I Had A Dream

I had a dream.
I dreamt that my people were suckered into worshipping Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu as themselves.
I dreamt that my people aspired to playing the son of a fat white man who dropped first person pronouns "I" "Me" and "We" when he spoke,
I dreamt Hollywood took an all American Chinaman girl and turned her into a mysterious Oriental beauty who stared but rarely spoke.
I dreamt that a son of Chan looked at Bette Davis with lust and disgust in THE LETTER and looked at Loretta Young in CHINA and Loretta Young looked back.
I dreamt that Sessue Hayakawa left the stage in Paris rather than perform for the Nazis.
I dreamt Hayakawa celebrated VE Day by inviting American soldiers to dinner.
I dreamt that Humphrey Bogart brought Hayakwawa to Hollywood to star with him in TOKYO JOE.
I dreamt that Hayakawa started an Asian American theater in Los Angeles.
I dreamt that Hayakawa went from the AA theatre to the movies.
I dreamt that Hayakawa starred in Hollywood movies as Pacific Islanders, Frenchmen, Chinese, Japanese, American Indians, and became such a heart throb he started his own studio.
I dreamt that Mako took over Hayakawa's theatre and renamed it East West Players.
I dreamt Mako played a disgruntled engineer on a Chinese gunboat serviced by White coolies.
I dreamt Mako was nominated for an Oscar for shooting his White coolie Steve McQueen being tortured by a White mob in Sacramento.
I dreamt Hayakawa was nominated for an Oscar for BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI.
I dreamt the Hayakawa studio and the East West Players inspired the Asian Americans to tell the story of Asian pop culture from Kwan Kung and 3 Kingdoms and Chushingura and Musashi to balance King Arthur and Shakespeare's Kings.
I dreamt...."Strike the Gong! We are on!"

I woke up confused. Everything in my dream was true, but in reverse order. Asians went from American glory and triumph to the insult of Charlie Chan and his champion Yunte Huang.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER by AMY CHUA

(FEBRUARY 18, 2011)

A writer researching Maxine Hong Kingston asked me about the assertion that Kingston got her storytelling talent from her mother. The writer wanted to know what questions I would ask Kingston’s parents. I told the writer I wouldn’t interview the parents. I wouldn’t put her parent’s in the position of lying to cover the daughter’s rep, or telling the truth and bringing down their daughter’s book. The truth of THE BALLAD OF MULAN and Chinese misogyny in Chinese lit was to be found in the BALLAD and Chinese lit, not the parents. The idea was repugnant. I would not make anyone but Kingston responsible for her book.

I realize now that I was defending was the relationship between parents and children as a family. I was rather maniacally defending a Chinese idea of family. I still don’t know why. I never had parents. We have personal reasons for defending or putting down the idea of the family against the universe. Chinese families are crazy about the defending the family against all comers.

Writers in China who had of load the unpopular to loose on the world would either disown their parents (like Soong Gong publicly humiliating his father, cussing him out and trashing the name before he went off to lead the Outlaws of Liangshan Marsh) or they’d write as Anonymous (the way MONKEY was written.)

Amy Chua’s THE TIGER MOTHER gives an insight into what kind of mother Far Mulan, Liang Hongyu and Mu Guiying were. Amy Chua seems to be in charge of the home. Her husband is the soldier who defends the home from outside intrusion, invasion. If he can’t, and her daughters are too young or don’t have the soldier’s skills and she does, she’s willing to go.

Through her daughter’s first trip round the 12 animals her word is law at home. At 12- or 13 kids begin to change. Interestingly Amy Chua relaxes her iron rule in response to her kid’s criticism.. More interesting is her kid’s response to their mother’s changes. They approve their mother’s iron rule while they were under twelve and approve her response to their criticisms. The mother and daughters response to each other seems to demonstrate that there was always give and take within the family. When the difference between the daughters shows –expresses –itself after 12, it doesn’t result in one or both walking out to a life of their own with vows never to be like mother Amy. The family rallies together to defend their members.

I don’t know the family. I don’t know the children’s stories told in the family. But the Mother Amy seems very Chinese or at least wise enough to have raised her kids to talk and criticize family life with understanding and love of the family.

Her book is not an instruction manual on rearing a family, but it does raise disturbing questions about our upbringing and how we raised or are raising our kids. Every family is different and every family is the same. Some play piano. Some learn to love old tractors and the soil. Exactly how different and how the same our families are to hers her book helps us understand by being so specific. That is good.

