AAPI Heritage Trivia
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110 free AAPI Heritage trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free AAPI Heritage trivia questions with answers. AAPI trivia for Heritage Month events, classrooms and team quizzes. The questions cover why May was chosen (Manjirō's arrival in 1843 and the golden spike in 1869), the laws that shaped Asian American life (the Chinese Exclusion Act, Executive Order 9066, Wong Kim Ark, Thind, Hart-Celler and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988), and the people who broke barriers: Dalip Singh Saund, Hiram Fong, Patsy Mink, Daniel Inouye, Norman Mineta, Elaine Chao and Kamala Harris. It also takes in activists Fred Korematsu, Yuri Kochiyama and Larry Itliong, Native Hawaiian Olympian Duke Kahanamoku, astronauts Ellison Onizuka and Kalpana Chawla, and cultural firsts from Anna May Wong and Bruce Lee to Michelle Yeoh, Chloé Zhao and Ang Lee. Easy questions come first; the harder ones will stretch history teachers. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the people, laws and events, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which month is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month observed in the United States?
May
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.
Q 02Which event of May 10, 1869 is one reason AAPI Heritage Month falls in May?
Completion of the transcontinental railroad
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.
Q 03What kind of American ship rescued the Japanese castaway Manjirō in 1841?
Whaler
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.
Q 04Which president signed the 1978 joint resolution creating the original Asian-Pacific Heritage Week?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 05Which president signed the 1990 law extending Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week to a full month?
George H. W. Bush
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.
Q 06Where did the first Asians recorded in what is now the US, in 1587, come from?
Philippines
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.
Q 07Who was the first Asian woman to win an acting Academy Award, for 1957's Sayonara?
Miyoshi Umeki
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.
Q 08The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was signed by which president?
Chester A. Arthur
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.
Q 09Why was the Chinese Exclusion Act repealed in 1943?
Wartime alliance
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.
Q 10Which 1898 Supreme Court case established that a child born in the US to Chinese parents was a citizen?
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
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.
Q 11Which group did the Supreme Court's 1923 Thind ruling declare ineligible for naturalisation?
Indian Americans
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.
Q 12Which president signed Executive Order 9066, the basis for interning Japanese Americans?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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.
Q 13Roughly how many people were displaced under Executive Order 9066?
125,000
Q 21Senator Daniel Inouye lost his right arm serving in which famed WWII unit?
The 442nd Infantry Regiment
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.
Q 22Which airport was renamed in Daniel Inouye's memory?
Honolulu International
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.
Q 23Kamala Harris, the first Asian American vice president, graduated from which historically Black university?
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.
Q 14Who defied the internment order, lost his 1944 Supreme Court case, and was vindicated decades later?
Fred Korematsu
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.
Q 15Which president gave the internment resister who lost his 1944 Supreme Court case the Medal of Freedom in the 1990s?
Bill Clinton
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.
Q 16Which president signed the late-1980s Civil Liberties Act, apologising for wartime internment and paying reparations?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 17A 1983 federal commission blamed the internment on race prejudice, failed political leadership and what else?
War hysteria
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.
Q 18Who was the first Asian American elected to the US Congress, taking his House seat in 1957?
Dalip Singh Saund
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.
Q 19Hiram Fong became the first Asian American US senator in 1959, representing which state?
Hawaii
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.
Q 20Which landmark law did Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, co-author?
Title IX
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.
Howard 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.
Q 24Who was the first Asian American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, as Labor Secretary in 2001?
Elaine Chao
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.
Q 25Norman Mineta, the first East Asian American cabinet secretary, had earlier been mayor of which city?
San Jose
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.
Q 26Activist Yuri Kochiyama was famously photographed cradling which dying leader in 1965?
Malcolm X
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.
Q 27Larry Itliong led Filipino farmworkers out on strike in 1965 against which crop's producers?
Delano table grapes
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.
Q 28Whose union joined Larry Itliong's 1965 strike within weeks?
Cesar Chavez
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.
Q 29What was Larry Itliong's nickname?
Seven Fingers
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.
Q 30Native Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku won Olympic gold in which event at Stockholm in 1912?
100-metre freestyle
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.