid-mission when I was wounded
and taken out of Iraq.
I remember being hit
and I remember just desperately trying to land the helicopter.
I mean, my legs were blown off. My arm was essentially severed.
I wasn't doing anything other than coming to
and trying to fly and passing out
and coming to and trying to fly.
Confusion, pain,
despair 'cause I thought that I was responsible
and that I'd failed as a pilot, I'd failed as a soldier,
I'd failed as an officer.
And later on, it was explained to me that,
"No, you were still trying to take care of your men."
And I've been fine ever since.
As long as I did my job as a soldier.
When I first ran for Senate, and I talked about
being a daughter of the American Revolution,
my opponent very derisively in the debate
looked at me and said, "Oh, yeah, I'm sure your parents
came all the way from Thailand
to fight with George Washington,"
as if like there is no possibility.
And I had to correct him. I was like, "Actually,
my ancestors did fight for George Washington."
I am half Caucasian, half East Asian.
My mother is actually ethnically Chinese,
but born and raised in Thailand.
So she identifies as Thai.
It was a twist of fate.
My parents met because of the Vietnam War.
My dad was in Asia because of the Vietnam War.
He fell in love with my mom.
But he married my mom, unlike so many of the other Thai women.
And to this day, I still get letters
from biracial Thai American kids my age,
"Can you help me find my dad? His name was Bob
and he was a sergeant in the Army."
And it just breaks my heart.
Growing up post-Vietnam in Southeast Asia
as a biracial Amerasian child was not a positive thing.
Had my dad not married my mom and stayed,
I would have had no future.
And my mother would have had no future
'cause everybody knew that I was a child of a soldier.
Well, the other kids would say, "Oh, you're big and clumsy,"
'cause I was a lot taller than other kids.
"Oh, you and your dad smell like cheese."
I think when I started feeling good about being biracial
was when I moved to Hawaii.
In Thailand, the term for me was " Luk khrung."
Luk is child. Khrung is half. So you're "half a child."
But in Hawaii you're a hapa,
which means also half, but it just means mixed.
But it's a positive term.
That's really the first place where I sort of grew
into my identity.
I was in middle school when my dad lost his job
and our family descended into poverty.
My mom and I told my dad, "Let's go to the States."
My mom couldn't come 'cause she didn't have a Green Card yet
and she did not have a visa and we couldn't afford
for her to come anyway.
When I got on that plane leaving Thailand for Hawaii,
she told me, "You have to take over."
I had to be mom.
But we were struggling. We had nothing.
I finally had a big fight with my dad and said,
"You are not in charge anymore because you cannot provide.
I'm gonna go get a job."
I marched down to Waikiki Beach and got a job
handing out flyers to tourists.
That was the first real income our family had.
I sold roses.
I scammed tourists... [laughs]
...playing volleyball on the beach.
I would be pretending to be just a local girl
and partner with a local dude
who would tell the tourists, "Listen, I'll play you
and I'll get that girl to play with me."
And I'd be like, "Who, me? Really? I get to play?"
It's kind of like our version of White Men Can't Jump the movie.
[laughs] Five bucks a game usually is what we played for.
I was really good.
I never worked harder in my life
than when I was poor.
I was exhausted every single day.
My dad was exhausted.
And if we could just help by a little bit,
just give people a little breathing room.
Those are the policies that I support today.
I don't think of myself as an overachiever.
I just fell into things
and I was just trying to survive.
I wanted to be a helicopter pilot
for the rest of my life.
Getting into politics was something I fell into
because I was mad
that we weren't taking care of veterans.
I wasn't trying to achieve anything.
And I failed, the first time around. I lost.
So I find myself here
where people talk about me as a high achiever,
and I really see myself as someone who was just
trying to survive and do the next thing.
It's probably very Asian.
[laughs]
[soft guitar music playing]
[Bowen Yang] There was a Chinese Bible camp that we went to
in the Rockies, in a lodge.
The kids ended up being all these very funny,
cool, horny Christian teens
who played the guitar and hooked up with each other.
I was never one of them. My currency in those situations
was to just be funny.
And one of the skits, I was called upon
to play Austin Powers
and do an Austin Powers impression.
