My Father

Dear Regular Reader,

If you think I write a lot about my mother, you're right. I mean, I can't get away from that woman. My sister and I have always been dominated by her strong personality, but our mom is also like our third sister--only bossy because she's the mother, after all.

This week, I'll fill you in a little bit about my dad. That's him in the photo as a young soldier in Germany. The Winfrey's (some who are first cousins to THE Winfrey--Ms. Oprah) are planning a family reunion this summer, and my father and I plan to attend. I just hope there's something vegan I can eat in Arkansas.

Although I've written about my dad extensively in an essay included in the anthology Brothers and Others published about seven years ago, I'll brief you here.

Born in Richmond Texas in 1927, my father was the oldest of three boys and a girl belonging to Andrew and Eleanor Winfrey. A chauffeur and maid, respectively, Andrew and Eleanor saved their money and built a small hamburger stand. It was the first eatery for blacks in Richmond, and, as the years passed, my grandparents grew it into a barbecue cafe with indoor dining. (Today, there's a monument to my grandfather in Richmond.)

As a child visiting during the summers, I would wait on customers and drink strawberry soda in that smoky cafe. Behind the restaurant, my grandparents raised animals they would slaughter for everything from ribs to chitlins. Thinking about it today, my vegan stomach turns. But back in the day, it was a source of pride knowing that my kin owned their own business. That, plus I was known to scarf more than a few pigs' feet.

Not satisfied with having just a cafe, my grandfather also learned bricklaying and built several houses. The family lived in one and rented the others to tenants. But by the time my father turned 18, he decided he wanted to see the world. He wasn't crazy about the idea of working in his parents' b-b-q joint forever, and all the successful black men he knew of in his small country town had joined the military to acquire their bling. So, my dad signed up for the Army.

Well, he ended up seeing the world, all right. He was stationed in the Philippines, Korea and Japan where he met my mother. Later, he was sent to Germany (we went with him) and several other American military bases. But my father also experienced a segregated military before President Truman desegregated it. While my dad was overseas fighting for America, America represented by the Army approached restaurants and shops near military bases in foreign countries and ordered them to either serve only its black or white soldiers--but never both at the same time. Once he returned from serving his country overseas, my father struggled to find a place to live in Washington state.

Several weeks ago, I read an article about the book Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, and it triggered something my father had told me about his childhood. He'd said that after class each day, he went to work picking cotton. Naively, I replied that it must've been nice for him to have earned some money. But my father corrected me, and clarified that neither he nor the other children were ever paid for their labor. Instead, the white people who would round them up after school each day were still practicing slavery when it was clear that slavery had been declared illegal nearly 80 years before. According to Blackmon's book, slavery continued in the south until 1945--18 years after my father was born.

If you'd like to know more about my father, I still have a few copies left of Brothers and Others. Drop me an email at watermelonsushi@comcast.net, if you're interested in getting one.

And, if you're not busy this Saturday, February 7, at 4 pm, you'll have the opportunity to listen to me being interviewed by Janice Malone at http://www.filmfestivalradio.com. Please tune in to hear us discuss multiracial issues as well the Watermelon Sushi film.

I'm also anticipating an interview with playwright and Watermelon Sushi Associate Producer Jaz Dorsey of Nashville. I'll keep you posted about when the article will appear on the AAPEX blog.

Meanwhile, if you're on Facebook, join our group on the Hip Hapa Homeez page. Dude, we're hip, we're hapa, and we're homeez!

Until next week, I am...

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

Perfect Peace

Although I consider myself an armchair anti-war activist, I have to admit that growing up on military bases was one of the best things that happened to me and my sister. Ironically, we spent our teen years as peaceniks protesting the Vietnam War and the "military industrial complex". But looking back now, I see that had it not been for the U.S. Army I wouldn't have been born me. The only reason my father was in Japan was because of war. Had he not met and married my mother, I might've ended up with a Japanese otosan. What a strange concept to consider!

But back to childhood. Even though we were unaware of it at the time, those military bases were havens of perfect peace for us kids of mixed marriages. Shortly after WWII, American military men took warbrides from Europe, Asia and Australia. Many GI's ended up with German and Japanese wives. During our years at Ft. Lewis, I remember having lots of friends with Japanese or German mothers. Their fathers were sometimes white, sometimes black.

In any case, I never heard a single racist comment during that period. Instead, I learned snippets of various languages and cultural traditions from all of my classmates. My best friend, Sondra, whose family was Puerto Rican once invited me to her Catholic Church. Although I consider myself agnostic, it was richly rewarding to be exposed to someone else's religion. My sister's best friend, Tessie, was Filipina and I remember that meals served in her home were markedly different from what Sondra's family dined on. The mother of the Mexican family next door taught my mother to make a popular noodle dish. In fact, there was so much ethnic diversity in our neighborhood that it was like living at the United Nations. Only no one seemed to notice that everyone was different because being different was normal.

Several years later, when my father moved us to an all-white, middle-class neighborhood in nearby Tacoma, our neighbors there rolled up the welcome mat and tossed it out. Today, I realize that the only reason no one burned crosses in our yard was because they thought they had too much class although they probably thought about doing it. A fireman who lived across the street called my sister and me the "n-word" one day as we walked past his house. Huh? How'd you like to have him come put out the fire at your house? Let's see, "Ya'll are nothin' but a buncha "n-words" so I'ma jest let yo home burn down." Most of the kids in our 'hood just told us point blank that they weren't "allowed" to play in our yard like we had a disease or something. Only one girl, whose parents both worked in factories, ever actually came inside our house. I guess, in the eyes of the rest of the neighbors, her having laborer folks put her in the same class with us coloreds.

