Apo Benigno Bicycled to Hawaii in 1946 and Made a Difference

Special Guest Author: Romel Dela Cruz

Benigno Apo Tomas Dela Cruz was born in Laoag City, PI. Apo (Filipino/Ilokano word of respect for a venerated elderly person) as he was affectionately called by his apokos (Ilokano word for grandchildren) was a young boy when his father died. He was raised by his mother and siblings. In the 1920s, at the age of 10, his four older brothers emigrated to Hawaii as sakadas (sugar plantation worker recruits from the Philippines). Apo was left behind to farm the small family plot and look after his mother and sister. He did this for almost 30 years and did not appreciate it but had no choice because he was the youngest male with no resources of his own.

In 1941, at the start of World War II, all of his brothers returned to the Philippines and one gifted Apo with a bicycle. Da bicycle* enabled him to court Asuncion Alonzo to whom he was married for 69 years. During and after the War, the bicycle was Apo’s and Asuncion’s sole means of transportation and the only possession of value that they could truly call their “very own.”

When the War ended in the early months of 1946, Apo heard that the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) was recruiting new sakadas in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, not far from Laoag. He had always been interested in going to Hawaii but was not certain if it was the right time, because the War had just ended and his son was barely a year old. However, Apo’s compadre (godfather of his son), Ricardo, who shared the same apelyido (surname) had completed most of his documents to go to Hawaii but had changed his mind. Apo offered his bicycle to Ricardo in exchange for his documents.

Apo became one of the last surviving 6000 Sakadas transported on the SS Maunawili (an inter-island cattle transport ship) by the sugar and pineapple plantations to work in Hawaii in 1946 to counter the anticipated ILWU strike that would change Hawaii forever.

The HSPA anticipated that the Strike that began on September 1, 1946 would end in their favor just as it always had in the previous fifty years by bringing in new workers (first the Chinese, followed by the Japanese, Portuguese, Europeans and other Caucasians, Puerto Ricans, Koreans and finally Filipinos beginning in 1906) to counterbalance the strikers. But this time, the HSPA had miscalculated.

Apo said that when he and the other Sakadas were on board the SS Maunawili for the 14-day voyage to Honolulu from Vigan, Ilocos Sur, they were secretly educated and advised by the ship’s crew and International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members of the pending Strike, the concept of pinagmaymaysa (one and united) and the benefits of joining the union for the betterment of all.

At first, Apo was not familiar with all the issues and the struggles of the sugar workers in Hawaii, but he listened and decided to follow despite understanding, too, that it would be a sacrifice because he would not be earning the money he eagerly desired to support himself and his family in the Philippines.

The Strike by the 34,000 sugar plantation workers was supported by the 6000 Sakadas. It lasted for 79 days. Many historians tell us that the Strike of 1946 was important because for the first time, the ILWU-led walk-out was successful in challenging the stranglehold that the sugar and pineapple growers, the Republican Party and other privileged classes had held over every facet of life in the islands for almost 100 years.

The new political and economic influence gained under the leadership of the ILWU and the unwavering support of its members then and in the years that followed transferred political control of governance from the Republicans to the Democrats beginning in 1954. Hawaii went from a territory to a State in 1959. The passage of many progressive laws, some very revolutionary, were instigated to help all workers in Hawaii, not only those in the ILWU. A fair living wage, guaranteed under collective bargaining laws, spawned the growth of a more educated and upward-mobile generation with “roots” tied to the plantations.

Apo, 102 years less 22 days, died at home in Honokaa, HI on October 31, 2015. Employed by Hamakua Mill Co., Paauilo HI, he had been a loyal “rank and file” member of the ILWU for 35 years. He had been a sakada and worked as a cut cane man (sugar cane cutter), sabedong man (herbicide sprayer), tractor operator and truck driver.

Even though Apo contributed to the important events that changed Hawaii, all he really knew was to work hard, provide for his family, and trust his gasat or destiny/luck to take him where he wanted to be. In the beginning, Apo’s bicycle* started off being merely a form of transportation. But that bicycle brought together the lives of two people who then exchanged it to follow their dreams for a better life for themselves and their offspring. Apo’s bicycle* took them from the village of Darayday in the Philippines to Hawaii … and to his part in making better lives for all the workers of Hawaii.

