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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

May is dedicated to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It is an opportunity to celebrate “Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. A rather broad term, Asian/Pacific encompasses all of the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island).”

We invite you to visit research centers that preserve and promote these cultural experiences. At UC Irvine, there is an ongoing VietStories oral history project that documents the experiences of Vietnamese Americans. “These audio- and/or video-taped life stories include Vietnamese and/or English-language transcripts of the interviews, brief summaries, time logs, and photographs of narrators. Some narrators have also contributed additional materials such as their own photographs and documents to be preserved with their stories.” View the interviews online at vaohp.lib.uci.edu.

Their goal, “is to capture the oral histories of first generation Vietnamese Americans who have memories of life in Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and the displacement and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam. Viet Stories plays an instrumental role in documenting their histories and legacies in order to preserve their stories for future generations.”

You can visit the Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive (OC & SEAA) Center at the Library Gateway Study Center on Monday-Friday 1-5pm. Jennifer Le works at this research center located adjacent to the the Langson Library. Follow the OC & SEAA Center on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/OCSEAA/.

The library stacks contain an array of secondary materials to support your research interests. The primary source materials are part of the UCI Special Collections, which is on the 5th floor of the library.

 

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