Asians in America

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

This is a thread for talking about the Asian experience in America, issues of identity and tradition for Asian-Americans as groups and individuals, and the profound influences Asian peoples, practices and ideas have had on American cullture and society. These things have been touched on in Film Festival, Restaurants and other threads, but it seems that a separate thread is needed, if only to provide a forum for discusing the articles on Asians in America that seem to keep appearing on a regular basis in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School

[Anonymous]

In the Home section of the Los Angeles Times for last Thursday, 14 June 2007, an article appeared, "Backyard Zen," dealing with the numerous Japanese-style gardens of LA and the men who created and tended (and, in some cases, still tend) them. This article caught my eye because I am one of those people not living in Beverly Hills or the Hollywood Hills who is nonetheless fortunate enough to have a Japanese Zen garden and an older, traditional Japanese-American gardener to care for it. (Both garden and gardener are a legacy from the lovely Japanese woman who, along with her husband, a famous comic-book artist from the seventies, sold the house to my wife and myself.) The article has a large, front-page photograph of a spetacular Beverly Hills garden with a boulder-and-shrub-lined reflecting pool and a moon bridge arching over to a Tokugawa-era tea pavilion that looks even larger than the one at the Japanese Garden in Van Nuys open to the public and owned by the City of LA (see my post on the Garden in the Japanese Community Resources in the San Fernando Valley thread). A much smaller photograph shows us a portrait of Takeo Uesugi, the Japanese-American landscape architect who designed the garden. Uesugi, a former professor at Cal Poly Pomona, came to the US to study American landscape architecture and stayed to become part of the century-long tradition of Japanese gardeners whose work has influenced not just Zen gardens but the entire landscaping aesthetic of Southern California. Although Mexican-American and other Latino gardeners have come to dominate the business in recent decades, the Japanese-American gardeners came first, most of them not as well-educated and successful as Takeo Uesugi, and some of them continuing to work far past retirement age, like Roy Imazu, profiled in the Times article, 75 and hard at work mowing a lawn in Panorama City, and like my own gardener, laboring weekly to make my backyard a work of art.

The Japanese immigrants who came to this country took up gardening as a trade for reasons similar to those that have inspired more recent immigrants from Mexico and points south. It is work that people from mostly rural backgrounds often have a knack for and work that does not require a great deal of money or extensive education or fluency in English. But Japanese-American gardeners, perhaps because of the Zen aesthetic traditon in Japan, began early to create a distinctive gardening style that influenced gardens throughout LA and all of California. The story of the Japanese-American gardeners and their tradition and its influence is told in a new exhibition that opened recently at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo and will run through October 21, "Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden." This would make an interesting and productive field trip with multi-cultural resonance, as many of our Latino and Latina students have fathers, grandfathers and other relatives who work or have worked in the gardening business. The story of the Japanese-American gardeners of California is both inspiring and disturbing, interrupted as it is by the social shame of the concentration camps into which Japanese-American gardeners and their families were herded during the Second World War for the ever-dubious reason of national security. That the gardeners and others forced to live out the war years in places like Manzanar chose to return to American society and continue to contribute to it is a testimony to the strength and compassion and, need we add, patriotism of the Japanese-American citizens of California.

The Times article details the specific influence of Japanese gardeners and gardens on LA, especially the way they have contributed to the local sense of "nature in the city" that makes LA both natural and urban in a yin-yang manner unique to itself. New York has Central Park, an oasis of greenery in the concrete urban jungle. LA has a jungle that is both urban and real jungle, with unexepcted bits of the Japanese garden essentials--stone, water, trees--surprising and delighting the tourist (and native) in the city with a bit of nature around the next corner or over the rise of the next hill. As Takeo Uesugi notes, the Japanese garden is a flexible form. This is certainly true of the Zen garden in my modest backyard, with its tall bamboo grove, raked-gravel "stream" and small-boulder "mountains" and its reflecting pool with waterfall that is also a small swimming pool and spa. I live in a desert environment in a congested and industrialized valley. But when I step into my backyard I enter a water garden of Zen serenity and balance, a unique part of life in LA and a tribute to Japanese-American gardeners, living and dead, and to their hard work and creative vision.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School

[Anonymous]

