110 Fun Facts About AAPI Heritage

In which month is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month observed in the United States?

Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month is observed in May; it began as a heritage week proclaimed under a 1978 resolution and was extended to a full month in 1990.

Which event of May 10, 1869 is one reason AAPI Heritage Month falls in May?

Completion of the transcontinental railroad rested on Chinese labour to the very end: on the final morning, eight Chinese workers laid the last rail before the golden spike was driven.

What kind of American ship rescued the Japanese castaway Manjirō in 1841?

A whaler, the John Howland, took the 14-year-old castaway off a desolate island; he later sailed home, was made a samurai and interpreted for his country as it opened to the West.

Which president signed the 1978 joint resolution creating the original Asian-Pacific Heritage Week?

Jimmy Carter signed the joint resolution on October 5, 1978, a year after Congressman Frank Horton's first bill for a heritage week in early May had failed to pass.

Which president signed the 1990 law extending Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week to a full month?

George H. W. Bush signed the 1990 law that expanded the observance to a full month for that year; a later act of Congress made the month-long designation permanent.

Where did the first Asians recorded in what is now the US, in 1587, come from?

Philippines: Filipino crewmen armed with swords and shields scouted ahead of a Spanish landing party at Morro Bay, California, on October 18, 1587; their galleon sailed on three days later.

Who was the first Asian woman to win an acting Academy Award, for 1957's Sayonara?

Miyoshi Umeki, a singer who had reached the United States only in 1955, was cast in Sayonara after becoming a regular on Arthur Godfrey's television variety show; she gave up acting for good in 1972.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was signed by which president?

Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, weeks after vetoing a harsher 20-year version; it was the first major US law to bar immigration by a specific national group.

Why was the Chinese Exclusion Act repealed in 1943?

Wartime alliance: China was fighting beside the United States and enemy propaganda kept citing the ban, so Congress repealed it in December 1943; the Magnuson Act still let in only about 105 Chinese immigrants a year.

Which 1898 Supreme Court case established that a child born in the US to Chinese parents was a citizen?

United States v. Wong Kim Ark began when a California-born man was refused re-entry after visiting his parents in China; the Court ruled 6-2 that the Fourteenth Amendment made him a citizen at birth.

Which group did the Supreme Court's 1923 Thind ruling declare ineligible for naturalisation?

Indian Americans: Thind, a WWI Army veteran, argued he was 'Caucasian', but the Court held he was not a 'white person' in common understanding, making immigrants from India ineligible for citizenship.

Which president signed Executive Order 9066, the basis for interning Japanese Americans?

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942; its text named no ethnic group, yet the Army used it to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast, most of them US citizens.

Roughly how many people were displaced under Executive Order 9066?

Roughly 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast and held in ten inland camps such as Manzanar, far more than the German or Italian Americans ever interned.

Who defied the internment order, lost his 1944 Supreme Court case, and was vindicated decades later?

Fred Korematsu's wartime conviction was vacated by a federal court in 1983 after evidence emerged that the government had withheld reports undercutting its claim of military necessity.

Which president gave the internment resister who lost his 1944 Supreme Court case the Medal of Freedom in the 1990s?

Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998; after September 11 the same man filed Supreme Court briefs for Guantanamo detainees, warning against repeating the wartime wrong.

Which president signed the late-1980s Civil Liberties Act, apologising for wartime internment and paying reparations?

Ronald Reagan signed the act on August 10, 1988, saying 'here we admit a wrong'; the $20,000 payments to each surviving detainee began two years later, each sent with a signed presidential apology.

A 1983 federal commission blamed the internment on race prejudice, failed political leadership and what else?

War hysteria: the commission's report, Personal Justice Denied, found the camps were not justified by military necessity, and five years later Congress answered with an apology and payments to survivors.

Who was the first Asian American elected to the US Congress, taking his House seat in 1957?

Dalip Singh Saund, a Punjab-born farmer and local judge, beat the famous aviator Jacqueline Cochran for a California House seat in 1956, seven years after he became a US citizen.

Hiram Fong became the first Asian American US senator in 1959, representing which state?

Hawaii sent Hiram Fong to the Senate when it became a state in 1959; he had shined shoes as a boy to help his family before earning a Harvard law degree and going into politics.

Which landmark law did Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, co-author?

