Generation Rising

CROWD: On strike, shut it down!

MAN: There's a strike going on here!

GORDON: It felt like the world was about to explode.

DAN: Retuning Vietnam veterans were telling us the truth about what was going on.

SCOTT: How do these atrocities get to be committed?

BRENDA: It felt great to be a part of this incredible ground-swell that was just enveloping the country.

LAUREEN: We wanted to start a school of ethnic studies to tell the true histories of the people who contributed and built this country.

EDILLOR: Filipino's were here, and we made a difference.

ALEX: They create the United Farm Workers and they became, in a sense, the west coast civil rights movement.

If a lot of people put their mind to it, they can win.

MAN: It was the first time the voices of Asian people in our generation were coming out.

NOBUKO: It was like a genie coming out of the bottle, you couldn't put us back in.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ MAN: One, two, three, testing, testing, one, two, three.

NARRATOR: In the 1960s, Asian Americans are looking at the world through a new lens.

Everything is in upheaval.

And anything is possible.

As the children of immigrants, Asians are trying to understand their role in America's history.

They are claiming their voice.

In the fields, on college campuses, and in the public square.

No one can imagine where these struggles will take them.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: California's Central Valley.

One of the richest agricultural regions of the United States and home to some of its poorest workers.

It is here where Asian Americans spark a farm labor movement that will galvanize the world.

For Alex Fabros, this story begins with World War II when his family immigrates from the Philippines.

Like many new arrivals, they rely on farm work to make ends meet.

FABROS: The family came to California in 1948, so my father's in the military, but on the weekends my dad would work out in the fields just to earn extra money so he could buy a house in Salinas.

Then in 1950, he buys a home in a part of Salinas where Asians are not allowed to own homes.

And they tell them, we don't want you in this neighborhood.

After we moved in, they would take stones and they'd break our windows.

My mother had brand new rose bushes.

They would come in and they tie ropes around the rose bushes, and they do wheelie's on the lawn.

There was this kid that had this dog and he'd sic that dog on me.

I'm about six years old and I'm running as fast as I can.

This dog is barking at my heels.

It's a German Shepherd.

So my father went around the neighborhood.

He had a pistol and he banged the doors and said the fight's between you and me and not my family.

And nobody bothered us after my father did that.

Years later I enrolled in a local junior college, but I basically flunked out.

My father said, you're going to go work on your grandfather's farm until you decide exactly what it is that you want to do.

You've got to learn what life really is like on the outside.

So I became a migrant farm worker in Delano, California.

NARRATOR: Alex joins the army of farm laborers that crisscross California harvesting crops.

Working long hours for low wages, they're not protected by labor laws and can be fired at any time.

FABROS: You get up at 4:00 in the morning.

You're hoeing, you're bent over, it's cold, it's wet out there.

But these guys are working hard for $1.25 cents an hour.

These are really old Filipino men.

We called them Manongs.

Manongs is a term of respect that we give to people who are older than us.

In the evenings, these old men would sit outside and they'd tell stories about what it was like to grow up in California in the 1930s.

They'd say, "Junior, go back to school.

Become something, become someone," you know, "Don't end up like us."

NARRATOR: Very few Filipino women were able to immigrate to the US, and Filipino men were barred from marrying white women.

As a result, an entire generation is forced to live out their lives as bachelors deprived of family.

But there are some exceptions.

LORRAINE: I'm half Filipino and half Mexican.

My father met my mother working in the fields and he didn't speak Spanish and she didn't speak English.

And so my father learned how to speak Spanish so that he could get to know her.

Had my father not met my mother, he would have been like the Manongs.

I was born in a labor camp.

It's a mile and a half from Delano.

It was a two bedroom, barrack, bunk house.

There were seven of us and then my mom and dad.

The bathroom was out back, which we shared with two other families.

So you get to know your neighbors well.

Working in the fields you work in the fields from when you're a child.

There were no labor laws set that prevents parents bringing their children to work.

It gives them one less thing to worry about if your children are out there working with you.

FABROS: Lot of Filipino men wanted me to become the person they could not become.

They're telling me, we'll save money for you to go to college.

All these old men had that dream of having us young kids out of the field, not to go through what they did for the last 20, 30 years.

NARRATOR: By the mid 1960s, working conditions have gone from bad to worse.

