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Victoria "Vickie" Taketa - Part 1

Date: April 3, 2023
Interviewer: Yvonne Kwan and Ellina Yin
Interviewee: Vickie Taketa (1947 - )

Victoria (Vickie) Taketa has long roots in the Santa Clara Valley region. As a precocious young person who challenged gender norms in the household and on the assembly line, Vickie would go on to become a counselor trained in multicultural practices. Vickie was also one of the early founders and teachers of Asian American Studies at San Jose State University. In addition to serving as a long-time counselor at Foothill College, Vickie would serve on the Japantown Neighborhood Association and Japantown Community Congress'helping to perserve and honor the history of San Jose Japantown.

Transcript of Vickie Taketa

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Systems & Power Timeframe 00:00 >> 6:23

Victoria Sachiko Taketa. I was born August 8, 1947. I was born the 20,000th baby in San Jose. I was born at San Jose Hospital. And San Jose had this huge competition about who will be the 20,000th baby. And if you look at the San Jose Herald, they're the ones that ran the articles and eventually took a picture of me and my mom. My mom, I'm going to be my mom, and she's holding me, and I became the 20,000 baby and the I believe it was the chamber that held this huge composition competition. And it was like working it up. You could you could tell by every article that the excitement was starting to increase. There's a young boy who's looking at a blackboard, and it's it says 10,000th baby. So he must have been the 10,000th. And it said, who will be the 20,000th? And so when the day finally comes, as my mother tells me, she was working on the farm and she tells my dad, it's time. I need to go to the hospital. So he drives my mother to the hospital, and he waits till she's wheeled into the labor area. And my mother tells me that everybody was excited. All the other women who were waiting were all excited because they wanted to be and have the 20,000th baby and my mother comes in and my mother's like, “she's going into labor.” And so I became the 20,000th baby.

The interesting part is I asked my mother, what did that mean to her and to my dad? You know what? And she said she didn't know that they were having this competition about who will be the 20,000th babies she just heard about when she got into the area where the women were all waiting. And she heard them saying things like, oh, there's there's all these presents and the birth will be free, you know, and it's going to be an honor to to be the the mother, and it's an honor for the child. So I asked my mother, I said, so what did you what did you get for, you know, having the 20,000th baby in San Jose? And she said she believes that the hospital said that the birth was free. But she said, you know, your dad and of course, I know my dad…He's very he's not going to he's not going to love that. So he actually paid; even though they said the birth is free, my dad paid for my birth.

And so I said to my mom, Well, when I was 18, you gave me a baby ring and you gave me the the picture. And who gave who gave that the baby ring? And it was Hearts department store. And if you ask anybody that's pretty close to my age or my generation and they're they've lived in San Jose they will know Hearts department store. It's a it was a beautiful store and right downtown San Jose and hearts was…became the family became I don't want to say famous but well-known because their son was kidnaped, and he was a young man and they kidnaped him for ransom and he he was killed in it. So it's kind of a sad story. And so I always thought that the reason why the Hearts gave a baby ring, it was a 14 karat gold little baby ring, and it was in a really cute little box. I always believed it was because of their connection to their child. And so they just you know, they they gave the they they offered the ring when the competition was going on. And they just wanted the ring to go to the baby.

So I always felt like that was the connection. So even though my parents worked really hard to make a living, they would always shop at Hearts, and Hearts was expensive. And I used to think, okay, why don't we go somewhere else? And maybe art, our dollars could stretch a little. But. But from that point on, I understood. Mm hmm. My parents and why they did what they did. And so even when I came to school here, I would go to Hearts and I would shop at Hearts, and I could still see the inside of that store. And there was kind of this always this connection. I don't know if the rest of my family felt that way, but I always felt this connection between myself and the owners and the store. So I shopped until the store closed in downtown San Jose, and then they opened a store or maybe had another store in Sunnyvale. So I shop there until it closed. So that's the that's the story about 20,000th baby.

I often wondered and I've always talked to friends of a few friends of mine about, you know, how did they you know, here they are waiting for the 20,000th baby. They made this big public, you know, kind of like public competition out of it. And I often wondered what else was available for the mothers and for the, you know, for the child. And we used to…wee used to talk about maybe we ought to go and look up records and and see what that's about.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 6:23 >> 12:46

Growing up in this valley as a child, and and thank goodness, memory is collective. You know, it's built upon. Otherwise, I don't know how you would hold all that information. But I just remembered rural. I remembered traveling what seemed like to a child traveling far to get to somewhere meaning from my house to downtown San Jose or my house to Japantown. I always thought that my house to my sister's husband's family in Berryessa. I used to always tell my parents, “Are we going to the mountains?” So if you can picture you're living in the middle of this valley. Traveling to Berryessa felt like going to the mountains and to a kid, it was just like, “Oh my gosh.” And so that his how rural this area was. There were no freeways, There were no central expressways. There was only San Jose. I remember it as a downtown Japantown was another town, but it was a a place that I went to, I went to church. I would go to maybe the market like the Dobashi’s or the pharmacy or something like that where the doctors and downtown was more like shopping, movies like this. But Japantown was a different experience as well. It was more like a part of the community, more like that. You know, I'd see friends at church, and I'd see my parents see friends, and it was it was more a part of maybe. Yeah, it was an extension of my community, whereas downtown was, you know, going shopping and going to the movies.

In today's world. Oh, my goodness. I grew up on a road called Lawrence Station Road, which is today Lawrence Expressway. And that will tell you the difference that would happen to this valley. When I was a child growing up and it was very rural and orchard and agriculture, to watching it become suburban, I mean, just wall to wall houses from, you know, Los Gatos all the way down the peninsula, all the way to San Francisco. San Francisco was an excursion when I was a child. It was an outing. It was like it's like what people do when you go to Yosemite today, it's it you were just go on an outing today. You can get there in an hour. Before we'd have to ride from let's think of going to San Francisco, going on the El Camino. It's not on a freeway on the Camino and the El Camino was maybe a 1 lane going one way and 1 lane going the other way and that's how you going to get to San Francisco, not on a freeway.

One of the things that I noticed when I was when I was when I was a kid growing up here in in the Valley, we began to see I began to see tract homes come in very slowly. I mean, one tract home came in and it came in where Homestead is right now between Homestead and El Camino. And some of my classmates came from that tract home and and I remember listening to my parents because my parents farmed, and I remembered listening to the adult conversation. I was one of those kind of kids that would always pay attention and they would talk about that. This is this is the this is the future that the farmlands were going to disappear and more and more of these suburban suburban homes were coming. And we began to see other farmers, other Japanese American farmers moving. If they're not moving to Japantown area, then they're moving to Barryessa they're moving, they're moving out. They're moving south. They're moving there. Some of them are even going maybe to Salinas or Watsonville, but they're going south. So they're going to south San Jose. They're going to the outer parts of the city. And so if you were farming in this valley and you began to understand that that this was the future and the farmland was going to begin to disappear, then you would hear talk of families starting to look and to move.