Title IX bars sex discrimination in federally funded education and opened school sports to women; Mink had turned to law and politics after medical schools rejected her applications.

Senator Daniel Inouye lost his right arm serving in which famed WWII unit?

The 442nd Infantry Regiment, a mostly Japanese American unit, is where Daniel Inouye lost his right arm to a grenade while leading an assault in Italy in April 1945; he received the Medal of Honor in 2000.

Which airport was renamed in Daniel Inouye's memory?

Honolulu International took the name of Daniel K. Inouye in 2017; after Pearl Harbor he was classed an 'enemy alien' and barred from enlisting, then volunteered in 1943 and later spent 53 years in Congress.

Kamala Harris, the first Asian American vice president, graduated from which historically Black university?

Howard University, in Washington, was the choice of a student whose mother had left India at 19 to study at Berkeley and went on to become a breast cancer researcher.

Who was the first Asian American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, as Labor Secretary in 2001?

Elaine Chao arrived from Taiwan at eight speaking no English; she went on to run the Labor Department for all eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, the only cabinet member to stay that long.

Norman Mineta, the first East Asian American cabinet secretary, had earlier been mayor of which city?

San Jose elected Norman Mineta mayor in 1971; three decades later, as Transportation Secretary on September 11, 2001, he ordered every one of the thousands of planes over the United States to land.

Activist Yuri Kochiyama was famously photographed cradling which dying leader in 1965?

Malcolm X was shot at New York's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965; Kochiyama, held in an Arkansas camp during the war, had befriended him in 1963 and ran to the stage while others fled.

Larry Itliong led Filipino farmworkers out on strike in 1965 against which crop's producers?

Delano table grapes: Itliong's mostly Filipino union walked out of the vineyards in September 1965, and it took five years of striking and an international boycott before the growers signed contracts.

Whose union joined Larry Itliong's 1965 strike within weeks?

Cesar Chavez let his mostly Mexican members vote, and they chose to join the Filipino strikers; the two unions later merged as the United Farm Workers, with Itliong as Chavez's assistant director.

What was Larry Itliong's nickname?

Seven Fingers: Itliong was missing three fingers, lost by one account in an Alaskan cannery accident; he had left home for the United States at 15 with only a sixth-grade education.

Native Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku won Olympic gold in which event at Stockholm in 1912?

100-metre freestyle: Kahanamoku won it in Stockholm and again in Antwerp in 1920, collecting five Olympic medals across three Games while popularising surfing worldwide.

Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian American in space, died aboard which shuttle?

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven aboard, and no shuttle flew again until September 1988; Onizuka had made his first spaceflight a year earlier.

Who became the first Indian-born woman in space, flying aboard a NASA shuttle in 1997?

Kalpana Chawla studied aeronautical engineering in India although her professors urged her to choose another subject, then moved to the United States; she died on her second mission in 2003.

Which five-time world champion figure skater served as US ambassador to Belize from 2022?

Michelle Kwan became the State Department's first public diplomacy envoy in 2006 and spent a decade on that work before the Senate confirmed her for Belize in September 2022.

Which fashion designer first chased an Olympic place as a competitive figure skater?

Vera Wang competed at the 1968 US championships but fell short of the Olympic team, so she turned to fashion, working at Vogue and Ralph Lauren before making her name with bridal gowns.

Who is considered the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood?

Anna May Wong had her first lead in The Toll of the Sea (1922), yet MGM passed her over for the Chinese heroine of The Good Earth; Luise Rainer took the part and won an Oscar for it.

Bruce Lee founded which hybrid martial arts philosophy in the 1960s?

Jeet Kune Do, 'the way of the intercepting fist', grew out of the Wing Chun that Lee had learned in Hong Kong and first taught to friends in Seattle.

Angel Island, where an immigration station detained Asian arrivals from 1910 to 1940, lies in which bay?

San Francisco Bay: the island station held Chinese arrivals for weeks or months under the Exclusion Act; a fire destroyed its administration building in 1940 and hastened the move to the mainland.

How did Chinese detainees at the Angel Island immigration station famously voice their despair?

Carving poems into the walls: some 200 Chinese poems survive in the barracks, which were due to be demolished until a park ranger noticed the carvings in 1970.

Which railroad's roadbed, bridges and tunnels were built mainly by thousands of Chinese workers?