The Manongs reach a tipping point, and are willing to put their jobs and lives on the line to establish a union.

FABROS: We didn't have medical benefits.

When one of our guys falls down and he gets hurt.

Someone's got to cover his benefits.

We didn't have a health plan.

When these guys get old, we want to have a pension plan.

EDILLOR: Larry Itliong was president of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee known as AWOC.

Summer of '65 he began to talk about organizing, improving the working conditions and increasing the salaries.

LARRY: We feel that we farm workers should have an organization of our own.

FABROS: One of the things that most people forget is that it was the Filipinos in September, 1965 who started the grape strike, not the Mexicans.

(overlapping chatter) EDILLOR: The strike happened mainly because of Larry Itliong's will and determination.

He was a trained labor leader.

He was not a polished speaker.

LORRAINE: I was 13 years old the day that my family went out on strike.

I remember we were working, when my father says, "Come on, we're leaving."

I said, "We're leaving?

It's 10:00 in the morning."

So we left.

LARRY: To go on strike, you suffer a lot of hardship.

Maybe you'll get hungry, maybe you're going to lose your car, maybe you're going to lose your house.

LORRAINE: And I remember leaving the field and seeing the strikers, so the Filipinos.

NARRATOR: But the Filipinos face a dilemma.

As they strike for a union, the farmers bring in Mexican workers to replace them.

FABROS: It's one of the things I learned that the farmers like to do.

They liked to pit the Mexicans against the Filipinos.

You're going to be fighting for the same pot of gold.

NARRATOR: Many Mexican laborers have already joined the National Farm Workers Association, led by the charismatic Cesar Chavez.

FABROS: I remember meeting at the Filipino community hall in Delano.

All the labor contractors were there.

A lot of the farm workers were there and you're trying to decide, "Are we end the strike or are we going to negotiate with the Mexicans to join us?"

Then Larry Itliong, he gets up and says, "I'm going to go talk to the Mexicans."

LORRAINE: When the strike happens, Cesar Chavez wasn't really quite ready.

But Cesar also knew that if they didn't join Filipinos then, then it would never happen.

NARRATOR: Larry approaches Cesar Chavez and his colleague Dolores Huerta, another powerful organizer.

DELORES: Come on out, brothers.

We are waiting for you.

NARRATOR: As one of AWOC's cofounders, her relationship with Larry and the Filipinos goes back years.

FABROS: And then a couple of days later we're at this church.

They're talking about the strike.

They're discussing, "Should we go on strike or not go on strike?"

Now all of a sudden it says "huelga."

I said, "What the heck's 'huelga'?"

Because I thought they were saying hell no.

They said, "No, It means strike.

We're going on strike."

So the Mexicans joined us.

LARRY: We are your brothers and sisters over here.

Come on.

Come on out!

FABROS: They take the Mexican labor movement and the Filipino labor movement, they create the United Farm Workers.

LORRAINE: They really pushed that the workers eat together, they have meetings together, that they were at picket lines together.

It was only because they become one union, that they were able to win the strike.

EDILLOR: Larry knew that his style was not good PR.

He's aggressive.

He wore his emotions on his sleeve.

He needed Cesar's charisma, his ability to speak.

CHAVEZ: Was going to be built by farm workers.

It's going to be for farm workers.

EDILLOR: Whereas Larry wanted to get down and dirty, he wanted to work out in the fields.

FABROS: Delano became more than a farm labor dispute.

It became, in a sense, the West coast civil rights movement for people of color.

All of a sudden people started equating what's happening in Delano to the black civil rights movement on the East coast.

You started having these politicians coming out there.

You have Robert Kennedy calling hearings as to why the white growers are not going to get people of color these benefits that they're asking for.

Not only are you boycotting in Delano, now you're sending groups and college students and people who believe in a labor union and equal rights to do a secondary grape strike.

Now they're boycotting in New York.

They're boycotting in Montreal, in Canada.

They're boycotting in Europe.

They're boycotting California grapes.

LARRY: The strike and boycott against grapes will continue.

LORRAINE: It took five years to finally get the growers to sign a contract.

MAN: Boycott grapes!

Boycott grapes!

LORRAINE: Growers couldn't sell their products and so they had to sign.

MAN: Larry Itliong, what do you have to say about seeing grapes at the stores after all this time?

