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Quiz: Does your family know these AAPI Heritage Month history facts?

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ParentsTogether - Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with Your Family. Take our AAPI History Trivia!
Nasirun Khan

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and whether your family is of Asian, Pacific Islander, or Native Hawaiian descent or not, it’s a great reminder to learn more about America’s rich and diverse AAPI history.

If you or your kids haven’t learned a whole lot of Asian American history in school or the media, you may not realize how long and involved that history is. Over the past few centuries (yes, centuries!), Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been making huge contributions to America’s arts and culture, economy, politics, athletics, scientific fields, and more.

Use the following AAPI trivia questions and answers to test your true knowledge of American history, but also as a guide to what you could research more together — during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond!

As a bonus, read about how AAPI history impacts our daily lives, the incredible diversity that exists within the label “Asian,” and how to talk to your kids about Japanese internment camps.

Take the AAPI heritage history trivia quiz

AAPI Heritage History quiz
1. Hawaii is home to the country’s highest percentage of Asian Americans, Pacific Islander Americans, and multiracial Americans compared to any other state. In what year did Hawaii become a U.S. state?
Answer: C) Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, after a long relationship with the mainland United States. American missionaries, businesspeople, and sugar cane planters first took an interest in the islands in the early 1800s, and Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1898. Historians say that the path to statehood was slow because of discrimination against the Hawaiian islands’ large Polynesian, Chinese, and Japanese populations.
2. The first large-scale immigration of Asians to the continental U.S. was when hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers arrived during the California Gold Rush (1848-1855). However, well before the Gold Rush, a smaller population of which ethnicity became the very first settlers in mainland Asian American history?
Answer: C) Most historians believe that Filipinos were the first Asians to live in America — Filipino sailors first arrived in California in 1587! In the 1760s, some Filipino sailors settled in Louisiana, building a small fishing village along with enslaved people and other people of color.
3. What age was actor and singer Auli‘i Cravalho when she voiced Disney’s Moana?

Answer: B) Auli‘i Cravalho was 14 when she voiced the widely celebrated character Moana. As a Native Hawaiian actor playing the first Pacific Islander Disney princess role, she and her character made a big impact on the diversity represented in family movies. Cravalho will be an executive producer of Disney’s forthcoming live-action Moana film!

4. In 1948, Vicki Draves and Sammy Lee became the first Asian Americans to win Olympic gold medals for the United States. What was their sport?

Answer: A) In August 1948, American divers Vicki Draves and Sammy Lee both won gold at the London Olympics. Draves (who was of Filipino and English descent) and Lee (who was Korean American) grew up in California at a time when public pools were racially segregated. Non-white people were only allowed to swim for one brief period on one day of the week, while the rest of the time pools were designated for white people only. To train, Lee had to practice jumping into a pit of sand when he wasn’t allowed in the pool, while Draves had to conceal her Asian identity to get into a swim club.

5. Which of the following is NOT a U.S. territory in the Pacific?

Answer: B) American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands are all U.S. territories, with a political status similar to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Those born in all of the U.S. territories except for American Samoa are granted automatic U.S. citizenship. Meanwhile, the Cook Islands are in the same region of the South Pacific as American Samoa, but the Cook Islands are recognized as an independent country that has a close relationship with New Zealand.

6. Ang Lee, who is Taiwanese American, is known as the first non-white filmmaker to win an Oscar for directing. Which of these movies was NOT directed by Ang Lee?
Answer: D) Ang Lee has been making films for over three decades, has been nominated for nine Academy Awards (Oscars) and has won three of them! Lee’s films include Life of Pi, Hulk, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, among many others. (Seven Samurai was directed by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and was released in 1954, the year Lee was born.)
7. There are over 300,000 Hmong people living in the United States. Hmong is an indigenous ethnicity originating from Southeast Asia. Besides California, which U.S. state has the largest Hmong American population?

Answer: D) Although Minnesota is not particularly well known for its diversity, the state is home to over 86,000 Hmong people — not too far off from California’s Hmong population of 99,000. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. recruited Hmong soldiers to fight the portion of the war that took place in Laos. After the war, Southeast Asia became especially dangerous for the Hmong population due to their involvement in resistance efforts. So in 1975, thousands of Hmong people migrated to the U.S. and other countries. The U.S. set up refugee resettlement programs through Catholic and Lutheran social services agencies, many of which happened to be based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

8. Who was the first Asian American in history to appear on U.S. currency?
Answer: A) Anna May Wong’s image is featured on quarters produced by the U.S. Mint starting in 2022 as part of the American Women Quarters Program. Wong, who lived from 1905 until 1961, was the first Asian American film star in Hollywood. The year before her death, Wong became the first Asian actress to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
9. A more recent figure in AAPI history, Kamala Harris has been lauded as the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to be elected Vice President of the United States. What is her actual ethnic identity?
Answer: C) Vice President Kamala Harris was born in California to a Tamil Indian biologist mother and a Jamaican professor father. She wasn’t the first multiracial person or first person of color to hold the office, though: that was Charles Curtis, who was Native American and white, and served as vice president from 1929 to 1933.
10. In a disturbing chapter of Asian American history, about 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast were imprisoned in relocation camps in remote desert areas during World War II, simply for having Japanese or part-Japanese ethnicity. What fraction of Japanese heritage required people to report to the authorities to be relocated?
Answer: A) Everyone in the designated military areas on the West Coast who had at least 1/16th Japanese descent was forced to leave their homes, cars, jobs, businesses, and most of their belongings behind in order to relocate to the camps. People of Japanese descent had to leave home even if they had been born in the U.S. and were U.S. citizens. About 60 percent of the people forced into camps were U.S. citizens.

Joanna Eng is a staff writer and digital content specialist at ParentsTogether. She lives with her wife and two kids in New York, where she loves to hike, try new foods, and check out way too many books from the library.

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