“Parenting” themes generally focus on what you can or should or shouldn’t or wouldn’t pass on to your kids through your efforts at self-improvement or enlightenment. But what about the shit we can’t control, but pass on to our kids anyway? There are good and bad traits, like physical prowess or beauty, or a neurological predisposition to love cocaine over all other things in life; there are also conditions, or situations, like poverty or celebrity.
One of those things is ethnicity. There are ethnic traits, of course, but I wonder what I’m passing on to Sweet Potato in terms of the condition of her ethnicity. I come from a Japanese American concentration camp family. The concentration camp thing has gotten a lot of press in the past twenty years or so, arising from the ethno-political cultural discussion, but when I was a small child, Farewell to Manzanar hadn’t come out, and “camp” was occasionally mentioned, but never discussed. This was, let’s say, 25 years after the end of internment.
One of the legacies of the internment is a kind of chronic shame that initially developed in silence. Before internment, the Japanese were probably like any other immigrant group, making their way slowly into the American milieu, probably assimilating more or less at a steady pace. The postwar effect of the internment was to concentrate and isolate the Japanese, and you get the sense that after the war, the Japanese were in a period of great tension and struggle, yet there was no talk about it. They formed closed postwar communities in west coast cities. There was toughness, and a kind of omerta, but it protected a crime committed by FDR and the Joint Chiefs.
The California Central Valley in the early 1970s was more John Steinbeck than Ken Kesey, and we were a queer little family with home haircuts and too many books. Our family friends seemed to be mostly camp Japanese, interested in Buddhism, Jung, aikido, and Canadian whisky. For all their love of talk, my parents seemed to play down the camp thing -- after all, they were small children during the dispossession, and, perhaps it wasn’t devoid of fun for them. I also think, though, they had no way of talking about it yet; camp Japanese still hadn’t figured out what to say about it (Fred Korematsu excepted).
I used to think it was an ethnic thing, the shame, but maybe it’s more like a crime victim type of thing. The population was dispossessed, humiliated, then set back outside with a pat on the head. The shame and the anger stayed in your family, but transferred, effectively enough, without discussion. The salt burns less in me than in my parents, it’s less in them than it was in their parents. It’s a feeling hard to analyze and even hard to pinpoint, but I have it.
Last night I was in a coolish locavore place, at the bar, wrapping up dinner with a business friend, when the bartender cunt decided to play Guess the Orientals, which is a variation of What Are You Anyways? I was seething; fucken Ohio can be as backward as anywhere. My South Korean friend, though, a more worldly and gracious person, responded without my defensiveness, and talked easily about different Asian people.
I’m impressed when people meet casual racism without defensiveness. For a while we lived in Hawaii, where the local Japanese Americans, never interned, are coarse, expansive, natural. I envy their ability to react without my ingrained shame, which is both inaccessible and so immediate.
How will I pass it on to Sweet Potato?