LARRY: Well I think that's it's great and thanks to the co-op store that have been supporting the grape boycott to help bring about justice, and dignity, and help the farm workers.

FABROS: Working in the fields, that's where I realized that if a lot of people put their mind to it, they can win.

I left field working behind me completely, but I never left the memories of these guys.

My decision to leave was made for me, not because I wanted to leave, but because I had received my draft notice.

NARRATOR: Alex Fabros ships out for Vietnam, one of thousands of Asian Americans who will serve in the most polarizing and disruptive global event of the 1960s.

REPORTER: In South Vietnam, the seemingly endless war against the communists is once again in the forefront of world attention.

REPORTER 2: As of today, there are 507,000 American troops in Vietnam.

FABROS: I had a lot of nightmares about Vietnam, that I don't want to talk about.

NARRATOR: This is the fourth war the United States has fought in Asia in only 60 years.

As in Korea, the country's perceived enemy is communism.

Many Asian Americans are forced to confront their racial identity in a whole new light.

SCOTT: I was pretty wild in high school.

I used to get in a lot of trouble.

I decided, you know, I need to get out of LA.

So I joined the Marine Corps.

The idea of Vietnam didn't even cross my mind.

I was 18.

At that age, I didn't think past a week in front of me.

MARINE: Right face!

SCOTT: Soon as I got to boot camp, the drill instructors told us, you know all you guys in this platoon are probably going to end up in Vietnam and half you aren't going to make it back.

MIKE: When I decided to enlist, it was not, uh, deeply thought out.

When I went to boot camp, we had to line up on these yellow footprints in single file and they instructed us to go tallest to shortest.

Four drill instructors pulled out the two biggest guys in the front and they beat them.

Beat them down, kicked them, they were bleeding.

I was thinking, "What the f... "What have I done?"

I mean, this is, like, a big mistake.

During one of these classes, my drill instructor says, "Private Nakayama stand up."

Stood up at attention and he goes, "Turn around."

So I turned around and he goes, "All right everybody.

This is what a gook looks like.

You remember this, because they're going to come after you."

SCOTT: I arrived in Vietnam in October of 1967.

I was stationed at Khe Sanh and Hill 881 Tet offensive of 1968.

It was the biggest battle of the war.

REPORTER: The pressure at Khe Sanh has lasted a week now.

A bad week for the marines here.

A week in which they've suffered under the guns of the North Vietnamese in these surroundings hills.

SCOTT: The hill I was on, 881, we had 100% casualty rate.

That means out of the 400 Marines initially stationed on the hill, 400 Marines were either killed or wounded in the three months I was there.

(gunfire) Not a fun place to be.

MIKE: We would go out for 30 to 60 days into the jungle.

We're trying to draw out the North Vietnamese army into battles.

I was 11 months there and we had set up a perimeter next to a hill.

Boom.

We got hit with rockets.

I got hit from a grenade explosion in my shoulder.

And I'm thinking, "I'm going to die here."

I got taken off the helicopter on the stretcher.

The treatment tables are in the back.

There's doctors and they're treating people.

They treated him, they treated him.

They left me and I was the last one.

I said, "Hey man.

When you guys are going to treat me?"

And he says, "Oh you should have told us you were American.

We thought you was a gook."

NARRATOR: Asian American women also serve in Vietnam.

Lily Adams is Chinese Italian from the Bronx.

When she tells her father she's enlisted in the Army, it's the first time she sees him cry.

LILY: I was in nursing school.

An army nurse recruiter came to visit our school once.

And she made it sound pretty good because it would pay for my last year of nursing school.

I would have some money in my pocket.

I got orders for Vietnam.

I was 20.

It was the town of Cu-Chi and we had built a giant military base.

We were told it was the busiest hospital in Vietnam.

My first day, it's this guy that said, "Well, I'm Doctor so-and-so.

And we could, like, kind of, pair up, spend some 12 months together."

And uh....

I, I, I basically worked to contain my anger.

And I said, "Thank you very much.

That's very nice of you, but I'm not interested."

That was my first day.

I was mistaken for a Vietnamese prostitute.

If I wanted to walk around the compound, I had to be in uniform.

Even when I was in uniform, sometimes these guys would ask me if I wanted to do whatever for so much money.

♪ ♪ I was afraid of American GI's because they really believed that we were there for them.

