Today’s fractional finding

Today’s fractional finding: my dad’s annotated bibliography of “Japanese in the United States,” published in 1969 by Sac State Library. The cloth binding is red. It’s got a Library of Congress call number (E184 J3 J37 1969), which we might dangerously equate with an Amazon listing or an ISBN barcode presence. But I accord a similar kind of official-ness to these numbers: once you’ve got one, you’re published, baby.

Josh said that it was an amazing feeling to pick up the bibliography from UW’s Interlibrary Loan today: someone handed him a book that my dad wrote. I asked Josh what he meant. But thinking about it, I can only describe it as a presence that physical (not virtual) objects can carry. This pamphlet is, in all likelihood, an object that the two most important men in my life have now both touched.

Somehow, this copy of the bibliography did not come from Sac State Library, which would be expected. Instead, it’s from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. I have no idea how it got there. (But my sister now lives in Austin, a little over an hour from San Antonio.) Inside the back cover, the card pocket has an empty chart printed on it, which suggests that the bibliography’s never been checked out, or at least that it wasn’t checked out before the digital age. Or maybe even until now.

The contents: first, there are two introductions. There’s an introduction by the College Librarian, before my father’s introduction. Some of this first introduction is useful, historically speaking. It says that my dad’s bibliography was part of a series of publications by Sac State Library staff, intended to showcase the Sac State Library collection for faculty and students.

Then, there’s a longer paragraph, assuring the reader that my dad is “especially well qualified.” Given what I know about the publication of American literature by minority authors, this part of the introduction seems to echo the well-meaning-but-slightly-problematic genre of “white author introduces and thus validates minority author.” Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar: all African American authors who had these kinds of introductions to their first published works. The introductions were something like a gentleman’s “letter of introduction,” trying to smooth over bridge (or boundary) crossings.

I don’t mean to critique the college librarian heavily: he’s promoting my dad’s work, saying what my dad could not, and did not, in his own introduction. This librarian knew a fair amount about my dad’s personal history: he talks about my dad’s internment, and he mentions my dad’s book manuscript. And he says that my dad spoke in secondary schools and colleges about internment.

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A memory detour here: my dad used to come to my elementary schools to talk about Japanese culture. Sometimes he’d bring food, but most of the time he’d wear his dark blue kimono along with an array of objects. He’d shake the huge pocket-sleeves of the kimono, making them jingle: “What do you think is in here?” he’d ask the kids. “Money!” they’d shout. The year before he died, he spoke to my fifth-grade class, but he didn’t talk about Japanese culture. Then he talked about internment, at least for the first time that I can remember.

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My dad’s own introduction to the bibliography is oddly detached and academic: the first sentence is in the passive voice: “This bibliography was compiled by…”. After that, there’s a note about how the annotations “are not critical evaluations, and there is no attempt to make value judgments of the materials under review.” (Why not? And, the humanist-skeptic in me asks, “How not?”) He concludes his short 3-paragraph introduction with a bit about scope, which strikes me as overly modest, or perhaps very Japanese enryo: it is “not a definitive and comprehensive study of the subject field.”

No first-person voice, no “I” whatsoever. Maybe all of that “I” is in his own manuscript.

A bit more about the content for now. Because it’s a bibliography about Japanese Americans, my dad included annotations about both Miné Okubo’s graphic novel Citizen 13660 and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter. These are now two of the most well-known (and now widely-taught) narratives of internment. I’ve written scholarly papers about both of these books.

So the bibliography gives me something unexpected about my father: He was a scholar of internment literature and Asian American literature, like me. We could have had a conversation about those two books, Okubo’s and Sone’s.

And in a sense, I suppose, we’re having a conversation now. Peeking behind the Interlibrary Loan tracking slip, there’s the cover image for the bibliography: the pen-and-ink outline of a red chrysanthemum.

P.S. Didn’t win the writing contest, but am nevertheless excited that I submitted something, and that it made it to finalist status at all. And, some exciting news: I’ve been asked to talk about the book-in-progress, and possibly give a reading from it, in November. More details when they’re finalized.