“Every Cherry Blossom Festival, we would go to San Francisco and help fold wontons,” Dr. Amy Sueyoshi nostalgically recalls when describing helping her mother as a child at her brothers’ Boy Scouts Troop 12 booth.
In the carefully folded dough of fried wontons, Sueyoshi found a deep sense of community that she would continue to foster in adulthood. In fact, this young, conscientious child who helped in the “back kitchen” would grow into an accomplished academic and historian.
Sueyoshi has authored a multitude of scholarly publications as well as two books: Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi (2012) and Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental” (2018). These books illuminate the complex intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Now serving as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University (SFSU), Sueyoshi’s academic and community work continues to contribute to creating spaces for those who are marginalized.
Childhood Influences
Since childhood, Sueyoshi was both educated and politicized. Sueyoshi’s father was Okinawan and Kibei Nisei, and Sueyoshi’s mother was Shin-Issei from Tokyo, Japan. Thus, Sueyoshi was raised in a household highly conscious of the Japanese colonization of the Ryukyu Islands, named “Okinawa” as a Japanese prefecture.1
Sueyoshi’s mother would also educate Sueyoshi about Japan’s war-time atrocities in countries, including Korea and China. Rather than receive toys for Christmas, Sueyoshi would receive books about Japanese American incarceration.
“My childhood was about being educated around what it meant to be a Japanese American historically and also what it meant to be both Okinawan and Japanese regarding Japan’s unfair treatment of Okinawa,” she said.
Community Engagement
Another important aspect of Sueyoshi’s childhood was her engagement with the community, an experience influenced by her mother. Sueyoshi describes the Boy Scouts Troop 12 as a historically Japanese American troop in San Francisco that became largely Asian American by the time her brothers joined. With the troop, Sueyoshi would help fold wontons at Cherry Blossom Festivals and attend ski trips.
She explained how Troop 12 was an important community for a child living in San Mateo, especially in a suburb where she felt “a deep sense of inferiority.” Although she acknowledges that Asian American communities have their own unique challenges, Sueyoshi found comfort in Troop 12.
“To me, as a child, it served as a refuge from the whiteness that I faced in San Mateo,” she explained. Sueyoshi additionally clarified that San Mateo was not all white, but she mainly felt isolated from other Asian Americans who came from more wealthy, educated families.
Even as a child, Sueyoshi was determined to create space for those who were outcast. Undergoing heart surgery early on, Sueyoshi was not able to participate in physical education class, a major course part of mainstream curriculum.
“I wasn’t the popular kid because of all these physical disabilities,” she reflected. In fact, Sueyoshi always attempted to befriend those on the margins of school society. “I did have a deep sense of compassion towards folks who didn’t necessarily feel like they were part of a larger community,” she said.
This compassion was later reflected in Sueyoshi’s community work. “[I try] to provide a space for young people, whether it be in a classroom or in queer organizing, in a community group,” she explained.
Path to Academia
At the start of college, Sueyoshi did not plan on becoming a historian. In fact, her sights were set on becoming a doctor because she wanted to give back to a profession that helped her during her hospital stays. However, Sueyoshi realized that science was not for her.
After struggling in general chemistry in addition to a number of other science courses and being put on academic probation, she decided to enroll in a history class. Performing well in the course, Sueyoshi began pursuing the field that she had an affinity for ever since childhood. “History saved my life in terms of allowing me to finish college,” she remarked.
It wasn’t until Sueyoshi took a women’s history class that she became intellectually excited about the field, particularly in studying gender and sexuality in historical contexts. Sueyoshi describes her experience reading Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era by Elaine May.
“It was this incredible book about how gender and sexuality really propelled and advanced the Cold War,” Sueyoshi explained. “It totally blew my mind.”
As a result, Sueyoshi became determined to spread this intellectual fascination to students struggling in college. She attended UCLA for graduate school where she received a Ph.D. in history.
After a relentless job search, Sueyoshi became a professor at SFSU in 2002 as its first queer studies scholar in the College of Ethnic Studies. Although grateful for the position, Sueyoshi points out how late the College was to hire a queer studies scholar.
As a historian, Sueyoshi battles systemic marginalization. “Both Asian American history and queer history are not recognized as central to the U.S. historical narrative,” she reflected.
For Sueyoshi, the fight against erasure is routine. “It’s just part of the work,” she explained.
Challenges in Academia
However, Sueyoshi describes how there were many challenges she faced when investigating and writing at an intersection between Asian American and queer studies. It began as early as her dissertation in the mid to late 90’s with Sueyoshi’s struggles to find a dissertation chair who would support her work.
“AIDS is still very much a big deal. And what that means is that homophobia, transphobia, are very super real,” she remembered.
When Sueyoshi worked to publish her first book Queer Compulsions—a treatise that critically engages the life of Japanese immigrant Yone Noguchi with regards to race, gender, and sexuality—Sueyoshi discusses receiving rejections from fifteen publishers during the blind review process.
“In one case, the editor didn’t even send it out to blind reviewers,” she recalled. In other instances, when Sueyoshi received reviews, answers suggested bias. “Queer Compulsions is ultimately a critique of whiteness and white imperialism as well as the exoticization of Japan,” Sueyoshi explained.
“They were sending [the book] to East Asianists [to review]. So these are typically white academics who are studying Japan and Asia…but a number of them wrote back in the review and said things like, ‘Couldn’t you depict the white guy [Charles Warren Stoddard] a little more nicely?’” she laughed. “I’m like, ‘I’m just stating what he wrote in his letters. I’m not making any judgment on it.’”
Notes:
1. Gavan McCormack and Satoko O. Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 1-5.
© 2025 Kayla Kamei
