Contemporary Asian and Pacific Islander Culture

You’ll find significant Asian art collections in L.A. at the Fowler Museum and L.A. County Museum of Art, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum.

If you’re looking for garden tranquility or a mid-day break, try the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park (the oldest public Japanese garden in the U.S.), the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden at UCLA, the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego, or the Hakone Gardens in Saratoga.

For a Los Angeles night on the town, catch the East West Players, the nation's premier Asian American theater troupe.

Gold Rush Beginnings

Though Hawaiians and Filipinos engaged in the Pacific shipping trade came to California and some settled in the early 1800s, the Gold Rush is responsible for the major influx of Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants who came after 1848. Chinese fortune-seekers came in the largest numbers, establishing San Francisco’s Chinatown, the largest in the U.S. Early Hawaiian (or “Kanaka”) settlements contributed a few place names to Gold country, most notably the elusive “Kanaka Jack” gold mine.

Learn more about the Gold Rush at Sacramento’s Discovery Museum, and then visit nearby Locke, CA, the only town in the U.S. built exclusively by Chinese labor for Chinese people.

In the late 1800s, discriminatory laws and violence forced most non-white miners to abandon prospecting and turn to other opportunities, including farm and road-building work.

Transcontinental Railroad, Economic Depression and Discrimination

Recruited by the thousands, Chinese laborers primarily built the transcontinental railroad, which you can investigate at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

Railroad companies laid off thousands once the line opened in 1869, and a depression followed. The Chinese became scapegoats, and the U.S. Congress passed a series of Exclusion Acts that ended immigration from China until World War II. Learn more at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum.

People of Japanese and Filipino ancestry suffered similar fates. As immigration increased in the early 20th century, anti-Japanese and Filipino sentiment increased along with it, resulting in laws that limited new immigrants and deported those already in the U.S. Explore the Japanese experience in California at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Japanese Internment During World War II

Two War Relocation Authority Japanese Internment camps were located in California, Tule Lake and Manzanar, which has been designated a National Historic Site.