From tales of Filipino fishing villages in Louisiana to the ousting of Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii, the varied stories of Southeast Asian Americans will be shared at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center through a Smithsonian Institution series titled “I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story.”
The center’s lobby and library will display the 30 banners that make up the traveling series for the next 10 weeks — from Saturday, March 19 through Sunday, May 29.
“Asian Americans, including Pacific Islanders, have played a tremendous role in the development of our whole culture,” said Robin Blackwood, the director of the center’s history program. “Now, if you bring it home to Tucson specifically . . . we know that some of the old Tucson Chinese families who helped found this Chinese center here, came to this area when the railroad came and stayed.”
Bringing the exhibit provided the center and the city a way to further learn about other communities, Blackwood said.
To complement the free Smithsonian exhibition, the center is also hosting a series of events with a local emphasis, along with collecting oral histories from from a few Southeast Asian families in Tucson.
One of those families is Bao Ma’s.
“We got picked on a lot, not being American,” said Bao Ma, the chief operations officer for the family business, which includes multiple locations of the Vietnamese restaurant Miss Saigon and one Food Spot Market and Chinese Deli.
Ma’s father, Vo Ma, worked with the U.S. military and finally brought the family to Tucson from Vietnam in the 1970s after several failed attempts to smuggle his family out of the country. Bao Ma remembers both of his parents working two jobs to support their three sons. He said his father worked seven days a week for 12 hours each day. They met at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, 1288 W. River Road, earlier this week to record their family’s story for the center’s oral history project.
The center hopes to have the interviews completed to play at the Asian Pacific American Celebration on Saturday, May 7. May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage month.
“I would like to let people know that everyone who comes to the U.S. can become a business owner,” said Vo Ma, the one who started the family’s business.
Honoring and remembering their heritage is important, said Bao Ma, who has friends whose grandparents were part of the Asian population that moved west to work on farms and the railroad.
The Smithsonian exhibit chronicles everything from railroads in the West to agricultural work in Hawaii to Japanese internment during World War II to the influence of Asian cuisine to the labor movement and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, said Blackwood.
“Since 9/11, there have been new types of problems, more anti-South Asian activity, people that are either Muslim or confused with Muslims,” Blackwood added. “Sikhs being attacked. These new challenges are also addressed in the exhibition.”
An app for Apple devices corresponds with the exhibition, offering supplemental videos, commentary and photographs for specific banners. The center wants to open the exhibit to schools on field trips.
To support the local activities — speakers, film showings and even a cooking class — the center received a $5,000 grant from the Tucson Pima Arts Council and a $10,000 grant from Arizona Humanities.
The cost of hosting the exhibition is $2,000, plus shipping to the next location.
The Pan Asian Community Alliance and Pima Community College are collaborators in the weeks-long series.
“I think that’s important, because it can begin to feel a little remote unless we bring in the local influences that make our community special . . . ,” Blackwood said, offering the possibility of mariachis at the May festival as an example. Some of the center’s Chinese-American youth are active in mariachi. “The cross-cultural influences that we have here that are special that we wouldn’t necessarily see on a national stage, I think it’s really important to emphasize those.”
