The inside of the new Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) History Museum on Hospital Street in the Jewelry District was washed in sunlight on a Thursday afternoon. The walls, newly painted in yellow, pink, and purple, bring to life the stories of the Asian diaspora across the country. The displays are organized into thematic sections like Identity, Migration & Immigration, and Solidarity — founder Jeannie Salomon worried that a chronology of events in AAPI history would be too dry.
“I want first and foremost for [AAPI] youth to come in here to know their history because it’s not in the textbooks,” Salomon said. As founder and director of the Cultural Society for Entrepreneurship, Bilingualism, Resources, and Inspirations (CSBRI), she’s been amplifying the voices of Asian Americans for years. An important part of that work has also been bringing the local AAPI community together and connecting families with cultural resources, like Chinese and Korean language classes.
The museum was designed to engage visitors of all ages; an interactive display in the front which highlights historically important AAPI individuals is decked out with stools so younger children can access and read each panel. Contained within a glass display case in the center of the room is a diorama of the AAPI Mobile History Museum, which Salomon and CSBRI carted around to different educational institutions and non-profits before they had a brick-and-mortar location.
Setha Phongsavan joined the team last fall, as the Mobile Museum was visiting places like Brown University’s Family Weekend and the West Warwick Library. Born and raised in Woonsocket, Phongsavan had been working in the film industry before getting involved. He said that with the recent SAG-AFTRA and Writer’s Guild strikes and the general nature of the industry the last few years, he ended up having a lot more time to focus on personal projects, many of which were related to his heritage as a Lao American.
“To me, ‘Identity’ in this museum basically means we’re not a monolith,” Phongsavan said, referring to one of the sections. “Growing up, Southeast Asians just didn’t exist; people just thought I was either Chinese or Japanese.”
Salomon said that it was important for the museum’s opening to cover the broad strokes in AAPI history, since she says this is the first museum in the country to focus solely on the AAPI immigrant experience, not all of Asian history. Some of the major points include American incarceration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, the historical erasure of Chinese railroad workers, the refugee crisis following the Vietnam War, and the rise in anti-Asian hate in recent years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Asian American history is American history. The stories of exclusion, resilience, and perseverance are not separate chapters — they are essential threads in the American experience,” one of the displays reads. Salomon and Phongsavan curated the museum’s first exhibition together and wrote the interpretive panels themselves.
There are some local spotlights, including information on the Providence-born Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs, and some of the archival research done by Jeffery Yoo Warren and his community and research collaborators on Providence’s Chinatown, which existed downtown between the 1880s and the 1960s. The back wall features an exhibit called “From the Mekong to the Narragansett,” referring to the Mekong River, which flows through Southeast Asia, and the Narragansett Bay here in Rhode Island. It tells the story of the Lao, Cambodian, Hmong, and Vietnamese refugees who fled Southeast Asia in the 1970s following the end of the Vietnam War and came to Rhode Island.
“That’s actually my father,” Phongsavan said with some pride, referring to a photograph on the back wall of a Lao American leader — his father — and the president of the Tolstoy Foundation. By 1987, more than 12,000 Southeast Asian refugees had settled in Rhode Island, Phongsavan’s parents included, in large part due to individual sponsor families, many of whom were Catholic. International voluntary agencies like the Tolstoy Foundation, the International Institute, and Catholic Charities also encouraged migration and supported sponsor families and refugees.
Salomon said they hope to have new exhibits in the future; she mentioned they were in conversation with some Pacific Islanders about better incorporating those histories into the museum. Phongsavan hopes to establish a stronger connection with the Indian American community in Rhode Island, since, according to voting data from 2022, Indian Americans are the largest Asian ethnic group in the state.
“We talk about the intergenerational divide with immigration,” Salomon said, referring to the language and cultural barriers that AAPI people often face within their own families. “Believe it or not, that’s how I grew up 35 years ago. That means that within the ethnic Chinese family — maybe even the Asian family — not much has changed.” She said she hopes that better education about the vital role AAPI people have played in American history may inspire change and undo harmful cultural patterns.
“I know that second-generation Americans have this conflict, and they need to see their history,” Salomon said. She hopes that easier access to this kind of information will support AAPI students and teachers who cover these histories. “I want to equip them to talk about Asian American history in the classroom, because people look to [you] if you look Asian.”
The Asian American and Pacific Islander History Museum will have its grand opening on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 — you can find out more information and register here!
By Keating Zelenke / Mary A. Gowdey Special Projects Fellow / kzelenke@ppsri.org