Kiyo’s story, part 11: 1945 Professor Nimoy, Kiyo’s boss, was Russian Jewish, but had come to the US as a child with his parents. He was a full professor at the University of Chicago and highly respected in his field. He had a wife and three children, two girls and a boy. In exchange for […]
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Tag: Japanese-American experience
My mother’s kimono
This week my place is a kimono museum. For the past five years, since we started clearing out my mom’s house, a pile of Japanese kimono* that belonged to my mom and aunt have been sitting on my childhood bed, neatly folded and wrapped in a cotton sheet, while I tried to figure out what […]
Writing “American Fish”
“American Fish” was initially written as a scene in a play. I was taking a playwriting class from Ed Bullins, African-American playwright, and we were assigned to write one scene per week. I wrote it in 1985, so I honestly can’t say that I remember what inspired the scene. I thought it would be very […]
Bridging cultures
In 2000, students at the American School in Japan read The Loom and Other Stories and had the following questions, which I responded to by e-mail two hours after landing in Tokyo from California (and it was around 4 am California time): 1. How much of the book is autobiographical? I would say that many […]
Japanese-American
A Japanese-American is someone who has been trained in the Japanese ways of ultimate courtesy, but who has a quite independent and secret American sensibility locked into that pleasant and self-effacing exterior—like a bonsai. A tree trying to grow, but forced, through clipped roots and wired branches, into an expected shape. Like bonsai, a Japanese-American […]
Osewa ni natta
I decided early on that it was hopeless; I would never be Japanese, so why try? There was too much to know, too much to be understood that could not be conveyed by the spoken English word. I would rather be forward-looking—American. But much as I tried, I could never leave it behind. Someone would […]
How much of it is true?
In 2011, I responded to some questions from a young man in Minnesota who was taking a short story class and had read The Loom. Would you be willing to give me a short biography of yourself? In short: I was born and raised in San Francisco, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants. My family moved […]
Deru kugi
The Japanese have a saying, “Deru kugi ga utareru”—the nail that sticks out gets pounded down. I did not hear this saying until I was an adult, but as soon as I heard it, I knew it was true. It was one of those unspoken rules that had ordered our lives; but not knowing what […]
Bedtime Story
When I was a little girl, and my mother put me to bed, she did not tell me stories about enchanted forests or beautiful princesses. I had seen “Sleeping Beauty.” I knew “The Three Bears.” These were not the stories I wanted to hear from my mother. “Tell me the story of when I was […]
Nihonjin
At the age of six, I thought “American” and “English” meant the same thing—white people. After all, Americans spoke English. You have to understand, this was at an age when I also wondered why “onion” was spelled with an “o.” It seemed to me that it should be spelled with a “u,” except that would […]