I think I said the words, "Yeah, baby,"
and then everyone in the room
exploding in laughter.
I was like, "Oh, I wanna do that for the rest of my life."
I would run to the basement,
watch SNL and MADtv, and all these sketch shows.
I was obsessed.
I made that my whole identity.
Being on the improv troupe in high school,
going downtown to the Bovine Metropolis Theater in Denver
to like, do shows with like 33-year-old men
who had drinking problems, as a 15-year-old.
Like, I was building my life around this.
I was very like meekly, bashfully
saying that to people, especially to my parents.
I was trying to make that a palatable dream to them.
In no world would it have made sense for me
to be like in showbiz when they were like,
"We sacrificed everything.
Why would you wanna do short form improv?"
One day I was me, Cristina Yang,
and then suddenly I was... [inhales]
...lying for him and jeopardizing my career
and, uh, agreeing to be married
and wearing a ring and being a bride.
I loved Sandra Oh on Grey's Anatomy so much
that I said, "I guess I'll go to NYU
to study chemistry and be pre-med
because I wanna be like her. I wanna be like Cristina Yang."
I stayed on the pre-med track all the way through,
and it was about what
a media portrayal was indicating,
what my parents felt safe in me doing.
I remember taking my MCAT the second time
and voided my score
in the middle of the test.
I called my parents
and I was like, "I can't do this.
I don't know what I'm gonna do.
I'll figure it out.
But this is what I need to do."
The audition for Saturday Night Live
kind of spanned a couple years.
My manager at the time was like,
"It's SNL tape season."
You get to submit a tape of five minute characters
and impressions that you do.
I didn't have too many Asian public figures to work off of.
I did... a Ken Jeong impression,
a SoulCycle instructor,
a Michiko Kakutani impression.
It ended up being me screaming at the top of my lungs
about how Jeffrey Eugenides was a hack or whatever.
It was just me having fun with all of these different authors
and literary figures.
I kind of miraculously took
the liberated path on that.
I was like, "I'm gonna do this
as an exercise to do whatever I want.
This will never be seen.
I will never be considered.
Let me just have fun with this for me."
I booked the pilot Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens
the same summer that I sent in the tape to SNL.
We shot in a Chinese restaurant.
It was a dinner scene
and we were eating like wood ears
and duck and fried rice.
And it was me, B.D. Wong, Awkwafina, Lori Tan Chinn.
Like three different micro generations
of Asian actors.
Something really enlightening happened.
Being on a set with other Asian people
and not having to explain myself,
like not having to justify my existence there,
not having to be like peripheral or ornamental.
Like, we get each other.
And I think I took that sort of comfort and confidence
into my last audition for SNL.
In between takes of Nora from Queens,
I gave my phone to a PA, I was like,
"If a 212 number calls,
please call cut because I have to take it."
It rang.
They offered me the job to be on cast for SNL.
It's poetic to me that it was
on the set of Nora, that I was with Awkwafina,
that I was with a bunch of other Asian people
that this thing in my life changed
and everything else did in its wake.
Yeah.
[soft piano music playing]
[Manny Crisostomo] I got this internship
with the Pacific Daily News.
There's a new executive editor. I said, "I'm excited.
I'm ready to spend three, four months
honing my skills as a reporter."
Then he looked at me and goes,
"Well, I looked at all your writings
and I don't think you're good enough to be a reporter."
"Oh my God, I love journalism.
I wanna stay in the business." And he goes, "Well,
do you have experience as a photographer?"
I said, "Yeah, I was a yearbook photographer."
I got my tax refund and my mom bought me a camera
at the naval base
and I started taking photography.
I was a photo lab assistant. Every once in a while,
the editors would come back to the photo department.
I was the only one there and they said,
"Hey, somebody is bringing in
these weird mutant vegetables and fruits.
Can you go photograph them?"
And I would photograph somebody holding
their conjoined twin cantaloupes,
cucumbers that are oversized,
and their pumpkins that are deformed.
The mutant vegetable and fruit beat
was my early project.
I left Guam to study photography
and work on the mainland.
I was in my late twenties.
There were a couple of reporters that spent a year
working on the Michigan juvenile justice system
and some of its failings.
