What does it mean to be AAPI in Minnesota right now?

In May 2021, Sahan Journal and MPR News collaborated on series called ChangeMakers to ask this question.

 Civil Rights Organizer Bo Thao-Urabe described the Minnesota AAPI community as unique with over 60% are  Southeast Asians who came post the wars in Southeast Asia - Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Myanmar – compared to only 10% from Southeast Asian in most states. Minnesota also has a high number of adoptions of Chinese and Korean (15,000) babies, as well as “Medical Alley” that is now bringing in a lot of educated workers from China and India. Lily Tung Crystal of Theater Mu noted that “one of the reasons why we think that the violence is happening is because other people often see Asian Americans as not truly American, or other, or even subhuman.” Community Organizer Anthea Yur wants the Asian community to confront racism head on and hoped “that we can start breaking this narrative of being the model minorities, being considered subservient. When your parents are first-generation immigrants, there is a level of survival that you’re taught. You’re taught not to resist.”

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Read the complete ChangeMaker series at Sahan Journal:

• My celebration of AAPI Heritage Month
• Activist and organizer Anthea Yur wants the Asian community in Minnesota to confront racism head on
•  ‘America is not somebody else; America is us’: Civil rights organizer Bo Thao-Urabe wants Minnesota to measure success differently
• Theater Mu’s Lily Tung Crystal: The more people hear Asian Americans’ stories, the more they will treat us as the true Americans we really are
• Chef Yia Vang on his Minnesota Rice initiative, discovering his father’s heroism, and what he  tells the kids with the ‘stinky’ lunches​

Find out more about Asian American history:

• A 1911 Report Set America On a Path of Screening Out ‘Undesirable’ Immigrants – Smithsonian
• The Two Asian Americas – New Yorker

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