And so when we moved, we moved from the Valley to Sunol. So I grew up and I spent the rest of my middle school years in high school years in Sunol, and I went to high school in Pleasanton. And when I would come back, I would see acres and acres of trees that had been uprooted with big gaping holes in the grounds. And I don't know if you've ever been through the Central Valley when the when the orchardists are ripping up the old trees so they can plant new trees or they're ripping ripping up orchards to plant something else like vineyards. Right now it's ripping up portraits to put in vineyards. And you see this big, huge gaping holes. And the roots are the trees are laying on their sides. It almost looks like a war scene. It looks really there's something about it that's kind of violent. And I remember coming through the valley and just looking at all these uprooted orchards and thinking to myself, Oh my gosh, yeah, it it's more than just changing it. It's gone.

Timeframe 12:46 >> 14:22

When you get used to something, you, you almost forget you and you think it might be one language, but I, I believe it was the other language. And the reason why I say that is I remember I once said to my mother because she would she'd look at me and if she looked at me, she would speak Japanese, she would stop speaking English. And so but if she'd look at my niece, she'd speak English because she knew my niece couldn't speak Japanese. So I would look away from her so that she wouldn't do that. And it's because your mind just you're you just change. You don't even know you're doing it. So I would have to remind my mother, Mom, you need to speak English because I don't think they understand you. And she'd go, I'm speaking, I'm speaking English. And it's because she's looking at me, right?

So when I was a child, I want to think that my mother spoke English to me, and I know she didn't. She spoke Japanese to me. My parents spoke Japanese to each other. My dad spoke English to us, so but my mother spoke Japanese to all of us as we were growing up. Yeah. Mhm. And only if she felt like maybe she wasn't getting her point across or something. She might speak and try to speak English to us. But she spoke Japanese. Yeah. I want to think that she was speaking English but she wasn't, you know.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 14:22 >> 24:24

(Interviewer) We you ever formally taught in Japanese? Did you take classes?

I went when I was in, when I was in college, I took a class because I knew I was going to go visit my uncle in Japan. And I didn't want to I wanted to be able to to communicate with him. I knew if I got him to speak to me, I'd be okay because I can understand the language better than I can speak it. And so I know how to get people to talk to me right in Japanese. And so I went and took a class. I learned how to write. And I remember I went to Hawaii one time, and I was writing my mother about the food and the weather because my my ability to write was like probably five or six years old. I think maybe a five- or six-year-old could communicate better than I could. But I wrote her a postcard and I remember her telling me, yeah, my friend was looking at your card and thinking and said to me, Oh, Mrs. Taketa, isn't it wonderful that your granddaughter is writing you a postcard? And she she told her friend this was her best friend. She said, “No, that's Vickie!” So I tried.

Let's put it that way. I tried, I, I, I think that what I did learn is that Japanese has various levels, right, of speaking. And I wanted to be able to when I spoke to my uncle, show him the respect and tried to speak to him at this level instead of at this level. And he he he got a big kick out of me. He could see I was trying. So he just he told me, don't worry. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there are certain concepts in language that are really hard to communicate, and I know when I'd spend hours like with my mother or when I was in Japan, I spent hours with my cousin because she and I felt a connection and because she and I felt that connection, we spent the time working with the language to get our our need to communicate with one another and to tell our stories with each other. And my mother was quite surprised that I had the level of conversation with her brother and me with my cousin because my mother said, Uncle Hiroshi told you that? I said, Mom, either the language is living in my head because you spoke Japanese to me since I was born. So it's there and maybe I needed to be in Japan so that it just kind of started to shake some of that. And the longer I stayed, the more I would surprise myself that I could speak a fluent, you know, an intelligent sentence. And she said maybe you're like me. She I said, What do you mean, mom? And she said, Well, I think it in English, but when I go to speak it, it just won't come out. She said. But I feel like I construct that she didn't use the word construct, or maybe she did in Japanese, but she was saying, I think it in English, but it just won't come out. And I said, Maybe that's me, maybe I think it in Japanese, but because I don't have the the confidence or the maybe all the words, I don't feel comfortable speaking it. And so she and I kind of for the first time were talking about what it is about our inability or uncomfortableness to speak the language. But I really believe that that there is something in that first the language that if I was fluent, I think I would have had an ability to communicate with my mother on another level. Yeah, but because we spent a lot time with each other; it developed over time. I think it would’ve happened a little more quickly or something. But it happened over time. And I was lucky enough for her to live up to 99, so it gave me the time to do that. Otherwise, I believe there would’ve been a lot lost in coming to know my mother as a person. Thank you for reminding me how culture is so steeped in language.

And there are there are singular words that my sister, my younger brother, we can say to each other and we don't have to say another word. We can just say these one words and we totally understand what other people might have to write a whole page in order to say what that word means and how you're feeling in that moment, at that time in this incident. And that's all we have to do is say one word and we kind of all look at each other and nod and more in agreement. And it's because something cultural is being passed about behavior, about what we what we approve of, what we disapprove, what we resonate with, what we don't resonate with. It's all loaded in that one word. And there's a couple of words that I just love because of when I don't have words to explain myself or a feeling. If I can use that one word, it will put me in that context, in that moment. And whoever, whoever I'm communicating with understands it. My mother and I would do that from time to time. She would look at me and just say one word, and I'd say, Yeah. And we just sit there and SHHH… it's it's because language is so loaded with feeling and it can put you into context. It's it could be about values, it could be about behavior, it could be about feelings, it could be about thought. It could be about it could. It could include the quietness; it could include the weather. It it describes everything. And so I maybe that's maybe that's other cultures.

But also language is because of my parents and because I know my parents values and and I know I know where their values are rooted and where they come from. Does that make sense? Because we were taught, gosh, if I didn't hear it once, I heard it once a week, my parents were very clear about this is how we behave, this is what we do in our family. What other people do is what other people do, but this is how we behave. And so it was really clear we were Japanese. It was really clear you be proud of your culture. And that used to be when I think about when I think about my parents experience in America as immigrants, I think about I think about how they were able to take their hopes and dreams and still put it into a positive, a positive place that we would take the best of what this country has to offer and move forward with it, even though they themselves were not able to benefit from their hard work and their hopes and dreams. And so but those were rooted in those cultural behaviors. Those were rooted in in their experience. And so I look I look at them, and I think about when they were incarcerated, how they then could come from that place and still say, be proud of who you are. Right. We do this in our home. We behave this way and and then try to teach us to stay out of harm's way. Yeah. Because I was amazed at some of the stories my father would tell us about about the world we were going to find ourselves interacting with, whether it was as young people or as adults, you know, people talk about how African Americans must talk to their their children about participating in the world. Well, my father had a very similar view about what was out there. Yeah.

Systems & Power Timeframe 24:24 >> 31:28

One of the things that I'm going to answer your your question, one of the by saying this first one of the things that I learned as a young child growing up was as as you begin to experience the world around you and you're told a set of rules in your own house, and then years you hear about a set of rules from your school or other people, and you begin to see and feel you don't… You can't articulate it because you're too young, but you have an understanding that there's something, there's something different. And there's it's as a child, I had the language to say that there's two parallel universes, but I would have said that I just knew that. Hmm. I found myself always questioning and thinking, Hmm, I have this rule at home. I have this rule at school. The I used to always be a person about fair-fairness. I remember always going to my dad about what's fair and what's not fair. And because I noticed these contradictions and and there were times in my life where I would, even though I was raised in a very Japanese household, there would come times in my life, my life when the contradictions were just too overwhelming. And and I felt that I needed to to make a statement about it.