Mother Chua has brought White and Chinese-American readers out of the family room to criticize her and her book with stories or defenses of their own families. That is good. The only fault of the book is it’s too honest. That too is good.


Frank Chin

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

PHO 87

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Radio Interview with Frank Chin

An interview with Frank Chin on NPR's "On Point" regarding Yunte Huang's book on Charlie Chan. Audio here (Chin comes in at approximately 26 minutes).

NARASAKI’S N0-NO BOY vs JOHN OKADA’S NO-NO BOY

Attached are emails I sent to everyone, including the playwright Ken Narasaki whose last words to me were:

You, who were once a life force that helped spawn so many Asian American theater artists have now become a poison determined to kill your fellow artists because they are not you.

He accuses me of the same crime as David Henry Hwang. They must’ve met at the David Henry Hwang Theatre.

I don’t want to kill any writer. A writer once written never dies. I want the writer given his proper measure. That’s not rhetoric. The proper measure of a writer is the knowledge he claims in his work. Critics from the writer’s culture take a writer’s measure. That same standard applies to Japanese American writers who claim to be Japanese American and writing an especially Japanese American work.

Ken Narasaki claims to have improved on Okada’s ending in his play. I measure him against his claim. What makes his claim offensive is he is sure that had Okada lived he would have written an ending more like Narasaki’s.

I continue to believe that if John Okada were alive, he wouldn’t be quite as harsh a critic, but of course, we’ll never know.

The JACL of Mike Masaoka and his scribe Bill Hosokawa condemned NO-NO BOY in the JACL paper, the PACIFIC CITIZEN. JACLer Kenji Okuda is the curator of JACL image at the Smithsonian Institution. He was offered Momo Yashima’s A COMMUNITY DIVIDED, a reading of the JACL docs, government papers and personal papers of Frank Emi, leader of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, and Heart Mt draft resisters Mits Koshiyama and Yosh Kuromiya. Okuda refused with, “Washington is a JACL town.” And so it was, the JACL’s Norman Minetta that had his brother-in-law Mike Masaoka’s name placed on an official monument as a “civil rights advocate.”

Masaoka had been a paid “Confidential Agent” of the FBI. Actually two Confidential Agents T-11 to spy on the Nisei whose civil rights pretended to serve, and SLC-147 to spy on the JACL! The JACL openly mischaracterized the camp resistance to the JACL’s drafting the Nisei out of camp and the Rocky Shimpo, the Denver paper that carried the news of resistance and counseled standing on the Constitution. A COMMUNITY DIVIDED was kept out of the Smithsonian because it was anti-JACL. John Okada and his family were known to hate the JACL. The JACL had rejected the unfinished manuscript to a new Okada novel, unread, for UCLA’s collection of camp memorabilia.

Narasaki had rewritten the anti-JACL NO-NO BOY as a pro-JACL, NO-NO BOY and passed it off as the work of John Okada.

Literary research of NO-NO BOY led me to the JACL, and Michi Weglyn’s YEARS OF INFAMY and the bewildering endorsement by the JACL’s Mike Masaoka and the contradictory quote from Okada’s novel, a book the JACL’s Hosokawa belittled and effectively condemned to a warehouse. Jim “Hajiime” Akutsu presenting himself as the model for Ichiro in Okada’s NO-NO BOY led to James Omura and the Denver, Rocky Shimpo and the Fair Play Committee and the draft resisters from Heart Mountain and vast and variously complex Japanese America opened up before us. You are the Sansei among Chinamen. What you say counts more than anything a non-Nikkei like me coughs up. I seem to have reduced him to tearful namecalling.

Reader's of the exchange of emails will see Chinese I respect disagree on N0-NO BOY. But we're Chinese. Japanese American lit is an expression of Japanese America itself. Have the JA's given up authority over their lit to the JACL who gave it to the White racists?

What does JA think about Okada’s work? Does Japanese America care? Narasaki is depending on Japanese American indifference to Japanese America.

Frank Chin

YOSHe AND N0-NO BOY

A release selling Greg Watanabe as the Clark Gable of 21sf Century. Watanabe is playing Kenji in John Okada’s NO-NO BOY a new play written, set to go places, by Ken Narasaki, and directed by Alberto Isaac. March 27^th was the premiere performance. Has it attracted your attention yet?