Another sad story from the Valley Edition of the Los Angeles Times, the Califonia Section, for 10 June 2007, "Then and Now: Hilltop grave may become a shrine," this one tells of a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman, Okei Ito, who came to the US to work at the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony near the town of Coloma in the Mother Lode country of Northern California, where she suffered horribly from homesickness and died at the age of nineteen in 1871. The 136-year-old granite headstone marking her gravesite is inscribed in Japanese and English: "In Memory of Okei, Died 1871. Aged 19 years. (A Japanese Girl)." Okei Ito, or Okei-san, as she is known to Japanese-Americans, is apparently regarded as a folk hero both here in California and in her native Japan, where a replica of her granite headstone was erected in Aizuwakamatsu, the city of her birth. There is also a Japanese song that laments Okei's early death. "To the Japanese, this farmland is our Plymouth Rock," according to Fred Kochi, a fourth-generation Japanese-American who is spokesman for a confederation of groups, including the American River Conservancy and several chapters of the Japanese American Citizens' League, who have come together in an attempt to raise $4.6-million to buy the 303 acres that once comprised the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony. The groups hope to turn the land into a memorial to Okei-san and other early Japanese settlers in America. The acreage now is part of the Goldhill Ranch, owned by the Veerkamp family, whose ancestor Francis Veerkamp bought the land from the founder of the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony, Dutch adventurer and entrepreneur John Henry Schnell.

In Japan Schnell , a weapons trader, had lived a type of Last Samurai existence, fighting alongside samurai Katamori Matsudaira of Northern Japan. Presumably in gratitude for this service, Matsudaira gave Schnell, married now to a woman of Matsudaira's clan, the financial backing to found the Wakamatsu farm colony in Northern California for the purpose of raising tea and silkworms. When gold-hungry miners dammed the stream that provided the farm's water source, thereby crippling Wakamatsu's agricultural and commercial prouctivity, Schnell eventually abandoned the project, which was bought by Veerkamp and turned into a fruit-tree orchard. Okei-san came to work initially for Schnell, then worked for Veerkamp after Schnell, in search of more funding, returned to Japan and eventually disappeared (some say he was killed). According to Veerkamp family and local legend, Okei-san would climb a hillside every evening to watch the sun set in the direction of her homeland while singing a song, "Yuyake Koyake" ("Sunset"), with tears streaming down her face. She died at 19 from a fever, possibly induced by malaria, although modern medicine might speculate that she suffered from immune system impairment caused by severe and prolonged depression. Okei Ito's headstone was paid for, inscribed and erected by Matsunosuke Sakurai, a compatriot and original co-worker on the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony.

Reading this article made me contemplate again the remarkable persistence and pride of Japanese immigrants to California, a state that initially exploited them, then demonized and eventually incarcerated them for the crime of being Japanese. I thought also of the appalling political propaganda from early twentieth-century California that Clay showed us in the final slide presentation of the seminar, with Japanese-Americans represented as sinister "Orientals" bent upon destroying the prosperity and security of California's "original settlers," white Americans. Again I marvel that Japanse-Americans have stuck it out and continued to live in and contribute to this state (a phenomenon I comment on in my post on Japanese Gardens in LA in this thread). I hope the groups trying to buy the original site of the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony as a memorial to Okei-san succeed, but her spirit and legacy live on, memorial or no, in the contributions of generations of Japanese-Americans to the diversity and uniqueness of California.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School

[Anonymous]

The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum is a website museum in which the history of this railroad is illustrated by many valuable photos. The real life of many Chinese Kulis (meant Chinese hard labor workers), who controbuted their lives to build this railroad but were often overlooked in this part of American history, are shown clearly in this website. There are a lot of useful information and photos that can be used in the social study class, American history class, or Chinese language class. I used many of the photos in this website to do several activities in my Chinese class when I introduced the histroy of Chinese Americans to my students. It went very well. However, in order to use those photos in the classroom you need to get authorization from the museum first. The website address is as following: http://cprr.org/ Please let me know if you have some ideas of how to use this website as part of your lesson.

[Anonymous]

On Friday 22 June I visited the Japanese American Nationnal Museum's exhibition on Japanese gardens and gardeners in LA and beyond (see my post "History of Japanese Gardens in LA" in this thread on the Los Angeles Times article "Backyard Zen" spotlighting the JANM exhibition). The museum itself is remarkable for its visual beauty (no surprise there, but still delightful) and for the efficiency of its layout and signage. I did not get a chance to eat at the new on-site restaurant or visit any other exhibitions and displays during this comparatively brief visit (see my post on the museum's website in the Web Resources thread), but I did go through the entire garden exhibition and was able to watch the series of videos profiling individual gardeners and their work.

