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Yosh "Bill" Watanabe (1944)
A Japanese American born in Manzanar, California in a concentration camp. His family was one of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. He found the Little Tokyo Service Center, which focused on the social welfare of Little Tokyo and Downtown Los Angeles.
CC Yin (1937)
A Chinese American born in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. His family fled to Taiwan after Communists took over China from the Nationalists in 1949 and arrived in America 1964. Yin started out as a civil engineer, but then bought a McDonald's restaurant in Oakland in 1984. Now, he operates a fast-food empire with 30 McDonald's in Northern California. His wife, Regina Yin, partnered with him to create the nonprofit Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs in 2001 to increase Asian American and Pacific Islander representation in local, state, and federal politics.
Susan Ahn Cuddy (1915)
Cuddy, Korean American, was the first Asian American woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II. She was an aerial gunnery officer at flight school and taught fighter pilots to maneuver stimulators and to shoot down enemy aircraft. During the Cold War, she was a code breaker and intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C. As section chief, she managed more than 300 agents working on the former Soviet Union. Besides her military achievements, she blazed a path for future interracial marriages when she broke anti-miscegenation laws marrying an Irish American.
Daliph Singh Saund (1899)
An Indian American and Sikh born in Punjab, British India. In 1920, he came to the U.S. and studied agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley and obtained his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics. He farmed lettuce in California and distributed chemical fertilizers. He campaigned for American naturalization of South Asians and was elected Justice of the Peace in Imperial County. In 1956, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Asian American in Congress.
