Strings of origami cranes, circles of wish lanterns, maneki nekos and daruma figures—for decades I’ve watched my sister Teruko grow as an artist. I remember Teruko’s pencil sketches and charcoal drawings that our mother framed in our hallway to Teruko’s first solo show in Sacramento to public art installations in …
A maneki neko statue keeps moving mysteriously around a “sort of” Japanese restaurant in Boyle Heights. A music teacher keeps hearing some drumming in Leimert Park, with no visible drummer. A team of kid detectives roams Los Angeles, looking for ghosts—not to vaporize or “bust” them, but to listen to …
Was I looking at a pile of charred kindling, a set of raven’s wings or feathers?
In a heightened wave of anti-Asian racism, including attacks on Asian elders and the murders of 8 Asian women in Atlanta, I have felt the need to reach out—to family, to friends, to community. (For more about what’s been happening in the Seattle area, including a response from Yonsei professor …
As we survey the past year of lockdowns and quarantines that started here in the States by mid-March, 2020, we take stock of a wide spectrum of revelations and experiences over the last twelve months. From new personal practices and experiments in the arena of safer-at-home, to illness and loss, …
When I was a little kid in California in the early 1980s, it was cool to be a rebel, or a resister. On the sawdust-covered playground of my elementary school, we played out different scenes from the movie Star Wars. A popular scene reenactment was the trash compactor scene, when …
The following essay is adapted from a talk that I gave to the City of Tacoma Historic Preservation, Tacoma Historical Society, and Historic Tacoma in November 2020. An edited video version is available here on YouTube.
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