I was the lead photographer in that project
from the Detroit Free Press.
And then I was, like, thinking, you know,
I wanna do something on high school.
I wanna spend a year at a high school.
I picked this high school.
It was in a part of southwest Detroit
that a lot of the auto plants have closed,
so there's unemployment.
I was in classrooms.
I photographed the jocks,
I photographed the dropouts,
I photographed pregnant teens.
I remember going to the prom
and I just felt like this doting father.
They were my kids and they're all dressed up
and they're all like, beautiful and stuff,
and I was like, super proud.
We ran the story and, um,
I got nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
I remember I called up my mom,
"Hey, Mom, I'm up for this thing
called the Pulitzer Prize,
and it's a really, really big deal.
I'm probably not gonna win.
But I just wanna let you know that, you know,
I'm a finalist and stuff."
And she goes, "Don't worry, son.
I'm gonna go to St. Jude church,
and I'm gonna light a candle for you."
You know, a few days later, I win the prize.
People say, "How do you get a Pulitzer Prize?"
I said, "Just make sure your mom
goes to St. Jude church in Guam
and lights a candle for you."
I just won the Pulitzer Prize.
I was sort of the top of the game,
and I was just, like, really, really homesick.
The indigenous people of Guam are called Chamorus.
We have a word in Chamoru language,
and it's called mahalung.
Mahalung is this longing, this homesick.
It's wanting to smell the air of your island.
I was talking to a friend of mine about it,
and she goes, "The only way to mitigate the longing
is get a sense of belonging."
And I sort of make it a mission to...
belong.
To find other Chamorus,
to tell their stories.
I'm one of 250,000 Chamorus on this planet.
I'm on a mission and I'm passionate about
photographing each and every one of them.
We survived.
We survived colonial powers
from the Spanish to the U.S.,
invading powers like Japan.
We are resilient.
I just wanna document that.
[bright, gentle music plays]
[music ends]
[soft, groovy music playing]
[Nergis Mavalvala] I was a squash player.
I was in graduate school at MIT.
There was no women's squash team,
so I had to play on the men's team.
And it actually gave me
a fair amount of secret pleasure
when I would get on a court with a man
who would take one look at me,
at the time, I was a small, you know,
scrappy young thing,
and say, "Oh, I got this."
And they had no idea what squash I could play.
I would get great pleasure from winning that game
more than any other game.
There's a piece of me that-that thrives
on that kind of being the underdog.
In Pakistani society,
there is this desire
for every family to have a boy child.
And my mother would say, when nosy people would ask,
"Well, don't you want to have a son?"
And she would say things like, "Why do I need a son?
I have Nergis."
[bell rings]
I grew up in Pakistan.
It's a very interesting milieu for me.
I grew up in this Zoroastrian family.
I went to a Catholic school
in an extremely Islamic country
as a rabid atheist myself from childhood.
So, it was this constant juxtaposition of things.
[horn honks]
The messaging from our parents was,
"There's no future for you here.
You have to go overseas.
We have no money to send you overseas.
The only way you can do it is through scholarship.
So the rest is in your hands, children."
That was the dream.
That was something that changed the direction of my life
like nothing else has ever done.
For a while, I thought I would be a doctor, a medical doctor.
This is, of course, you know, classic Asian family.
There are only a few things you are allowed to be.
You could be a doctor. You could be an engineer.
You could be a lawyer.
I read too slowly to be a lawyer.
I couldn't bear dissecting animals,
so that put the whole medicine thing out of the way.
So engineering was left.
But then when I got to college,
I learned there is this identity of being a researcher,
of asking questions to which no one has the answer,
and you could be the one that could find it.
You could be a scientist and you could be part of discovery.
In 2015, we were able to, for the very first time,
directly observe gravitational waves
from the collision of two black holes.
These had been a prediction of Einstein's
theory of general relativity
a hundred years earlier,
and we had just seen one.
So the theory was correct.
We have thought of space as empty and pristine,
and it's none of those things.
It's filled with popcorns and ripples and tears.
But the part of it that I'm interested in
is the wavy part.
When you have two objects like black holes
and they orbit each other and collide,
they give off these waves,
and we, far, far away
from where those collisions happen,
should be able to see those waves.
