A Shared Pacific Arena: Empire, Agriculture, and the Life Narratives of Mary Paik Lee, Angeles Monrayo, and Mary Tomita

Introduction

In Denise Cruz’s book Transpacific Femininities Cruz locates debates about the “making and remaking of the modern Filipina” in the twentieth century in terms of the interaction of the Philippines with the United States, Spain, and Japan.² Cruz’s argument speaks to Matt Matsuda’s contention in Pacific Worlds: “For Pacific worlds are not synonymous with just one declared and defined ‘Pacific,’ but with multiple seas, cultures, and peoples, and especially the overlapping transits between them.”³ Cruz’s and Matsuda’s comments are instructive, as they encourage us to think expansively about people’s relationship to the Pacific, not only as a site of community formation or an arena of imperial contestation but also in all the ways people imagine themselves to be connected to a region.

This unmooring of the Pacific, so to speak, gives us another perspective through which to consider an arena of US history that usually is less traveled: Asian American women’s rural history. Because of the gendered demographics of many Asian American communities in the pre-1965 era, which overwhelmingly favored male migration, we have fewer records and analyses of working-class women who were involved in farming. This lack of documentation is also a result of the nature of farm labor, which is typically more isolated and migratory, especially given the considerable restrictions many Asian American communities faced to sustained residence.⁴ Rather than conceptualizing rural history as “land-locked” or distant from metropolitan areas, what might happen if we consider rural space to be part of this expansive Pacific movement that Cruz and Matsuda argue about, as fundamentally connected to larger processes of empire, migration, labor, and community-building?

Recent research by scholars like Nayan Shah and John Howard underscores how rural spaces offer alternate possibilities for men and women, even with the extensive legal restrictions that regulated intimacy in the US West or the conditions of extreme coercion and official scrutiny implemented in the World War II Japanese American concentration camp.⁵ Toward this goal I want to compare the life history narratives of three working-class women who lived in rural California in the twentieth century: Mary Tomita, a Japanese American woman whose parents had a farm in Ceres, California, and who was born in the United States; Angeles Monrayo, who migrated as a young child from the Philippines to Hawai’i and then to California; and Mary Paik Lee, who left Korea as a child at the onset of the Japanese Occupation, later moving to Hawai’i and then spending most of her life in California. Through their full-length works, we are able to develop nuanced portraits of their lives in the first half of the twentieth century. I have chosen these three texts because they all shed light on the significance of Asian American women in California agriculture in the pre–World War II era and, in Monrayo’s and Lee’s cases, Hawai’i agriculture as well. In the early twentieth century both Hawai’i and California featured large-scale farming, which required a tremendous amount of labor, one of the reasons why the rural experience became such a regular component of Asian American lives during that period. For these workers agriculture was one of the very few occupations they could readily pursue.⁶

Furthermore, the three projects involve life history narratives through a firsthand perspective. These works, in a particular sense, exemplify “first-stage recovery research,” as termed by Vicki L. Ruiz, as they represent histories that have been recovered, reclaimed, and recontextualized by scholarly essays that explain and expand upon the women’s writings.⁷ In earlier stages of Asian American histories in the 1970s and 1980s comparative analyses across ethnicity were quite common, especially because of the focus on articulating what the political category of “Asian American women” meant, as well as the relative dearth of full-length books in the field.⁸ As a writer and a teacher I wondered what it would be like to read across three different life...