Central Pacific crews were mostly Chinese; in June 1867 thousands of them stopped work for a week, demanding better pay and shorter hours, until the company cut off their food supplies.

Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 law ending national-origins immigration quotas at which landmark?

The Statue of Liberty: at its base on October 3, 1965, Johnson called the Hart-Celler Act 'not a revolutionary bill', yet it ended four decades of quotas that had all but shut out Asian immigrants.

Vincent Chin, whose 1982 killing galvanised Asian American activism, was beaten to death near which city?

Detroit: Chin was beaten with a baseball bat in June 1982 by a Chrysler supervisor and his laid-off stepson; a witness said one of them blamed people like him for lost car jobs, and neither man went to prison.

Wataru Misaka became the first non-white player in the league now called the NBA in 1947, joining which team?

New York Knicks: they drafted the 5-foot-7 guard after he helped Utah win the 1947 NIT in their home city, where he recalled the crowds cheering for him, but cut him after only a few games.

Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win the Best Actress Oscar for which film?

Everything Everywhere All at Once won Yeoh the Oscar at 60 for playing a struggling laundromat owner; accepting it, she told women not to let anybody say they are past their prime.

Which former Goonies child star won an Oscar in 2023?

Ke Huy Quan, who left Vietnam by boat at seven, quit acting when the roles dried up and worked behind the camera; seeing Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 persuaded him to try again.

Chloé Zhao became the second woman ever to win the Best Director Oscar for which film?

Nomadland won Zhao the Best Director Oscar in April 2021, the first for a woman of colour; she cast real van-dwelling nomads such as Linda May and Swankie to play versions of themselves.

Taiwanese director Ang Lee's first English-language film was which 1995 adaptation?

Sense and Sensibility was scripted by its own star, Emma Thompson, in her screenwriting debut, and the script won her an Oscar; Lee later won Best Director for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi.

Which president's proclamation changed 'Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month' to 'Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month'?

Barack Obama's first proclamation adopted the new wording after George W. Bush's had kept the older name through 2008; in 2021 Joe Biden's widened it again to name Native Hawaiians.

Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson's mother, Ata, belongs to which Pacific Islander community?

Samoan: Johnson first wrestled as Rocky Maivia, a ring name joining his father's with that of his grandfather, the Samoan wrestler Peter 'High Chief' Maivia, whom he looked up to as a boy.

The 1907-08 Gentlemen's Agreement curbed labour emigration to the US from which country?

Japan: under the 1907-08 Gentlemen's Agreement, Tokyo stopped issuing passports to labourers bound for the US mainland, in return for an end to the segregation of Japanese pupils in California schools.

Sammy Lee, the first Asian American man to win Olympic gold, later coached which diving great to his first Olympic medal?

Greg Louganis lived with Lee's family before winning platform silver at 16 in 1976; Lee himself had trained over a sandpit because his local pool admitted non-white swimmers only one day a week.

Kristi Yamaguchi gave up which discipline to win 1992 Olympic singles gold?

Pairs skating: Yamaguchi and Rudy Galindo were US champions in 1989 and 1990 before she dropped the event to train for singles alone, winning the world title in 1991 and Olympic gold a year later.

Amy Tan is best known for which 1989 novel, filmed in 1993?

The Joy Luck Club took shape after Tan's 1987 trip to China with her mother, who went to see the daughters she had left behind almost 40 years earlier; the journey pushed Tan to finish the stories.

Which architect designed the glass pyramid that opened at the Louvre in 1989?

I. M. Pei, the Chinese-born American architect, saw French critics attack his glass design for five years, yet crowds streamed in when President Mitterrand opened it in March 1989.

Which memorial did Maya Lin design at 21, while still a Yale undergraduate?

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial began as a class project; her V-shaped black wall beat more than 1,400 other entries in 1981 and drew fierce criticism before it was built.

Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?

Parity: Wu's 1956 cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment showed the weak force distinguishes left from right; the 1957 Nobel went to theorists Lee and Yang, who had proposed the test.

Jerry Yang co-founded which internet company after studying electrical engineering at Stanford?

Yahoo began in 1994 as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', a directory Yang built with fellow Stanford graduate student David Filo; the company incorporated in 1995.

