A Visit to His Mentor

When the poet Garrett Hongo revisits his Los Angeles homeground from Oregon, he sees two people: his mother and, with a box of mochi pastries in hand, his mentor, Wakako Yamauchi.

Hongo first visited Yamauchi’s low, airy house in Gardena’s large Japanese community, where he grew up, in 1975. He was a 23-year-old graduate school dropout casting about for the path that would lead him to a national reputation. At 50, she had published a short story a year for 15 years in the Los Angeles newspaper Rafu Shimpo. Frank Chin and his co-editors had recently published her in “Aiiieeee!” a pioneering Asian American anthology in which her coming-of-age story, “And the Soul Shall Dance,” confirmed her as a conduit to self-discovery for many new writers.

“I walked through the door and told you you were a treasure of Asian American writing, and you said, ‘Hi!’ ” Hongo recalls during a recent pilgrimage to her, poking fun at her languid modesty. They’re a near-comic contrast: the petite storyteller and the broad-featured poet, his words tumbling around her, while hers form carefully. “This is so long ago,” she teased him, “you don’t even know when you’re embellishing something.”

But she admits: “It’s been a long friendship.”

“I bugged older people a lot in those days,” he says. “It was unimaginable to me that a Nisei [second-generation Japanese-American] writer would write with that kind of emotional openness. She told me stories about the struggles of the Nisei, the itinerant farmer’s life, the relocation to Poston [the Japanese internment camp in Arizona] where her family was forced to move. The soldiers. The women who went through the factories. Afterward, they came back to L.A. and couldn’t get jobs.”

In those years, Yamauchi worked painting shower curtains. Having started writing and doing illustrations for the camp newspaper, she made a deal with the editors of the Rafu Shimpo: She would illustrate a special Christmas issue and they would publish her writing.

In quietly eloquent stories such as “The Sensei,” the story of a couple’s post-war entanglement with a Buddhist priest the husband met in an internment camp, and “Shirley Temple, Hotcha-cha,” which shows the wartime misery of Japanese civilians, her characters find emotional courage amid social dislocation.

“In our days, there was a lot of prejudice,” she says. “I wanted to be in magazines. I sent to the New Yorker, Redbook, Esquire, Cosmo--and I’m getting no response. Not, ‘I like the Yamauchi stories,’ or ‘I don’t like the Yamauchi stories.’ Nothing. I fell into a deep depression.”

Then came “Aiiieeee!” and various literary quarterlies began publishing her. She also made a name as a playwright (New York’s Public Theater produced her play, “The Music Lessons”).

The afternoon with Hongo fills with talk of his poems, her stories, her plays, his recent anthology of her work (“Songs My Mother Taught Me,” from Feminist Press), his new memoir (“Volcano,” from Alfred A. Knopf) about his family and early childhood in Hawaii.

“I teach her to my students [at the University of Oregon],” Hongo says. “A whole new generation of writers.”

She envies today’s Asian American writers: “I’m amazed at how free they are, how big they write. I’m so closed. That’s the way I still feel. I have to pull myself apart to say what I have to say. It’s horrible. You just pull it out.”

“My god!” Hongo declaims. “She’s saying I’m a Chippendale dancer!”

Smiling, she enjoys his mischief, but won’t let go of her point. “I was brought up a Japanese woman, trying to not be noticed. That was everything. To be invisible. Now, that kind of silence is hard to understand.”