Things I remember from my youth:
- watching Kung Fu every afternoon after school
- going to the Obon Festival every fall at the Buddhist Temple down the street
- eating manju on special occasions
- visiting family in Hilo
- wondering if Yul Brenner was really Thai when I saw The King and I
- my grandparents telling me they didn’t vote because when they moved to California, no one would let them buy a house in a white neighborhood
- all the sansei coaches in the basketball and baseball leagues
- all the nisei men gardening
- all the yonsei half-breeds
- thinking “shoyu” and “soy sauce” were different things
- my brother firing pretend bullets at the real remains of Manzanar
- my friend Cindy Lam explaining that her father was killed when they escaped from Vietnam
- being really proud of Lenn Sakata, the only major league baseball player I knew of who was Japanese American
I didn’t know yet that David Carradine in Kung Fu was not cool. Little did I know that it had been decided that American was not ready for an man of Asian ancestry to play a lead role in a television series. And I didn’t understand the Yul Brenner caricature. All I knew was that here were Asian characters and that the rest of the world knew (however insensitively) that we existed. So what is it about all of us Asian Americans who run to the television when an Asian face appears? What makes us flock to each other in this sea of diversity we call the United States? What makes other groups stick together? What are we looking for when we identify with an ethnic group?