"Beyond the Japanese Garden" is an exhibition both sad and beautiful, one that evokes admiration and compassion for the gardeners' work ethic, their struggles to survive socially and economically, and, sometimes, shame (on the part of non-Japanese viewers) at the restrictive, coercive measures used to exclude and control Japanese-Americans and deny them their right to full participation in American life. The exhibition includes a concise but comprehensive time line that highlights the numerous punitive legislative efforts in Callifornia, and the nation, to exclude and segregate Japanese-Americans. Some of the most egregious examples of these racist legislative fiats are the Alien Land Law of 1913 that barred Japanese-Americans from owning or leasing land, the 1923 Supreme Court decision which upheld the Alien Land Law, and the 1922 Supreme Court decision that barred Japanese-Americans from becoming naturalized citizens. The wonder is that so many Japanese-Americans, in the face of such minatory persecution, elected to remain in California and work at residential gardening, one of the few jobs open to them, and give back gifts of lasting beauty to a state, and nation, that treated them with such contempt. That contempt reached epidemic extremes in the imprisonment of California's Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps for most of the Second World War. The concentration camps are not the focus of the exhibition but they are the dark sidebars to the main text as viewers watch ex-gardeners return from the camps to pick up lives and businesses shattered by wartime imprisonment and then, with indefatigable optimism, begin all over again.

The exhibition contains images of the gardens designed by Japanese gardeners and one wall dispalys the humble but efficient tools used before the advent of chain saws and leaf blowers to sculpt the semi-arid landscape of Southern California into tranquil oases of stone, water and artfully shaped vegetation. The videos mentioned earlier contain interviews with older gardeners and sometimes with sons or grandsons who have gone into the family business. But, as the exhibition makes clear, most children of Japanese-American gardeners went on to earn college degrees and pursue professional careers in law, education and medicine. (One sign displays a quotation from a gardener who bragged that his lawnmower would send all his children to law or medical school.) One of the videos is narrated by Naomi Hirahara, the renowned Southern California mystery novelist whose part-time detective protagonist is, as her father actually was, a Japanese-American gardener.

The exhibition, which runs through 21 October, would make an excellent field trip and one with special meaning for our Latino and Latina students, many of whom, like most Japanese-Americans, have, or have had, a gardener in the family.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

My experience as an Asian American has gone full circle. I grew up in a small city in So. Cal. that is predominantly Caucasian and Hispanic. There were few Asians in this city. Growing up I was embarrassed of my culture and tried to blend in to the main stream. I did not appreciate my heritage very much. There were time when I would be so embarrassed to bring ethnic foods for lunch. It was not until college where I took Japanese language and history classes that I began to appreciate my heritage. I have really around and now embrace my culture and see it as a great blessing.

John Yamazaki [Edit by="jyamazaki on Jul 10, 11:13:34 AM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

When talking to other Asian women who like myself had immigrated here at a young age with my parents, I find the experiences that are most poignant and complex are those of eldest daughters. For us, being the eldest means that you are responsible, a dutiful daughter to your parents but also acts as a surrogote mother to your younger siblings as well. The eldest daughter must help out with the household and must be a good role model for her younger siblings.

It is often difficult to balance the Asian side of repsonsiblities with our American craving for independence. In talking to so many women, I find that this balance is a constant struggle.

[Anonymous]

Well, I am Cambodian-American. I was born in Stockton, Ca, a small city in the San Juaquin Valley. People who are usually not around very many Asians tend to see Asians as being Japanese or Chinese. Even in Stockton, where quite a few Cambodian refugees settled (outside of Long Beach), there were still citizens who had no idea Cambodians are Asians, too.

Back in Cambodia, my dad was a soldier and his family were farmers. My mother lived in the capital and her family worked in the government. When they escaped Cambodia to come to the U.S., they worked at a ski resort in Utah, before coming to California to become farmers [the Khmer Rouge had destroyed everything they had]. Soon, the Cambodian population increased, and associations began popping up to support the immigrants and their children.

Up until I was about 10, my father went to college and taught the Khmer language at a local high school. He taught my siblings and I for a few years before we moved to Southern California (I've lived in Long Beach and a smaller town outside of Riverside, CA). When I was in Stockton, I didn't really notice the differences between the lighter-skinned and tighter-eyes, and wealthier Asians (Japanese and Chinese) and the darker-skinned and often poorer Southeast Asians. I associated with other Cambodian kids and went to school with them--participated in many Cambodian activities and so forth. I wasn't proud or ashamed to be Cambodian. It was when I was going through high school and college did I realize that in the United States, Cambodians carry a stigma with them. These are groups of people who came over from Cambodia and is immediately put on government assistance and programs--they get on and stay on for years and years without any strong and lasting program to launch them into the job market. These are people who are poor and under-represented at colleges where Asians make up the highest percentage. These are people who are in gangs and face the risk of being deported. These are the Asians who aren't successful in terms of professional careers but make their wealth from either owning and selling donuts, jewelry, or opening a video store.

