CSUN Project Preserves Asian American Voices

At first glance it would appear that the Heart Mountain Sentinel and the Chingusai have little in common, if anything at all.

One newsletter was compiled by prisoners at a Japanese internment camp during World War II, the other by members of a support group for bisexual, gay and lesbian Koreans in Los Angeles.

Yet they are bound by a common thread: Each preserves a segment of Asian American history through the voices of the people who experienced it.

“This is a view of history created by the communities themselves, not as reported by a newspaper, written by an author or portrayed by Hollywood,” said Kenyon Chan, chair of Cal State Northridge’s Asian American Studies Department. “It’s how the communities saw things, which is very important because their histories are locked in these newsletters.”

The university has already gathered an extensive collection of original copies of internment camp newsletters. Now, Chan and his colleagues have embarked on an ambitious project to collect newsletters currently produced by Asian American organizations throughout Southern California.

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Chan said his department decided to launch the project--the Asian American Community Newsletters Collection--out of concern that an important segment of Asian American history would be lost if the newsletters were simply discarded with the week’s trash.

When complete, the unique collection will complement the internment camp papers by allowing students to examine what the communities created during vastly different times, said Robert Marshall, archivist for CSUN’s Urban Archives Center, which will house the collection.

Chan’s department has sent letters to 150 Asian American groups, requesting copies of their newsletters and seeking a commitment that they will send copies of all future publications. The letter explains why the department considers such seemingly mundane publications to be historical treasures:

“The contemporary records of our work, play and struggles are reflected in many mediums including community newsletters and documents produced by community organizations,” Chan says. “We must preserve our present so that others will understand our past.”

Participants’ newsletters will be cataloged, placed in acid-free folders and storage boxes and indexed by Marshall and his colleagues, who will receive some assistance from Chan’s students.

So far, nine organizations have sent in material, including the Chinatown Service Center, the Asian American Drug Abuse Program, Pacific Asian Language Services and Chingusai of Los Angeles: The Korean Bisexual, Lesbian & Gay Network.

Dozens of other groups have begun searching for back copies of their publications, Chan said.

“When people are making history, a lot of times they don’t even realize it. So we’re asking people to dig through their garages and file cabinets,” Chan said. “Unfortunately, a lot of it has already been lost.”

Tony Gardner, curator of the CSUN library’s Special Collections section, said, “It will be the only collection of its kind in the area and possibly the country.”

The university’s existing collection of internment camp newsletters shows how valuable such ordinary items can become.

The newsletters, which include copies of the Manzanar Free Press, the Poston Chronicle, the Gila News Courier and the Daily Tulean Dispatch, chronicle in simple, unembellished prose one of the most infamous periods in American history.

Citing national security at the height of World War II, the U.S. government sent 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, to 10 internment camps. The civilian prisoners were forced to abandon homes, businesses and careers until their release years later, and in many instances their possessions were sold off.

The publications they created illustrate that, above all else, newsletters have always been used to communicate information about issues confronting a community, while capturing its members’ reactions.

Prisoners at the internment camp in Wyoming, for example, used the pages of the Heart Mountain Sentinel to tell of how more than 3,000 of them signed a petition for the removal of barbed wire and guard towers from their camp.

“For what shall it profit the citizens of the United States if they save the whole world and lose their own freedom,” they wrote in the petition, which was printed in the Sentinel.

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Fast-forward 55 years to present-day Los Angeles, where members of Chingusai, which means “among friends,” are using their newsletter to share information about dating and Web sites.

The story “Raymond’s Outing” in a recent edition of Chingusai gives one Korean man’s account of how he was outed when a drunk friend blurted out during a party that he was gay, and the support he subsequently received from his friends.

“Before being outed, I never thought about dating because I was so locked away in the closet,” he wrote in Chingusai. “I thought I was the only gay Korean person on the planet! . . . Thanks to my friends, I learned a lot about being gay and Asian. I learned that there were a lot people out there like me.”

Many of the newsletters reflect their groups’ pan-Asian philosophies.

Pacific Asian Languages Services, which provides free interpretation for health care providers, uses its VOICES newsletter to address the problems of language and cultural differences when Asian immigrants seek medical care.

In an issue last spring, Heng L. Foong, the group’s project director, conjured up a scenario that faces countless Asians who speak little or no English.

“Imagine being ill in a country where English is considered an exotic language; where nurses, doctors and social workers are trying to convey, in an unfamiliar tongue, that you have contracted a life-threatening illness; where a social norm such as taking two aspirins for a headache is viewed as abnormal or possibly illegal; where a trip to the doctor’s office costs one hundred dollars; or where your employer doesn’t offer a health plan and pays you only ten dollars a day,” Foong wrote. “Imagine that.”

If all goes as planned, the newsletter collection will be available for students and researchers to use by late summer. Gardner said he hopes that the internment newsletters, which must be encased in special plastic sheets before they can be used as a research resource, will be available later this year.