And when I would when I would think to do those things, I would think, okay, I'm not going to live to see my 13th birthday. I'm going to die today. Either that or I'm going to be disowned and I'm going to be homeless. I'll give you an example of what I mean by that. And and I think what it did is it eventually would probably give me the courage to because I was finding my own voice. And I think in finding my own voice, my I think my parents set me up to find my own voice. I used to have conversations with my mother, like, oh, wow, you know, why? Why would you? You know, it was almost as if I was saying, Why did you teach us in this manner? So then when we do find our voice, it's not consistent with with Gaman. Gaman is right on is to [persevere] and and yet, if you're going to teach me to be proud of myself and be right at some point I'm going to use my voice and that is not Gaman.

And so here I am at about 12 and and I decide that I'm tired of doing housework and washing clothes and ironing and and putting the clothes into drawers, into everybody's drawers. So whoever stayed home and off the farm had to wash clothes, mop the floors through the dishes, cooked that, get the dinner ready. You know, when you wash the clothes, you got to hang them up on a line because there's no such thing as a dryer. And then you've got to iron them, fold them and put them away. And we lived in this house that was upstairs and downstairs. And I remember piling all the my brother's shirts to go down into their drawers and they decided that they didn't want to go put it in their drawers. They were too busy doing what they were doing. So my mom said to me something like, Well, why didn't you put your brother's clothes in their drawers? And I said, Well, I, I folded them really nice so that they can take them downstairs with them.

And, and she decided that no, that was part of my job and I needed to go and take them downstairs. So I decided to throw a fit. So I picked up the clothes and I threw them all down the stairs. So the downstairs went like this and like this in clothes is just sliding down the stairs. All my beautiful iron shirts and whatevers are all flying down my. There was my one younger and my other brother, my other brother flying and I'm thinking, okay, that felt really good, but you're going to die. You're not going to live to see 13 because dad’s going to come home and oh gosh, you just did a big no no. So my mother was like, okay, I knew it was late to your father comes home, so here comes my dad, right? And I could hear them talking in the kitchen. And this is when you need to know language because your parents are doing it in Japanese.

And I could hear him and she's telling him and she's. Just throw on the clothes all over the place. And so I hear my dad say, I think it's time for the boys to put their own clothes away. I you can't. You're going from death to do you know what I'm saying? It's like you've just been pardoned. Never in my life would I have ever thought that that I would be pardoned. I don't know what I expected, but I did not expect that from my father to say it's time for the boys to put their own clothes away. And so I said to myself, so there are things that you can draw a line, right, and have a case for. I didn't need to further clothes down the stairs. Maybe I could have had a dialog with my mother about it, but it didn't. That didn't materialize. So from that point I knew that the yeah, you could, you could find a resolve and that you could still follow some of those cultural values, but also find something a little bit more just in that narrative about doing housework and, and washing clothes.

Timeframe 31:28 >> 37:22

I think I think one of the things throughout my life that that helped me and maybe I don't know if I was if that's a part of my personality to begin with or if it's something that that because we were taught to be silent and to as as a young child, what it does when you when you're not speaking, it causes you either to daydream or focus somewhere else or you focus and you start listening to people around you. And maybe as a child, because I was always listening to what adults were saying, I wanted to know what they were saying. And I started to use listening, using that quiet time to listen, to listen to what people were saying, listen to other people's stories so that you started at least for me, I started to to know who, who, who someone was, whether they were all my classmates or the people on the bus going to school or the people my class or standing outside the classroom or listening to my colleagues.

One of the one of the things I began to understand is you you begin to understand the environment that you're living in, whether you're living there at work or whether you're living there as friends or you're living there as a kid in a family. You start to you have a pretty, pretty good understanding of where you are. Meaning, I understood where I was in my family because I was just paying attention or asking questions or just listening.

And so one of the things when I first started Foothill College as the Asian American Multicultural Student Services coordinator, Mike Honda and Paul Sakamoto were my community advisory board members. And I remember going to them one time to ask, talking to them about the students were advocating for and demanding our full time Asian American counselor on campus. And this was back in the seventies, I'm going to say 73, 74, because I was hired in 73. And one of the things that Paul Sakamoto said to me, and it reminded me of my own upbringing, right, because he's Japanese American, I'm Japanese American. And he said to me, never feel the need to fill in the space because it's quiet. Let the other ones fill the space because in filling that space, they're going to tell you something. And that resonated with me because that was basically what my parents, my father was saying to us. And so I, I learned to, as I negotiated things at the college, as I worked with my colleagues, I mostly was back here while all that's going on over here. Right. And then I can go home. I could see what the problem is. All right? And I do this. So it's it's about that quiet allows you to start developing those listening skills, but it's more than listening skills because you're doing this, too.

You've got to use them. You've got to use all of that, you know, to to see what's going on in a situation. So those values I see on the wall in Japantown that that that my parents brought with them, depending on the situation most of the times, I think my values will hold. But there are times, if I'm in a particular situation, I have to look at the context of what's trying to be solved and what needs to take place. And sometimes you you meaning you, which I'm saying I what I do is then I have to figure out a way to not to move outside of that in order to get something done. Because in order to get something done, you're going to have to put yourself out there, meaning you're being taught not to put yourself out there. You're you're being told not to speak up or speak out.

Again, you understood. I understood the context of where I was. I understand that I have to be willing to accept the consequences because there are consequences when you speak up. And I mean, I can give you example after example of when I chose to speak up and as I got older, my, my, my tact changed.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 37:22 >> 42:55

When I was younger, you you kind of just you trying to figure your way out, right? You're trying to figure out how much you can push before they push back really hard. So an example would be I worked in electronics when I was first starting college and I worked full time and I worked in electronics because you could work a full shift and still go to school. And so I looked around where I was working. It was all women. It was all almost all women of color, and it was all women. And then there was a probably a population of Caucasian women, white women from high school. And when I worked in electronics, the companies were just starting Intel, AMD, they were all chips. Silicon Valley was just starting to grow. It had a different environment in those days in those companies because it was loose and it was young and the women had to wear white smocks and we had to wear dresses. And and we worked at these long tables like this, and we had these machines that we worked with. And the technicians would come under your table fixing the wiring underneath. And so you'd stop because you've got a dress on there working under the table. So you'd stop and your supervisor would say, Oh, Victoria, why are you stopping? I said, Well, Jeff is under the table and he says he's looking at you like so. And you're saying, “Well, I don't feel comfortable, you know, he can finish doing his work and then I'll continue my work.” And so when the supervisor started to become insensitive about our feelings about men crawling under the table while you're working at your job and fixing machines, and they could be under there a half an hour.

And some of them women were older women, and they didn't feel comfortable either. So they kind of they kind of came to me and said, Would you would you bring this up at a meeting with our supervisors? Because we heard you tell them that you didn't feel comfortable. We don't feel comfortable. And so I'm thinking to myself, oh, my God, here I go. And one of the things that when you think about consequence, one of the things I needed that job, it I needed the job so I can go to school. But I also understood that from talking to my coworkers, they needed the job because they were putting their kids to school. They needed the job because that was the only alternative for them.

