LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS WOMEN

Tura Satana (1938-2011)

The Yellow media snobs and Hollywood mini-stars have gotten their prizes and found they were empty. Even of money. Especially empty of money. Remember when Mako was a star on the make? What's his name Pat Morita was the Hollywood Nisei? Emptiness is what the Yellows in America learned from the White famous Yellows. (No one stands up for the deserving. ) A Yellow scholar writer Yunte Huang preaches from the Gospel of Our Father Who Art in Hollywood, Charlie Chan be Thy name. THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE HONORABLE DETECTIVE AND HIS RENDEVOUS WITH DESTINY. Emptiness and the look and sound of an ego, expressing itself. This too will pass. But Tura Sultana the big, busty girl from Manzanar Concentration Camp, “I can’t say that I will miss the barbed wire fences and armed guards. I will miss the lovely weather there,” will live forever.

She was born in 1938. Most of her memories are of Chicago, where her family was relocated and growing up among Italians, Jews and Poles in “a Mafia section of town.” She beat up five black girls that jumped her in school. They did not want any “slant eyes” in their school. She remembers the names of the girls who objected to her Oriental presence. She went on to become a burlesque star, to become the star of Russ Meyer movies, to become an enterprise of tee shirts, artwork, comic books and dolls to become a real life mother and a real Yellow legend that will live as long there is a drop of lust yearning to be free.

She was an artist. Art was not a “religion” to her. She didn’t expect to be “discovered” by holy Hollywood like other Asian artists. She took care of her artistic image and herself. Her promo doesn’t have a word of her physical attributes but does lay into the racism of Manzanar and in her school. She closes with “One day, I was just told Jeannette and her friends that if they touched me one more time, that I was going to rip them a new rear end. She told me to try it, so I proceeded to do just that. I took on all five of the girls at once and they never knew what hit them after I was done.

“All I know is I was I got called into the principal’s office and told that I had injured all five girls and that I was being put on detention…"

“Do I have your attention yet? Good now you will have to to wait for the film to get the rest of the story!”

She didn’t run and hide when Whites (or Blacks) called her Jap, and she still had fans.

Too bad she's passed. I would have like to have known if she had read Toshio Mori or Okada's NO-NO BOY, or FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER or Michi Weglyn, or Maxine Hong Kingston. What made her fight? She knew she was a Yellow. What did she read?

FCC