Author Bio: Romel was a plantation boy, born in the Philippines, who came to Hawaii as a young child and grew up in Paauilo, Hawaii. He attended Paauilo School, graduated from Honokaa High School, then went to college in Honolulu, HI and Los Angeles, CA, graduating with a BA in History and a Masters in Public Health from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Romel volunteered with the US Peace Corps in the Philippines and spent a work career of almost 40 years in education, social and health services of which 25 years was as a hospital administrator, including 12 years at Hale Ho’ola Hamakua (hometown nursing home/critical access hospital), before retiring in 2007. He now tends a little farm in Ahualoa, volunteers in the community, researches and writes about the Filipino experience in Hawaii, and dotes on his three apokos. He is pictured with one of his apokos, Sophia, his 4-year-old granddaughter.

* Photo of a replica of Da Bicycle, based on Apo’s description of it. He indicated that it was Japanese-made and purchased before the start of WWII. During the war when there was a shortage of rubber tires, he shoved rags into the tire which made for a very bumpy ride especially for his wife who rode on the back of the bike, holding onto him, whenever they had to go to town.

Ron Chew’s first job, when he was 13, was working as a bus boy at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s China Town. The waiters would share their tips with him and he would save these tips in a bank account. After his stint as bus boy, he went on to do many other things and forgot about his “tips” account … until many years later, when he became Executive Director of the Wing Luke Asian Museum (WLAM).

Under his leadership, the WLAM made the jump from a grassroots organization/museum to its current presence as the world class, vibrant Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience. And it started with Ron’s “tips” account which, over the years, had grown to $10,000 (bank interest was much higher than it is today).

People would ask him how he, as a single father of two small children, could give so much on his meager museum salary. $10,000 is a lot of money to donate to any cause, even those we believe in. But Ron had a vision of a museum that would “keep our stories going.” He donated his $10,000. In retrospect, he suspects that he hadn’t touched his tip money all those years because he felt that it didn’t really belong to him. It belonged to the community of immigrants and Asian Americans who had tipped him so generously when he was a struggling bus boy. Now it was time to give back to that community.

The WLAM’s substantial expansion included a successful $23 million capital campaign that enabled them to acquire and renovate an historic building for the permanent home of their museum. This is what the Oregon Nikkei Endowment wants to do. Its museum, the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, created in 2004, needs a larger facility to house its many exhibits and growing artifact collections to better preserve and tell our community’s stories.

How much are you willing to give to keep our stories alive?

More information

Volunteer

Donate

Contact: Lynn Longfellow, Executive Director Oregon Nikkei Endowment, 121 NW 2^nd Avenue, Portland, OR 97209, (503) 224-1458

Today is Giving Tuesday, the global movement that demonstrates the power of giving back. Please consider giving time, effort and/or money to the organizations and causes that matter most to you.

Contributed by Anthology author, Matthew Salesses (essay reprinted from Glimmer Train)

I Didn’t Understand My Book Until After I Sold It

Eleven years ago, I started a novel about expatriates in Prague. I was an expatriate in Prague, a Korean adoptee teaching English as a Foreign Language to executives at Czech companies. It was my first year out of college. I wrote a Pynchonian cast with a white American kid at the center. A political novel about the effects of American culture on Eastern Europe.

The year afterward, I went to Korea for the first time. I told myself I didn’t care to know anything about my birth family. I told myself I was simply curious. I started dating a woman who would become my wife. After that year, we dated long-distance while I did an MFA at Emerson College, in Boston, with the idea that I would do a little tinkering and publish my masterpiece.

Of course, my book was no good. I spent my MFA combining my Anglo American protagonist with his Asian American friend, setting the book back in time to 2002 when a major flood devastated Prague, and finding a consistent style. The other big thing I did was start therapy. I wasn’t talking about my adoption yet, but my protagonist became adopted.

Then I took a year off to go back to Korea and get married, and I lost my job there for missing work on Christmas, the best thing that could have happened to me. I started the book over, writing five or six hours a day. My protagonist was now thinking back on Prague from a hospital, dreaming about a ghost woman. I submitted that draft as my MFA thesis—it finally had the title The Hundred-Year Flood—and revised for two years afterward. I found my first agent and revised with her suggestions. At the same time my daughter was born, my agent sent the book out to publishers. I had written well over a thousand pages to get two hundred I almost liked.

The rejections rolled in. When I returned to the page yet again, I couldn’t seem to face the book I’d written. I ran into depression, mostly related to my changing worldview. I was a new father, and part of fathering a biological child meant facing how much my birth culture and birth family mattered. For one, I didn’t know what to tell the pediatrician about my medical history, what diseases my daughter might chance facing. In my writing, I started exploring my protagonist’s Korean side. After another couple of years, I found a new agent who sent the novel out again.