I had to be vigilant, very vigilant, on base, off base or whatever.

SCOTT: When I was there, the Vietnamese people would come up and try to trade for stuff, you know.

Some of the Vietnamese people looked at me and said, "Hey, you, same, same Vietnam," and for a minute I thought, "What are they talking about?"

Then I got it, you know, "Hey, you look like me, and you're just like us."

We called them Gooks.

That's what I thought they were, and then when he said that to me, then I thought, "Well wait a minute, I must be a Gook also."

FABROS: I'm 22 years old.

I'm a Sergeant.

I was assigned to a unit in Vietnam that required translators.

♪ ♪ One day Sergeant C calls me up and says, "Al, they think they've got a VC, that they just captured in the village."

Well, we went out there and the Vietnamese security people had already worked him over a little bit, and I squatted down next to him, so we were eye to eye, and I asked him in Vietnamese, "Why are you fighting us?"

He looks right at me, right in my eyes.

"Why are you here?

This is my country.

Why are you here?"

I think right at that moment I realized that, "Okay, Alex, why are you here?"

GORDON: 1968 is a transformative year in American history, specifically for Asian Americans.

Many of us were deeply affected by gruesome images of death and destruction.

At the same time, there was upheaval in America, cities were exploding and Dr. Martin Luther King would be assassinated.

There were other killings, political murders.

It felt like the world was about to explode.

DAN: The younger generations started taking positions, very strong on what was happening in Vietnam, and it was because we had so many returning Vietnam veterans who were telling us the truth about what was going on.

REPORTER: The war in Vietnam, the problems of race and the cities, these are issues facing the citizens of the United States, and they are issues vividly facing the students on an urban campus.

NARRATOR: As the school year begins, students are trying to make sense of a world turned upside down.

At San Francisco State, a college with a mostly white student body, young people of color question whether their own education is failing them.

They demand more minority faculty and a curriculum that reflects their lives and concerns and they want it now.

Students like Dan Gonzales, Penny Nakatsu and Laureen Chew, all of them, 18 or 19 years old.

LAUREEN: I grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Growing up in Chinatown was a very nurturing experience.

You had a community that you interacted with on a daily basis.

I was accepted into San Francisco State in 1966, and that's only because my mom refused to have me go away for college.

She thought the worst, like I would be some wayward woman having free sex everywhere or something like that.

NARRATOR: Galvanized by the civil rights movement and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., student activists organize to have more classes in black history and culture.

HARE: We're trying to start a black studies, a program at state college, and I think that it has the greatest and last hope to solve the educational problems of the black race.

DAN: The demand for black studies was influencing Asian Americans.

We started reflecting on our, our own experiences.

And saying, "Yeah, you know, we need to have something like that for ourselves."

MAN: For your information: Philippines refers to the country, and Filipino refers to the people.

This is exactly what we want.

To study our Filipino culture and history.

LAUREEN: I was trying to figure out who I was, and then I met this other Chinese girl who grew up in South City and she was much more adventurous, and she was the one that asked me to go to this meeting.

NARRATOR: Laureen joins the impromptu gatherings that are springing up all over campus.

Black and Brown students call for solidarity with the people of colonized Latin America, Asia, and Africa, what they call the Third World.

MAN: This is the first time in the history of all existing colleges in the United States that we have dissolved class barriers between people of the Third World.

LAUREEN: It was a real "A-ha" for me, saying like, "Wow, you know, they're not Chinese, but we have similar experiences, in terms of the dominant culture not validating who we are."

DAN: African Americans had been here for a long time.

Their civil rights movement was complemented by our perspective, for example, on internment, and the concentration camp experience of Japanese Americans.

On the exclusion, almost a century long exclusion.

NARRATOR: In 1968 Alex Fabros is serving in the Marines, but he has friends in college who are confronting these issues.

FABROS: Our story was not taught in the classrooms.

The Chinese built the railroads.

Okay.

That's it?

They didn't talk about the hardship.

They didn't talk about the exploitation.

They didn't talk about the Filipinos working in the fields.

They didn't talk about the farm labor strikes.

Total omission.

LAUREEN: That is what the Third World Liberation Front was about.

To tell the true histories of the people who contributed and built this country.

PENNY: History?

