“It’s not just about getting the content out there,” says Kelly Fong M.A. ’07, Ph.D. ’13. “It’s about transforming communities — building that sort of space for connection.”

She’s talking about, of all things, a textbook. But not just any textbook. It’s a first-of-its-kind documentation of Asian American and Pacific Islander history, packaged in one place and targeted to an audience that almost never gets to learn about this demographic: American high schoolers.

Fong, a continuing lecturer of Asian American studies at UCLA, saw the need for an AAPI text when there was a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic; Karen Umemoto M.A. ’89, the director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, agreed. We wouldn’t have seen the level of vitriol we did, Umemoto says, if people had an understanding of the key part Asians have in the fabric of American society.

Patsy Takemoto Mink quarter.
Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, was recently honored by the U.S. Mint, which put her likeness on the back of a limited-edition quarter.

The result is Foundations and Futures, a new, 50-chapter multimedia textbook designed with the state’s new ethnic studies graduation requirements in mind. Students can study broad subjects like war and empire; the harrowing story of thousands of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II; and individuals like Patsy Mink, the first woman of color in Congress. Among the book’s contributors are influential writer Helen Zia, who authored a chapter on Vincent Chin, a Chinese American engineer who was beaten to death by two white autoworkers in a 1982 racist attack in Detroit, and Thuy Vo Dang, a professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies who wrote a chapter about Vietnamese Americans.

The textbook comes with elastic lesson plans that allow teachers to pick and choose appropriate topics, along with guides to deeper resources such as videos, maps, archives and photos. The textbook will be available for the 2025–26 academic year, ready for schools to use to fulfill their curriculum requirements.

For those seeing their grandchildren studying materials that haven’t changed since they were in school 60 years ago, Umemoto says the textbook can’t come soon enough. “Everyone I talk to says that they wish they’d had it when they were in school,” she says. “That’s the most resounding response. People want it yesterday.”

Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Winter 2025 issue.