“The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas” is set to arrive on HBO Max on Wednesday, aligning its release with AAPI Heritage Month while centering Asian American and Pacific Islander identity through a mix of celebrity and everyday voices. Directed by Eugene Yi and built as part of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ “The List Series,” the documentary brings together unscripted conversations designed to feel intimate rather than scripted or performative.
Yi, who is Korean American, said he has been thinking for years about how the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander” is understood in the United States. In an interview with The Associated Press, Yi pointed to how the public image of the term can become narrow, saying he often sees it limited to people “who might look like you and me,” while leaving out others who may fit the definition. Yi told AP he was “beyond excited” when he was approached to helm the project.
In the documentary, Yi’s AAPI stories are delivered through interviews conducted by journalist Jada Yuan with 15 people of AAPI heritage across industries. The lineup includes TV broadcaster Connie Chung, Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth and “Basement Bhangra” creator DJ Rekha. The cast of interview subjects also features actors Sandra Oh, Kumail Nanjiani and Bowen Yang, whose public profiles often skew toward comedy, according to the documentary’s portrayal in AP’s report.
Yi said the film gives particular value to that unscripted space, describing how people who work professionally in comedy may feel more comfortable discussing deeper parts of their experience when the conversation is not written in advance. “When talking to people who are professionally funny, oftentimes they’re really comfortable not being funny,” Yi said. “I appreciated that chance to get a little bit deeper into some of their stories.”
Among the non-actors featured is Yia Vang, a chef and owner of Vinai, a Hmong restaurant in Minneapolis. AP reported that Vang filmed his “A List” interview three years ago and has since appeared on cooking and lifestyle shows. Vang told viewers he was born in a Thai refugee camp and moved to Wisconsin when he was 4, and he compared being filmed for the documentary to a confessional in which old memories surfaced.
In Vang’s segment, the AP report describes how he recounted being driven in part by a desire not to be “the weird kid,” including an account of discarding school lunches packed by his mother with sticky rice and fermented vegetables. He said he did not expect to get emotional, but the memory did, and he drew a lesson from it: “I will never, ever try to be ‘cool,’” Vang said. He framed his approach to food as grounded in fidelity to the integrity his parents taught him, and he said the dishes he once threw out later became part of his restaurant’s menu in what he called “full-circle redemption.”
The documentary is also designed to speak to questions of visibility beyond the AAPI community itself. AP reported that Asian Americans are among the fastest-growing U.S. populations, but that adults in the U.S. struggle more to recognize AAPI influence than people from other racial groups, according to a survey by The Asian American Foundation. The STAATUS Index, produced in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, found 4 in 10 U.S. adults cannot think of a single famous Asian American, with Jackie Chan among the most frequently named, despite being not American; it also reported that about half were unable to name examples of famous Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.
Norman Chen, CEO of The Asian American Foundation, said the survey results indicate that, for much of America, people learn about Asian Americans less through direct contact than through media portrayals. Chen told AP he attended a screening of “The A List” and called the film a reminder of the breadth of personal stories the documentary curated, saying he was unsure it would have been made a decade ago. “Even people that we don’t know have such powerful stories to show you the depth and richness of our community and the struggles that we’ve had to go through in multiple generations,” Chen said.
Yi said the timing of the film, begun when Vice President Kamala Harris was running for president and later released during a period in which he described the political environment as hostile to diversity efforts, can make the documentary appear inherently political. He said he saw “how quickly things can backslide and how quickly people can be erased,” and he referenced experiences of people being “disappeared” in the streets and histories being “erased.” Yi said older participants in the documentary connected their stories to historical events, including a story from activist Kathy Masaoka about her mother’s incarceration in Japanese American camps.
Yi said he hopes the film helps viewers see past and present struggles endured by AAPI communities while also building community forward. He told AP that “We can really move forward from this moment in terms of rebuilding and reclaiming and taking up space with confidence and hope again.”