Haing S. Ngor won an Oscar for his acting debut as journalist Dith Pran in which 1984 film?

The Killing Fields: Ngor, a Cambodian doctor who had himself survived the Khmer Rouge, had never acted before a casting agent spotted him in Los Angeles, yet he won Best Supporting Actor.

Senator Tammy Duckworth lost both legs in 2004 when what was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade?

Her Black Hawk helicopter was hit over Iraq while she was co-piloting it; in 2018 she became the first senator to give birth in office, and the Senate changed its rules so she could bring her baby to votes.

Sunisa Lee, the 2020 Olympic all-around gymnastics champion, was the first Olympian from which community?

Hmong American: Lee grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and practised as a girl on a balance beam her father built for her; she took up gymnastics at six, late for an elite gymnast.

Chloe Kim won Olympic gold at 17 in 2018, and again in 2022, in which snowboarding event?

Halfpipe: Kim all but sealed the 2018 title on her first run, tweeted between runs that she was 'hangry', then landed back-to-back 1080s; in 2022 she became the first woman with two Olympic halfpipe golds.

Which treat served in Chinese American restaurants closely resembles a cracker made in Kyoto since the 19th century?

Fortune cookie look-alikes are sold near Kyoto's Fushimi Inari shrine, and the American version most likely began with Japanese immigrants in California around 1900.

Andrew and Peggy Cherng turned a 1983 food-court stall in a California mall into which Chinese American chain?

Panda Express grew out of the Cherngs' sit-down Panda Inn after the Glendale Galleria's managers invited them to try a fast-food version in the mall's food court.

Peter Tsai, a Taiwanese American professor in Tennessee, patented a technique vital to which pandemic essential?

N95 masks trap particles with the electrostatically charged filter fabric he patented in 1995, and Tsai came out of retirement during the COVID-19 pandemic to study how the scarce respirators could be sterilized and reused.

Jensen Huang, a Taiwan-born engineer who washed dishes at Denny's as a teenager, co-founded which chip maker in 1993?

Nvidia was planned at a Denny's too: Huang met co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem at the diner because it was quieter than home and had cheap coffee.

Minoru Yamasaki, the Seattle-born son of Japanese immigrants, was the architect of which New York landmark?

World Trade Center towers got their famously narrow windows from Yamasaki's own fear of heights; he won the commission in 1962.

Tyrus Wong, a Chinese American artist inspired by Song dynasty landscapes, set the visual style of which Disney film?

Bambi took its soft, sparse forests from Wong's pastels, yet he was fired shortly after finishing the film, in the fallout from the Disney animators' strike.

The ukulele, an emblem of Hawaiian music, grew out of small guitars brought by immigrants from which country?

Portugal's islands of Madeira and the Azores sent the immigrants whose machete and cavaquinho became the ukulele in the 1880s; the Hawaiian name roughly means 'jumping flea'.

Ajay Bhatt, who studied engineering in Baroda before joining Intel in 1990, is best known for which computer connector?

USB made Bhatt an unlikely celebrity: a 2009 Intel advert had an actor play him as an office rock star, and Conan O'Brien's show parodied it.

Norman Mineta ordered every plane over the United States to land on 9/11 as secretary of which department?

Transportation was his brief, and with 4,546 aircraft aloft he shouted down the phone to the FAA to bring all the planes down, an order nobody had ever given before.

Taipei-born Steve Chen, an early PayPal employee, co-founded which video site with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005?

YouTube made Chen its chief technology officer, and in October 2006, less than two years after the launch, he and Hurley sold the site to Google for $1.65 billion.

Which chief from the island of Hawaiʻi brought all the Hawaiian Islands under one kingdom by 1810?

Kamehameha I finished the job by negotiation rather than battle: after storms wrecked his invasion canoes, the ruler of Kauaʻi agreed in 1810 to a peaceful union.

Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, wrote which enduring song years before taking the throne?

Aloha ʻOe came to her on horseback around 1878: riding home from a ranch on Oʻahu, the princess saw a tender farewell embrace and began humming the tune.

The Chamorro are the indigenous people of which Pacific island, a US territory since the Spanish–American War?

Guam was captured from Spain in 1898, and the name Chamorro itself began as a Spanish label for the islanders of the Marianas.

The canoe Hōkūleʻa revived Polynesian wayfinding in 1976 by sailing from Hawaii, without instruments, to which island?

