Last spring, the Community Advisory Board of the Oral Histories Project received a $500,000 contract from Santa Clara County to document the oral histories of over 30 Asian American activists in the Silicon Valley area.
The board chose Yvonne Kwan, San Jose State assistant professor and program coordinator of Asian American studies, to spearhead the project.
The Oral Histories Project is split into two groups: The Community Advisory Board and the AAPI Perspectives team.
Associate Student President Nina Chuang said the AAPI Perspective team is currently in the editing process of the project.
The board consists of community leaders, legislators and activists who have made a difference in the county. They helped comprise a list of candidates to interview for the project.
“These are prominent figures in our community who saw that during COVID-19 – a lot of our elders were passing,” Kwan said. “We also saw a rise and resurgence of anti-Asian violence.”
The AAPI Perspectives team includes Kwan as the primary investigator, Chuang who leads a high school intern research team, a videography team and a creative director.
“We essentially want to do our homework before we enter someone’s presence,” Kwan said.
She said the high school interns would research information on the internet, which would help her generate interview questions.
“Our interview questions are standardized up to a certain point, but when you’re asking people about their specific experiences, we want to tailor it to what they have done,” Kwan said.
After the interviewees are selected by the Community Advisory Board and the research team has provided background information, Kwan and the videography team attend the interview scheduled by Chuang.
“We’ll go through a range of questions that usually start with family origin, their schooling experiences, their interaction with their neighborhood – just capturing what life was like for them,” Kwan said.
The interviews then delve into their respective histories as activists in their communities.
Afterward, the videographers edit the video and generate a transcript that is then polished by the interns.
Kwan separates the AAPI Perspective Oral Histories Project into two phases: the first phase includes the video recording of 36 interviewees, curriculum building for K-12 schools and the archiving of the oral histories that will be made available to the public.
“It’s a community based, community centered project,” she said.
Kwan said she is currently requesting a follow-up grant from Santa Clara County to take the project into phase two.
The second phase will include more oral histories in addition to the creation of a youth program.
The youth program aims to train high school and college level students to conduct interviews, capture oral histories and document the lives of “role models” in their communities.
Paul Fong, former Democratic California State Assembly member and SJSU alumnus, said the Community Advisory Board received funding from Santa Clara County and made it their mission to find a person to lead the project.
“We contacted San Jose State University – Asian American studies, and that’s when we introduced the project to Kwan,” Fong said. “She gladly accepted the project and she’s been championing the whole thing.”
Connie Young Yu is a local Asian American historian in San Jose and serves on the Community Advisory Board.
Yu was a founding member of Asian Americans for Community Involvement, which was founded in 1973 and “serves individuals and families with cultural humility, sensitivity and respect, advocating for and serving the marginalized and ethnic communities in Santa Clara County,” according to its website.
“It was really a unique time and a unique process in terms of bringing different Asian groups together to form this organization so that this organization had depth and breadth of skills and ability to then begin to advocate for Asian Americans in the Silicon Valley,” said Victoria Taketa, SJSU alumna and Community Advisory Board member.
She said the organization aids in a wide range of subjects, including education, social issues, employment and mental health.
Taketa said the proposal for the grant included the importance of documenting the contributions of Asian Americans in Santa Clara County to then be used as resources in education.
“Through education, we can begin to combat anti-Asian hate,” Taketa said. “It’s the mission of this grant to document oral histories to then be used as educational materials.”
Yu said one of the earliest interviewees for the project was Paul Sakamoto, the first Asian American superintendent in a U.S. school system.
“When you listen to his life, it’s a story of Japanese Americans in America – the struggle, what incarceration camp was like and he always said, ‘It was harder to come out than to go in,’ ” she said.
Yu said one particular story details a boy who was chasing fireflies along the perimeters of an incarceration camp in Arkansas at night when a soldier shoves a rifle in his face.
“He’s telling this story that has probably never been published or heard before and we’re going, ‘Oh my God, that’s what it was like during that time!’ ” she said. “We’re talking about human experience.”
Fong said the story of the boy is similar to former U.S. Secretary of Transportation and former San Jose Mayor Norman Mineta’s experience during his time within an incarceration camp.
“They took a baseball bat away from him in camp because they said it was a weapon,” he said. “He was just a young kid and he wanted to play baseball.”
Janet Arakawa was one of the early interviewees in the project. She was an activist in the 60’s who advocated for the inclusion of minorities and the separation from stereotypes in textbooks before the formation of Asian Americans for Community Involvement.
“These are the hidden histories of our community,” Nina Chuang said. “As an Asian American student, having the privilege to not only work on this project, but also interact with these elders, makes me feel visible.”
Kwan said the majority of the surrounding areas in the Silicon Valley were agricultural lands that were farmed and developed, which gave the county the name, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
“A lot of those contributions were Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but we are missing that history because it’s not being told,” she said. “Or it is being told, but there are no avenues for it to be really institutionalized in our curriculum.”
On May 4, 1887, San Jose’s own Chinatown, one of the largest Chinatowns in California, was burned down deliberately by anti-Asian arsonists where the Signia hotel, formerly known as the Fairmont hotel, stands, Yu said.
Yu said before the fire took place, the San Jose city council voted to condemn Chinatown as a hazard and use the site as ground for a new city hall.
“My grandfather lived there,” she said. “He worked there and he saw the fire and told us kids, ‘It was deliberately set to chase us out.’ ”
A public apology for the injustices toward the Chinese Americans was made by San Jose’s city council September 2021. Yu said she was someone who helped in the writing process for the apology.
John Heinlen, a German businessman and land owner,leased five and a half acres of land to displaced Chinese Americans affected by the fire, and the land became known as Heinlenville.
A new park named after Heinlenville is under construction on Jackson and Sixth to commemorate John Heinlen and Chinese Americans who were displaced.
“Here was an immigrant who embodied everything that this country is about,” Taketa said. “Whereas our political institution down the street did not.”
Taketa said she hopes the Oral Histories Project helps to humanize and stop stereotypes such as the “model minority” from being used as a tool to silence Asian Americans.
“We want to be able to define who we are and our behavior,” she said. “Not someone else’s interpretation, not seen through their lens, but we want to advocate who we are so that our rights are protected.”
Santa Clara County supervisor Otto Lee spearheaded the funding of the Oral Histories Project.
“He knew the history and he wanted to capture it,” Fong said. “He was the one who proposed the $500,000 for us and he was able to get the other supervisors to buy into it – it was an Asian American perspective who got us the funding for this project.”
Chuang said the Asian American experience is not normally seen in textbooks and references representation in media as an example that there is still work to be made.
“In this documentary, it will not only provide a vessel for the Asian American community to connect with our history and actively engage in the people that come before us, but also, that we connect with our identity on a deeper level,” she said.
