Words Matter

Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi: Interview by King-Kok Cheung

A lasting friendship between two acclaimed Nisei writers, Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi, blossomed in the desert of Poston, Arizona, where the two women were interned during World War II. Yamamoto, author of Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1988), received the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1986. Yamauchi’s Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir (1994) received the Association for Asian American Studies’ 1995 National Book Award in literature. But Yamauchi is best known as a playwright. Her plays include The Music Lessons, 12-1-A, The Chairman’s Wife, and And the Soul Shall Dance, which won the 1977–1978 American Theatre Critics Association’s first regional award for outstanding playwriting. Some of the themes that recur in the work of these two writers—whose lives have been intertwined at various points— are remarkably similar. But their temperaments are markedly different, as becomes evident in the joint interview I conducted with them as part of the fiftieth anniversary commemoration 19 Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi Interview by K I N G - K O K C H E U N G of the Japanese American internment. I wanted to interview them together because they know each other intimately and I hoped that, being exceeding modest, they would speak more freely that way. Allowing them to talk about each other brought up information I would have had a difficult time eliciting in a one-on-one conversation. The interview took place at Yamauchi’s home in Gardena after the hostess had plied us with a generous assortment of sushi. Throughout the interview , Yamamoto is referred to as Si (pronounced Sai), as she is called by her friends. K K C When did you two meet, and how long have you known each other? H Y About 1940, when I went down to Oceanside. As soon as I got there, my brother, who was in the same class as Wakako at Oceanside Carlsbad High School, would tell me about this smart Japanese girl that was in his English class, and it turned out to be her. W Y When I was a girl, I lived in Brawley. I used to read Si’s columns in the Kashu Mainichi,1 and I thought, My goodness , who is this person? This was the first time I had read a Japanese American who spoke about our culture, the food we ate, and I thought, This is wonderful! You can be honest. So I read her column for quite a while, and then we moved to Oceanside because my father had suffered an enormous crop disaster, and it was like fate. Somebody said that Si Yamamoto lived here. I wanted to meet her, and I did, one day, at the meeting they were trying to develop for the young people’s club. I’d already known Johnny, her brother, because we were in the same class, and I used to see her other brother, Jemo; and I met her. H Y She said at that time she got the impression I was cold, but I distinctly remember playing tick-tack-toe with her on the blackboard in the schoolhouse where we had the meeting. 344 Words Matter K K C What was your impression of Wakako? H Y I thought Wakako and her sister really worked hard because they would come out with these sun hats and work out in the fields picking Kentucky beans while I just puttered around the house and went back and forth to the library. W Y Our family lived in town. My mother had a boardinghouse , so, when the farmers came to pick up, we’d go out to the fields, too, and we’d get paid! We’d be so tired that at lunchtime we’d just lie in the dirt. H Y I didn’t know that. I would have invited you in. W Y I didn’t even know you lived there, and, yes, I did think you were cold. I was so effusive. I thought she should have been responsive to that, but she wasn’t. She was very calm and very august. K K C And you met again at Poston? W Y Yes. The first time we met in Oceanside I don’t think I saw Si much then. But in camp we both were working for the Poston Chronicle. That...