When I was in high school, my two best friends were also the offspring of warbrides. Silvia's mother was Austrian while Helen's mother was French. I was also friends with two girls who both had German mothers although one had a black father, and the other a white. I don't think any of us were particularly conscious of it then, but one of the reasons, I figure, that drew us together was our having mothers with accents. Having a foreign-born mother is what separated us from other classmates more so, I believe, than being mixed-race, or even black. I mean, it was a pretty big deal to attend some mother-daughter school function and present your mom to "real Americans" who would gawk at her before rudely demanding of you, "What did she say? I can't understand her." Of course, there was probably some remaining hostility towards Germans and Japanese who had been America's enemies during the war. Still, common sense would dictate that warbrides had been screened and approved for immigration by the U.S. How harmful could they've been? Was my mother toting a machine gun during the war? Was she the one who ordered the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Between dodging bombs dropped by Americans and running to bomb shelters, she barely survived on the few rations doled out by her government.

While we've come a long way since the days of outright animosity towards foreigners, we still have a ways to go. That's evident by some of the events that took place post-9/11. A friend of mine who is half black and half white, but looks of Arab descent, caught hell the first year following 9/11. When he once visited me in Los Angeles, he was stopped from taking photos of the LaBrea Tar Pits! No kidding.

These days, I'm grateful for my military upbringing although I remain vehemently anti-war. Still, I believe the only answer to peace is education. Until people learn the truth by studying accurately recorded history, we are doomed as a species to continue battling one another based on some physical trait.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

Sha Na Na Na Na Na Na

Strolling through the local health food store today, I noticed the music that was playing over the loudspeaker. The tune was catchy, the lyrics thought-provoking, and the singers quite talented. Stopping in the tea section, I sang along--under my breath, that is. You don't want to hear me singing out loud unless you're wearing earplugs--thick ones.

Anyway, listening closely to the song released a multitude of memories. The record, Get A Job, was a big hit when I was a kid. I'd heard it hundreds of times before, of course, but today the words struck me deeply. Perhaps I was reading more into it than what was initially intended, but I got the distinct sense that the songwriter was saying he wanted a job, but couldn't find one and because he was a black man he was out of luck, i.e. "Is there any work for me?"

Later at home, I googled searched the singers, The Silhouettes, and learned that their song had been released late in 1957 and went on to become a Billboard smash early in 1958. The songwriter, Richard Lewis, was a former serviceman who had moved back to his mother's home after being discharged--unable to find a job. Even though he wrote the lyrics to make it seem as if he was just sluffin' and not really seriously looking for work, I got the feeling that like with a lot of black servicemen, there just weren't any options made available to him once he came home. I know that's what kept my father in the Army until retirement. Where else was he going to go?

As I checked out the video, what struck me right away was the audience. Here, four grown black men are onstage rockin' and rollin' away to a song that laments how they can't even participate in the system. Yet the entire audience is made up of white teenagers. As they clap their hands and sway to the beat, the Caucasian kids look totally oblivious. Didn't they even think about how ridiculous it was that they were bouncing in their seats to a song filled with socio-economic angst, and that the very singers of said song wouldn't even be allowed in that auditorium with them had it not been for the need to have them on stage singing? But why would you even think anything if you've never been taught to examine anything? The beauty of a system that oppresses an entire race of people is that the oppressors aren't allowed to think, especially about their privileged place in the hierarchy.

Damn. This is a crazy planet. When I consider how outraged Americans were to discover the system of apartheid that was once South Africa, I am thrown for a loop about the way they allowed racial segregation to continue for so long in the U.S.

Back to music. We had so much of it in our house that my sister and I were singing and dancing at an early age. There was always a radio on playing the Billboard top 100, and we quickly learned the lyrics to most of the popular tunes--morbid tunes, like Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley. There was a lot of music on TV, too, and I remember watching shows like American Bandstand, The Lloyd Thaxton Show, Upbeat, Hullabaloo, Shindig and, later, Soul Train. I remember when Nat King Cole hosted his own weekly series, and when Leslie Uggams was a regular on Sing Along with Mitch (Miller). So much of American music is black music yet so many black musicians were never given the credit nor the royalties they deserved. But neither were black Americans in other fields.

You know, I keep harping on hope, and the larger possibilities that lie in front of us. Let's HOPE I'm right.

Namaste.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

http://one-hitwonders.blogspot.com/2008/02/silhouettes-get-job.html

Life Is Worth Waiting For

For a Southern black man like my father, watching Barack Obama inch closer to the Democratic nomination is a big deal. In fact, it's monumental.

Born in 1927, my dad joined the military in order to leave behind a life divided by black and white. In the backwoods Texas town where he grew up, both blacks and Mexicans were lynched without any intervention by local law enforcement. His escape was the U.S. Army, but what he found there was just more more segregation.

Forced into the "colored" unit, he thought it ironic to be stationed in countries like the Philippines, Japan and Korea where the locals didn't even know that they should be prejudiced against blacks since they'd never seen any before. But the military bigwigs took care of that by imposing their own racism on the natives. By designating which local eateries should feed only whites, and which ones only blacks, they guaranteed that Americans wouldn't be the only folks imposing segregation by race.

In the 81 years since my father's birth, major changes have taken place in this country. As a kid, my dad (along with all of his schoolmates) was forced to pick cotton without pay by local Caucasian plantation owners. Today, my father can look at a television set and see someone near his skin shade running in the primary for the presidency of the U.S.

Sometimes life is worth waiting for.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

P.S. That's my father in the photo above in his Army days.