And so I sat there and I said, okay, I'm going to speak up. I could get fired. Some of these young supervisors or, you know, they they might be three or four years older than me, and they're going to graduate any time soon for their MBA and they'll be gone. Or they're working on their bachelors, they'll be gone. And they also know that I'm going to school. So maybe in that way they treated me different. So when I spoke up, they weren't very happy about it. In fact, one of the supervisors said to me, because all I asked was that we could wear shorts. Can we work shorts to work instead of dresses and skirts? And they said no, because they wanted us to look presentable when customers came in to see how the chips were being made and the cleanliness of the room and blah blah, blah. And I said, Well, but the the the smocks come down to here and you won't, you won't see anything else. You're just going to see our knees and we'll still be dressed nicely from the knee down. And one of the supervisors, I'll never forget what he said, he said, We hired you to make chips. We didn't hire you to change the rules. And don't ask me why I did this, but I was so mad because he put in a couple of F words, right? And I thought, okay, I got up, and I left the room and I went and sat in the in I went and sat in the bathroom. And I remembered somebody come in and said, Oh, such and so wants to apologize to you for using bad language. Would you come out so he could. I said, No, I'm not going to come out. And I got called into the big supervisor's office. And I would say shortly after that we got to wear pants and in shorts. Yeah. So that's what I'm talking about today. It's not because I felt like when you find yourselves in those situations, if you don't look at the consequences, I don't know. It's, it it didn't feel good. But I understood the people who were coming to me and who were asking me to speak up. And in its because of them, I spoke up not because I was like, I think I'm going to go speak up. But yeah, yeah.

Timeframe 42:55 >> 48:49

San Jose State was, you know, you find you've my experience at San Jose State was this. As a young person you have this value about education. You get those values from your parents, about what education is and what it can do. And then they it gets fostered as you come through a school, you know, there's a narrative that they give you about education. And so once you get to college. But I'm I'm also thinking I probably felt this as I'm coming through grade school. I again, I just don't know what that quite means. But I know something is not quite right. I know that they're yeah, I just know that. And I know that because I watch what happened to my friends and how they get overlooked and how they get treated and it's as if it's it's as if someone makes a decision in the educational institution that they're not worthy of time. And in an in it's easier just to let them fall through the cracks than it is to pay attention to them. So I became aware of that. And watching that as I'm coming to the educational as I'm coming through K-12. And so by the time I get to college and I begin to see that when you talk about multicultural education or diversity or anything that has any subject that has to do with that is when I realize my lived experience and what I'm being taught in theory are two parallel universes and in and I begin to see that the people who are to teach me really don't have an understanding or don't have the basis to teach me that subject.

It wasn't until I got this one teacher was a psych or an anthropology teacher, and I wrote this paper that that somebody actually took interest in that in the subject matter that I was writing about, that made me feel like, okay, there is somebody out there that understands my lived experience. It's not this book lived experience. It's not it doesn't fit the theory that I'm being taught it. The language the language was making was making me feel like my cultural lived experience was less than because they would. The difference between independence, dependence, independence and interdependence. And I thought to myself, I don't see it as a disadvantage, and I don't see it as a less than I see it as a strength. There's something and my my one instructor, the first time I had this instructor who saw and understood what I was trying to communicate, I would find that same instructor in graduate school and a very similar instructor in graduate and graduate school who would understand and would champion my my thesis word for word. He knew every word that I wrote so that no one could say, change that. And he he was awesome. He was awesome. I would have never picked him for my advisor. It was an accident. He became my advisor, and he became my greatest champion for my paper.

But anyway, going back to going back to education in how I dealt with that is, is once I got over the myth that that education was this this this tower and I started to learn to accept that part of my part of my being a student is I'm going to be a teacher in my own class. There are times when I get frustrated. There are times when I get tired of teaching, always teaching. And I remember when I was in graduate school, some of us would sit down and go, when do we get to be students? They ought to be paying us because we were in that first. I was in the second wave of the multicultural grant for the Department of Education Counseling that Mike Honda was responsible for. And the subject was new, the the area was new. And so there's always thank God there was so many of us that we could support one another through that program. And we we started to get some really great professors into that into that department, which then helped us. But part of part of what I experienced was that if you're a person of color and you're a person of diversity and you're going to champion diversity or multiculturalism or culture, you're going to teach, you might not have signed up to teach, but you're going to teach. You're going to, you're going to teach.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 48:49 >> 56:21

I was fortunate at San Jose State to have a wonderful advisor named Murray Whitaker in the sociology department, and he decided that he was going to take me under his wing and I was a soci-crim major. And so he would I would try to go into AJ to take classes. But the Department of Justice that area, the AJ, Administration of Justice, they didn't like sociology students because we were a little bit too progressive, and so they would make you wait, they would put you on wait lists. And so I would go to Murray, and he would try to get me into those classes, drug classes and things like that, drug in community. So what I did was I went to African American studies because that was there first. And in trying to learn about myself and have an understanding of of being an American from another culture, being Asian American, I would take a lot of psych classes and anthropology classes. And once I took an African American studies classes when I understood this is where my education is going to happen, because I began to see and I understood, I understood everything in those classes. I understood that I understood myself in in context of of racism when I understood African American history. And I also felt like I when I took my first African American studies class and I started to learn about W.E.B. DuBois and I felt like, who? What else don't I know what what else has been held for my education? What what would I be like if I would have learned about all of this back when I was learning U.S. history for the I don't know how many 10th time or, you know, the same history over and over how.

And so I just remember getting very angry about that, about what was kept from my education and then I started looking around. There was no Asian American studies yet. And then the first moment I took the Asian American studies class. But it was that awakening when I took that African American studies class of, Oh my God, look at this richness as and and this started to speak to me about that parallel universe that I was experiencing. And there was a lived experience, and then there is a national narrative, or it could be or your school narrative. But they were here in my lived experience was always coming up against it and saying, there's something, there's something not right here. And so when I took Asian American studies is when I realized that this is where I needed to put some of my efforts, because this is the narrative that needs to be told this, this is the story that's missing.

This is this is what my father gave me when I was eighteen. And so I said, Who? It's almost as if you're here handed. How do I say this? I'm wondering if it's if maybe I need to ask some of the other the students, when I call them on the phone as I'm interviewing them, it's almost as if they hand you, they hand you a key that you don't have any understanding that this is going to be a part of the rest of your life. And so it it never dawned on me to say no when Mike [Honda] said, why aren't you teaching the class? And I said, Oh, he goes, Yeah, you. Because I asked him a question. I said, you know, they're looking for somebody to teach, teach this class. And he just said, why aren't you teaching it? And so because of my experience in the classroom where I felt like I was teaching anyway, right? And so I said, okay, I'll go ask for the syllabus because I was asked to if I would teach the class by by Donna, because I knew Donna, because Donna was leaving, Donna Fung was leaving. And she said, can you teach class?