And why should we care to see those waves?
Because those waves bring us information
about those black holes.
Why should we care about those black holes?
Because those black holes are the building blocks
of our universe.
And so, if we want to understand
how the universe is put together,
we have to understand black holes.
If we wanna understand black holes,
we've gotta measure their gravity
because they don't give off light.
And that's what my work has been about.
Being a minority has touched my life
in many, many different ways.
And the most significant way is a total comfort
with being a maverick,
being an outsider in the mainstream.
Whether it is being comfortable being a queer person
when it was really pretty hard to be a queer person,
to working on a physics experiment
that everybody thought was sure to fail
and that you're foolish to try.
To be other is okay.
Just by being a scientist
and being a South Asian, a Pakistani American,
and being a queer person,
and being able to say all those things,
and yet have success in science
has meant other people can imagine that
for themselves as well.
[music ends]
[solemn music playing]
[Kathy Masaoka] In conversations,
whenever Japanese Americans
get together,
we often ask each other,
"What camp was your family in?"
But in my family,
the family never-never talked about it.
And I didn't know enough to ask.
So, like, when Pearl Harbor was mentioned in high school,
I just felt very much like everybody was looking at me,
very embarrassed, but not understanding why.
We didn't really know who we were.
I think all of us were going through that identity issue
of like, trying to be American.
And American didn't mean person of color.
It meant being white.
I would see other Japanese Americans group together
and I'd feel like, "I don't wanna be with them."
Going to Japan was part of that search, thinking that,
"Well, if I don't fit in here, maybe I fit in there,"
and-and finding very shockingly and sadly
that I'm not.
Not and never will be Japanese.
I felt that there was no future.
[soft music plays]
But somehow, I did get back.
I found Asian American studies.
["We Are The Children" plays]
♪ 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 ♪
[Kathy] The Vietnam War was showing us
how people saw us
as the example of looking like the enemy.
So, again, we were the enemy.
Not really being seen as fully American.
It was the first time I liked being Japanese American,
being around Japanese Americans.
But we didn't march just as Japanese Americans.
It was as Asian Americans.
♪ Brothers and sisters all around the world ♪
[song ends]
We didn't know anything. We had no skills.
We just saw a need. And we just, you know, said,
"Okay, we have to organize something."
[light pensive music playing]
We took our ideas a lot from the Black Panthers, actually.
Idea of serving the people.
Starting programs that were needed,
like the welfare rights group, parents' group,
health fairs and clinics.
After a while, we started thinking about
how all of this connected to the camps
and our experience as Japanese Americans.
The demand for reparations became louder.
Even if we didn't win, we had to fight.
We didn't feel an apology by itself was enough.
We demanded monetary reparations.
And our group demanded that there be hearings,
not just in Washington, D.C., where you hear
scholars and legislators speak,
but you hear the people speak.
In 48 hours,
we were told to pack up and leave.
[woman] I did not want my children
to feel the burden of shame
and feeling of rejection by their fellow Americans.
[Yayoi Arakawa Ono] This inhumane, cruel treatment
and happening took place in the good ol' United States
and not in Gestapo Germany.
Hard to believe, isn't it?
That was a total eye-opener.
It was the first time that I heard
people speak about the camp.
People that looked like my mother.
She didn't get to tell her story,
and I wanted her family story to be told.
My mother's family was removed from their farm in California,
taken to Gila River concentration camp in Arizona.
And I think that as I learn more and more constantly,
I realized what it really meant.
How the first generation came here
and overcame all of the laws and injustices.
Not being able to be citizens. Not being able to marry.
Not being able to own land. Not being able to vote.
All of that and they still stayed
and then they were put in the camps,
and lost all of it. It's like...
h-how do you even continue after that?
And so, um, my mother, her future was, you know,
really sort of changed drastically by the camps.
So she had a lot of anger, still a lot of pride,
but at the same time, it had been, you know,
squashed down by the camps.
I mean, I don't think I really appreciated or understood
the depth of the loss.
[light applause]
The legislation that I am about to sign
provides for a restitution payment
to each of the 60,000 survivors.
Here we admit a wrong.
