Asian Americans Who Are Making a Difference in the World Today

Ai-jen Poo is a champion of workers’ rights, a passionate labor organizer, and founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. In 2010, she helped pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, the first law in the US to guarantee domestic workers — housekeepers, nannies, etc. — basic labor rights like overtime pay and vacation time. As Time magazine put it, “Ai-jen Poo wants to make you see invisible people.”

Cecilia Chung has spent her life fighting for LGBTQ rights and on behalf of those affected by HIV/AIDS. Having made a name for herself for her work with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, she now heads Positively Trans, a project of the Transgender Law Center. Chung, herself, is a transgender woman living with HIV. “When I was coming into the movement, transgender people were dying left and right — not just because of violence, but because of what we later found out was HIV,” Chung told Them magazine. “We weren’t just fighting for our rights, we were fighting for our lives by demanding treatment and more research. We were also demanding to be seen as human beings.”

US Senator Tammy Duckworth is no stranger to being first — the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress from Illinois, the first person in Congress born in Thailand, the first woman with a disability elected to Congress, the first female double-amputee elected to the Senate, and the first senator to give birth while in office. In 2018, her daughter became the first baby on the chamber floor. (Sen. Duckworth advocated for a measure that would allow infants in the room for the first time).

“We’ve got to get to a point where it doesn’t raise eyebrows to have someone give birth in office,” Sen. Duckworth told Marie Claire. “Just like it shouldn’t raise eyebrows to have a woman be a senator or a woman in the cockpit or a woman in the boardroom. We’re not there yet, unfortunately.”

Helen Zia is a longtime journalist, author, and civil rights activist, whose work helped raise awareness about the depths of Asian American discrimination in the 1980s, when a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two autoworkers in Detroit amid the economic devastation at the time. Zia continues to speak out about injustice, most recently lending her voice to defend Asian Americans facing violence during the coronavirus pandemic. “Though the wave of anti-Asian racism that looms in response to the global coronavirus pandemic is ugly and frightening, it is not new. I should know: I witnessed the harassment and violence Asian Americans faced in the wake of the collapse of the US manufacturing sector in the 1980s,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “Scapegoating Asian immigrants and Asian Americans did nothing to save the US auto industry then. And it won’t provide the scientific advances and government leadership necessary to slow the spread of COVID-19 now.”

Rinku Sen is a journalist, author, strategist, and racial justice activist who most recently served as co-president of the Women’s March 2020. As the president and executive director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, and publisher of the award-winning news site Colorlines, Sen helped push forward the modern conversation around race, including the Drop the I-Word campaign, which pressured media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal.”

Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, became a name that made headlines when, in 2012, she stood up against the sexism that undergirds Silicon Valley and sued the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the most powerful in the world, for gender bias and sexual harassment. Her lawsuit ultimately failed in court but succeeded in transforming the conversation about women in tech. Pao detailed her case in the book Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, and in 2016 founded Project Include, whose mission is “to give everyone a fair chance to succeed in tech.”

Chef Roy Choi is best known as the king of the modern food truck — and delicious Korean-Mexican fusion — but his role in the food world is much broader and deeper than that. In 2015, he challenged fellow chefs to open restaurants in food deserts — and then did as much the following year, with his now-defunct fast food mini-chain Locol, which opened in Watts and East Oakland, California, featuring healthy, tasty versions of fast food at affordable prices. In 2019, Choi dove even further into food politics with the TV series Broken Bread, which raises awareness about food waste, sustainability, and social justice in and across Los Angeles, the city he calls home.

Before we knew her real name, we knew Chanel Miller as “Emily Doe,” the 23-year-old woman raped by Brock Turner — aka “the Stanford swimmer” — in 2015. Her 7,200-word victim impact statement during the subsequent trial went viral after Buzzfeed published it, and helped lay the groundwork for the #metoo movement, as it spoke with clear and present anger about what sexual assault victims experience and endure. After Turner served an abbreviated sentence, Miller decided to go public with a poignant, unsparing memoir, Know My Name, in 2019. It became a New York Times bestseller.

Andrew Yang made history as the first Asian American man to run for president as a Democrat, going from a virtually unknown tech entrepreneur to become one of the chief advocates for universal basic income — an idea that has become even more compelling in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. His work continues with the nonprofit Humanity Forward.

In 2017, Kamala Harris — the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants — became the first South Asian American senator in history, and then made history again in her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. In addition to her passionate work in Congress, Sen. Harris’ mixed-race background has helped to elevate and transform the conversation about identity, particularly in politics. “We have to stop seeing issues and people through a plate-glass window as though we were one-dimensional,” Sen. Harris said in an interview. “Instead, we have to see that most people exist through a prism and they are a sum of many factors.”

In January 2020, Awkwafina became the first Asian American to win best actress in a film (comedy/muscial) at the Golden Globes, for her role in The Farewell. She said backstage, “It feels incredible, but I think there’s also this other feeling that you want there to be more. I hope this is just the beginning.”