Finally, after a decade of working on the book, a decade after I lived in Prague, I got my break. It started with a trip back to the City of Spires. I led a writing trip to the Czech Republic and as if it was a magic charm, soon after that trip an editor asked to see a revision of my first three chapters. I rethought who my protagonist was after ten years of living with him. He was different from who he’d started out as, but he wasn’t right yet. I kept revising. My editor bought The Hundred-Year Flood on the promise of further revisions.

Almost as soon as I sold the book, I realized that other people would read it. I had been working on in private for so long. Of course I had hoped for this, but now it was real. That reality took the book out of a safe space, a silent space. I had to answer, publicly, the question of what really haunted my protagonist.

In the middle of my edits, I went to a football game with a mentor. He said he had sold a novel about the one-who-got-away. During his own final edits, he asked himself if he really was still hung up on his ex. The question made him realize that the love story at the center of his book was a father-daughter relationship. It was a book about the writer’s love for his kids. That was the love that mattered to him now.

I thought hard about what he had told me. He had done a kind of self-therapy. I knew that some aspect of my own novel had always been off. If other people were going to judge me by this book, I had to judge myself. All of the stuff about Korea, about haunting, about myth—what was that? I had thought my book was about the loneliness and confusion I had felt in Prague as an Asian American expatriate. I had gone through draft after draft trying to get close to my protagonist. What I was missing, though, was what I had been denying in Prague and what had made me leave for Korea directly afterward.

In other words, it took me until my final revision to see that I was writing a sort of love letter to my birth mother. I started the novel before I ever returned to Korea, before I married a Korean woman, before I admitted to myself that I thought about Korea at all. Eleven years earlier, when I went to Prague because I was too scared to go to Korea, I started a novel that was always about connecting with my roots and my inability to do so. If the book is about loneliness and confusion, it is about the loneliness and confusion of adoption. I needed eleven years of self-therapy, of revising my words and my identity, to see that I had been writing about my own past all along.

Matthew Salesses was adopted from Korea. He has written about adoption and race for NPR Code Switch, the New York Times Motherlode blog, and Salon, and his fiction has appeared in PEN/Guernica, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and Where Are You From: An Anthology of Asian American Writing, among others. He is also the author of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying and Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity. The Hundred-Year Flood is his first full-length novel.

“This is an exquisite, unforgettable book about the extraordinary demands of identity and the transformative power of art and love.”

— Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country

Sapna Cheryan and Zach Katagiri, two of our Anthology authors, recently published an article in Social Psychology about the ways that people cope when they feel that a core part of their identity has been threatened. The article focuses on masculinity (What happens when you tell a man that he is not “manly”?) and has been generating some interesting media buzz, subsequently getting coverage at an assortment of notable news organizations including Salon, UK Daily Mail, and MTV.com.

Their study was inspired, in part, by earlier work that looked at the ways that Asian Americans would assert their American identities in situations where they were subtextually sent back to Asia (i.e. “Where are you from?… Yeah, yeah, but where are you really from?”). The authors were hoping to support that work while taking a look at another example of identity threat/assertion as a way of opening up dialogue about the social norms and expectations that we perpetuate, often without even thinking about it, and the implications such things can have in both humorous (men who are told they are weak report being taller than they are and having had more sexual partners) and very serious ways (men with baby faces tend to have more aggressive tendencies and commit more crimes).

A complete list of coverage for the story:

• “Manning Up.” Social Psychology, 46(4), pp. 218–227
• Salon, June 24, 2015, Men Overcompensate in Gross Ways When Their Masculinity is Threatened
• MTV.com, June 25, 2015, Here’s Why Guys Exaggerate How Tall They Really Are
• UK Daily Mail, June 23, 2015, Are you man enough? Men lie about their height and number of sexual partners if they feel their masculinity is being questioned
• UW Today (University of Washington), June 22, 2015, Men May Overcompensate When their Masculinity is Threatened
• Raw Story (Pandagon blog), June 24, 2015, Male overcompensation is toxic even when it’s not violent
• Medical Daily, June 23, 2015, Man Up, Bro: Men Tend To Overcompensate When Their Masculinity Is Threatened
• The Stranger, June 23, 2015, UW Psychology Experiment Finds That Guys Exaggerate Their Height When They Feel Their Masculinity Is Threatened
• International Business Times, June 23, 2015, Men who fall short of masculine ideals overcompensate with gender stereotypes

Sapna Cheryan is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Her research interests include identity, stereotypes, and prejudice, and she has published articles on stereotype threat and strategies of belonging to social groups in journals such as the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology and Psychological Science. Her awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University in 2007.

