Encountering Ourselves in Each Other

AAPI Heritage Month x Women's History Month x Pride Month!

As unhealed trauma overlapping with grabs for dominance at breakneck speeds continue to embattle our world, I want to pause for a moment to celebrate these three AAPI—more specifically Nikkei (Japanese diaspora)—authors whose literary works move us toward the opposite of embattlement. Toward Breath. Imagination. Possibility. Love.

Karen Tei Yamashita. traci kato-kiriyama, or tkk. Susan Kiyo Ito.

These three writers place courage and creativity behind their pens and bring us deeply humane, lived pathways ways through intergenerational trauma through art. And rather than feeding the machines of dominance in all its forms and narratives, they use language to reunite and reconnect us, writers to readers, back and beyond.

Thank you forever, Karen Tei, tkk and Susan!

I never really understood the power of hybrid memoir until I read Karen Tei Yamashita’s Circle K Cycles (Coffee House Press, 2001). By using journal, narrative, photographic image, fiction, multiple languages and graphic design, she so artfully opened my senses not only to the challenges of perpetually marginalized Japanese-Brazilian dekasegi, but to all who leave their homelands for work, only to return home one day to a new form of Othering. Yamashita has written numerous books, and this one has stayed with me because of her powerful queering of what memoir can be.

Forward twenty years, traci kato-kiriyama’s Navigating Without Instruments (The Accomoplices | Writ Large Press, 2021) also unlocked the possibilities of memoir in their/her collection of poetry, micro-essays, notes to self, and iconography. I felt expanded, seen and met as she made offerings from their queer SoCal politicized Nikkei artist contexts. This lit project is powerfully holographic! What a joy + relief + discovery to read.

Susan Kiyo Ito’s award-winning memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere (Mad Creek Books | Ohio State University Press, 2023) is as beautifully rendered as it is heartachingly insistent that her experiences as a biracial Sansei adoptee be languaged, shown and told. For me, she’s queered, expanded and turned what being Sansei and Nikkei means, and her breathtaking, page-turning book left me only the stronger for it.

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I’ve been working hard on my own book proposal (Draft 14, seriously folks), and my goal is to have it done by the end of next week, sent into at least one agent’s Inbox. My prayer is to do my humble best in joining writers like Karen, tkk and Susan in years to come. I trust in the very marrow of my bones that our stories, and the very ways they ask to be told, matter. Please send good vibes for getting this book proposal DONE!

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This is not a book, but a poem I wrote years ago. I offer it to you here as today’s gesture of faithfulness.

Unearthed

I've lived a backward life--
One day, I'll be buried with wings.
I began old, spent a lot of time with the dying.
I used to take Happy Meals to the cemetery
back when I was trying to grow upright.
Now I accept I'm a weeping willow
bending to touch what's beneath me.

Wishing you a season rich with your own intersections and the medicines they bring,

Coke