AAPI Heritage Trivia
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110 free AAPI Heritage trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free AAPI Heritage trivia questions with answers. AAPI trivia for Heritage Month events, classrooms and team quizzes. The questions cover why May was chosen (Manjirō's arrival in 1843 and the golden spike in 1869), the laws that shaped Asian American life (the Chinese Exclusion Act, Executive Order 9066, Wong Kim Ark, Thind, Hart-Celler and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988), and the people who broke barriers: Dalip Singh Saund, Hiram Fong, Patsy Mink, Daniel Inouye, Norman Mineta, Elaine Chao and Kamala Harris. It also takes in activists Fred Korematsu, Yuri Kochiyama and Larry Itliong, Native Hawaiian Olympian Duke Kahanamoku, astronauts Ellison Onizuka and Kalpana Chawla, and cultural firsts from Anna May Wong and Bruce Lee to Michelle Yeoh, Chloé Zhao and Ang Lee. Easy questions come first; the harder ones will stretch history teachers. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the people, laws and events, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which month is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month observed in the United States?
May
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month is observed in May; it began as a heritage week proclaimed under a 1978 resolution and was extended to a full month in 1990.
Q 02What event on May 10, 1869 is one of the two reasons May was chosen for the heritage month?
Completion of the transcontinental railroad
Completion of the transcontinental railroad: the golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, on a western section built largely by Chinese labourers.
Q 03The first Japanese immigrant, Nakahama Manjirō, arrived in the US on May 7 of which year?
1843
Manjirō landed in Massachusetts in 1843, aged about 16; Captain William Whitfield of Fairhaven took the shipwrecked teenager into his home and enrolled him in school.
Q 04Which president signed the 1978 joint resolution creating the original Asian-Pacific Heritage Week?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter signed the joint resolution on October 5, 1978; the idea came from congressional staffer Jeanie Jew, and Frank Horton and Norman Mineta introduced it in the House.
Q 05Which president signed the 1990 bill extending the heritage week to a full month?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush signed the 1990 law that expanded the observance to a full month for that year; a later act of Congress made the month-long designation permanent.
Q 06Where did the first Asians recorded in what is now the US, in 1587, come from?
Philippines
Philippines: Filipino sailors from Pedro de Unamuno's Manila galleon expedition went ashore at Morro Bay in October 1587, the earliest recorded Asian landing in the present-day United States.
Q 07Who was the first Asian performer to win an acting Academy Award, for 1957's Sayonara?
Miyoshi Umeki
Miyoshi Umeki won Best Supporting Actress for Sayonara at the 1958 ceremony, the first Asian performer to receive an acting Oscar.
Q 08The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was signed by which president?
Chester A. Arthur
Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, weeks after vetoing a harsher 20-year version; it was the first major US law to bar immigration by a specific national group.
Q 09In what year was the Chinese Exclusion Act finally repealed?
1943
The Magnuson Act of 1943 repealed exclusion while China was a wartime ally, but it allowed a quota of just 105 Chinese immigrants a year.
Q 10Which 1898 Supreme Court case established that a child born in the US to Chinese parents was a citizen?
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment made a California-born son of Chinese parents a citizen, the foundation of birthright citizenship.
Q 11Which group did the Supreme Court's 1923 Thind ruling declare ineligible for naturalisation?
Indian Americans
Indian Americans: Thind, a WWI Army veteran, argued he was 'Caucasian', but the Court held he was not a 'white person' in common understanding, making immigrants from India ineligible for citizenship.
Q 12Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans, was signed in which year?
1942
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, ten weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack; two-thirds of the people removed under it were US citizens.
Q 13Roughly how many people were displaced under Executive Order 9066?
125,000
Q 21Senator Daniel Inouye lost his right arm serving in which famed WWII unit?
The 442nd Infantry Regiment
The 442nd Infantry Regiment, a mostly Japanese American unit, is where Daniel Inouye lost his right arm to a grenade while leading an assault in Italy in April 1945; he received the Medal of Honor in 2000.
Q 22Which airport was renamed in Daniel Inouye's memory?
Honolulu International
Honolulu International was renamed Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in 2017, four years after the senator's death; he had received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Q 23Who became the first Asian American vice president of the United States in 2021?
Roughly 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast and held in ten inland camps such as Manzanar, far more than the German or Italian Americans ever interned.
Q 14Who defied the internment order, lost his 1944 Supreme Court case, and was vindicated decades later?
Fred Korematsu
Fred Korematsu's wartime conviction was vacated by a federal court in 1983 after evidence emerged that the government had withheld reports undercutting its claim of military necessity.
Q 15Which president gave the internment resister who lost his 1944 Supreme Court case the Medal of Freedom in 1998?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 1998, placing his name beside Plessy, Brown and Parks in the nation's 'constant search for justice'.
Q 16Which president signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, apologising for internment and paying reparations?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act on August 10, 1988; it offered a formal apology and a $20,000 payment to each surviving detainee.
Q 17What was the 1983 federal commission report condemning the internment as unjust titled?
Personal Justice Denied
Personal Justice Denied, the report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, found the incarceration stemmed from race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.
Q 18Who was the first Asian American elected to the US Congress, taking his House seat in 1957?
Dalip Singh Saund
Dalip Singh Saund, born in Punjab, won a California House seat in 1956; he was also the first Sikh in Congress and had become a US citizen only in 1949.
Q 19Who was the first Asian American US senator, elected from the 50th state in 1959?
Hiram Fong
Hiram Fong, son of a Cantonese sugar-plantation worker, took his Senate seat in August 1959 as a Republican, the first Asian American to sit in the chamber.
Q 20Patsy Mink was the first woman of color in Congress. Which landmark law did she co-author?
Title IX
It bans gender discrimination in federally funded education; she had been rejected by all 12 medical schools she applied to.
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris, daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, took office in January 2021 as the first woman, first Black and first Asian American vice president.
Q 24Who was the first Asian American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, as Labor Secretary in 2001?
Elaine Chao
Elaine Chao, born in Taipei, led the Labor Department for all eight years of the George W. Bush administration and became Transportation Secretary in 2017; she married Mitch McConnell in 1993.
Q 25Norman Mineta, the first East Asian American cabinet secretary, had earlier been mayor of which city?
San Jose
San Jose elected Norman Mineta mayor in 1971, making him the first Asian American mayor of a major US city; the city's airport was renamed Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport in 2001.
Q 26Activist Yuri Kochiyama was famously photographed cradling which dying leader in 1965?
Malcolm X
Malcolm X was shot at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965; Life magazine's photograph shows Kochiyama, a former Jerome, Arkansas internee, holding his head as he lay dying.
Q 27Larry Itliong led Filipino farmworkers out on strike in 1965 against which crop's producers?
Delano table grapes
Delano table grapes: Itliong's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked out on Delano growers on September 8, 1965; Cesar Chavez's mostly Mexican union joined a week later, and the two merged into the United Farm Workers.
Q 28How long did the Delano grape strike last?
Five years
Five years: the walkout began in September 1965 and ended in July 1970, when a consumer boycott of non-union grapes forced the growers to sign union contracts.
Q 29What was Larry Itliong's nickname?
Seven Fingers
Seven Fingers: Itliong lost three fingers in an Alaskan cannery accident; he had immigrated at 15 with a sixth-grade education and organised cannery workers before turning to California's fields.
Q 30Native Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku won Olympic gold in which event at Stockholm in 1912?
100-metre freestyle
100-metre freestyle: Kahanamoku won it in Stockholm and again in Antwerp in 1920, collecting five Olympic medals across three Games while popularising surfing worldwide.