Scenes from Seattle

In an effort to be less bare bones/text driven, I offer a few scenes from my trip to Seattle--a brief Asian American pictorial if you will.


First panel of mural at Pike's Place commemorating Japanese Americans' contribution to Seattle and the legacy of internment.



Last panel of mural at Pike's Place commemorating Japanese Americans' contribution to the area and the legacy of internment.



Lion dance in Seattle's Chinatown



Bruce Lee's gravesite (and the orange I brought him when I paid my respects)

A Diverse Final Three

I'm addicted to the reality show on Bravo, Top Chef, and tonight's episode whittled down all the competitors to the final three: Hung, Casey, and Dale--a Vietnamese American immigrant, a white American woman, and a gay white American man. The one straight, white male, Brian, just got voted off on tonight's episode. Dale sports a mohawk and has a fairly masculine vibe going on, Casey is feminine but also stands her ground and isn't any more or less emotional than her male competitors, and Hung is the most aggressive and confident and independent of the three. A lot of stereotypes being broken and challenged in this show, so Bravo to Bravo!

Homogeneity

I'm at the Portland, OR airport and as I'm looking around me, it dawns on me that there are is a certain homogeneity to airline passengers--especially at 8am (I've been here since 7:00am) and especially when it's not summer. Although I do think you can detect certain regional differences (there tends to be a higher concentration of Asian American passengers in the Bay Area/CA), in general most airline passengers appear to be white middle-class American--with a fair number of them being business travelers (mostly male, some female). There's more than a similarity to race, however--there's a similarity to our luggage, to our dress, and in a post-9/11, post-British bomb scare world, there are many less carry-ons and many more flip-flops/sandals.

It does make sense that airline passengers would be a fairly middle-class bunch--although air fares have decreased in recent times, the truth is, it still costs money and it takes a certain mentality to fly (I recently came across a few examples of people who never fly--out of fear-anxiety but also because they were priced out of such travel or believed themselves to be and because they never flew before, as adults I think there was a certain anxiety about this type of unknown travel).

So my question is: are there any places that are truly heterogeneous? Where diversity really exists on every level--gender, race, class, sexuality, region, religion, age? Traveling by train you see more people of color (especially in the South you see more African American travelers) but there still doesn't seem to be true diversity (there are also a lot of college aged people on trains). Would a baseball game be a more representative slice of America? Do sporting venues give us the chance to come together en masse and in public? Or perhaps it's the hospital--after all, illness never discriminates.

Legacy of Internment

This is my last day in the Pacific Norhtwest. It has been a fruitful research trip, and an even more fruitful recharging the batteries trip. And unlike my recent excursion in West Virginia, nothing on this trip has really sent me into the realms of racial discomfort and paranoia, although there have been moments, in reading and researching about the Japanese America internment/incarceration, and in looking through the archives and handling original documents related to this piece of history, when I have been filled with a sense of deep sorrow and sadness.

I don't know why the Japanese American internment/incarceration has this effect on me--but I've always felt a strong pull to make sure people know the details about this period in U.S. history--that one of the worst flauntings of the constitution happened with Executive 9066--that Japanese Americans experienced the worst brunt of institutional racism and discrimination--one whose legacy is felt to this day, not only within the Japanese American community but in terms of our own governmental policies with respect to post-9/11 and Iraqi and Afghani detainees.

It always amazes me that more people don't comprehend the ramifications of EO9066--that the constitutional rights of ALL PEOPLE, INCLUDING U.S. CITIZENS, WERE SUSPENDED ON FEBRUARY 19, 1942 and the U.S. military chose to only incarcerate people of Japanese descent. Sure there were a few Italian and German men (almost all were immigrants and had not been naturalized) who were detained, but there was never a forced, en masse removal of German or Italian American people on the West Coast. And there was never a case of espionage by any Japanese American--so the conceit of "military necessity" was a myth that many historians have since proved in the aftermath of internment.

And again, as I wrote in an earlier post, the internment was never only about the Japanese American community. There have always been allies of various races who protested the internment. And there were certainly plenty of people of all races (including some self-hating Japanese) who probably thought it was a good thing. But I guess the thing to remember is that like it or not, we're all in here together. I'm not trying to plead a Rodney King "Can't we all just get along" mantra, but I do think that we need to remember the past and to understand that it's never just about one group--the legacy and ramifications of internment (like slavery and like the displacement and genocide of American Indians) affects us all.