Tahiti was reached using only traditional navigation, and in 1980 Nainoa Thompson repeated the voyage as the first Native Hawaiian in modern times to guide a canoe that far unaided.

Which Hawaiian dish of diced raw fish takes its name from a word meaning to slice or cut crosswise?

Poke began as cut-offs from the day's catch, eaten raw with sea salt as a snack; served over rice it becomes the poke bowl.

The best-known Hawaiian musubi, a block of rice wrapped in dried seaweed, is topped with a grilled slice of what?

Spam musubi borrows its shape from Japanese onigiri, and the tinned meat became a Hawaiian staple during and after World War II.

Hawaii-born Chad Rowan, fighting as Akebono, became the first foreign-born grand champion in which sport?

Sumo had never promoted a wrestler born outside its homeland to yokozuna, its highest rank, until Akebono won two tournaments in a row.

The 1886 equal-protection case Yick Wo v. Hopkins began when a city denied permits to which Chinese-owned businesses?

Laundries in wooden buildings needed a permit, and San Francisco turned down some 200 Chinese owners while granting every non-Chinese application but one.

Which Japanese American internment camp in California's Owens Valley did Ansel Adams photograph for Born Free and Equal?

Manzanar's residents had, in Adams's words, overcome defeat and despair by building a vital community in an arid but magnificent setting, and that is what he set out to show.

Taiwan-born David Ho, Time's Man of the Year for 1996, pioneered combination drug therapy against which virus?

HIV stopped being an automatic death sentence once Ho's team showed that hitting it early and hard with several drugs at once could keep it under lasting control.

The 1885 Rock Springs massacre, in which rioters killed at least 28 Chinese coal miners, struck which US territory?

Wyoming saw soldiers arrive within a week: six companies were sent in after the governor appealed to President Grover Cleveland for federal troops.

Filipino deserters from Spanish galleons founded Saint Malo, perhaps as early as the 1760s, in which present-day state?

Louisiana's bayous hid the village so well that the first published account came only in 1883, when journalist Lafcadio Hearn wrote it up for Harper's Weekly.

Student activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee coined the term 'Asian American' in 1968 at which university?

UC Berkeley students founded the Asian American Political Alliance with it, choosing the new name to replace 'Oriental' and to unite different Asian ethnic groups under one identity.

Chinese-born Mabel Ping-Hua Lee rode on horseback in a 1912 New York parade as a teenager to demand what?

Votes for women came to New York in 1917, but not to Lee: as a Chinese immigrant she was barred from citizenship and the ballot by the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Portland-born Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to fly for the US military, in which wartime unit?

WASP pilots flew under military command yet were classed as civilians, so when one died on duty, as Lee did in 1944, no military funeral was allowed.

Chinese immigrants who bought false family identities after a 1906 fire destroyed birth records were known as what?

Paper sons claimed on paper to be children of US citizens, and they memorised family trees and village histories to survive weeks of interrogation.

Gary Locke became the first Chinese American governor in US history when which state elected him in 1996?

Washington kept Locke as governor until 2005; he later served as US commerce secretary and as the first Chinese American ambassador to China.

Who became the first Asian American woman elected to the US Senate, winning a Hawaii seat in 2012?

Mazie Hirono is also the nation's first Buddhist senator, though she calls herself non-practising, and the first immigrant born in Asia to win a Senate seat.

In 1974's Lau v. Nichols, Chinese American families won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that schools must provide what?

English-language help had been denied to about 1,800 Chinese-speaking pupils, and the justices ruled that sitting through lessons they could not follow was no meaningful education.

Yo-Yo Ma, born in Paris to Chinese parents and founder of the Silk Road Ensemble, is a master of which instrument?

Cello lessons began with his father when Ma was four, and he named his ensemble after the ancient trade route that linked China and Europe.

Madras-born Indra Nooyi was chief executive of which food and drink giant from 2006 to 2018?

PepsiCo's executives got an unusual thank-you from Nooyi: she wrote to their parents and visited their homes to build a more personal connection.

Jeremy Lin, the star of 2012's Linsanity craze, got no athletic scholarships and played basketball for which university?

Harvard got him partly because Stanford, across the street from his high school, never offered a scholarship; a Harvard assistant coach first wrote him off as a Division III player.

