AAPI Month a Time to Celebrate Culture and Family

By Luciana Chavez

On July 1, Merced College History Professor Adam Fong will begin a yearlong sabbatical during which he will take the deepest dive he can into his family history.

He’s been eager for this project because the Fong family lore, since they immigrated from China, echoes Asian American and U.S. History in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unexplored, it’s catnip for a historian.

“I’ve loved history since I was a high school sophomore studying Western Civilization and the Tudors of England,” Fong said. “I realized that if you understood the story of one family, you could understand the history of a country.”

We caught up with Fong — along with classified professionals Nang Thao, Meuy Saechao and Rosalie Kekahuna — to celebrate the work of Asian American and Pacific Islanders on campus during AAPI Heritage Month in May.

Nang Thao (Hmong)

As the Student Support Coordinator in the Merced College AgTEC program, Nang Thao recruits students for the Ag Systems Certificiate program, an innovative competency-based education (CBE) initiative.

The program empowers field workers and others by recognizing and building upon their existing work skills while developing new competencies to help them succeed as the ag industry evolves. Thao, herself an immigrant eldest daughter, reaches out to other immigrants every day, offering a brighter future through the certificate program.

Thao’s Hmong parents sought the same. After the Vietnam War, Thao’s father Xai Toua Yang disobeyed his own father by fleeing Vietnam, quietly crossing the Mekong Delta to avoid Communist patrols, and escaping through the jungle to a refugee camp. Nang was born in that camp in September 1987.

Her family then arrived in Texas in December 1987 before making their way to California.

“My dad talked about the blood, sweat and tears it took to get our family to America,” Thao said. “He reminded us growing up that every day, we have an opportunity to do something with our lives. It makes me tearful thinking about it, even 10 years after my dad passed away.”

Thao’s parents succeeded. Four of the five Thao children, including Nang, are Stanislaus State graduates, and the fifth earned a degree from the University of the Pacific.

“My parents were immigrants, and it was so hard for them to navigate life in the U.S.,” Thao said. “So for us, they were a compass, pointing us in the right direction. My dad taught us to always ask the right question, to read between the lines, so we could get to where we needed to go.”

Thinking about how her father enrolled at Merced College later in his life, and had to drop out to support his family, keeps Thao focused on what’s important in her job.

“It’s a beautiful concept,” she said about the CBE program. “Someone like my dad who wanted to go to school can go now without having to stop work. These low-income, migrant families maybe never thought they’d have a connection to college. And now they do.”

Meuy Saechao (Mien)

Payroll Specialist Meuy Saechao, an alumna with an AA in Accounting, will celebrate 25 years working at Merced College in June.

“I consider it a privilege to have worked here so long,” she said.

Saechao has that privilege because her family, which comes from the Mien ethnic group in Thailand, immigrated to Oregon when she was 11. Landing in Aloha, Ore., was a bit of luck, since she then attended a Mien Christian youth camp in Redding, Calif., every summer.

“That’s where I met my husband,” she said. “He’s from Merced. I ended up in Merced because of marriage.”

Those American experiences helped Saechao to thrive after a tough start, caring for her five siblings with no formal education when the family arrived in the U.S. in 1989.

“I’d look out the classroom window and wonder what the teacher was saying,” Saechao said. “Sometimes I’d cry. I had to repeat fifth grade because I hadn’t learned anything. But that was a good thing. It gave me time to grow.”

Saechao feels grateful for the difficulties she overcame.

“I realized my life here was different than in Thailand,” she said. “Like at school, during Thanksgiving, we’d have turkey and all the trimmings. Most American kids take that for granted, but I enjoyed it so much. For me, it was a whole new world.”

Saechao, now mother to a 10-year-old son, connects life in a poor mountain village in Thailand to the humility and compassion she feels now while working in the Merced College payroll department.

“Everyone comes from a different family dynamic,” she said. “Everyone has tough times. I have to remember that. I remind myself to just serve our people. In Mien they say, ‘To be a leader, you have to be a worker first.’ So I always tell my husband, ‘God sees everything we do, even the little things.’”

Rosalie Kekahuna (Hawaiian)

Growing up on the mainland, Rosalie Kekahuna learned to love her Hawaiian roots thanks to her mother Agnes, who is half Hawaiian and half Portuguese.

As an adult, Kekahuna stayed connected to her Hawaiian side by keeping the Hawaiian last name of her late father, U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Paul Kekahuna, a Korean War veteran buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

Kekahuna, now an Administrative Coordinator in Student Services a mother to three sons and a daughter, has gotten creative to ensure her children appreciate their lineage.

She remembers working with a young Black woman in another department years ago, talking about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and thinking, “I wish we had something like HBCUs for my kids to tie to their Hawaiian roots.”

Then the light bulb went on and she remembered Kamehameha Schools. The private school system in Hawaii, anchored by a $15.8-billion endowment and a sterling academic reputation, is committed to immersing Hawaiian students in their culture and language so both survive.

Native Hawaiians have enrollment priority; mainland students with Hawaiian heritage, like Kekahuna’s children, find it difficult to get in. But her son Kaneen graduated from Kamehameha Schools in 2019, and her daughter Kanalani will be a high school senior there next fall.

Kekahuna has sacrificed time with her children to ensure they get that specific education. Working in counseling, she maintains a similar vigilance for the big picture.

“As the youngest of 11 in my family, I had to navigate my own education,” she said. “A big part of what I do is to make sure our students can do the same with the proper support system.”

Kekahuna, in her 20th year at Merced College, now honors her Hawaiian blood by respecting racial, ethnic and cultural diversity.

“Our Merced College students often question their race and identity,” she said. “I have learned how not to make assumptions about them. I try to approach students with openness and to listen to their experiences so they feel comfortable and seen and heard.”

Adam Fong (Chinese)

Five years ago, Fong developed and began teaching a course on the History of Asian Americans. Ever since, his motivation to research his own family has grown, because he realized how much history they’d experienced.

His grandfather served in World War II, and at least one uncle served in the Korean War. His mom, a San Francisco State college student in the late 1960s, experienced student protests led by Black students and eventually teaming up with Asian and Latinx students. That campus unrest led to the creation of the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.

“I don’t know if my family is the central piece to that history,” he said. “But I understand that the history my family witnessed — their stories about those times — might open up different ways to analyze our collective history.”

Fong will interview 43 family members over the age of 18, including himself. The interviews, followup conversations, analysis, and documentary research — the National Archives at San Francisco, located in San Bruno, holds immigration records for Angel Island, a.k.a. the Ellis Island of the West — will take up most of Fong’s sabbatical year.

The work will help Fong enrich and personalize the courses he already teaches. He plans to produce a reference of his findings for his family members, so “the stories don’t get lost.”

He is also open to making the larger time commitment to publish his work in scholarly journals or a future book chapter.

“This is the discovery phase,” he said. “Integrating my research into a larger narrative would be the next project.”

Fong, 52, said he hopes the work will help illuminate what has happened to California families that endured beyond the immigrant generation and experienced things like bilingual households and multicultural marriages. He hopes to begin showing what the fourth generation experiences now.

He feels gratified to have reached this career crossroads.

“Teaching at Merced College has been so great for me personally,” Fong said. “I’ve been given the ability to create new courses. I’m starting a sabbatical. I very much appreciate the support.

“When my mom passed away in 2024, she knew about the research I wanted to do. Then my sister passed away at the beginning of this year. So this all feels very timely. I’m excited to start this project.”