White House Initiative Turns the Spotlight on the Asian American Experience

It has teamed up with StoryCorps for the #MyAAPIStory project.

(Photo: Lesley Magno/Getty Images)

May 21, 2016· 3 MIN READ

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

They’re the fastest-growing demographic in the United States—including both people who are newly arrived to these shores and folks whose families have been here for generations. Now the White House is backing an effort to collect audio recordings of the diverse experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, or AAPIs.

For its #MyAAPIStory project, the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs has teamed up with StoryCorps, the New York City–based nonprofit that has recorded thousands of Americans’ stories over the past 13 years.

“The contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to this country are countless, diverse, and meaningful,” Alissa Ko, the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote in an email to TakePart. Through #MyAAPIStory, the White House hopes “to share and document AAPI stories, perspectives, and experiences so that they are represented in our nation's narrative,” wrote Ko.

The White House’s commitment to collecting AAPI stories made teaming up with StoryCorps a natural fit. “We maintain a real focus on building a diverse archive with diverse voices. The Asian American and Pacific Islander population is among the groups of folk we look to make sure is represented in our archive,” Colleen Ross, the director of marketing and communications for StoryCorps, told TakePart.

StoryCorps was started in New York City by radio producer and documentarian Dave Isay. Through the process of filming his documentaries, Isay found that when he gave the microphone to people and let them tell their own stories “there was a real moment of empowerment,” said Ross. With a booth in Grand Central Terminal he launched StoryCorps in 2003 with the goal of recording, preserving, and sharing the life experiences of people from diverse backgrounds.

“The premise was that two people come to a booth, and a facilitator would work with them to help them have a 40-minute conversation,” said Ross. “In the end they would get a copy of that interview for themselves, and another would go to the Library of Congress. Those conversations are part of a digital archive that is now the largest collection of human voices in existence.”

Through several in-person booths across the nation StoryCorps has amassed more than 65,000 interviews. The experiences of AAPIs have been included in those stories, and some, such as the video of grandmother Kay Wang, have been animated and uploaded to YouTube. To enable a broader cross-section of people to participate in StoryCorps, last year the nonprofit launched a mobile app that enables people to have conversations whenever and wherever they want. Since then it has had another 55,000 stories uploaded through the app.

Once users download the StoryCorps app it guides them through the "Great Questions List," a broad set of questions designed to unpack a person’s personal history. “It includes questions like ‘What was your first job?' 'When did you first fall in love?’ and more personal questions like 'Can you sing me a song from when you were a child?' Those prompts can be an effective way to shape some of those stories,” Ross said.

The initiative comes at a time when the invisibility of AAPI actors and stories—and stereotypical movie and television portrayals, such as the trope of the nerdy AAPI friend—is being increasingly called out on social media. Last year director Cameron Crowe was widely condemned for casting white actor Emma Stone as a part-Chinese character in his film Aloha. In early May after the trailer for the upcoming film Dr. Strange was released, Marvel Studios received similar criticism for casting white British actor Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, a character originally written as a Tibetan monk.

As a result, over the past two weeks the hashtags #StarringJohnCho and #StarringConstanceWu have trended on Twitter, with people reimagining a Hollywood where Asian American actors are cast as the leads in major movies and television shows.

In a post on the White House blog, Ko encouraged AAPIs to share stories about whatever topics they want—meaning that actors such as Cho and Wu could upload a story about their experiences with typecasting and whitewashing in Hollywood. Ko also suggested themes such as being the first in a family to go to college, sharing what it was like to immigrate to the U.S., and dealing with the model minority myth. Helping smash that myth is also the focus of the U.S. Department of Education’s new commitment to gathering accurate data on the experiences of AAPIs in public schools.

This isn’t the first time that the White House has used the StoryCorps app as a tool for collecting people’s stories. “In the summertime they did some work around older adults in conjunction with their Conference on Aging. They did a story collection around the anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act,” said Ross. But this latest opportunity to work with the White House “really excites us and is consistent with the work that we do. Opportunities like this with the White House help promote ways to continue to develop the diversity and dimension of the voices that are in the archive.”