Zach Katagiri was born in Hawaii, grew up in Oregon, studied in California and Kyoto, Japan, and now lives in New York. He has been working in digital media for the past 15 years, doing audio and video production, graphic design, and web design and development (http://www.zachkatagiri.com). His primary gig is as the US Business Director at CMNTY (pronounced “Community”), managing digital marketing efforts, helping to support clients, and establishing their New York City office. He and his wife live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and love to cook/eat/drink, play/watch basketball, and take advantage of a city that has something different to do every day.

Sometimes, when we try to unravel a family mystery, we uncover more than the buried treasure that was the initial purpose of our journey. We learn about our family’s history, the country our family came from, and … ourselves. I asked Huan Hsu, author of The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China, to share his thoughts about his enlightening trip through time as he went to China to look for his great-great-grandfather’s buried porcelain.

Written by Huan Hsu, Special Contributing Author

When I first moved to Shanghai to search for my great-great grandfather’s buried porcelain, I was annoyed at everything. Though I had known that, compared to America, China would be dirty and crowded and chaotic, I remained unprepared for how much of the country would repulse me.

It wasn’t the pollution, inefficiency, and filth–I had braced myself for those things, which weren’t uncommon in many developing countries. It was the specifically Chinese things like the long fingernails, the purpose for which I could never really ascertain. The pushing and shoving on subway platforms. The inability to stand in line. Public urination and defecation. Spitting. Laughably bad translations of Chinese into English, or Chinglish. Underwear drying on street signs or tree branches. Pajamas worn as streetwear. And this was Shanghai–imagine how I would have handled a second or third-tier city.

I took great effort to avoid such sights, restricting myself to a network of expat havens where I would find decent coffee and western food and good service. When encountering Chinese habits, I stood in harsh judgment of them. Non-Chinese expats had the privilege of being able to regard these things as exotic eccentricities, one more weird ha-ha-can-you-believe-this? story to tell their friends back home. But to me, they were deeply embarrassing, as retrograde as foot binding. They served as reminders of China’s long history of ignorance and savagery and deprivation, and it pained me to see how far the country still had to go to catch up to the civilized world. Not only was I embarrassed for Chinese people, but I was also concerned how they would reflect on me, since it was unlikely that anyone who wasn’t Chinese would draw the difference between local Chinese and a Chinese-looking guy from Salt Lake City.

Despite the stereotype, there actually were Chinese people in Utah, especially in and around the university where my father was a physics professor. The sprinkling of Chinese students at my high school were typically brainy. Many of them went to Chinese school on the weekends, something I managed to squirm out of. My family attended a Chinese Christian church, an evangelical congregation influenced by missionaries in Taiwan in the mid-1900s. After services, we often went to dim sum, where ancient Chinese men with long white nose hairs sucked on chicken feet between drags of cigarettes. So there were opportunities to interact with Chinese people and culture, and I chose not to because they were so starkly other, and associating with them or wallowing in my family’s Chinese heritage would have stunted my assimilation into the dominant culture. And so I arrived in Shanghai with bulwarks firmly in place, thanks to a lifetime of practice in defending against Chinese influences.

At the same time, I needed the backwardness. Those weird habits were what maintained those bulwarks, preventing me from acquiescing to China and Chinese people. I needed to remain an outsider, which led me to uncharacteristically seek out confrontations, in some stubborn quest to assert my Americanness to everyone I met, perhaps the only urge that was more quixotic than the one that had taken me to China in the first place.

Then I started searching for the porcelain, and I saw just how much of my family’s history had been lost or forcibly removed, and that few vestiges of old China remained. When it came to porcelain, the country was so inundated with fakes and reproductions that I wondered if it would be possible to know the authenticity of anything I managed to find. Kicking around rural China, I noticed that many towns had preserved even less historical architecture than Shanghai. When I asked relatives or locals for areas that might have given me a glimpse into my ancestors’ lives, they usually shrugged and said that those things were long gone. I found myself yearning for the “real” China, while also pondering just what constituted “real.” Those same luxury shopping malls–always the same roster of designer brands and coffee franchises as everywhere else–where I used to take refuge from all things Chinese now seemed to be encroachments of decidely non-Chinese culture.

