Search the Media Repository
Discover the curated images, videos, and primary sources featured throughout Foundations and Futures
History is more than just text on a page; it is the photographs, voices, and artifacts of the people who lived it. The images and recordings featured across Foundations and Futures are part of a meticulously curated media repository. Whether you are building a lesson plan or investigating an artifact, you can use this database to trace the provenance of our media: discover who created an asset, the historical context behind it, and how it can be used to bring Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences into your classroom.
Multimedia
Chapters
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Hawaiʻi International Film Festival Audience
Since 1981, the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival has been a platform for Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and international cinema across the Asia-Pacific region.
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Video
Visual Communications on Self-Representation in Media
Founded by filmmakers from the University of California, Los Angeles’ EthnoCommunications program, Visual Communications is a media arts organization dedicated to the self-representation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through photography, documentary films, educational exhibits, audio records, narrative cinema, and other media.
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Bruce Lee in The Way Of The Dragon
Hong Kong American martial artist and actor Bruce Lee’s performances had a lasting influence on future generations of martial arts filmmaking.
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Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong in Daughter Of The Dragon
Sessue Hayakawa (left) and Anna May Wong (right)—two pioneering Asian American performers of the silent film era, a time when Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were not widely represented—starring alongside each other in Daughter of the Dragon (1931).
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The Face of Fu Manchu Movie Poster
Bent on world domination, the fictional supervillain Dr. Fu Manchu perpetuated fear of the Yellow Peril to wide audiences—as seen in various novels, comics, TV shows, and films, such as The Face of Fu Manchu (1965).
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Aloha Movie Poster
The 2015 film Aloha caused controversy by casting white actress Emma Stone (lower right) as the role of Allison Ng—a character whose heritage is mixed race Native Hawaiian, Chinese, and white.
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Shirley Maclaine Applying Yellowface for My Geisha
The troubling practice of yellowface often relies on using makeup and prosthetics to create Asian-looking eye shapes, as seen here with Shirley Maclaine (center, holding mirror) on the set of My Geisha (1962).
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Year Of The Dragon Community Reaction
Year of the Dragon (1985) was protested for its depictions of Asian Americans as violent criminals and drug dealers. Others, however, argued that such protests jeopardized the careers of the film’s Asian American actors.
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Community Character Abed Nadir
Community’s Palestinian-Polish American character Abed Nadir—while written as a seemingly archetypical nerd lacking in social skills and a penchant for pop culture and filmmaking—is beloved by and has deep relationships with the rest of the cast.
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Early Years of Visual Communications
Visual Communications was founded in 1970 as one of the first Asian American and Pacific Islander media arts organizations in the US. Hito Hata: Raise The Banner (1980) is considered the first feature-length film by and about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
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Never Have I Ever Characters Nalini and Devi Vishwakumar
In the Netflix TV show Never Have I Ever, the character of Nalini Vishwakumar (left) is portrayed as a hard-working dermatologist who is strict with her strong-willed teenage daughter Devi (right). She might be seen as a Tiger Mom.
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2025 STAATUS Index Bar Graph
Thirty-seven percent of 4,909 Americans surveyed said they couldn’t think of a film with an Asian American character, according to the 2025 STAATUS Index (Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the United States produced by The Asian American Foundation (TAAF).
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Stop Asian Hate Rally in San Jose
A group of protestors in Spring 2021 call national attention to the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, fueled by racist rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Phoeun You On Balcony
After serving twenty-eight years in prison, Phoeun You was released on parole in 2021, but ultimately deported to Cambodia as a result of IIRIRA.
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Sok Loeun Arriving in the US
Sok Loeun (kneeling), a US. citizen, voluntarily self-deported to Cambodia in 2015. As of 2024, more than 17,000 Southeast Asian Americans have received notice of final deportation as a result of the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).
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Photo of Ny Nourn as a Child
After her mother fled from the Khmer Rouge regime on foot from Cambodia, Ny Nourn was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. She and her mother eventually resettled in San Diego, California, when she was five years old.
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Vietnamese Family at Fort Chaffee
Between 1975 and 1996, 1.2 million Southeast Asian Americans arrived in the United States as refugees. In this photo, a Vietnamese family is seen at an arriving center in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, under the auspices of the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
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President Lydon B. Johnson Signing Immigration Act
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) on Ellis Island, ending decades of race-based categories for immigration.
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War Bride and Inlaws
Some three hundred thousand Chinese, Filipino, Korean and Japanese “war brides” came to the United States as spouses of US servicemen stationed in Asia. They helped to shift the demographic of the Asian American population.
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Inazo Nitobe and Mary Elkinton
A Japanese American diplomat Inazo Nitobe was able to marry a white woman Mary Elkinton in the 1880s at a time when interracial marriages were frowned upon by society or outright prohibited through state-by-state anti-miscegenation laws.