There was a point in time where I was ashamed to have people know me as a Cambodian. I didn't want people to lump me in with all those other Cambodians. I had an identity crisis and I didn't know where I belonged. One of the places I grew up was in a very small town called San Jacinto. The only Asian students were myself, my siblings and 2 other kids. I grew up with Mexicans, whites, and blacks and adopted their culture for many things. Whenever I would go to Long Beach or Stockton, I would never get along with the youths because they spoke differently and were interested in different things. I went through my late teens blowing off the Cambodian culture. When I reached my upper-division years in college, I joined the Cambodian Club and forced myself to get in touch with my Cambodian-ness. I was older and could then understand the importance of who I was. I began rediscovering my true identity and appreciating different aspects of what it means to be Cambodian.

It's very different when you are growing up, looking non-stereotypical Asian. Most people think I'm Latina or Philippino, at the most. I think the Chinese and Japanese get treated with a bit more respect and appreciation than their southeast counterparts because they're seen as more successful and productive. Maybe it has to do with the two groups being in the U.S. longer, maybe it has to do with the strength of their countries, maybe it has to do with skin color, maybe it has to do with all of the above. But I often feel the discrimination with the Asian populations as well as the discrimination amongst the other 'race' groups out there.

[Anonymous]

I have way too many personal experiences being Asian American that I share with my students. I am Chinese American from the SF Bay Area, have lived throughout the US, but have never been to Asia. My students of course naturally ask me about China as if I am an expert about China. Although I know little about Asia, I know a lot about being Asian American. I love to share the experiences about my family and their struggles being Asian American in the US. My family originally came here as paper children of family friends of other Chinese already in the States until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. I try to explain the challenges of the discrimination my grandparents, aunts, and uncles felt from their journeys from Angel Island to living within the boundaries of SF Chinatown. I also relate these experiences to those that Black and Latinos faced during the civil rights era that civil rights applied to all races. I hope to share more of these stories with my students.

[Anonymous]

I do relate with some of the struggles and complexities that come with being the oldest daughter from an Asian immigrant family. I have two younger sisters and both of my parents were working to support us when we moved to the US from South Korea. I did take on the dual role of mother and sister and the responsibilities were tremendous: I had to cook, do homework with the "kids" and make sure that everything was taken care of before my parents came home. Improvisation was a key word during those trying days. Luckily, my siblings were extremely helpful and cooperative. The pressures were immense at times--learning a new culture, language, and surrogate parenting. The only thing that kept me going was envisioning how hard my parents were working to sacrifice their well-being and culture to give us a better life. All the late nights of waiting, being up at 2am, and the like were nothing compared to what my parents went through. I don't think I will ever understand the degree and the depth of their love for us. As I get older, I am getting glimpses of what their actions resulted by the choices we, as Americans, are able to make in our adopted land. Moreover, having gone through such toughness training at an early age has taught my sisters and I to be resilient in all circumstance. I would like to believe that all three of us are able to pass along some of the values of hard-work and sacrifice to our individual families.

[Anonymous]

So many stories and episodes to think about...I'm a 1.5 generation Korean-American: Born in Seoul but came to the states at the age of 7. Feeling out of place has been a common thread amongst the 1.5 generations. In one sense, I was raised and educated in Korea up to a certain point--unlike my two younger sisters, I have maintained a majority of my language (due to a lot of expected late night studying as the representative of my "clan") in reading, writing, and speaking. When I came to the US, I had to act as a translator for my parents when they used to take my sisters and I to school. I distinctly remember carrying around a small notebook to collect new vocabulary words to memorize so that I can use it in an opportune time. There were also issues of bullying--having been bullied due to my cultural difference and then becoming the bully. Those early years were some of the toughest memories yet. When I had a chance to go back to Korea after 20 years of being in the states, the level of culture shock I experienced was unbelievable. Instead of feeling at home, Korea felt more foreign than the US. Getting used to the cultural norms of a group-mentality society was the toughest adjustment--I felt like the antithesis of group-think. At the same time, I adhere to some of the traditional values of my culture (i.e. honoring your parents, taking care of your younger siblings, etc) in the states that are in conflict with mainstream social norm. It has been an interesting journey thus far. I do have to say I've met some wonderful individuals along the way who have shared some of my experiences or have had ones vastly different from mine. The identity as an Asian American is constantly evolving.