China ages exponentially faster than the West, and I would sometimes return to Shanghai from short research trips to find that streets and facades had vanished, replaced by whatever kind of development suited the municipality–apartment complexes, shopping centers, or office towers. Even the historical buildings, though no longer demolished, seemed to disappear, their bones clad in internationalist five-star hotel clothing and retaining as much of their original spirit as the SoHo Apple Store does with its past. The shift could be jarring, and I found myself searching for something, anything, on which to moor myself.

It became comforting to still find an alley where butchers hung their cuts from street signs. Or a row of wan vegetables growing on a thin strip of dirt between buildings. Or an elderly man in his underwear sitting in front of a flagship Louis Vuitton store and reading his newspaper as if the plaza was an extension of his living room, a boulder in the stream of shopping bag-laden, nouveau riche Chinese flowing past him. I didn’t find this charming or quaint–that would have been patronizing. I simply reveled in its authenticity. Whatever their origins, these behaviors at least appeared unalloyed by the forces that seemed to drive modern China.

Eventually I had to admit that I was holding China to an impossible standard–to be western and modern and accommodating while also remaining ancient and authentic and my own secret. But China didn’t care what I wanted, and the sooner I understood that, the sooner I could appreciate it for what it was.

Besides, you don’t get anywhere in China as an outsider. You don’t get to experience the “real” China as an outsider. And you definitely don’t get to dig for your family’s buried heirlooms as an outsider. Learning the language was an important first step, showing me that it was possible to gain a Chinese identity without sacrificing my American one. Being a Chinese American in China didn’t have to be a binary thing. I was free to choose which peculiarities I accepted and which I still couldn’t tolerate. In the same way that you don’t get to choose your family, you don’t get to choose where your family comes from, either. All those idiosyncracies, love them or hate them, are what makes your family your family, you you, and China Chinese.

Bio:  Born in the Bay Area and raised in Salt Lake City, Huan Hsu is the author of The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. As a staff writer for the Washington City Paper in Washington, DC, and the Seattle Weekly, he won two Society of Professional Journalists awards and received recognition from the Casey Foundation for Meritorious Journalism. His essays and fiction have appeared in Slate, The Guardian, The Literary Review, and Lucky Peach. He currently lives in Amsterdam where he teaches journalism and creative writing at Amsterdam University College.

To contact Huan Hsu: huanhsu@gmail.com

Written by Stella Choe, Special Contributing Author (and Actress, Dancer/Choreographer)

About two years ago, I was in a YouTube video called What kind of Asian are you? It was inspired by a funny little moment that happened at a party and had happened many times before. We thought it would be a good laugh to turn the tables just once, and so the video was born. I knew it would resonate most definitely with Asian Americans, but I had no idea what a ride it would take me on.

I was born and raised in Southern California, the youngest of three daughters of Korean immigrant parents who came to the United Stated with a single suitcase, so the story goes. We were among just a very small handful of Asians living in a very white community, but Iʼd say it was normal enough. There were things that definitely made us stand out from the rest of the neighborhood. Among them, the smell that would seep from our kimchee-filled refrigerator, my grandfather who would pick me up from school and speak to me in Korean in a tone that always sounded like he was yelling, my momʼs broken English and thick Korean accent that would almost always lead to the McDonaldʼs clerk on the other end of the drive-thru speaker asking us to repeat our order until we had to yell it over the shoulder of my pissed-off mom.

While my parents made an effort for us to maintain a sense of our Korean heritage, I think their main priority was that their children assimilate and be accepted as American. Every night, my mom would make 2 dinners – one for herself and my dad, which would be the typical Korean fare of bap and panchan, and one for me and my sisters, which varied between spaghetti, enchiladas, hamburgers and frozen TV dinners. Although they spoke only Korean in the house to each other, we were never forced to speak it. While other Korean family friends went to Korean school on the weekends, I was twirling around in dance class.

My relatively normal and happy childhood was also filled with embarrassing moments: being greeted with Konichiwa by total strangers; being stopped by old men who wanted me to know that they served in the Korean War; and dealing with people shocked that I had no trace of an accent no matter how many times I repeated that I was born here. Looking back, I find it perplexing and even a bit heart-breaking, that my parents tried so hard for us to be regular American kids because no matter what, we would encounter moments like these that reminded us we were not. Anyway, it was all for the best, because thatʼs who I am … Korean first and then American.

