I was born in a country where there is a belief that having one boy is worth more than having seven girls. Women were used to be considered as a men's shadows rather than individuals. A woman was treated like a machine that works hard, eat little, talks little, and obeys to a man. In a family, a sister should treated her brother as more value than herself. Even a son could consider himself more important than his mother. When my grandmother was in her 20s (she is now 68 years old), one of her friends was kicked out of the village because she wanted to remarry two years after her husband's death! Time passed. Our culture has been changing a lot. Several decades ago, the world history took its turn and our country changed its way to look at the gender issue. Women started to have more freedom. We now can choose our own husbands, our own careers, our own will having children or not. Women now can have equal career opportunities as men. All of these changes in my country, however, did not clearly happened in a single event. Along with the whole world, our women have more freedom to live a life they want. Yet, unlike the United States and most parts in the world, we don't have our own women’s history written down.

I like to study women’s history because I like to study about how history helped me living a life I'm living now. Since 1994Portland is like a second home for me, I feel like I should learn about women in history and the Portland YWCA as one part of that story.

As a female and an immigrant, I'm really interested in studying about women of color, especially the African American women and Asian immigrant women in the YWCA during and after World War II. And as an immigrant, I think I have the advantage understanding immigrants' lives during this hard time.

I was born in the Philippines on December 13, 1975 and I moved to the United States in August of 1987. First we lived in California, then Virginia, Washington, Illinois, and now I currently reside in Portland Oregon. My interests have driven me to study literature and linguistics at Portland State University. Naturally cultural studies, specifically Asian cultural studies have always kept me interested. As a part of a growing minority, I am interested in defining these individual cultural voices in whatever form I find them in. Each community has their writers, sculptors, musicians, oral tradition, etc. I am not a historian by training, but I have noted that throughout the histories that I have read in my years of schooling some histories have greater importance placed on them than other histories. I have come to accept this as a dilemma that minority groups share in trying to define their place in the United States. Who's history is more important and what does it mean when we teach one history and ignore another?

In my own quest it is important for me to know the history that I come from. As an immigrant and as a Filipino male in America, I add to this history. I feel that I have as much insight as the next human being about our present state of affairs and that the stories I have are equally important when trying to understand what it means to come between two cultures. Inspecting the stories, acts, and events that have befallen other immigrant Filipinos is a part of the rich cultural context that I draw a sense of community strength and cultural identity from. In this project, I try to outline some of the basic history and try and place Japanese and Chinese immigrants in the context of a shared prejudice, and what it means in our dialogue of race-relations. How does a clear history of prejudice towards one minority group strengthen the community and foster dialogue both from within Japanese and Chinese communities and how is this dialogue seen an materialize into action from outside the community.