This site started out as an endeavour completed for the HHUM 206 class in the Spring of 2020 titled “Honors Humanities Keystone Project”, which is part of the University of Maryland’s Honors Humanities Program. Each year, a cohort of Honors Humanities students design and carry out an independent project, called a “keystone”,  as part of the requirements needed to receive the Honors Humanities citation upon graduation from the University of Maryland. For more information about the keystone project see http://www.honorshumanities.umd.edu/keystone.html. In general, the keystone project is a project through which students may engage with personal interests, passions, or pressing social issues while developing important skills including communication and research. This project focuses on exploring the collective memory of the Asia-Pacific War through diverse perspectives from the descendants of those who lived through the war. Eventually, this endeavour evolved into a personal enrichment project that has continued outside of the classroom.

The interviewer is Carolyn Chen, a current undergraduate student at the University of Maryland. As a Chinese-American born to two immigrant parents, she grew up hearing bits and pieces about the Asia-Pacific War from her parents during dinner table discussions as well as from family members in China. Additionally, her upbringing in Howard County Maryland, where a large Asian-American population flourished, exposed her to the wartime stories of Korean immigrants. It didn’t take long for her to notice that whenever she and her Korean-American classmates discussed their Asian identities or consumed Asian popular culture, the topic of the Asia-Pacific War would eventually come up. She noticed the subconscious, yet lingering presence of the war in her family members and Asian-American friends through feelings of bitterness or resentment that were elicited by mere mentions of Japan or WWII. As she learned about WWII in school, she soon realized that American coverage of the second world war tended to greatly overlook the Pacific War, choosing to focus almost exclusively on the European front instead. Very few of the events or places often mentioned by her parents and Asian-American friends when discussing the Asia-Pacific War were included in American history textbooks, if at all.

Upon further research into the remembrance of the Asia-Pacific War in the U.S. and around the world, Carolyn uncovered a plethora of modern-day issues emanating from the Asia-Pacific War. These issues tended to be coupled with volatile and oftentimes, contradictory memories surrounding the conflict. Eventually, she began to understand that the collective memory of the conflict itself was contentious: the memories of each individual and society were merely fragmentary. Due to few attempts at a serious collaborative effort to unite diverse memories and perspectives of the conflict, a complete understanding of the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War is difficult to obtain. However, in order to strive for a deeper understanding of the consequences and impact of the Asia-Pacific War, it must not continue to be forgotten in American society. The purpose of this project is to solidify the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War in historical remembrance and gain a deeper understanding of its current-day implications.