Apolo Ohno, raised in Seattle by his Japanese-born father, won eight Winter Olympic medals in which sport?

Short track suited a former roller-skating kid: his father, a hair stylist working 12-hour shifts, had put him into swimming and skating at six to keep him from becoming a latchkey child.

Steven Chu, a 1997 Nobel laureate for cooling atoms with laser light, later led which US cabinet department?

Energy went to Chu in 2009 after a unanimous Senate confirmation, and in office he started the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy.

Which author, raised in Rhode Island by Bengali immigrant parents, won a Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies?

Jhumpa Lahiri won with her debut book, and she modelled the hero of its closing story on her father, a university librarian; her novel The Namesake later became a film.

Nam June Paik, the Seoul-born artist who built robots out of television sets, is considered the founder of what?

Video art's founder also gets credit for the first use, in 1974, of the term 'electronic super highway' to describe the future of telecommunications.

Maxine Hong Kingston blended memoir with traditional Chinese folktales in which 1976 book about her girlhood?

The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Time named it one of the top nonfiction books of the 1970s even as critics disputed its genre.

The first Sikh house of worship in the United States opened in 1912 in which California farming city?

Stockton's gurdwara, founded by the Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society, became a benefactor of the Ghadar Party, the movement of Indians abroad to end British rule in India.

Which Filipino-born writer is best known for the 1946 semi-autobiographical book America Is in the Heart?

Carlos Bulosan was largely forgotten for two decades after his death, until young Asian American activists rediscovered the book and had it republished in 1973.

Which wrestler turned film star, whose mother is Samoan, made his WWF debut under the ring name Rocky Maivia?

Dwayne Johnson's first ring name joined those of his father, Rocky Johnson, and his grandfather Peter Maivia, both professional wrestlers; he soon dropped it to become the Rock.

George Takei, Star Trek's Sulu, turned his childhood in wartime internment camps into which Broadway musical?

Allegiance, which Takei called his legacy project, reached Broadway in 2015; as a boy he was first housed in converted horse stables at a racetrack before being sent to the camps.

Which 2018 romantic comedy, adapted from a Kevin Kwan novel, starred Constance Wu, Henry Golding and Awkwafina?

Crazy Rich Asians was the first film from a major Hollywood studio in 25 years to feature a majority cast of Chinese descent in a modern setting.

Which ABC sitcom about a Taiwanese American family in 1990s Orlando was based on chef Eddie Huang's memoir?

Fresh Off the Boat was the first network sitcom starring an Asian American family since Margaret Cho's All-American Girl in 1994; in development it was titled Far East Orlando.

Hawaii-born Auliʻi Cravalho was a 14-year-old high school freshman when Disney cast her to voice which heroine?

Moana nearly went to someone else: Cravalho had not planned to audition at all, and the casting director says she was the last of hundreds of actresses to try out.

Steven Yeun earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination as a Korean immigrant starting a farm in Arkansas in which film?

Minari takes its name from the water celery the grandmother plants by a creek, praising how resilient it is; the role made Yeun the first East Asian American nominated for Best Actor.

Which comic actor from The Hangover and Community practiced internal medicine at a California hospital before fame?

Ken Jeong earned his M.D. in 1995 and treated patients at a Kaiser Permanente hospital for several years before switching to entertainment full time.

Which pop star, born Peter Hernandez to a Filipino mother, was known across Hawaii as a child for impersonating Elvis?

Bruno Mars was performing regularly with his family's band by the age of four, and a local weekly dubbed him Little Elvis.

Guangdong-born James Wong Howe won two Academy Awards, for The Rose Tattoo and Hud, in which Hollywood craft?

Cinematography brought Howe 10 Oscar nominations across a career of more than 130 films, after he had come to America from China as a small child.

Which actor went from a childhood hospital ward straight to an Arizona internment camp and later played Mr. Miyagi?

Pat Morita spent most of nine years in hospital with spinal tuberculosis before joining his interned family, and The Karate Kid later brought him an Oscar nomination.

Grammy-winning singer Norah Jones, born in Manhattan in 1979, is the daughter of which Bengali sitar master?

Ravi Shankar and Jones were estranged for a time; she later travelled to New Delhi to be with him and wrote material there that ended up on her album The Fall.