[Anonymous]

Sarah,

I can understand your experiences. I have a younger brother, and it was a given that I would be his caretaker when my mother wasn't around. (Our father died when we were young) It was understood that I would go to a college nearby so that I could come home on the weekends and watch him while my mother worked. At the time, I was bit resentful about this, but now I'm thankful. I have a close relationship with my brother, and I figure my sacrifices were small compared to my mother raising two kids on her own.

I also have had a similar "identity crisis," if you will. I'm second generation, and I don't know where I belong. I know that America will always see my as an outsider because of the way I look. At the same time, to Koreans (even my family), I'll always be the American. This was especially evident in my trip to Korea a couple of years ago. Even though everybody looked like me, I felt completely out of place. I have the naive hope that I would go there and I would somehow feel like I was supposed to be there all along.

So where do I belong? I'm sure a lot of people go through this...when I read WEB duBois' The Souls of Black Folk, I was finally able to put a phrase to what I felt: double consciousness. Even though we may not want to, we end up looking at ourselves based on how others view us.

[Anonymous]

Asians in America? What's the general feeling about racism and stereotypes?

I posed the above questions to an Asian American friend, a self-described "banana"--white on the inside and yellow on the out. Here is his response.

"I am part of both and accepted by neither. The Asian stereotype is more positive (smart, hard working, etc...) and therefore there is much less anger around it. Most negative Asian stereotypes is related to size and appearance and I have really no perspective on that." (The last comment refers to his height 6 ft).

[Anonymous]

I'm a Japanese-American, born and raised in Southern California. My grandparents were immigrants from Japan, so both my parents were born in L.A. and Sacramento but were sent back to Japan to attend school once they reached age 5. My father returned to the U.S. when he was 17 and was drafted into the U.S. Army. My mother returned to L.A. at age 22 when she was to be married to my dad (arranged marriage through their parents). I was raised in a bicultural, bilingual home but with very traditional Japanese customs. It was tough for me to be a teenager and not have the freedom that my friends had because my mom was so strict. But I had friends of different ethnicities and never thought I was any different from them until I was about 15. One somewhat painful experience was when I was invited to my Caucasian girlfriend's house. The father was home so I was not allowed to go inside. He had been in WW2 and hated Japanese. On other days when the father was not home, the mother was very kind to me and invited me in. So, my visits to her house had to be planned in advance. On another occasion when I was working parttime, a rather inebriated customer began yelling at me that I killed his cousins in the war, blah, blah, blah. It was probably the most painful experience that I had and I'll never forget it. Had I been better prepared for this experience, I probably wouldn't have reacted as I did (cried for days, didn't want to talk to any Caucasians, etc.). Now that I have my own children (who are biracial Caucasian-Japanese), I have always told them that there are a lot of racist people they will encounter. Some will voice their feelings; others won't. But that they must always be aware that they are targets because they are physically different. One one occasion when my son's basketball team played in a tournament in Las Vegas, the team (composed primarily of Asian boys) were at the pool and I was nearby. A group of Caucasian parents lounged on chairs nearby, too. I noticed there seemed to be a problem with the basketball team boys and the Caucasian boys. Words seemed to be exchanged and our boys seemed upset. One of the Caucasian mothers said, "Look at that Asian gang." I could have said a lot of things, but I merely said, "There are part of a basketball team. They are not in a gang." Later that night, our boys were eating in the food court, and one of the Caucasian boys made some racial slurs at our boys. Thank goodness one of our boys walked up to a dad of the Caucasian group and told him what was going on and to asked the dad to make the boys stop harrassing them. The dad apologized and apparently talked to the boys because the taunting stopped. So, as for Asian-Americans here in the U.S. and racism? It's alive and well. I'm always conscious of my physical difference only because others notice it. When my husband (Caucasian) and I were first married, he had no idea what it felt like for me, but through the years, as I encounter situations, he has begun to see the perceptions of people and the sometimes hostile environment that people of color experience. [Edit by="willoughbyak on May 21, 7:07:52 AM"][/Edit]
[Edit by="willoughbyak on May 21, 7:34:24 PM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

I have the privilege and honor of working at a school that is 80% Asian. I love working there I think the kids are great and could not ask for a better situation. However, there is something that bother me. The thing was seeing racism with in the Asian population. I have come to find that many of my students have learned to have a strong dislike for other based on their family’s origin. Most of this hate is learned from their parents and comes from historical wrongs committed between the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people. As I have learned more about each group’s history I have begun to understand the hatred that still exists. My hope is that as they grow up together here in the school environment that will learn to see each other differences and forgive one another for past wrongs.

[Author]

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