But even before that, I was teaching with Emory. That was with AACI. That was a whole different style of telling you to teach. They would say show up at Tuesday at 6:30p at Room 12, you're teaching. And then they'd give you all the material and you taught. But this was you're teaching the class by yourself. You're teaching a different subject. You're you're not teaching the history of Asians in America. You're teaching Asian American women. So when Donna handed me the class, I took the syllabus, and then I spent hours at Stanford and UC Berkeley in the library. And thank God my colleague at Foothill College, her husband was a Stanford professor. And so they were able to get me into the the library because Stanford would not let you in the library if you weren't a Stanford student. I just spent hours, just hours reading about women in China, women in Japan, women in the Philippines, and trying to get a sense of women's place and how women's the culture in which women, the immigrant women came and brought with them. And then I did a lot of research here about women in social services. I went and looked at a lot of stats that the county didn't have. I thought I would find stats, but I didn't find any stats. So I could incorporate that in. And then I taught the class.

Yeah, but again, Mike Honda probably had a lot to do with my teaching Asian American studies, but it came because I realized that that, that if there was a choice between not offering a class because Asian American studies couldn't find an instructor that it was a story that needed to be told and maybe that's a thread that runs through me is that it's a story that needs to be told and we need to know our history. And if it means actual work, then it means extra work, you know?

Timeframe 56:21 >> 1:03:55

I look back at high school and and I kind of um, these what we would call leadership, you know, leadership roles. And um, what I like to do, I like to just work in the background. I like to be a part of the team. Um, my because I worked on a farm, extracurricular activities, we always had to negotiate that because of the work on the farm came first. And so, um, I was very present in in school, but being present doesn’t mean you’re raising your hand and you’re talking a lot. Because of the way I was raised, you’re a good student. You go to class. You do your homework. You participate. But it, um, but somewhere amongst all of that, my teachers would kind of try to encourage me to be this student body president or something like that. And I never felt comfortable with stuff like that. And, even though I didn’t feel comfortable, I would be the student body president. So, I’m thinking to myself, either I can’t say no, or they talked me into it.

And I was student body president in the 8th grade in my small school. And, um, when I was in high school, I was nominated to be um, my representative to the student body. I wanted to be the judge. I said now, if there’s a position that resonated with me and I felt like I could do, um, I would like to be the class judge because there was such a thing…if students got into trouble you had to go before the judge. A friend to my came to me and pleaded to me that he wanted to go to law school. And he really wanted this. I still know this person to this day. So I acquiesced and said I won’t run for judge. I won’t run for judge. And he became the judge.

(Interviewer) Did they go to law school?

No. He did go to Stanford, but he did not go to law school. And so he’s owe me one for a long time. So, anyway, so um…so somewhere along there, um, in high school, I was voted to be a senior counselor. A senior counselor. There were a group of women who were identified, must have been by the staff and faculty, or the faculty and the Dean of Women, and the Dean of Men… must’ve selected us. Probably about 12 of us. And our job was to work with the freshmen class women. And we were seniors. We would help them negotiate coming into the high school. And, you look at everybody, and most everybody is on the track to go to college. And, um, most of these people I knew were friends of mine.

Um, my parents were not big on sleepovers and things like that. It was a cultural thing. And so, when I first started high school, it was very difficult because people would invite you to things like sleepovers. And I’d go home, and my parents would be like, “What’s a sleepover?” And um, or, spending the night at somebody’s house. It wasn’t until I met my friend Melissa that her mother insisted with my parents that I’d be able to attend a birthday with their family. And spend the night and explain that it wasn’t a burden on them or anything like that. But they would, they wanted my company with their daughter to celebrate her birthday. And so, when I told her that my parents, we don’t do things like this in my family, she insisted that she talk to my father. So I had to explain to her that my father could not think that I had put her up to that. Because it would really be known. Right? Because it’s a part of that, how you do it, right? It’s all about how you do it.

And so, she managed to talk to my dad. My dad said ok. So now I could do sleepovers like everybody else, slumber parties in high school. So I knew all the people who were on this list of women who were selected to be senior counselors. And, um, so I was fairly honored that I was selected. I as like hmm, I wonder who put my name up. To this day, I feel like it was Mr. Hagler, my my history-geography, history, political science, uh, instructor. Because he always had this… he was was a a teacher that really understood those of us who were students of color. And he was very supportive and very fair with all the student athletes because the majority of them were Filipino or Samoans or Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans. And uh, it was something about him and the way he showed respect. And the way he engaged us was very different most of the other teachers.

And anyways, so, I always thought that maybe he, he nominated me. Um, it could have been the Dean of Women. Because I think that I chose to work in education, I chose to work with at-risk. I chose to work with multicultural and multiethnic. And, I thank God for idealism because it will um, it will make it bearable if you have passion and some sense of idealisms. But you also have to have some really strong ties. What makes it bearable is that you got to look for allies. And everything I’ve ever done is because I had allies.

Timeframe 1:03:55 >> 1:17:42

At Foothill College, my ally, my first ally, was Dr. Jean Thomas, African American counselor. She would be my touchstone. She would be the person I'd go and do temperature, and I spent the first three months at Foothill just looking. And in talking to people, but mostly looking to find out what is the informal structure here that operates. That's very powerful. And then what's the the the the institutional structure and where are those who who who has the power there? And and then Jean Thomas. And so between Jean and and talking to Mike and and Paul from my community and then looking at the informal and the formal and then working really closely with the students because the students also have some history that I didn't have. And so they were educating me as well. So if if you have a strong alliance and if you have a strong network, those pushbacks don't feel is overwhelming. They still are because you're still four or five people against 2000 in terms of staff and faculty on your campus and administration. But it helps to know that that your perspective and your goals are are the right thing to do.

I would say two things. Curriculum, curriculum and faculty positions, because these are about ownership curriculum. It's about ownership and faculty FTES are about ownership and nobody wants to give up ownership. So for those of you who have the experience of working at an educational institution and there's departments, the English, the social science, the math, you begin to understand that every department has their curriculum. Every department has a certain amount of faculty. Your district office or your president will allocate budget to the different departments. And that budget includes faculty and staff. And even within a department, they're going to they're going to jostle around for who who gets that money? Do the people who teach calculus get the money? Do the people who teach algebra get the money? They're going to they're going to make their case as to who gets the money and why does psychology get it? Does anthropology get it? Does ethnic studies get it, does anthropology get it in social science department? So there's always going to be this this pull.

So when I get to Foothill College, there is no ethnic studies. The reason why I am there is because the students are asking for ethnic studies. That's why my my program, my department was developed is because the students demanded that there be an ethnic studies, that there would be recruitment efforts and counseling efforts and and financial aid to support those efforts. And so during the the late sixties and early seventies, this is happening all over California, in the community college in the state university students are demanding this. They want ethnic studies. They want their history to be told. They want it to be a part of the narrative of the history of America. And so multicultural program at Foothill De Anza. De Anza has a multicultural, Foothill has a multicultural. I'm the Asian. I'm the Asian-American coordinator. My job is to develop curriculum, develop all the services, do all the recruitment work on retention, do the hiring. I was I think I was a a person of a whole department of one. And but each one of the coordinators had this daunting task. You're put on a campus that's been forced to to take on this this program. You have a few allies who supported the program. And so you kind of have to look for those allies. Oftentimes, they're not who you think they are. Ours happen to be from the English department, and I think one was philosophy, one was English. And so what we need to do is each one of us, meaning in the multicultural program, is to develop curriculum and then do the hiring, look for faculty who can teach ethnic studies. Well, you're developing curriculum into department. That, number one, doesn't want you to become your own department, because then that will take large amount of money away. So now you're trying to develop curriculum that's going to be housed in their area, but you're still asking for a faculty position to teach those classes, which means you're going to take away from the other social science classes.