I never learned anything about the history of Asian Americans, or Japanese Americans, or camps.

That eventually led me to involve myself in political activism.

What we wanted to see was an educational institution that served the communities, served the people.

NARRATOR: Under the umbrella of the Third World Liberation Front, Asian, Latino, and Native American students, as well as progressive whites, join forces with the Black Student Union.

DAN: One of the major objectives was to start a School of Ethnic Studies.

We called it Third World Studies that would have the same status as other established schools on the campus.

NARRATOR: At first, the administration seems open to a School of Ethnic Studies, but students grow frustrated with what they see as empty promises.

After months of inaction by the university, the students call for a general strike on November 6th, 1968.

CROWD: On strike, shut it down.

On strike, shut it down.

On strike, shut it down.

PENNY: The BSU-TWLF demands, asks that a School of Third World Studies be formed that was based on a concept of self-determination.

We asked for students and faculty members to boycott, stop classes, stop business as usual.

LAUREEN: Our main thing on campus was to be disruptive, to force the administration to be responsive to the demands.

NARRATOR: Laureen and others used a variety of tactics to make their point.

They interrupt classes, form picket lines, and broadcast their demands by loud speaker.

Their goal, to shut the school down.

LAUREEN: I was with one group where people picked up the typewriter and threw it across the room, and students got all freaked out and started running out of the classroom, you know, because we were that passionate to start a School of Ethnic Studies.

♪ No more pigs on our campus ♪ ♪ The revolution has come ♪♪ NARRATOR: But behind the scenes students like Dan Gonzales are doing the hard work of building a brand new curriculum from scratch.

DAN: That was my major task, understanding how to put the courses together.

The Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans drafted their own curriculum proposals, and then we all met together as Asian Americans and talked about how we were going to start these courses.

PENNY: In those days the term Asian American didn't exist.

We were all Orientals.

1968, that was the first time that I heard the term Asian Americans.

MAN: There's a strike going on here, and that means that either you're on our side, or you against us.

NARRATOR: No one anticipates the magnitude of the strike.

From the start, the police come in force to shut down the protestors.

REAGAN: A little dissident group, with their 15 non-negotiable demands, you talk about negotiating.

I would call to your attention that the Black Student Union has declared that their demands are non-negotiable.

NARRATOR: Soon afterward, the state of California appoints a new president, S.I.

Hayakawa, an English professor at the college.

DAN: It was really clear to us that he was being used because he was a person of color, and if he could exercise his authority and power in a manner that was consistent with the Ronald Reagan way of dealing with campus upheaval, he was going to be very useful.

REPORTER: The new president, renowned as an expert in the meaning of language, decided early in the day to face his critics.

The communication failure was obvious.

Hayakawa took that matter, and the sound truck wiring, into his own hands.

MAN: Some of the militants have called you and Uncle Tom.

They say they thought that you would identify with the minority groups, such as the Blacks.

What is your answer to them?

HAYAKAWA: Well, I'm the first Japanese Uncle Tom in history.

I think it's kind of an achievement.

LAUREEN: He forbade any rallies on campus, that he threatened, "You can have a rally, I'm going to arrest all of you."

And that was kind of like, a turning point.

PENNY: The rally was going to be called at 12 noon.

LAUREEN: I heard all these people outside already saying the, "On strike, shut it down."

CROWD: On strike, shut it down.

On strike, shut it down.

On strike... PENNY: It all happened really quickly.

I saw the police come running up with their batons in hand.

MAN: Go to your classes.

Disperse from the center of the campus.

LAUREEN: Suddenly, there was like a military movement.

The TAC squad on horses, they came out from the gym and just like surrounded all of us.

(crowd chatter).

(crowd chatter).

But then it just got all quiet, and then at that point no one could get out.

The TAC squad just surrounded us.

We could not leave.

If you were in that circle, you are going to be arrested.

Al: There was over a thousand police, dogs, horses, Paddy wagon.

We will fight the oppressor on our terms, not theirs.

MAN: This morning, they're going to arraign 10 at a time.

All of those who were arrested out at San Francisco State College.

LAUREEN: I was not going to cop a plea.

I mean, my mother had a hissy fit.

"What are you doing, you know, getting arrested?

I have one child, whom I thought I raised and spent money to go to a high end Catholic school.

You should be like a saint."

