"Growing Up Asian in America"

Sometimes when I was growing up, my identity seemed to hurtle toward me and paste itself right to my face.

I felt that way, encountering the stereotypes of my race perpetuated by non-Japanese people (primarily white) who may or may not have had contact with other Japanese in America.

Events that had happened quite apart from the me who stood silent in that moment connected my face with an incomprehensible past.

Confusions and distortions abounded.

How is one to know and define oneself? From the inside--within a context that is self-defined, from a grounding in a community and a connection with culture and history that are comfortably accepted?

Or from the outside--in terms of messages received from the media and people who are often ignorant?

Being neither "free white," nor "African," our people in California were deemed "aliens, ineligible for citizenship," no matter how long they intended to stay here.

I have a certain claim to this crazy place where the prayers intoned by a neighboring Shinto priest (standing in for my grandmother's nephew who is sick) are drowned out by the rehearsals for the pop singing contest in which most of the villagers will compete later that night.

I linger longer than she does, so reluctant to leave, savoring the connection I feel with my grandmother in America, the past, and the power that lives and shines in the morning sun.

"Why did you go into those camps," I raged at my parents, frightened by my own inner silence and timidity.

I shift my vision and my stance.

when the war came, there was no space at all for the subtlety of being who we were--Japanese-Americans

I had not been able to imagine before what it must have felt like to be an American--to know absolutely that one is an American--and yet to have almost everyone else deny it.

I have a place here on the East Coast, where our neighbor is so much a part of our family that my mother never passes her house at night without glancing at the lights to see if she is home and safe; where my parents have hauled hundreds of pounds of rocks from fields and arduously planted Christmas trees and blueberries, lilacs, asparagus, and crab apples; where my father still dreams of angling a stream to a new bed so that he can dig a pond in the field and fill it with water and fish.

I come from a people with a long memory and a distinctive grace.