So what we do is we develop the curriculum; we go to the curriculum committee. That's no easy task. To get your curriculum passed, you've got to prove that it meets the requirement of all the CSUs and UCs in the state of California. And then then you then you get it approved. You get a we got an associates degree going Lilit Dr. Lilia Chung and I wrote the curriculum and the curriculum sits because we can't manage to get break loose a faculty position to teach it. And so Lillia Chung, because of her background and her Ph.D., she can teach a few of those classes. She can teach the history of China, the history of Japan. She can teach a humanities class as well. But we can't get break loose enough to teach the Asian-American studies classes. And so that's where we start to push African Americans, Don Dorsey was able to write the curriculum with withheld for an AA degree in African American studies. We got Chicano studies as an AA degree. And so one of the things that happened that really kind of before before I retired, what we tried to redo again is they because of not being able to get the funds for the FTE to support the AA degrees, if they don't get use, the department can actually shelve the degrees. They don't. They don't. How do I say this? There's it's it's a fine line between getting rid of it and then really causing an uproar or you shelve it and let it just die because it's sitting on a shelf and collecting dust. Right. So the Chicano studies gets shelved, Asian American studies get shelved, African American studies is able to stay because they have a an African American faculty person teaching, teaching the classes, one person. And that's what keeps the the AA degree and African American studies alive. MM. Yeah.

Oh, that the the one thing I wanted to add to all of this, my journey at Foothill College goes from that position as Asian Americans, Asian Americans multicultural specialists. Everything I learned in that position for eight years gave me I didn't know it at the time, gave me all the skills I needed to do everything else that I did at Foothill College. I learned things that I never set out to learn. I didn't set out to learn curriculum development that just I didn't. And and so I went from that to to doing the career center and developing the career center because I would it's a part of my counseling. And from there, I became a full-time counselor in 1988, in all this Asian American studies and all this minority staff association in all this work on diversity is something that it wasn't just myself. I could I could I could give you numbers of a faculty of color, of administrators, of colors who did this work on top of their work. So if you were hired as the dean of students, the person that I knew would do that job and this job, all of us who were who believed in in multicultural education just did the work on top of your work. And so it would be like having two jobs. But but the commitment was there.

The parallel activities feed right into what you're doing if you're teaching a class. I think one of the I think one of the the the the real fundamental joys for me of teaching Asian American studies, whether it was at San Jose State or whether it was at Foothill-De Anza was the ability to bring in all of that activity that was happening around you and that and bring it to the students or bring the students to the event. I took a look at I took a look at one of my pages on my vitae, and there were just one after the other events that I took students to because I wanted to expose them to all the arts, all the arts and creativity that was going on that wasn't there. And all of a sudden, it was starting to to it was almost like an explosion of art and music and film that was taking place. And I wanted students to be exposed to that. And I wanted them to be exposed not only to the talent but to the stories that they were telling. And so we'd go to San Francisco, we'd see we'd see plays. The directors, the actors would stay after and and have open discussions. We'd go see poets and playwrights, and Janis Mirikitani. And it just was it was a time when students would be willing to even do that. So if I had them in my film class or if I had them in my women's class, and I would say that they're willing to give us all tickets to go see the play, and they would all go. And so again, all my all my activities that I did in the community connected right back and was a link to whatever I was doing. So if if it wasn't about the classroom to bring it into my classroom, if it had to do with a network for students and and to connect them to mentors or to internships and things like that, then that's how I got myself involved. It all connected. It all kind of supported that same narrative. It was the same narrative.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:17:42 >> 1:25:14

Oh, gosh. I moved into my neighborhood. I selected my neighborhood. I was looking for a home and I said, Where do I want to live? I wanted to live somewhere when I open the front door. I looked at a world that I wanted to live in. I wanted it to be diverse in age, ethnicity. I wanted different economic levels. I wanted it to represent, I guess, how I grew up. And that's how I grew up. I grew up with with diversity, of economics, of ethnicities, of age. And yeah, that feeds my soul that I like it when it looks like my world. And so when I moved in, I the first thing I got a flier for a neighborhood association. But it wasn't my neighborhood association. It was another neighborhood association. And I would go to the meetings, and I would, any time I would bring up any time I would bring up a subject about something. They would always say, well, that seems to be over in your area. Why don't you handle it? And it became the theme. It was like a mantra.

So I decided, okay, hmm, if this is going to be the case, I started to ask around. I started to ask people, was there a neighborhood association over here? And people would say, Yeah, but most people don't want to talk about it or something like that anyway. The gist of it was there was a neighborhood association. It got too political, and it disbanded. So I said, Well, just give me a couple of names and let me go talk to these people and see if we can't re reform or re-band or re rebrand, or we need a neighborhood association. And so I went and talked to Warner Bloomberg, who's still very active, Ron Harper and Morgan Lines. And so when I went and I and I approached them, they told me the story and I said, would you help form another neighborhood association? There's all these things that are happening and it's going to impact us as a neighbor[hood] and we need a voice at the table. And so they said, okay. And so then I went and talked to a few other people and they said, Who's going to. Who's going to. Who's going to run this neighborhood association? And that's when I said, well, we can decide, you know, it doesn't have to be right. And so they said, okay. And I said, I understand that it was political before.

We'll make it about neighbor and neighborhood issues and we'll keep our focus there. And very slowly knocked on a whole bunch of doors and knocked on a lot of doors and said, would you come? Would you come? Would you come? And most people who participated said, yes. So we reform formed and then we renamed it. It used to be the Jackson Taylor Neighborhood Association. And somebody said, Why not Japantown? And I said, Why not? So Warner had written up the bylaws and we started it. And we've been together, oh, gosh, 25, 30 years.

Gosh, living in the neighborhood and and the neighbors that come to our meetings want to live in Japantown, and they like living in a community that has a little a little town. They like the fact that it has history and that in it still has charm. And it's still quaint. And so any time that we have any issue about preserving the history and the culture of Japantown and that history is very diverse, it's not just about the Japanese history. It's about Heinlenville and the Chinese history, the Filipino history and African American history and so on. And so any time that we need help as a neighborhood association, we can call upon other neighborhoods that are on the outlying areas, meaning we have North Side. North Side is a real strong advocate of Japantown proper, Hensley, Vendome, a Hyde Park, Saint James, Julian Saint James. Sometimes we go even as far as Spartan, which is way over there by Seventh Street past through past the university. Sometimes we come together as a neighborhood to speak about one issue really loudly to the city. But sometimes it's about Japantown and and giving voice to what keeps Japantown unique.