Following the release of the video, the outpouring of response was overwhelming. Just a few weeks after it was uploaded on YouTube, I was contacted by a Korean production company looking for a non-native Korean to play a role in one of their films. A few months later I was on a plane to Korea to play the part of Maksoon in JK Younʼs Ode to My Father (Gukje Shijang).

The film depicts the story of a manʼs journey to take care of his family and keep his promise to his father, set during the end of the Korean War and moving through the next few decades into the present. Basically it was the story of my parentsʼ and grandparentsʼ generations, a story I didnʼt know much about. A lot of my parentsʼ past is a mystery, particularly my fatherʼs. Growing up, my dad wasnʼt all that emotional and communicative, but it was definitely his pride and lifeʼs duty to be the breadwinner and provider for his family. Getting to be a part of this film gave me a tiny peek into my parentsʼ lives when they were kids, trying to figure out life and love, all against the backdrop of a time and place that was quite literally foreign to me.

About a year after shooting the movie, it was released in Korea and in December of 2014, I took my family to see it at a theatre in Koreatown, here in LA. As soon as the movie started, I was swept up in the story of Koreaʼs history, and more importantly, the story of my own parents. Afterwards, I sat with my family at a cafe next door and my mother began telling us stories she had never shared before. She talked about being a young girl growing up during war and having to leave college early to help support her family by taking a job in Saigon, Vietnam, where she eventually met my father. I was deeply touched as well as embarrassed since most of my life, I hadnʼt really attempted to engage her in a conversation about these aspects of her life.

Iʼm still processing the whole experience, but the video leading to the movie was like kismet. This whole crazy thing has led me on a journey of discovery and understanding about my family, my identity, my culture. And after all these years, Iʼm finally seeing my parents as people who were incredibly brave and resilient. They lived through some challenging times that defined who they were and set them off on a path that resulted in me having a pretty awesome life. I have a renewed appreciation for who I am and how I got here.

With the video getting so much attention and the subsequent journey back to my roots that ensued, I feel a little pressure that thereʼs an expectation that I speak with some authority on issues of identity, culture, and race. Iʼve never been one to want to rock the boat or offend anyone or state publicly my opinion on really anything, for that matter. When I was asked to do an interview on the Huffington Post live, right after the video was released, I was terrified to be part of a conversation that up to this point, I had felt I didn’t have anything worthwhile to offer. I confess, I was just trying to get a laugh!

Things happen for a reason, I am learning. Look, Iʼm writing this blog post. I am now more inclined to join in the conversation and not be so reluctant to have a bigger voice in it. Everyone has a story. I think it makes a difference to share, acknowledge, listen and be heard. And if you can do it and make someone laugh ʻtil they pee, then even better.

Author Bio: Stella Choe is native of Southern California and started her career as a dancer. She has worked on film, TV, and stage. Credits include The Replacements, The Muppets, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Two and a Half Men, and Paul McCartney’s World Tour 2001. She continues to work as a dancer/choreographer, writer, and actress.

Stella created and co-wrote another YouTube mini-series called Asian Stereotype Police

Follow Stella at: twitter@stellakimchoe

We always love hearing about publication updates from our Anthology authors, so we are pleased to share that Tony Robles (his piece in the Anthology is “The Bee Keeper”) has a new book available:

Title: Cool Don’t Live Here No More — A Letter to San Francisco

Publisher: Ithuriel’s Spear Press, SF

Purchase from SPD, Berkeley, CA

Description: Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Activism. Filipino Studies.

Review: “In poems and vignettes, Tony Robles has written the generational memory of San Francisco at the point where alienation, deportations, and technological invasions are gutting its soul. This Filipino activist just won’t have it and neither will you after reading this superb book that restores the sense of a People’s City.”—Jack Hirschman

Author: Tony Robles was born and raised in San Francisco. He is the author of two children’s books, Lakas and the Manilatown Fish and Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel, written for his son, Lakas. He is co-editor and a revolutionary worker scholar of Poor magazine where homefulness, a landless people’s revolution is taking place. In 2010 he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Mythium Literary Journal for his short story, In My Country. Robles is also a housing rights advocate and board president of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife Tiny and his son Tibu.

Tony’s blog. His phone number: 415-374-5344

Upcoming Events:

Reading at The Green Arcade on July 8

Reading at Eastwind on July 18 with Amy Uyematsu, author of the Yellow Door.