NARRATOR: Laureen and a few other demonstrators argue their case in court.

But a jury sentences her to 20 days in prison.

LAUREEN: When I finally had to go to jail, she was devastated.

She came and visited me in jail.

I was so scared of being there.

You know when I saw her, I just started to cry, and then she did also.

You know, basically knowing that I shouldn't be there.

After I finished my 20 days, for the first time I heard her say something to defend me.

She said, "My daughter was not very smart, but I'll say this.

She did not hurt anybody, and what she wanted to do was to make a better world for people."

NARRATOR: The San Francisco State Strike is the longest student strike in US history.

After five months, the administration finally agrees to establish a School of Ethnic Studies.

The legacy of the strike defines a generation eager to change society, and assert a new identity as Asian Americans.

FABROS: It's just like the, the Filipinos and the Mexicans getting together to form a labor union.

Asian-American encompasses everybody.

I thought wow that's something.

People are finally starting to realize that we wear our race on our face.

NARRATOR: The Asian American movement bursts forth across the country.

In New Jersey, Gordon Chang is one of only five Asian students in his class at Princeton.

GORDON: It was the summer of 1969, when I came back to the Bay area and met a lot of the activists who had been at San Francisco State or at UC Berkeley.

It was a stunning moment for those of us, that we look at each other and all of a sudden found that we had so much in common.

If we were to transform in society, we had to move beyond the ivory tower gates, and to go into where the everyday people lived.

BRENDA: When we moved to New York we were told, "There's a budding Asian American movement.

You've got to really get involved in that."

JAN: You have to remember that there was not an Asian American sense before and it was just starting to gel.

The first thing we got involved with were these demonstrations.

GORDON: I remember my mother, I told her about going in anti-war demonstrations, and sharing with her my hope for a radical new world, and she was very upset.

She was almost crying, and she said, "This is their country.

They're just going to shoot you down."

And I said, "Well this is my country.

This is where I live and this is what I feel I must do."

BRENDA: It felt great to be a part of this groundswell of a movement that was just enveloping the country.

We were involved with Black, Asian, White, Latinos, and that was incredible.

And then there's this duo, Chris and Joanne, and they're singers, folk singers.

They sing about the Asian American experience.

LENNON: These are two young people that, they call themselves "Yellow Pearl".

Their grandparents were Japanese, I guess, and they're young singers called "Chris and Joanna" and they're beautiful singers and they have a story to tell, and they're going to come on down and do it.

Here they are, Yellow Pearl.

NOBUKO: Usually people know very little about Asians, and this is a song about our movement, about our people's plight in America.

♪ BOTH: We are the children of the migrant worker.

♪ ♪ We are the offspring of the concentration camp.

♪ ♪ Sons and daughters of the railroad builder who leave ♪ ♪ their stamp on America.

♪♪ NOBUKO: It was a very powerful thing to be able to do that for Asian Americans, for young people to be able to hear us sing these words because we had never had our own song.

♪ BOTH: Sing a song for ourselves, ♪ ♪ what have we got to lose.

♪ ♪ Sing a song for ourselves.

♪ ♪ We've got a right to choose.

♪♪ NOBUKO: And there's something about music that's a visceral thing.

It's emotional.

You can't do it in a speech.

You can't do it by reading a book.

(Taiko drumming) ♪ ♪ It was like a genie got me out of the bottle.

You couldn't put us back in.

You can't just have a leaflet, you can't just have a demonstration.

The art gives flesh and blood to the politics.

People were drawing, people were making posters, people were making films, people were writing, people were doing poetry.

LAWSON: I told you so, oh yes.

You take your old name back, Chano.

I told you so, oh yes.

Chano.

GORDON: I really appreciate the visual art, the poster art, but also the documentary film making that was I think so important in helping craft an Asian American identity.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Even as Asian American culture is blossoming, the war in Vietnam continues to rage.

Veterans returning home have to grapple with their role in the conflict.

SCOTT: Coming home was the biggest cultural shock.

Especially during the '60s.

You kind of went from "Leave it to Beaver" when I left, to the hippies and the radical antiwar movement when you get back.

I started going to LA City College.

Since I was a Vietnam veteran, and there weren't too many around, that subject came up a lot.

"Hey you were in Vietnam.

You know, you're Asian American.

You're a Marine Corps veteran.