And so it is about creating those history benches through the Japantown Community Congress. It's about, I don't know, you'd have to go to Japantown to see that we have these marble benches that tell the history. Some of it's Filipino American Filipino history, some of it's Japanese American, some of it's Chinese American, and so it was John Vasconcelos who wrote a bill SB 307 that funded the the preservation project of the remaining three Japantowns in California. That was once 48 before the war. And now there's three. One is LA, one San Francisco, one is San Jose. And so I, I participate to to again, to keep that kind of diversity, to keep from overgentrification to to work with keeping. When I say keeping our neighborhoods healthy, I mean healthy could also mean an ethnic balance healthy could mean an age balance healthy. It's not just about personal safety healthy. Because if we think of personal safety as being just physical safety, then we miss a lot of what personal safety is about. Personal safety is really about having a sense of of wellness, of belonging, of feeling safe and belonging and things like that. So I participate in, in, in my community to do whatever I can to to facilitate and see that that we have a voice at the table with the city to see that that happens. And Japantown is in our neighborhood association, I mean, in the boundaries of our neighborhood association. So it's, it's almost as well at the center. So a lot of what I do in Japantown is about that.

Timeframe 1:25:14 >> 1:29:12

But just to go back really quickly, when you were talking about being the head of things, one of the things that is important and was important and I still support it, if they sometimes they still ask me to do it for Foothill. And that is when we were at Foothill, the staff and faculty at Foothill came together and developed an organization called APAN. And APAN is an organization of staff, faculty and administrators to serve the Asian Pacific students. And the way we do that is through scholarship, fundraising and the rites of passage that we had for students at the end of the year to celebrate their and to honor their achievements.

And so that was founded because one of our VPs was able to institutionalize our networks through funding from the state. And Rose Meyers was just an awesome, awesome vice president. And when she came to me and said, “Do you think you could put together an organization?” Because I'm willing to to write a grant and fund an African American network, an Asian American, a Latino Alliance and an LGBTQ? And I said, done. And she funded. And it was that kind of effort at Foothill College that would make me raise my hand and volunteer for things. We had this strong network. I always had the advantage of having a strong network of of of administrators, faculty, staff, students of color, huge, huge network. And we all had each other's back. We really did. And we worked together. We worked across the campus with the Anza. We had a multicultural network that demanded that we have equal opportunity education represented on every hire in the district. And if it wasn't for the Minority Staff Association that fought to have that implemented. And so there we were. We were on president’s hiring, chancellor’s hiring, math, physics, English because of because of that joint effort across across campus and throughout my campus, we had that network.

And so it was it was really easy to to raise your hand and do some innovative stuff with other faculty, like I did a learning community with a math instructor because I knew her. And so it was easy to do that and to write the curriculum. And my dean was real excited about that. And so I taught with a math instructor, learning communities, Math My Way. And then I did one for English for a year. I taught for a year. But again, you have to develop that curriculum. You got to develop it in in sync with the with an English instructor who's willing to do it as well. And it was all meant to serve at-risk students. And so that kind of work that I did at Foothill was just real easy when you had that kind of of alliances with other faculty.

Timeframe 1:29:12 >> 1:38:04

It's really important when you problem solve, because I worked in a department that could get really testy from time to time and I was the in-service coordinator for years in my counseling division and in-service could be a lot of fun and innovative, but we also dealt with problem solving and, and our Dean led us problem solve away from the monthly department meetings. And one of the things I learned when you're trying to solve personnel problems or issues in your department, you cannot focus on personalities. You cannot focus on the person; you cannot focus on personalities. You have to focus on issues. What are the issues that you're trying to overcome or and if you stay focused on that, you can get to this. You can get to this. But if you focus on this? Now, it's going to be a battle and it's going to be a bad one. If you have collective bargaining and unions. And we did. But if you focus, you just got to keep your eye on the issues and let's just stay there. And you've got to remind people issues, issues and yeah, and yeah, and, and be realistic about some things, not all things because some things, you know, from history that you can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Right? Or you, you just got to be informed is in many different ways as you possibly can you need to be informed in the and the more you're informed and more you know what's coming down the coming down the road, you can ready yourself. And that helped too.

So if you sat on different committees and some of them were budget and boring but you also know what's coming down, right? And so people would say things like, why don't you sit on that committee? You seem to like committees. And I'm like, I don't like committees, but you have to be informed. And so, you know, you just kind of go, I'll go sit on that committee and and sometimes you have to sit through the boring ones to get the the little bit a nugget that you're looking for.

It's called networking in in in networking the the the more the it's about educating yourself and staying connected and and I always found that where I worked as long as as long as I how do I say this there's what I call common gossip everybody knows common gossip. Common gossip is just common gossip. And then there's the the things you kind of go, Ooh, ouch. And sometimes you have to know what to pass on and what not to pass on. Does that make sense? Sometimes you you have to know how much is too much or so that people it goes back to keeping your eye on the issue is what I'm trying to say. If you can just keep your eye on the issue and all this extra noise that goes on, you just kind of don't you pay attention to it because they could be barriers, they could be traps, they could be right. You just got to pay attention. You just got to pay attention sometimes. But I try to just stay focused on this and then I use some of that noise to inform me. But I try not to listen to too much of the noise. It's the ability to be able to sift through that and then make genuine relationships with people. I always felt like my work at Foothill, I had relationship with people that was from the bottom to the top.

The people that I the people that I have interacted with over time in City Hall or in the Board of Supervisors or with any other organization that I might have to call on at some point for support. I build those relationships in. Whenever I build those relationships, I make sure that I follow through on those relationships so that they know they can rely on me and I can rely on them. I make sure that I don't put them in any. I try to make sure that what I'm asking of them doesn't put them in a position. I'll, I'll give them the I'll, I'll all the questions they ask of me, I will inform them of the pitfalls and but also of, of maybe who, who were what I'm asking them to do the pitfalls, but also the benefits. Benefits not only to me but to them as well. And so we build this kind of trust like, okay, she's not going to you know, she's not going to put us in a position where we're going to we're going to be having to to explain ourselves why we why we did this. Or maybe her judgment is not right or something.

I try to do as much of my homework as I can. I think that was always a part of what what I was told early on when I started my job at Foothill, I think Paul Sakamoto told me always do your homework. And so that always kind of is in the back of my mind. So when I work with people, I do my homework. And so when I ask when I ask a city council person, I do my homework. And so they'll say, well, how much and who's to be there? And and how do people respond to this issue? What what do you think is the what is the pushback? You see what I'm saying? And so you try to be as upfront as you can about all of all of the above so that they don't put themselves in a situation where they're they're having to answer. It's almost like don't create problems for them. Yeah, kind of kind of help them see what you see and then you're asking the same of them. What do I not know that you know, what do I need to know? You know, how, how can I help you do this? Or because they're thinking, how can I help you do this? Right? So same thing. How can I help you? Mm hmm.