Best-selling author, Jamie Ford, wrote the acclaimed novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, that examined the effects of World War II’s Japanese Incarceration upon people’s lives. His book opens with the incredible discovery of the belongings of Japanese families that were left behind when they were rounded up and imprisoned. I asked Jamie to describe how he turned an important event in our history into a compelling story that appealed to all. Thank you, Jamie, for sharing your writing process with us.

Written by Jamie Ford, Special Contributing Author

Hmmm…this post is supposed to be about process so let me begin with my most essential morning ablution: a cup of coffee. Like most addicts, I’m not a snob about my drug of choice. (Today I’m drinking leftover hazelnut Christmas coffee with a splash of chocolate milk).

Also, let me note that I’m wearing Batman pajamas. Not particularly germane to this whole process thing, but comfort is key, I suppose, and one of the benefits of being a full-time writer is being a part-time fashion criminal.

I once heard that my favorite wordsmith, the great Harlan Ellison, used to occasionally write in the nude. I guess my writer’s block has never been that severe.

Okay, enough warming up at the keyboard. Let’s talk process.

*Cracks knuckles*

Process-wise, it seems as though some authors meticulously outline everything, while others just write extemporaneously—they basically go commando.

I tend to do a little bit of both.

I do start with a few notes that are probably the least amount of words on a page that could possibly be mistaken for an outline–really nothing more than a beginning and an ending, with maybe a few scene ideas in the middle.

But that ending is über important.

And by ending, I mean a real, unambiguous, non-metaphorical ending. I look at storytelling as either banking or spending emotional currency with the reader. Good or bad, happy or sad, the ending is where those emotional debts are paid—if that makes sense? Plus, if I have a clear ending in mind, then the more nails I lay in the path of my characters, the more motivated I am as a writer to help them overcome them.

In the case of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, I wanted to write a noble romantic tragedy, with a bit of redemption. And in writing about the Japanese Incarceration, I couldn’t find that redemption in the ‘40s, so I found my ending in the ‘80s, when there was the redress, reparations were made to the Japanese Americans, and the Sansei (third generation) began to talk about what had often been left unspoken.

And of course along the way I took a lot of spontaneous twists, turns and unexpected detours. And sometimes I missed the exit to Storyland entirely and I stubbornly kept writing in the wrong direction.

Whenever that happens I eventually return to my senses, back up, delete those pages, reorient myself, and start again. (That’s a fancy, literary way of saying that I end up deleting 80 pages and sulking for a week).

In general, I try to get the entire story nailed in one draft, one chapter—one scene at a time. I’ll start my day by cleaning up what I wrote the previous morning and just keep going from there. I try not to slather words on the page with the intent to clean the whole thing up later or fill in the blanks. If I do, my stories tend to suffer a “death of a thousand cuts.” I need cohesion along the way to feel satisfied.

And more coffee.

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Written by Connie Nice, Special Contributing Author

From My Desk: Part 2, The Photograph

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when I look at this image taken May 13, 1942, there are no words to adequately express my emotions.

Two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt succumbed to intense pressure from Federal officials and issued Executive Order 9066. It called for all American citizens of Japanese descent as well as resident aliens from Japan to be removed from their homes and relocated in remote and secure camps for the remainder of WWII.

In the County of Hood River as well as many rural agricultural communities along the west coast, this meant that local farmers of Japanese descent would be forced to abandon their farms and orchards to comply with the order. According to an article by the Densho Encylopedia, Hood River Incident, “Nikkei farms contributed 25 percent of the valley’s production, even though they comprised less than ½ percent of the population.”

Farmers and families began the tedious and unsettling task of packing their belongings and trying to find sympathetic neighbors or friends who would manage and watch over their homes, belongings, animals and farms in their absence. How long would they be gone? When would they be allowed to return – if ever?

In conversations with some of the older Japanese American members of the community, I wondered what they took with them. How did they determine what they would need, not knowing where they were going or what their living conditions might be? Some of the women said they chose to look after their family’s needs first, since they were limited to one suitcase and a duffel bag. Medicines for the elderly and basic needs for the babies and children took priority over non-essential luxury items. Multiple layers of clothing worn on the day of departure left more room in the bags for other needs. There was no room for books, family photographs or sentimental trinkets. These were all left behind in carefully numbered and stacked boxes located in back rooms and barns.

Look closely at this picture, taken just a few months later …

I can feel the emotions of the day. Uncertainty. Sadness. Disbelief. Anger … maybe, but definitely fear. Lines of people saying good-bye. Some to watch and shake their head in disbelief and some to stand in line and wonder why.