What did you think about the war?"

MIKE: Before and during I didn't have a concept of the racist nature of the war.

Afterwards I was very aware.

It was such a traumatic and extreme experience I wanted to be able to understand what happened.

♪ GROUP: Bring em home.

Bring our brothers home.

♪♪ SCOTT: The Winter Soldier Investigation was put on by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

They were trying to get the opinion of the veterans, the people who actually fought in the war.

MIKE: It was a Holiday Inn with a large auditorium.

And there was tables set up in the front with about 15 chairs.

And then there was the audience.

So different groups of vets would go up and would talk about what atrocities they experienced or participated in.

We were all the non-whites.

And they never asked us to participate.

So when it was almost over we just went up and took over the tables and chairs and just started talking.

SCOTT: We all spoke and gave the perspective from each individual.

How did these atrocities get to be committed?

They just don't happen.

There's the whole thing of how they tell you, you know, the people over there aren't really people.

But they can't deny the testimony of all these dudes in the room.

NIXON: We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam.

REPORTER: Saigon, April the 30th 8:00.

The last American helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy prepares to lift off the last of the evacuees fleeing before the advancing communist army.

Tens of thousands of Vietnamese still struggle to escape their homeland for a new life elsewhere.

They are always arriving, these so-called boat people.

Sometimes as many as a thousand in one day.

NARRATOR: The war in Vietnam is officially over but its effects resonate for years to come.

A new generation of refugees from Southeast Asia will soon enrich the American experience.

NGUYEN: Typically when it comes to war we believe that it is the victors who write the history.

The Americans, for the most part, have gotten to write the history of this war.

Americans can't completely re-write the past to say they won the war, but they've put themselves at the center of the story.

So, even if it's a tragedy, in which they lose, they're the stars of the tragedy.

Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who died were Southeast Asians.

I really don't remember much about Vietnam.

My memory really begins coming here to the United States as a refugee.

My parents found an opportunity.

They opened a Vietnamese grocery store in downtown San Jose on East Santa Clara Street, which is the heart of the city.

My impression of San Jose is inseparable from the experiences of being a refugee.

I remember, when I was around 10 or 11 years old, walking down the street and seeing a sign in another store window that said, "Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese."

And I knew that this was directed at people like my parents.

My parents worked 12 to 14 hour days in the store almost every day of the year.

My parents were shot in that store on Christmas Eve...

So, for me... that sign will stay with me because it was a sign that was a story that was targeted at my parents and everybody like us.

So I swore one day that I would have an opportunity to re-write that sign, to write another story.

TRAN: I was born in 1974.

I was born in District 5, which is called Cholon.

It's like Chinatown in Vietnam.

Then my aunt, who had left in '78, sponsored our family, so we left in '83.

Grew up in southern California, in Santa Ana.

I had no awareness that the war had just happened.

Probably because my parents protected us from all of that.

And my dad, though he had gone to re-education camps, we didn't know much about that.

We didn't really talk much about that.

The only education I ever got from the Vietnam War was "Apocalypse Now," "Deer Hunter," "Platoon."

NGUYEN: Hollywood made literally dozens of movies about the war in Vietnam through the '70s and the '80s.

And they posed a real problem for me because I was a war fanatic.

And identifying with American soldiers.

My problem was that they were fighting Vietnamese people.

So, to see movies like, "Apocalypse Now," when I was 10 or 11, and to watch Vietnamese people being slaughtered, massacred, or raped in the case of other films, was really traumatic for me.

Coming to Berkeley as a student in the late 1980s was really a transformative moment for me.

I remember when I was being arrested and cuffed.

I was thinking...

I was looking at the floor and I was thinking, "God, this is what Berkeley's all about."

The first class I took there was Ronald Takaki's Intro to Asian American Studies.

He had just published his book, "Strangers from a Different Shore," which was the first major collective history of Asian Americans.

Most of us, in this classroom, had never heard of so many of the things that he was lecturing about.

They were Asian American students back then.

Now they've become the Asian American Studies professors.

I remember them telling us, "Well the '60s are going to happen again any moment now."

That was the 1990s.

We were convinced that that was going to happen.

They had committed their lives to academic knowledge but also this idea of the necessity of Asian American Studies as an activist practice.

And their classes were absolutely fundamental to me, in terms of turning me into a scholar but also into an Asian American.

