East of California: Points of Origin in Asian American Studies

Versions of this paper have traveled to places rather unfamiliar, until nowadays, in Asian American studies, though influences of Asian America in some way or another have permeated these sites for a while. Under the title, “The South and Midwest as Points of Origin in Asian American Studies,” one version was my talk at the East of California conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in October, 1995. ¹ Other versions wound through workshops at Oberlin College in March, 1996, and still others were bases for presentations of mine at the University of Missouri, the Nebraska Humanities Council in April of that year, and at the 1996 annual conference of the Association for Asian American Studies in Washington, D. C., in the session, “The Power of Place.” All versions are derived from some thoughts I voiced and went on to discuss with students at the University of Florida in November of 1994, a place that gave me an occasion to comment especially on the South in Asian American studies. In addition, my interest in “sense of place” in Asian American literature and interdisciplinary studies goes back to my studies of Hawai’i and the Northwest. ²

What may seem to be a picaresque wandering from place to place—each with a local connection with Asian American history and culture—is itself a demonstration of my topic and theme: Asian America has a long and widespread history in what is now the United States. In Nebraska, a librarian startled by John Okada’s telling of a “blond giant” from that state seized the occasion to research whatever she could, in local sources scarcely available anywhere else, about Okada’s story in Nebraska, where he was briefly “relocated” to attend Scott’s Bluff Junior College before entering the Military Intelligence Service. ³ To the new readers there of Okada’s novel, the fact that the “blond giant from Nebraska,” hearing about the Japanese American internment from his nisei comrade in the United States Army, is one of the only characters in the novel to state explicitly that Japanese American internees were suffering an injustice as Americans—not as the enemy—recalls nearly forgotten questions connecting Asian American history with Nebraska. “‘They could kiss my ass,’ said the lieutenant from Nebraska,” in Okada’s novel, condemning “they” who have put Japanese Americans into “the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers.”

Eventually Okada went from Nebraska to experience more of life in the American interior. While living in Detroit, he wrote No-No Boy. Other nisei wrote in the region even though their works were explicitly and ostensibly mainly about other places. Shelley Ota wrote Upon Their Shoulders, her saga of issei and nisei of Hawai’i, after she moved to Milwaukee. ⁴ Monica Sone wrote Nisei Daughter when the relocation of Japanese Americans took her far from her Seattle home to Detroit, Cleveland, and a permanent home in Canton, Ohio. ⁵ St. Louis and its Washington University figure briefly but importantly in the development of plot and character in Hawaii: End of the Rainbow by Kazuo Miyamoto, who attended medical school there in the 1920s. ⁶

So even a novel as imbued as No-No Boy is with details and a sense of its West Coast setting, in this case a highly localized Seattle and Portland, can be considered also a product of the Midwest or, more pertinently, Okada’s moves into and out of the American interior. Effects in the novel of regions such as the Great Plains go beyond the brief appearance of the “blond giant from Nebraska.” In moves from one region to another, forgetting and remembering the threads of one’s or one’s characters’ life-narratives become a theme. Okada expresses such a theme in the anxiety-laden interior monologue of Ichiro the No-No Boy, who thinks, with rebuke, to his mother, “There was a time that I no longer remember when you used to smile a mother’s smile and tell me stories about gallant and fierce warriors. . . .” (15) It is not only a time...