So and so I've worked with many of these people over and over on different issues. Yeah, it could be issues, could be homelessness issues, could be safety issues, could be anti-Asian hate issues, could be bringing in some services into the neighborhood that might be questionable. Maybe, you know, people don't want maybe a recovery house in your area or something like that. And so you have to go talk to your neighbors and and see what their what their fears are and see what the issues are and then see if there's a way to lessen lessen those fears in terms of of of that service in your in your neighborhood. And so you're not only doing a you're not only helping a service find a home somewhere, but you're helping whomever is championing that, whether it's a a city, a city person or a board supervisor person, somebody championing moving that into your neighborhood or into your area. Yeah.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:38:04 >> 1:44:03

I think I do it because I think I do it because it's a part of it goes all back to a part of the world that I want to live in. And it's why I moved into this area. I wanted to live in an area that did. When I opened that, when I opened my door, it's it's a neighborhood that I want to live in that, you know, diverse of age and ethnicity. And in one of the reasons I did the mural with Antonina from Hyde Park is that I wanted the kids to be able to see themselves in their own neighborhood. It's like I want it's like I want to see a neighborhood that I want to live in. I want them to see a part of themselves in the neighborhood. When do kids get to see their own reflection? And so the idea of doing a mural was about a mural that represented them. They had to come up with the concept. We asked them to come up with the one word, and they came up with the word believe, like believe in oneself. And so it's in all the languages of the neighbors who moved into this area.

So into this area, moved Irish immigrants, Chinese, Japanese, you know, Mexican Americans, Italians, Portuguese, the Germans and the Filipinos. The the Swedish, you know, because you can see all the connections throughout this neighborhood. And so all the first languages are on that. But we also asked students to go home and ask your parents if we could take a likeness of your face and put your face on that mural. Because, again, when the children get to see themselves reflected in their own neighborhood, they get to see themselves going to and from school every day. So it goes back to one of my basic, you know, if I had my own guiding principles, it would be diversity, diversity, diversity in in all its forms. And so that was, again, an easy…things like that are just easy for me to do. It's easy to give up my time. It's easy to give of, of yeah, it's easy to give of my time because it's something I'm, I'm passionate about that.

I don't I don't know if anybody starts out being an activist. I think it comes in… activism comes in as many different forms as there are people you can identify, meaning it. There's just not a template for it. It it's it happens when you can see and feel that something at that moment just isn't. There's something about what what your experience is isn't right. And maybe the first time you kind of say that she's that wasn't right, you know, and at some point you you take an action. The action could be as simple as saying, I don't think I'm going to frequent this store again because I don't like the way they treated me; my niece did that or it could be as it could be as loud as going before your City Council and saying this is wrong or but it just it could come through, it could…it finds itself in so many different ways. It can through art, music and plays and it can come through a teacher, it can come through…I've had those teachers. It can come through someone who writes something on your paper that that makes you feel that your lived experience is is a normal lived experience. It's and you're just going, Oh, that's different.

And it feels positive. And he made a change. He he changed. He changed how I was starting to to see how education could be versus when I would get these kind of statements about and I would disagree with my instructor or like, why did they say that? That that's. Yes, right. I remember I got an F on my paper once because I said the Civil War was fought over slavery. And my teacher put it was economics. And I thought the economics of slavery but didn't matter because I got zero points. And so activism, I, I never saw myself as that coming through. It wasn't that until you get together with a group of people and and you're talking about that, we're going to you know, we're about being activist or we're going to write, we're going to be we're going to demand. And in so it it starts to find a label. But it's always I think it's always about trying to do the right thing at that moment in in when you're witnessing something that is not right. Yeah.

Timeframe 1:44:03 >> 1:51:50

I think my parents planted the seed. My parents were always they had music in the house, they gave us musical instruments. Everybody had private music lessons. I sang all throughout my school years. I still sing, not currently, but I, I sang in choirs and courses and my parents, my mother, my mother's saying my mother played instruments, my father singing while he worked. And I was always asking him what he was singing. But so it was always there. We always had books. We always had. So something was planted. And I found that stories; I love stories. And I remember I went to go see the librarian when I was probably about 10 or 11, and it was an old Victorian house and it smelled of musty books. The whole Victorian house was full of books and lovely, lovely, wonderful Mrs. Cunningham. She looked like one of those people who would live in a Victorian house. She had this white hair with a button like this and she had glasses like wire rimmed glasses. And when you walked into the her courtyard, you walk through a gate like this that had roses on it like this, and you open the the gate like that and you went into this Victorian house and all these books. She sat you down next to the window, and she would ask you if you wanted some tea. And here I am, 11 years old and she asking me if I want tea. And I said, Sure. And she said, Now, Victoria, what kinds of stories would you like to read about? And she was the first librarian that just kind of was almost like you were visiting her in her house. Right. And you would start telling her things and she'd say, well, tell me about a book you you've read recently and and why did you like that book so much? And I started to realize that I liked a lot of books about real people or were based on real stories.

And so you take that and you fast forward to high school. I think one of the reasons why I, I looked forward going to school every day is I wanted to hear the stories that people were telling. It could be about, oh, my God, he doesn't love me anymore or, you know, he's seeing somebody else or all the stories that you hear when you were in high school, all the gossip. And so I used to think, okay, life is is very interesting. And we didn't have television when I was a kid, so we weren't watching television. So I go to school for television and somehow the storytelling is what really resonated with me. People stories really resonated with me. So all you have to do is take that, bring it forward to film. And film is about stories. It's about the stories that connect us all. And when people talk about an exposure, film can expose us when we don't have the ability to get that kind of exposure and it in it and it connects us to a sense of in a larger sense of humanity. And so when I think about film and film festival, I also think about Asian Pacific Islander stories that have not been able to find the big screen or even our screens at home. And and so I believe that if if I can help create a venue where young filmmakers can find voice to show their film, then I will spend my time working to see that their their film gets gets air time and gets the exposure because they're telling our story and our stories are not being told, not in not in that arena.

I think there are more books than I've ever seen in my life. I remember when I first was teaching Asian American Studies, I think you could count on your hand the numbers of books that were available for young people to read about Asian Pacific Islanders in terms of literature written by Asian Americans. I'm not talking about something written about by someone else, about with Asian American characters or Asian characters. And so I'm I'm really, again, taking this this form, this form of expression. And it in it comes right back to the the the my one guiding principle about diversity. And if if we could have access on our TVs and on our phones and at the movie theaters, all the stories that are being kept from us. And I go back and I think about that African American studies class I had I was starting to get emotional about. So what else is being kept from us? What else don't we know about each other? Because the the instruments that are used to communicate these stories is there's a gatekeeper here. And the gatekeeper keeps that narrative very narrow. And then that's how you get those two parallel universes. And I don't want to parallel universes. I want it to be one narrative, and it's the collective voices. So that's why I, I helped to create that space with the Silicon Valley. When I taught the media class, I would have to go to San Francisco to work with Shaun Wong was up at San Francisco State to get films from him. There was so little film, so little film for our voices to tell our stories. And so that again brings me to this place in time where I'm willing to work really hard so that young filmmakers can have a space.

Yeah. It's it's the lived it it goes back to what you collect it, you know, you collect it and it's your lived experience. And I have learned my whole life that you learning you get one kind of learning and in the educational institution and you get a whole another learning in the lived world and in the lived world. Oh, my gosh. The nuggets of learning and is and it goes back to that that African American class. What else is out there that that has been not I haven't been able to access because it's not been made available.