Asian American Podcasts
In just about every scene, they’re coming to prominence.
Many of the issues they face are finally coming to light.
And the entertainment scene? Well, the Asian American scene is popping off like crazy. Cruising through social media, one can see that they’re helping each other, sharing platforms, messages, marketing, and more.
Three events occurred to help me become very aware of this:
2. Crazy Rich Asians
A few years ago, I read the book and loved it. Not only was the writing pretty great, but a lot of it took place in Singapore, where I lived for five and a half years. I didn’t even realize it was being made into a movie until my social media channels started blowing up with ads for it. And I mean like everywhere. (It seems to follow the book pretty well too :)) Although I loved the book, the movie as “okay” for me. I’ve heard both positive and negative takes from various Asian Americans. See the trailer below.
3. Podcasts
Let’s get this out of the way first: I subscribe to a ton of podcasts.
But being curious about this particular topic, I decided to do a bit of searching. Initially, I came across Martial Arts Podcasts and Asian Cinema Podcasts, so I adjusted my Google search query. What I found were tons of people on Quora and forums across the web asking the same question: “What are some Asian American podcasts?” So I searched and searched. And then, I decided to create an answer.
So here I’ve compiled a list (listed in no particular order) of podcasts with Asian Americans on their mind. Some are serious, some are funny. But most are informational and enjoyable. I hope you find something you like. 🙂
If you know of a Podcast you think would fit in this listing, be sure to reach out and let us know!
Thanks, and Enjoy! 🙂
Asian American Podcasts
Asian Voices Radio
Asian Voices Radio is a cultural and educational podcast series covering topics that impact and shape our Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities.
What Kind of Asian Are You?
A podcast featuring conversations with Diaspora Asians (third culture kids) about their lives, stories, and experiences. The podcast looks to highlight, amplify, and validate Asian voices worldwide. Conversations about being Asian.
Fresh Off the Broke
Hosted by Chinese-Filipino first-gen duo Tiffany and Rhianna (she/her), Fresh Off the Broke strives to empower, highlight, and support Asian immigrants and children of immigrants worldwide. We use the art of storytelling to create a collective conversation between us, our guests, and our listeners. We aim to shed light on the Asian immigrant experience and issues within our community to bridge the knowledge gap and break the existing cultural divide.
Hearts in Taiwan
As kids of immigrants from Taiwan, our Asian identity started with beef noodle soup and ended with Chinese school. Now that we’re adults, we’ve found that we still have a lot to learn about Taiwan’s history and its unique culture. Cousins Annie Wang and Angela Yu share their journey as they discover their family’s heritage and celebrate Taiwanese culture in the context of the Asian American experience.
Love, Discovery & Dim Sum Podcast
An enlightening podcast that helps people discover more history and an Asian American perspective on race and culture. Hosted by husband-wife team of Baldwin “Only Won” Chiu & Larissa Lam.
Producing While Asian
Producing While Asian presents conversations with producers, production staff, and recognizable personalities who identify as Asian and Asian American, BIPOC, or with allies who support the BIPOC community. Host Don Mike Mendoza leads each interview with many people he’s met since the beginning of his tenure as Executive Artistic Director of LA TI DO Productions, and also gives insights into his own projects too. The Producing While Asian podcast was created to uplift the voices and creations of the BIPOC community and its supporters in the arts and entertainment industry in a time when highlighting these people and projects is imperative.
Rock the Boat Podcast
Rock the Boat is a narrative podcast about Asian American founders, pioneers, and leaders in their fields. Join host Lucia Liu as she uncovers the triumph and trials of top Asian leaders.
Bund to Brooklyn
A podcast hosted by Lucia Liu (host of Rock the Boat) and Siyuan Meng (culture writer at RADII) exploring how Asian Americans and Chinese deal with modern issues like dating, identity, mental health, and much more.
