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 out of Japantown when I was still a baby, and I grew up in the foggy “Avenues”—the bland but ethnically mixed Richmond District of the 1950s. I attended UC Berkeley during the last years of the Vietnam War and spent my junior year in England. After graduating, I taught English in Japan for seven years. After returning to the U.S., I discovered that there was actually a field that allowed me to explore the issues of identity and culture I’d been grappling with my whole life, and that I could actually make a living in it. I started doing intercultural training for companies that did a lot of U.S.-Japan business. It was great because I got to travel on business to Japan about twice a year. While working full-time, I went back to school to get my master’s degree in creative writing. My graduate thesis turned into The Loom, which was published in 1991 by Graywolf Press.

What were you doing when you wrote the book, and what are you doing now?

Well, it ended up being a book, but it was really a collection of short stories written over many years. I wrote the first draft of the first one (“Ohakamairi”) when I was a senior in college. I wrote and revised several while living in Japan. One was written initially as a scene for a playwriting class at City College with Ed Bullins. A few were written for story workshops at San Francisco State while I was getting my master’s degree.

I thought I could live a dual life—make a living and write, but making a living really takes it out of you! I was an English as a Second Language teacher for 14 years, and an intercultural trainer/consultant for 14 years. Then I got into e-learning development (imagine that! When I was in college, we didn’t even have computers!), and that’s what I do now. I create e-learning for an intercultural training company in San Francisco.

What was your inspiration for writing these stories?  Did your family experience a lot of the dilemmas that you discuss in your book? 

The book is fiction, but incorporates many actual elements of real life. My mother’s family was interned for three and a half years during World War II. My grandmother I never knew did perish in the atomic bombing. I lost my father to cancer and my sister in a rock-climbing accident. So yes, there are elements of autobiography in the stories; yet they are not autobiographical.

My motivation: As a Japanese-American born after World War II and growing up in the Richmond District of San Francisco, I had the feeling that I was in a 1950s television show about the perfect American family. But there was this other reality, one we were not focused on, where people spoke Japanese and worked cleaning white people’s houses and had Buddhist funerals when they died. There was a weird disconnect, and it was only after studying Japanese-American history after graduating from college that I understood the “cultural amnesia” that had been imposed on my parents’ generation (the Nisei) by the war and the internment. The Nisei generation, who grew up believing they were American like everyone else, had been questioned, doubted, and punished – and they came out of the internment experience as Super Americans. Their kids would speak English perfectly and have piano lessons and go to Harvard (or UC Berkeley 🙂 ), and “Japanese-ness” would be erased so that it could never hold them back. That was when I knew I had to go to Japan to understand the other half of the story and feel whole.

I also felt the need to open that door that had been closed on the past, and to make those stories show up in the fabric of American culture. I guess it’s like my loom metaphor – Asian-Americans were invisible in American society, or if they became visible, it was usually in some distorted or “demonized” way. There was an assumption back then (I guess it’s what people call “the melting pot”) that everyone should aspire to be white; well, that didn’t sit right with me. I needed to see the kind of people I grew up with appear in American literature. I wanted to let outsiders into my world; I didn’t want to always be an invisible ghost in theirs. It might be hard to imagine now when you have characters in popular culture like Christina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy or the Korean couple in Lost, but back then, about the only Asians you saw on TV were Hop Sing, the houseboy in Bonanza, or Mickey Rooney with his eyes pulled back. In American literature? Forget it! When I wrote short stories in grammar school, the main characters were always white boys named Steven or John. I couldn’t even conceive of an Asian-American fictional hero or heroine. It was like we didn’t exist.

My inspiration was really my dad and other Nisei like him. He was a great guy and a wonderful human being. So many of them sacrificed so much (you know about the 442^nd, right? The all-Nisei fighting unit that was the most decorated regiment in the U.S. Army in WWII?) with such modesty and grace. That they did not become bitter because of the way their country treated them is an example I’m not sure I have it in me to follow.

Did you experience these same struggles during your childhood?

I can’t compare anything I experienced with what the Issei and Nisei generations endured. By the time the sansei generation came along, people felt bad about the internment and were nice to us (at least in San Francisco). My challenges were mostly about identity, as I described above—about being marginalized and stereotyped, or feeling invisible.

What would you say are the largest challenges facing Japanese-Americans today? Have the issues changed since you wrote the book in the nineties?

Not that I’m an expert, but I imagine the biggest challenge Japanese-Americans face is extinction. Seriously – the outmarriage rate is really high! I have nothing against marrying outside the race; I did it myself. But it’s gotten to the point where I’m not sure there WILL be a Japanese-American culture in another couple of generations. All those chicken teriyaki church bazaars? Cherry blossom parades? What will happen to them? I’m worried that all the people who know how to make manju (Japanese sweet rice cakes) will die off! And immigration from Japan is not exactly robust.  I’m being semi-facetious here. But seriously, while the Chinese, Korean, Indian, etc. communities in the U.S. seem to be vibrant and growing, increasing their influence along with their numbers, it feels to me that the Japanese-American population is shrinking, in danger of falling off the radar entirely—another reason to write about it. As Isaac Bashevis Singer said, “Literature is the memory of humanity.”

“My place”: © R. A. Sasaki