Collection 3: "Growing Up Asian in America" by Kesaya E. Noda

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.

Sometimes questions came making allusions to history.

I was sometimes addressed or referred to as racially Japanese, sometimes as Japanese American, and sometimes as an Asian woman. Confusions and distortions abounded.

The very first immigrants were welcomed and sought as laborers to replace the dwindling numbers of Chinese, whose influx had been cut off by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

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.

At festival time there is liquor and food, ritual, discipline, and abandonment.

There is music and drunkenness and invocation.

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.

The village elders, the priest, and I stand respectfully upon the immaculate, shining wooden floor of the outer shrine, bowing our heads before the hidden powers.

The workers stand loosely grouped and at ease, but my uncle looks as harried and tense as a police officer trying to unsnarl a New York City traffic jam.

The front wheels of the car sink luxuriously into the soft, white sand by the roadside and the car slides to a dreamy halt, tail still on the road. I try to move forward. I try to move back. The front bites contentedly into the sand, the back lifts itself at a jaunty angle.

Or how, when the war came, there was no space at all for the subtlety of being who we were—Japanese Americans. Either/or was the way.

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...

Grandmother had Parkinson’s disease and it had frozen her gait and set her fingers, tongue, and feet jerking and trembling in a terrible dance.

From childhood through adulthood we’ve had our naked moments, sharing baths, idle conversations picked up as we moved between showers and closets, hurried moments at the beginning of days, quiet moments at the end of days.