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[APPLAUSE]
GEORGE TAKEI: Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,
as you know, on December 7, 1941,
and that plunged the whole world into another World War.
For Japanese-Americans-- American citizens
of Japanese ancestry-- it was a catastrophic experience,
because overnight, we were looked
at with suspicion and fear and outright hatred simply
because we happened to look like the people that
bombed Pearl Harbor.
JIMMY O. YANG: Yeah, I was born in Hong Kong
and I moved to LA when I was 13.
GRETCHEN HOWARD: In 2000.
JIMMY O. YANG: In 2000.
That was after the handoff from the British colony back
to China, right?
And I think there was a lot of worry there.
It was probably one of the reasons
why our family moved here.
And when I first came, I couldn't really
speak English very well, kind of like Jian-Yang.
You know?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
I learned English in Hong Kong how kids here
would learn Spanish.
GRETCHEN HOWARD: Right.
JIMMY O. YANG: So it's not very well.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
And I didn't understand the simplest slang, like,
what's up?
They don't teach you that in school.
What's up?
Right?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
Eventually, I learned a lot of English
by watching BET "Rap City."
That was my thing.
HELEN ZIA: So at the time that I was growing up,
there were so few Asians in America
that it was as though, when my family walked into a store,
anywhere, it would be like-- every head in the room
would turn and look in unison and with that look.
Not like, hey, welcome, but instead, it would be,
what are you doing here in my America?
And just that feeling of always being an alien, you know.
And we talk about aliens today, but it was really
like being an alien from Mars.
And that look-- especially when you
think about the 1950s, the 1960s, and even 1970s,
every war that was fought was against people in East Asia.
So as a kid, when we would go to the movies,
there would be that defining crescendo in a war movie
where it was like, oh, the Americans are winning
and we are going to kill them, kill them, kill them.
And the them looked just like us.
AIMEE PHAN: How do we address the current immigration
and the ongoing immigration issues that
are happening not only in this country but around the world?
How do we help other people in other countries in need?
And I think, especially the Vietnamese community, we
have a lot to say about it, especially since our community
was the last major migration of refugees into America.
We haven't had another recent one.
And I think that the Vietnamese-American community
can be seen as an example of the incredible benefits
and richness that can happen when you are generous
and when you're compassionate and when
you're exercising empathy, which is, I think,
something that's really important to consider when
we're thinking about a lot of laws that are being enacted
and proposed right now.
CHARLES YU: I think the way that TV specifically contributes
to it in this kind of invisibility of Asians
is that we get used to seeing a distorted
picture, a filtered version.
It's being filtered invisibly.
And because of that, I feel like you go to TV
and you know that's not reality.
And yet, your brain, on some level,
takes it as a substitute for reality
so that, when you see the Asian on TV, all of a sudden, that
filtered reality, for a minute, gets
like a glitch in the matrix.
You're like, oh.
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
There are Asians.
And so that disconnect is why it's such a jarring experience.
I think that feedback loop is starting to get broken.
Now you can see an Asian on TV and it's not like, oh, my god,
there's an Asian on TV.
But that's a pretty recent thing.
And I don't think that--
you know, I certainly won't be complacent in just thinking,
well, now that the ball has started to roll,
it's only going to get better from here.
JENNY HAN: I think we could have a bigger
imagination than we often do when it comes to casting.
And now I think it's definitely becoming
more of a sort of awakening in Hollywood that you can do that
and you can still have a successful film.
But I think, for a long time, the understanding
was, well, people--
we have to have a greenlightable actress
to play the part, and only--
it's not a coincidence that all the greenlightable ones,
for the most part, are white actors.
ADAM LIAW: We often look at change
as being a very gradual process, but changing opinions is not.
Changing opinion happens extremely quickly.
You look at something like 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiment in the US
changed kind of overnight.
And with COVID, it was kind of a similar thing
in a lot of Western countries where
you saw not a huge amount of anti-Asian sentiment
before that.
But then, because of some of the political messaging,
I think, around the origins of COVID, it just appeared.
It sparked.
