Justice in the ‘Beautiful Country’
The Statue of Liberty, meticulously patched and fitted with a new flame, turns 100 this week. Through the years, the statue has been transformed from a symbol of fraternity between France and the United States into the pre-eminent symbol of freedom, a beacon for millions of immigrants and a patriotic symbol of unrivaled emotional intensity. It has inspired poetry and song, speechmaking and caricature. But mostly the statue has been a personal symbol, to millions around the world, of the hopes and promise of a nation that proclaims itself dedicated to individual liberty. Five very personal perspectives:
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston is co-author of “Farewell to Manzanar,” as well as the writer of an award-winning teleplay based on the book. She lives in Santa Cruz.
My father reached America in 1904. The eldest son of a sa murai family fallen on hard times in Hiroshima, he left Japan for Bii-koko , the “Beautiful Country,” landing at Seattle after a short stint on sugar plantations in the Hawaiian Islands. He was alone and 17. He had $200 in his pocket and a dream in his heart to “make it big” in the vast land that promised opportunity, wealth and a new life.
Many years later--although his pocket never overflowed with gold and his dream faded like the silk kimono he had brought with him from Japan--he did have a life that was different, indeed, from anything he could have imagined as a youth. By 1941, he was a prosperous fisherman with two boats, a new Buick sedan and several dashing and expensive silk suits. He had a wife and 10 children and lived near the beach in Ocean Park, Calif.
One of his favorite weekend frivolities was to take his family to the Lick Pier Ballroom (later the Aragon) where I learned to dance the rumba and to jitterbug. “Georgie,” as the ample Jewish matrons used to call my father, was a smooth dancer and in great demand among the widowed and divorced older ladies who flocked to the ballroom on Friday nights. The dance hall was a gathering place for the local citizenry. Most were first- or second-generation immigrants--Italian, Portuguese, Russian--and all relished what they perceived to be a truly American pastime.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor extinguished the neon lights of the ballroom for a while--and extinguished my father’s dream of finally “making it big” forever. Not until writing “Farewell to Manzanar” with my husband more than a dozen years ago--when I finally reached a point where I could examine that part of my past--did I fully understand his . As I learned about Asian-American history--about laws that prevented ownership of land, excluded marriage to Caucasians, restricted citizenship and finally barred all immigration until 1952--respect for my father grew far beyond the traditional Japanese honor I had given him as a parent.
He had responded to a call for laborers, and--like the Chinese who had begun to accept the same invitation from the “Gum San,” or “Gold Mountain,” 50 years earlier--he came to participate in the building of America’s last frontier, the West. Little did he know of the indignities and injustices that Asians would encounter: servile jobs with low pay; ghetto living conditions; being refused service in restaurants; denial of the right to own land they had made fertile and prosperous.
But despite all those barriers, my father and thousands of other Asians managed to persevere--by their wits and hard work. Today, outstanding Americans with Asian faces have achieved success in numerous walks of life. To name a few: Sen. Daniel Inouye, writer Maxine Hong Kingston, the late astronaut Ellison Onizuka, U.S. Rep. Norman Y. Mineta, California’s Secretary of State March Fong Eu, and Academy Award nominee Pat Morita.
My father loved the American way of life. He named all his children after U.S. Presidents or their wives, or after movie stars. He pitched for a semipro baseball team, made dental fixtures, cooked for a sorority house, delivered babies, played the violin and wrote poetry. He used to say that America was his stepmother--sometimes cruel and rejecting but still the only mother he had, and he had chosen her , for better or for worse.
That made his experience during World War II all the more painful. After 37 years in this country, during which citizenship had been denied him, he was arrested by the FBI on false charges and sent to an army prison for “enemy aliens” in Bismarck, N.D. He was separated for a year from the rest of us, all of whom were sent to Manzanar in the Owens Valley for the duration of the war. That was the last and fatal blow to his resilient optimism, which, ironically, had been born and nurtured in the country that destroyed it. One of the amazing things about America is the way it can empower you with ideals such as freedom, equality and opportunity and at the same time undermine your efforts to realize them, especially if you are not of the white majority.
Yet these ideals continue to be among America’s highest virtues, evidence of which can be seen in the bill now before Congress to compensate Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. I wish my father had lived long enough to partake in the healing and forgiveness this long-overdue acknowledgment represents.
As a professor from Japan recently said to me, “America is not perfect, but she tries to be better, and that is virtuous.” Our ideals have tremendous power--the power to remind and to inspire and to correct. And now, with the flood of refugees from Southeast Asia and economic competition with Japan, acts of violence against people of Asian ancestry seem once again to be on the rise. It is as timely as ever to be reminded of those high principles that can counterbalance reactions born of anxiety, fear and ignorance.