She Fought Racism in Early Hollywood. Now She'll Be the First Asian American on US Currency
The pioneering Asian American actress Anna May Wong is one of five American women the U.S. Mint is recognizing this year with an image on the American quarter, and the first Asian American to appear on U.S. currency. Wong was born in Los Angeles in 1905, and she grew up helping out at her father's laundromat. When the film industry moved from New York to Hollywood, she started skipping school to visit movie sets. She would eventually go on to become Hollywood’s first Chinese American movie star. Wong fought the ever-present obstacle of institutional racism in the film industry to forge a remarkable career that spanned 40 years. Host Sasha Khokha talks about Wong’s legacy with Nancy Wang Yeun, a sociologist and expert on race in Hollywood.
Lost in Translation
What is it like to talk about your gender identity in different languages? What happens when the pronouns for “he” and “she” in a particular language are similar, or even identical? We meet Emmett Chen-Ran, who decided during his senior year of high school to tell his parents he is transgender. While he grappled with whether they would accept and understand him, there was another challenge: deciding what language he should use to tell them – English or Chinese? The California Report Magazine’s former intern Izzy Bloom and reporter Elena Neale-Sacks bring us this story, which first aired on NPR’s Code Switch.