Look closer …

See the women and children heavy laden with suitcases and heavy hearts. Look at their faces. These are the faces of people who came to this country to live a better life. To raise their children in the American Dream while still honoring the culture of their homeland. These are the faces of Americans being incarcerated against their will to appease a war they had nothing to do with.

The line moves forward now. Each family taking their place in a car while the windows are covered and the lights turned off. Moving away from the depot, the wheels begin the clickety-clackety sound that with each turn takes them further away from the homes they love. Taking them towards an unknown future. After “processing” at the Portland Fairgrounds, many would be taken to Tule Lake, California. Some to Minidoka, Idaho. Some would eventually return to the Hood River Valley after the war. Some would never return.

I hope your heart breaks like mine when I look at this photograph. Remember the faces and do not forget.

A special thank you to The History Museum of Hood River County for allowing me to share these photographs with you. Check out the museum’s historical photoblog.

Bio: Connie Nice worked for fifteen years as Office Assistant turned Museum Director at The History Museum of Hood River County. She is now retired, enjoying time with her family and working as a writer, consultant and motivational speaker. She has published the book, Hood River (Images of America). You can read more of Connie’s thoughts about life, faith, travel and family on her blog.

Written by Connie Nice, Special Contributing Author

From My Desk: Part 1, The Phone Call

I vividly remember the day the office phone rang. When I answered it, my understanding of what it meant to be a Japanese American was changed forever.

The person on the other end of the line wanted to know what materials and information we had on the internment of the Japanese American families after Pearl Harbor, specifically as it related to Hood River County. I responded that I would do some research and call them back. I had only been working as the part-time Office Assistant at The History Museum of Hood River County for a few weeks, but this was exactly the type of task I enjoyed – research. I went to the vertical reference files and pulled out the “W” drawer for WWII. I was surprised to find a fat file entitled, “WWII and the Japanese American issue.” I donned my white cotton gloves, pulled out the file and carefully laid it on the office desk.

As I opened the file and began to read the newspaper clippings, documents and letters, I was shocked. I consider myself an intelligent person and a passionate student of world and U.S. history, but to be honest I had never in all my life heard about Americans imprisoning Japanese Americans based on their ethnic culture and race.

I read about Executive Order 9066. I read about families loaded on trains and taken away to unknown far away “camps.” I read about the Japanese American soldiers in the 442 Regimental Combat Team and their heroic service in the European theater, even while back at home their families were locked in remote locations behind barbed wire fences. I read about the community movement of some residents of Hood River County to push out and buy up Japanese-owned farms and orchards while the owners were incarcerated, so they would have nothing to return home to after the war. I read and my heart broke. My eyes were opened to the sad injustices of life.

I gathered the research materials requested, then sat at my desk and thought to myself, “What can I do about this?” I can’t change the past, but I can make sure that the story of the Hood River County Issei and Nissei is preserved and not forgotten. I started pushing for a dedicated display that would tell the story. I met with some resistance. It’s not a “pretty” story, I was told. “There are many still alive that lived through that very sad and difficult time in Hood River County’s history. Maybe it was better to just let it die.” I could not let it die.

Over the next ten years, my job evolved from part-time Office Assistant to full-time Museum Director. Together with the museum board, staff and volunteers, we began to gather up fragments of information, photographs, personal interviews and artifacts. Our plan was to develop a permanent exhibit within the museum dedicated to sharing the story of the Japanese American citizens during WWII. We wanted the exhibit to honor their vital contribution to this rural agrarian community while also recognizing the difficulties they had faced and the atrocities they had experienced. The exhibit was completed in 2013 and now has its place within a newly renovated facility at The History Museum of Hood River County. The exhibit includes photographs, artifacts and an informational video, (Shikata-ganai) created by John Hardam from Light Wave Communications. The video features noted Asian American author Linda Tamura.

As American citizens, it is our responsibility and duty to be informed and to know about the history of our nation and our community, both good and bad. By understanding, recognizing and acknowledging our past, it helps us to not repeat horrific mistakes in the future. Think about it. Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes made in 1942? I hope not, but it’s up to this and future generations to make sure it does not happen again.

Bio:  Connie Nice worked for fifteen years as Office Assistant turned Museum Director at The History Museum of Hood River County. She is now retired, enjoying time with her family and working as a writer, consultant and motivational speaker. She has published the book, Hood River: Images of America. You can read more of Connie’s thoughts about life, faith, travel and family on her website’s blog.