From the producer …
I guess I could have cited the headlines --- "Asian-Americans: The Fastest Growing Ethnic Group in the U.S.," "LA County is the Capital of Asian America" --- or listed the numbers (nearly 6 million Asian-Americans in California; 15% percent of the population in LA County are Asian-Americans).
But I wanted to go beyond the sterile facts and figures to show stories about people. After all, it’s stories about people that we remember — not the numbers. And this is a Life Connected special. The mission of our station’s specials — we have four a year — is to show how we are all connected in Southern California, no matter our color or race.
How were stories selected?
The stories selected were part of a collaborative effort. Our Community Relations department has ideas, I have ideas and the reporters have theirs. I guess you can say we all squirrel-away story ideas during the year. Some ideas fall through. Some potential subjects don’t have time or simply don’t want to be profiled. But we ended up with some pretty remarkable pieces. The main theme of the special is the resilience of the human spirit. If you watch the entire show, you will see how diversely World War II impacted our communities.
For this special, we had only six weeks from start-to-finish. We had to move fast. Just two weeks ago, we were shooting and editing. This past week we shot the studio elements
I want thank the East Side Players, a theater organization based in Los Angeles; the Culver City School District and its Marino Language School in Culver City; and the US Forest Service who manages the Manzanar Hstorical Site for allowing us into their "house." Our stories would not have been complete without their cooperation.