Thrive Spice
Thrive Spice is a mental health and social equity podcast for Asian Americans, featuring real stories of resilience, grit and joy. It’s a safe space that feels like group therapy meets celebrity interview, with a healthy dose of self-care. Join us as we share the untold stories of influential AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, and creators – and ask how they have found ways to cope, survive and thrive. Our mission is to normalize conversations about mental health and promote social equity in the AAPI, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and LGBTQ+ communities. Each episode highlights ways to navigate the pressures of family, social media, our careers, our communities and our own minds.
Bamboo & Glass Podcast
2 Asian American women sharing the underrepresented perspectives that shape our lifelong journey of learning and unlearning. Check us out on Instagram: www.instagram.com/bambooandglass
Asian American History 101 Podcast
Asian American History 101 is a podcast co-hosted by Gen and Ted Lai, a daughter and father team. The podcast will entertain and educate people as Gen and Ted dive into the vast history of Asian Americans from their contributions to their struggles to their triumphs.
Happy Asian Woman Podcast
A show to help Asian-American women find more joy in love, work, and life. With mental health so crucial during these Covid times, let’s learn how to live our best lives. Hosted by professional journalist and Stanford grad Alice Chen.
Dear Asian Americans Podcast
Dear Asian Americans is a podcast for and by Asian Americans, focusing on authentic storytelling rooted in origin, identity, and legacy. Host Jerry Won brings on guests from diverse backgrounds and career paths to celebrate, support, and inspire the Asian American community. New episodes air every Tuesday across all major platforms. Instagram: @dearasianamericans
Modern Minorities Podcast
Sharon Lee Thony and Raman Sehgal are two MODERN MINORITIES – Asian-American industry pros “making it” (?) – even though they never became the doctors their parents wanted them to be. Each week, they are joined by folks of all stripes – entrepreneurs, corporates, athletes, reporters, politicians, entertainers, and more – to uncover how our different cultural backgrounds shape how we uniquely experience the world.
MODERN MINORITIES is a collection of conversations about work and life through the lens of race and gender. It is a show where we talk about “the thing” that everyone is thinking about, but nobody is actually talking about it. New episodes drop weekly.
This Filipino American Life Podcast
All The Asians On Star Trek Podcast
The podcast in which we interview all the Asians on Star Trek. Hosted by Phil Yu.
Feeling Asian Podcast
Welcome to Feeling Asian!
A podcast where two Asians talk about their feelings. After a lifetime of holding in their emotions (shoutout to Korean moms!), comedians Youngmi Mayer and Brian Park are ready to let them all out.
Each week, Youngmi and Brian dive into topics that range from dating to umm…not dating stuff, and invite their interesting friends along the way. Who knew catharsis could look so Asian?
New episodes out every Wednesday!
Follow us on IG @itsbrianpark and @ymmayer and @feelingasianpodcast.
Asian Enough Podcast
From the Los Angeles Times, “Asian Enough” is a podcast about being Asian American — the joys, the complications and everything in between. In each episode, hosts Jen Yamato, Johana Bhuiyan, Tracy Brown and Suhauna Hussain of the Times invite special guests to share personal stories and unpack identity on their own terms. They explore the vast diaspora across cultures, backgrounds and generations, and try to expand the ways in which being Asian American is defined.
Self Evident: Asian America's Stories
We tell Asian America’s stories to go beyond being seen.
As people of all backgrounds reckon with complex legacies of race, power, culture, and identity and ask themselves, “Where do I stand?” Self Evident presents reported stories and radically open conversations from the everyday Asian Americans who have been confronting this question for generations. Our mission is to empower local communities to share stories and build relationships around the value of self-representation.
Self Evident is a Studiotobe production, made with support from our listener community.
Saturday School Podcast
Wake up! Saturday School is a podcast where Brian Hu (@husbrian) and Ada Tseng (@adatseng) teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history.
New episodes released Saturdays at 8am, when all your friends are still in bed watching cartoons.
It’ll be a blast from the past, as they dig up some of their favorite works they’ve come across covering Asian American arts & entertainment over the years — and discover other gems for the first time.
