Michelle Har Kim
Michelle Har Kim received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, "Antipodes of Asian American Literature: Heterolingualism and the Asian Americas" (2012), explores a series of Asian American texts that are written in Spanish and/or that cite Asian diasporic lives in the Americas.
Updated September 2012
Stories from This Author
José Watanabe
March 6, 2011 • Michelle Har Kim
“The children of Japanese immigrants, we heard...that someday the whole family would return to Japan. The dream wasn’t too convincing, not even for our parents”1. The fifth of eleven children, the Japanese Peruvian poet José Watanabe (1946-2007) spent his early childhood in the sugar plantation town of Laredo, about three hundred miles north of Lima, in the region of La Libertad. There his issei migrant father met and married his Peruvian mother—“a mestiza Peruvian,” Watanabe elaborates in a recent interview.2 …