KARTHICK RAMAKRISHNAN: The main takeaways
of my portion of the talk is, first
of all, to talk about the growing
importance of Asian-Americans, but to show
that that growth, in and of itself,
is limited because there is a big gap between what
our numbers look like and where we stand in terms of leadership
and civic engagement.
And I'll submit to you that the problems of leadership
and mobility within the corporate structure
is related to our lack of visibility
when it comes to civic engagement,
and the solutions are linked as well.
AASIF MANDVI: You know, I've grown up
in many different places.
I was born in India.
I grew up in the UK and then spent
my high school and college years in Florida and then New York.
And so there was a sense of-- it sort of,
for me, encapsulated that immigrant journey,
that immigrant experience of living in different places,
having to be a constant.
I think a lot of what I've done involves
sort of shape shifting and adapting to environments,
different environments.
It's probably why I became an actor on some level.
WILSON TANG: Growing up as an immigrant,
watching my mom and dad navigate first coming to America
and not knowing the language and having
to work in a restaurant-- and my mom
was a seamstress and these low-paying jobs just
for our future.
And I think, for me, the fact of a restaurant and hospitality
was always my DNA.
My uncles, my aunts were all in the restaurant business,
and I just saw it was kind of my calling
to join that part of business.
JOANNE KWONG: My parents were working-class, so my mom was--
my mom used to be a bookkeeper.
My dad was an engineer.
And they struggled in a working-class way,
like I grew up in Astoria.
And I did follow kind of a very typical
second-generation Asian-American path where, you know,
New York City public schools, went
to a specialized high school, was on financial aid.
And I ended up working at places that were very institutional
so I became a lawyer.
And the law firms that I worked at were all 100 years old.
And I worked in the Southern District of New York,
over 100 years old.
And I worked at Barnard College, over 100 years old.
And I think, because of that, it always
made me appreciate that institutions
are built on the shoulders of those who came before us.
RUDRANI CHETTRI: I usually say my name is Rudrani Chettri
and I'm a trans woman.
I'm a transgender person, and this is how I identify myself.
And I'm not at all apologetic about who I am,
and I feel so proud of myself.
And I think, though the life has been difficult
for a trans person in India and also the rest of the countries
in the world, but I feel very proud that I'm
born as a trans woman.
And I hope that I also--
if there is something like next birth,
if I get a chance to be a human, I
want to be a trans woman again.
PEILIN CHOU: I was born in Taipei
and moved to US when I was five and grew up
in a immigrant Chinese family, so I definitely
grew up with the legend.
And every year, my family would gather on our front lawn
and eat mooncakes and gaze upon the moon.
And every year, I swore I could see that rabbit up there,
of course.
When I went to school, nobody else knew of the tale,
and so it was a really special thing
to be able to bring this to life in this film and kind of share
this story with the world.
MIN JIN LEE: I think that recognition of that
and speaking out against the fact
that how Asian-Americans can be complicit
against African-Americans is something
that I think we should all speak out against in the same way,
if we expect allies when people are attacking Asian-Americans,
we should certainly really think about how
we could be anti-racist.
And I think anti-racism is the minimum requirement
that we have.
HENRY GOLDING: We talk so distinctly
about Black culture, Asian culture, Latino culture,
but there's nothing that is being discussed
about mixed-race people and how they can own their ethnicity.
And so we sort of fall in this limbo
where, when we try to speak up, they're like, no, no, no.
You're not Asian enough, or you're not white enough.
I was never white enough for the UK.
I was never Asian enough for Singapore and Malaysia,
but I sure as hell wasn't going to let
that put me down and not have the ability to own and be
proud of my heritage.
So I did that very young, and so I've
been fighting it my entire life.
So when that came up, it wasn't a surprise.
It was just another thing.
But at this point, we have the platform
to be able to discuss these issues.
Talking about Asian rights, it's rights in general.
It's about being Portuguese mixed with Malaysian.
In Malaysia and Singapore, there's
so much mixed heritage from the Portuguese
to the Spanish to the Dutch all integrating into culture.
So why can't we be proud of that?
Why can't we own that as a badge of pride?
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