Baby Steps

Recently I received an email from a former Mount Holyoke student who wanted to get me caught up on her life and to share an anecdote with me. A few years ago she was working for a Fortune 500 company and found herself in a board room with about a dozen people (mostly men in their 40s and 50s) to review a brochure that would advertise the "diversity" and "global influence" of their company. The image they selected for the brochure was of a geisha. The student, who had taken an introduction to Asian American literature class with me, as well as an independent study on Asian American literature, realized, immediately, how problematic this image was, took a deep breath, and told them what her concerns were and made suggestions for more appropriate images to convey the message of diversity and global awareness. Her suggestions were both heard and taken seriously, they got rid of the geisha, and they implemented the new images.

Baby steps, but important ones. And I'm really proud that she was able to speak truth to power, to make her concerns heard, and to be taken seriously. She attributes a lot of her core convictions to being a Mount Holyoke alum, and I have to say that after teaching there for 3 years I am a convert to single-sex education. So here's to all of us taking small steps to try to enact social justice, one brochure at a time.

Speaking Out

I'm in Seattle doing research in the University of Washington archives. They have a lot of materials about the Japanese American internment, and two of the files I looked through were of Seattle area attorneys, Austin Griffith and Arthur Barnett, two men who represented various Japanese Americans and wrote letters to various government officials in an effort to find exemptions for these people from internment, and in the case of Arthur Barnett, a member of the American Friends Service Committee, he was very active in working with the Japanese American community in helping them through the evacuation, relocation, internment and then eventual relocation back to Seattle. Barnett, was also the attorney who represented Gordon Hirabayashi, one of four people who brought lawsuits against the US Government alleging the unconstitutionality of the camps (he didn't win during his time but he was vindicated years later, along with Min Yasui and Fred Korematsu).

Which just goes to show, there have always been people who have protested injustice--there have always been white allies. And I think that's important to remember, we've never just stuck to our own.

Asian American Chick Lit

I'm in the middle of reading the second of Kim Wong Keltner's Asian American chick lit books, this one called Buddha Baby. The first, Dim Sum of All Things, followed the adventures of 20-something Chinese American, San Francisco born and bred Lindsey Owyang. Neither is very good. As in, bad writing. As in, bad chick lit writing. The writer uses extended metaphors and similes in every paragraph and a lot of them are cheesy. The characters are relatively two-dimensional, and basically, it's just not good writing--the prose is not singing off the page, but rather, clunking off the page.

So why am I reading it? Well, there's this odd tension in the book--it seems to want to be chick lit and yet it also wants to be this self-consciously reflective piece of social justice and Asian American activism. It contains a little Chinese American history lesson in its pages, and a larger Asian American consciousness that does feel reminiscent of some of the better Asian American literature out there. It's this weird hybrid form, and actually, for that reason, I feel it's not successful--because it just doesn't know what it wants to be.

Or maybe, it's just bad writing, I mean what do you do with a passage like this:

"She was like an early Californian panning for gold, believing in her right to discover buried secrets. However, the strong current of verbal reticence that invisibly gripped the nearly dried-up Owyang riverbed hardly ever yielded a shiny pebble of insight" (Keltner 76).

Middle Passage Legacies & Residue

Last night I saw August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, which is the first (in chronology) of his cycle of African American plays that are set in the Hill district (a predominantly African American community) in Pittsburgh, PA. Gem of the Ocean is set in 1904 and features Aunt Esther, a spiritual leader of the black community, a woman who is 284 years old who holds the memory of the Middle Passage--the trauma of slavery--one who helps to heal and to "cleanse" the souls of black folks.

It was a remarkable play, and as one of my friends said, it really brought home the point that slavery--the legacy and residue of slavery and the middle passage, is a theme that continues to inform the lives of African Americans and all Americans. It is not simply a thing of the past to forget about and move on from. It is an entity that continues to inform how people live their lives.

We can see this in the Jena 6 case (see below to the post "Being Paranoid vs. Being a Target"). The latest update is that the charges of second degree murder have been overturned from the lead African American teen (thank goodness!). For more, go to this NY Times article (click here):

And the thing about the Jena 6 case and Gem of the Ocean is that both make a point that while white Americans have oppressed and abused and victimized African Americans, there is still space for inter-racial relationships, friendships, and intimate connections. Certainly the legal team and alternative media outlets and social justice organizations that worked on this case were staffed by people of various races. And even within the play there is a character, Selig, a white American peddler, who is clearly a friend and ally to the African American household central to the plot. And this is also what is important to remember, that the U.S. has never been monoracial, in either its composition or its intimate relations--there has always been inter-racial intimacies.

Anyway, after watching Gem of the Ocean I wish I could sit down and watch the 9 other plays in the cycle. An overwhelming task, perhaps, but an important one--because I think it's paramount for ALL Americans to really understand what the legacy and residue of slavery and the middle passage has left us, and how we can come to terms with this legacy--not to wish it away or believe it is gone but to move forward without forgetting.