What happened to us happened to many different people.
Being incarcerated,
being, you know, removed from your land,
it's not unusual in this country or in the world.
The legacy of fighting for reparations
is connection and solidarity.
You know, 'cause change will take a long time.
We're building something new from the bottom
and that's actually gonna sustain us, I think,
in the long run.
I may not be here, you know,
to see what actually comes out of it,
but we are dealing with trying to...
and, you know, I think it sounds very idealistic,
but change the world, change the systems,
change the systems that are not serving us.
[music ends]
[Cliff Kapono] I ended up winning this science fair
when I was 16.
There is this virus that was running rampant
on the north shore of O'ahu in the shrimp farms.
So I created this experiment,
essentially a COVID test for shrimp virus.
The judges were like, "Who did this for you?"
And I'm like, "No one. I just...
did it at school."
And they were like, "Wow. Qualified."
You get a free trip to the international,
and sometimes it's in Puerto Rico, Germany.
I'm like, "I'm going on a trip!" I was like, "Where's it at?"
They're like, "Oh, Arizona."
And I'm like, "Where's Arizona?" [chuckles]
It was so dry and so hot.
My internal compass was like, something's not right.
I need to figure out where Hawaii is right now.
We're walking with chaperones to this convention center,
and I just book it, like
beeline out of the crowd, and I start running.
The chaperones were like, "We got a runner."
So I'm sprinting blocks down,
and I get out past the cities, and then I get to a clearing,
and I look all around
and I just see mountains, 360,
and the sun is high.
And then my nose started bleeding.
And then I'm just like ready to faint.
I'm just like, "I'm dying!
I need to get back to Hawaii!"
[gentle music plays]
I knew then, I can't go far.
Growing up, I remember having to go to school,
kind of hating it.
Being indoors, I'm like, "This sucks."
As soon as the bell rang, my dad was there,
pick us up, straight to the beach.
That was kind of, I felt, when learning really started.
My dad would kind of send us out on the beach and say,
"Okay, go grab different seaweed on the shore."
And then he'd come back and he'd tell us,
"A Hawaiian name of seaweed
also has a Latin name.
This is science."
Same with surfing.
We'd do a bit of seaweed science,
then we'd grab the boards and we'd go out and we'd surf.
Understanding where the current goes.
Where is the wind? How is the sand moving?
What's the swell? What's the tide?
There is so much information around play.
That kind of gave me this weird value on science.
Science was like this magic power
to communicate to the world.
There is this weird opportunity that just presented itself
to go get a PhD in California, in chemistry.
Leave the only thing I have ever known
and start something that I don't know
what it's like or what it's about, but it's different.
The first racism for being a Hawaiian person I felt
was coming to California.
I was getting into conflict with other surfers around
where I should be surfing, who I'm surfing around,
and there's all these rules that I didn't know existed.
This surfer was getting close to me
and he ended up, like, pushing me.
He said, "Go home to wherever you come from."
And I was so upset.
I was like, "Dude, I wanna go home." [scoffs]
"Dude, I don't wanna be here.
I don't have to explain myself to you."
I told him. I was like, "I'm from this ocean.
Where are you from?
Do any of you know where you're from?"
I feel I came to get this PhD
as like a responsibility on my shoulder.
"The Hawaiian with the PhD, you're gonna help us."
It's like, it's all this pressure
to be, like, somebody.
I just wanna be in the ocean.
So I integrated some of the technology
we were developing in the lab
into a science project to try to see,
are there molecular signatures in the ocean that we can detect
that are shared among surfers across the world,
a last ditch effort to stay in school.
A writer ended up reaching out to me and I did an interview
and next thing you know I'm getting a call
from The New York Times at its front page
of the science section.
Interviews and calls from like, NBC
to like, NPR and Nat Geo.
Like, nerd celebrity of, like, institution.
Like I'm rolling in, like, fancy nerd land.
That was so important for me
because getting that global recognition value,
I knew that those stories that they were validating
weren't mine and they were my people's.
That gave me the confidence to return home.
My home allows me to be me.
[soft pensive music playing]
[gentle, poignant music plays]
[music ends]
[bright, harmonic music playing]
[music fades]