In the 1957 novel, John Okada took a grim dry subject, made a title of it NO-NO BOY and wrote the most depressing downbeat plot in a realistic yet entertaining "American" way that settled the nerves of jittery Japanese American readers, that the author was a vet of the war in the Pacific who has “reasons” for writing about a traitorous pariah that refused to fight.

How often do JA theatergoers have the chance to compare the work of JA novel to a new play that has taken on the burden of duplicating the literary effect in theatre? What better test for life in a community, than knowledge about itself? If there's a community, it will rouse if not rise.

Yosh Kuromiya said he re-read NO-NO BOY, which he had disliked, trying to understand Lawson Inada’s and my enthusiasm for Okada. He was still shucking the thinking other people were right about him, though he didn’t show it when Lawson and I came into his life at Heart Mountain. Why did Lawson and Frank re-issue this book?

Think of it. A resister had taken us seriously and re-read NO-NO BOY. Two year’s later Lawson Inada published DRAWING THE LINE, a poem about Yosh Kuromiya touching his pencil to the paper and drawing Heart Mountain in a single line. That same year Yosh Kuromiya a draft resister from Heart Mountain and Jim Akutsu the admitted model for Okada’s “Ichiro” the No-No boy, of NO-NO BOY appeared in Frank Abe’s CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION.

From Akutsu who told the same story the same way, we listen and learn that Akutsu went to see the Min Yasui, a lawyer released from jail to Minidoka concentration camp. If he told this story to Okada, he told it just as we heard it. He had just been ordered to appear by the Draft. He had a letter to the Spanish Consul to forward to the Imperial Japanese Government asking to be “repatriated.” He wanted Min Yasui to read it and advise him. He reasoned that when the U.S. Gov reads that letter they’ll say “He’s not a Jap! He’s as American as you or me!” and he’ll be free. Yasui said to forget it and obey the order to appear.

Yasui went on to write “The Mother’s Petition!” to work his way back into the good graces of the JACL. He was rewarded with the Denver Office of the JACL where he devoted his energy to putting James Omura’s ROCKY SHIMPO editorials out of business. The Rocky was where the camp resistance got their news and the editorials was where they got their advice to observe the Constitution.

Jim Akutsu had written James Omura at the Rocky to please forward his letter to Frank Emi at Heart Mountain. Omura refused. When the letter finally reached him, Frank Emi advised Akutsu to get himself a lawyer, in a hurry.

Yosh Kuromiya heard these stories told and retold by Jim Akutsu, James Omura and Frank Emi in the course of making Emiko Omori’s RABBIT IN THE MOON, Frank Abe’s CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION.

Elements of Okada’s fictional Ichiro and the real Jim Akutsu combines with the story of Frank Emi’s fronting of Kiyoshi Okamoto’s stand on the Constitution to organize resistance at Heart Mountain in David Mura’s novel FAMOUS SUICIDES OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE.

Yosh Kuromiya took NO-NO BOY seriously enough to go to Pasadena to see the new play. Yosh Kuromiya the resister writes Ken Narasaki, the playwright, the knowledge of Jim “Hajiime” Akutsu as Ichiro and JACL that has seeped from the novel, to the poem based on something of the novel, to the novel based on new facts and NO-NO BOY, to two PBS documentaries, into uncomfortable common knowledge among Japanese Americans. Narasaki might not have heard because of the constant nagging of the JACL and the threat of JACL police, the mainland 442^nd.

Instead of thanks Narasaki offers his reasons for rewriting Okada’s end to NO-NO BOY, that amount to, he’s dead. I can do what I want with the dead.: – we intended to show that in the end, there was hope for Ichiro...that he would discover love and life. I’m sorry you disagreed with the ending, but I continue to believe that if John Okada were alive, he wouldn’t be quite as harsh a critic, but of course, we’ll never know.

It’s because we’ll never know, that we should not fuck with the end as written. Okada isn’t the same rewritten, and Narasaki know’s he’s violated the work he claims inspired him. If Shakespeare had lived longer he might have rewritten a happy end for ROMEO AND JULIET instead of one dying after the other. Then again he might not.

Frank Chin

A Summary of Chinese Children's Stories and The Heroic Tradition

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