They Call Us Bruce Podcast
Books & Boba Podcast
Books & Boba is a book club dedicated to books written by Asian and Asian American authors. We cover a wide range of genres including contemporary, historical fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, YA, nonfiction, thrillers, graphic novels, and memoirs.
On a side-note, if you like this, then you might want to read about a Kung Fu student’s Journey to China. 😉
Sound and Fury
This Podcast is no longer Live. However, there is still a collection of great content to be enjoyed.
The Angry Asian Podcast.
Asian American / Asian Research Institute Podcast
The Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI) was established on November 19, 2001, by The City University of New York (CUNY) Board of Trustees, in a resolution introduced by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein.
The Institute is a university-wide scholarly research and resource center that focuses on policies and issues that affect Asians and Asian Americans.
It covers four areas: Asian American Studies; East Asian Studies; South Asian Studies; and Trade & Technology Studies.
AAWW: Asian American Writers Workshop Radio
AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, a national nonprofit dedicated to the idea that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our current and past events. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, and Hanya Yanagihara, as well as more emerging writers like Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang.
Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, dedicated to social justice but with a sense of humor and weirdness. We curate our events to juxtapose novelists and activists, poets and intellectuals, and bring together people who usually wouldn’t be in the same room.
We’ve got it all: from avant-garde poetry to post-colonial politics, feminist comics to lyric verse, literary fiction to dispatches from the racial justice left. AAWW Radio features curated audio from the literary events we hold weekly in our New York City reading room, a legendary downtown art space that hosted Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book party and where Junot Díaz used to play Super Nintendo.
Founded in 1991, AAWW is an alternative literary arts space working at the intersection of race, migration, and social justice. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we’re inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Produced by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
ABG: Asian Boss Girl Podcast
A podcast for the modern-day Asian American woman hosted by Melody Cheng, Helen Wu, and Janet Wang.
We started this podcast as an outlet for topics we are interested in, and for sharing stories we have as 20-30 something-year-old Asian American women working, dating, and living in Los Angeles.
It’s no secret that Asian women are lacking in almost all media outlets.
As three women working in finance, tech, and production who balance careers, life aspirations, and eventful social lives (we have our fair share of 5 am returns from the club), we hope our perspectives can help, inform, and entertain those girls (and guys) with similar backgrounds or an interest in our backgrounds.
We like to think of this as our invitation for you to join our once-private girl talk sessions!
So grab a glass of wine and let’s get this show started 😉
Asian, Not Asian
Welcome to “Asian, Not Asian,” a podcast by two Asian comedians not from Asia talking about American issues no Americans seem to care about.
Each week, Fumi Abe and Mic Nguyen will discuss race, politics, media, funny stuff, food pics, peace signs, model minority myths, urban myths, and urban outfitters.
New episode every Monday!
Follow us on IG: TheFumiAbe & NicePantsBro & AsianNotAsianPod.
Southern Fried Asian
Southern Fried Asian is a new podcast from The Nerds of Color hosted by @Keith Chow.
Typically, stories about Asian Americans are centered on the experiences of those who grew up on the coasts — New York, Southern California, the Bay Area — where communities of different Asian American subgroups have lived for many years.
On this podcast, though, we’re gonna look at a region of the country that isn’t typically associated with these stories and unpack what it means to be Asian American in the American South.
Asian America: The Ken Fong Podcast
Ken Fong gets to the heart of Asian American culture, history, and spirituality.
Through interviews with movers and shakers in the Asian American community — some you know, others you’ve never heard of before — prepare to laugh, cry, and be amazed.
Asian Women of Power
This Podcast is no longer Live. However, there is still a collection of great content to be enjoyed.
Love, joy, happiness and fulfillment, are your cultural boundaries keeping you from having all this?
Asian, American or Asian-American, there is pride to be found in your cultural heritage, being identified as one is an honor and never an embarrassment.
Join Kimchi Chow as she shares her insights on life lessons she has learned from the past 4 decades living as an immigrant in the USA. She shares tips from other Asian women and immigrants who overcame the challenges of cultural conflicts and how to find the key to claim power in life.