NARRATOR: Ham Tran is also seeking to address the unspoken trauma experienced by Vietnamese Americans.

He raises $1.5 million from his community to make a film about the war from a Vietnamese point-of-view.

TRAN: Making "Journey From the Fall" we had an opportunity to tell its peoples' story.

The people who were involved.

(speaking in native language).

TRAN: Action.

When we were casting I didn't want to cast actors.

I was looking for real people who had had experience, within the community.

We saw, like, 600 something people.

People would come and then share their stories with us.

TRAN: My education was my audition process.

A lot of people telling me stories.

Hearing 500 stories within two weeks really just... To some people I felt like they had been waiting years to get this off their chest.

The woman who came to visit the re-education camp, to give the news to our main character, she shared with us the day that she went to visit him and how she slid her foot under the table and spoke with him.

The only way they had contact was through that.

It was such a beautiful moment.

I'm like, "Let's try to capture that on film."

NARRATOR: "Journey From the Fall" is embraced by the Vietnamese American community and considered a critical success.

Meanwhile Viet Thanh Nguyen is seeking a way to address the legacy of the war.

NGUYEN: I wanted to confront what had been done to us.

I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an activist, I wanted to be a scholar and I didn't want to give up any of those kinds of things.

FRANK: Tonight our guest is the author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

NGUYEN: I wanted to write a novel that evoked the fall of Saigon and the Vietnam War.

And to tell it from a perspective that we hadn't seen before.

NARRATOR: In 2015, Viet is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "The Sympathizer", a darkly comedic tale about an undercover communist agent whose loyalties are split between Vietnam and the United States.

MEYERS: Viet Thanh Nguyen, everybody.

NGUYEN: All this success was made possible by pioneering people.

FABROS: You got these young people, all under probably age 21, fighting to make change happen.

A lot of those people went on to become professionals.

Some became judges, some became lawyers, a few became professors.

NARRATOR: Former student activists Dan Gonzales and Laureen Chew become professors of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State.

After retiring from the military Alex Fabros would also study and teach Asian American history there.

50 years after the Third World Strike there are now dozens of ethnic studies programs across the country.

And Asian American Studies courses are taking root in unexpected places.

Today, volunteers teach a weekly course to inmates at San Quentin State Prison.

Students learn about Asian American history from Exclusion, to Civil Rights, to the war in Southeast Asia.

The program's motto: "If you know history, you know yourself."

On graduation day, students are recognized for their achievements and celebrate their gains.

(applause and cheers) CHUNG: I give to you the graduating class of Roots Super Cycle 5, cap 35.

Another person we want to celebrate today...

I'm going to bring Thanh Tran up to the stage here.

THANH: This entire ROOTS experience it's been nothing but love, inclusivity, and feeling like I finally have a family.

And that's tremendous.

My mother she's Vietnamese and black.

But the problem is I never got to know my mother because when I was two years old I was placed into foster care.

And I lost more than just my mom, I lost my roots.

I lost my only connection to my roots in America, because I had no other family here besides her.

I began to notice that it was more than just the Asian struggle, the Latinx and black struggle, these were stories about what it meant to be human.

And that's what ROOTS taught me.

So I want to thank the team for seeing the humanity in me, for seeing the humanity in our brothers, for bringing ROOTS to us, dedicating your free time to us, because for a lot of us we didn't have a family, we didn't have hope, and you give us that.

(applause) NGUYEN: 1968, when Asian Americans came into being, now that story's no longer new.

There should be a new story beyond that.

I'm committed to the new story.

A new generation will go off and do something that I might find offensive, or I might disagree with, or that I may just not understand.

That's fantastic.

That's a logical consequence of what we wanted to do as a part of an Asian American movement, to create a situation in which Asian Americans were free to do anything they wanted.

REPORTER: The verdict stunned everyone, four officers acquitted of beating Rodney King.

HELEN: Then all hell broke loose.

ERIKA: There was a consiousness that woke.

CROWD: We want justice!

ERIKA: But as much as tragedy is a part of our heritage, so is possibility.

JERRY: We were one of the largest websites in the world.

It was really an incredible time.

VIET: To transform the system into something more just for everyone.

That's the hope, from which, the Asian American movement was born.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: To order Asian Americans on DVD, visit ShopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.