Before her migration from Vietnam, Kimchi already had a set of standards and expectations born from her Eastern cultural upbringing. After living in America for 40 years, her customs and culture has changed through her experiences that made her into a person she did not want to be.
She is an investor and a business owner with a background in engineering. On top of all of this, she is a wife, a mother and a daughter. Having her fair share of stress is an understatement, when she tried to balance her duties for her family and her obligations to her work. Kimchi tried to please everyone, forgetting about herself and almost losing her marriage from the imbalance in her life and setting the wrong priorities.
Apart from her own struggles, Kimchi witnessed a lot more from others, from relationships breaking apart to couples filing for divorce, parents disowning their children and even children committing suicide from the pressure they get from their parents. These incidents made her realize she needed to change and adapt to her new environment to protect herself, her marriage and her children. She saw that health, wealth and relationships are like the three legs of a stool, with each one playing a vital role to support each other and what they stand for. Exploring possibilities, experimenting on beliefs and learning painful yet meaningful lessons, Kimchi found a way to be more authentic with herself and show more compassion towards others.
In the past twenty years, she has learned an effective way to communicate with others and be relatable to them, giving them the respect that they yearn for. As a life coach and teacher, Kimchi empowers Asian women and immigrants so they can create a life with power, freedom and choice. She wants to help Asian women to live their lives to the fullest and express themselves freely no matter what country they live in. She wants to help every woman to know that happiness and fulfillment in life are within their grasp.
Asian Women of Power is the podcast that will address and compare the key values between Asian and North American cultures. The episodes will discuss behaviors, expectations and assumptions from men to women and from parent to child. Kimchi will share different communication styles based on different personalities that most people think are gender specific as well parenting techniques from the perspective of an Asian woman. With self-confidence, your life will look and feel meaningful and you can start inspiring others to live a better life. When you know what you stand for and believe it can make an impact, then there is a reason for you to share it to the world, as well as listen to the messages the rest of the world wants to share. Find balance in family and work with a life filled with positivity.
Bad Asians Podcast
This Podcast is no longer Live. However, there is still a collection of great content to be enjoyed.
The podcast that starts off talking Asian things and slowly devolves into self indulgent thought exercises. David and Imran are comedians in SF and NYC who provide colorful commentary on current events, culture, race, politics, media, model minority myths and conversation pieces.
The Sini-Gang Podcast
The Sini-Gang are pinoys depicting a slice of Filipino-American life in Virginia Beach, Virginia via a weekly, light-hearted Podcast.
We discuss anything and everything, and we call ’em as we see ’em through our Filipino-American eyes.
Don’t take us too seriously though, we don’t.
Escape From Plan A
Escape From Plan A is the podcast that talks about all the forbidden topics in Asian America.
They’re the topics that rarely make it unfiltered to NYT or Huffington Post, but constantly dominate any discussions among Asians when we’re freed from supervision.
We’re Asian women and men who’ve come together to carve out a uniquely Asian American progressive perspective that’s different from the usual supporting-cast roles we play for everyone else.
No more face-saving. Time to get real.
We also run an online magazine, Plan A.
The Filipino Garage - KuyaChris & Friends - A Filipino American Perspective
Sharing positivity, thoughts, music, and art—all through a Filipino American perspective.
Based out of Daly City, the Pinoy Capital of the United States, the goal is to empower the FilAm community and Pinays / Pinoys throughout the world by profiling awesome people and spreading good vibes.
This is a mix of personal journals, interviews, recordings, and whatever can be created. Hope you enjoy!
Project Voice
This Podcast is no longer Live. However, there is still a collection of great content to be enjoyed.
Project Voice is a podcast series is spearheaded by the voices of womxn and nonbinary folx of the Asian diaspora. As the host of Project Voice, I hope that this series will act as a digital space where members of our community can go to for guidance and resources.
– Jessica Nguyen
Founder and Host of Project Voice
The Asian American Voice
This Podcast is no longer Live. However, there is still a collection of great content to be enjoyed.
Offering Insight and Inspiration to the current and aspiring Asian American entrepreneur.