Secret Harvests

David Mas Masumoto

Description

• COURSE ADOPTION POTENTIAL for university courses on Asian American studies and disability studies
• ASIAN AMERICAN STORIES about a Japanese American family working on a farm and encountering a relative incarcerated during WWII
• FOR FANS OF Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira and Kiyo Sato’s Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Rural community
• Rural poverty
• Japanese American
• Family secret
• Biography
• Buddhism
• Gila River War Relocation Center
• Internment
• Organic farming
• Farm
• Disability
• Shame
• Family
• Autobiography
• Relocation

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781636280783
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Also by
David Mas Masumoto
Silent Strength
Country Voices
Epitaph for a Peach
Harvest Son
Four Seasons in Five Senses
Letters to the Valley
Heirlooms
Wisdom of the Last Farmer
The Perfect Peach
(with Marcy Masumoto and Nikiko Masumoto)
Sense of Yosemite
Changing Season
(with Nikiko Masumoto)

Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm
Copyright © 2023 by David Mas Masumoto & Patricia Wakida
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book Layout by Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Masumoto, David Mas, author.
Title: Secret harvests: a hidden story of separation and the resilience of a family farm / David Mas Masumoto.
Other titles: Hidden story of separation and the resilience of a family farm
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022016771 (print) | LCCN 2022016772 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280776 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781636281032 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781636280783 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Masumoto, David Mas—Family. | Japanese American farmers—California—Fresno—Biography. | Japanese Americans—California—Fresno—Biography. | Japanese Americans—California—Fresno—Social conditions—20th century. | Sugimoto, Shizuko, 1919-2013. | Disabled women—California—Fresno—Biography. | Meningitis—Patients—Biography. | Farmers—California—Fresno—Biography. | Fresno (Calif.)—Biography.
Classification: LCC F869.F8 M37 2023 (print) | LCC F869.F8 (ebook) | DDC 979.4004/9560922—dc23/eng/20220427
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016771
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016772
Publication of this book has been made possible in part through the generous financial support of Ann Beman.
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
For my Aunt Shizuko, the Sugimoto Family, and the Masumoto Family—for their resilience.
—David Mas Masumoto
To my Bachan Miyeko Okamura Kebo and my Grandma Rose Wada Wakida
—Patricia Wakida
Contents
Preface
I Farm with Ghosts
PART ONE
ARRIVAL
1. The Call—I Thought I Knew My Family
2. Shikata ga nai —It Can’t Be Helped
3. Footprints of the Past
4. The Foreign Language of Work
5. Landless—A Handful of Raisins
PART TWO
SEPARATION AND THE TIES THAT BIND
6. Diagnosis—A Child Forever Transformed
7. The Assault
8. Temples
PART THREE
PRISON
9. The Taking and The Promise
10. Bedlam
11. Faces We Wear—The Mongoloid Idiot
12. Camp Gardens
PART FOUR
TRIALS
13. First Meeting
14. No Place to Go
15. The Secret of Silence—Letting Go
16. The Great Escape
17. Blue Moon
PART FIVE
WALLS OF SECURITY
18. Family Reunion
19. Lost Altars—Our Butsudan
PART SIX
INITIATION
20. Family Letters
21. Photo Identity—Gold Star Mothers
22. The Face of Anger
23. Sunnyside
24. Redress
PART SEVEN
STRUGGLE FOR ACCEPTANCE
25. Awakening
26. Tōrō Nagashi —Floating Lanterns
27. The Great Fair
28. Caregivers
PART EIGHT
BELONGING
29. Farming as a Radical Act
30. Passing with Tennis Shoes and Blinking Lights
31. Farm Walks
Epilogue
The Wall and the Bench
A family separated by racism against Japanese Americans and the discrimination of people with developmental disabilities—reunited seventy years later, returning to their roots on a farm and bound by family secrets.
Every Family Has Secrets

PREFACE
I Farm with Ghosts
I farm with ghosts. They live in our fields. Each peach tree has pruning scars from the generations who worked these orchards. Every vine has been shaped by the hands of workers who returned each year to add their touch to the sculpture. People and their families have etched their marks on my farm, and I, too, hope to leave behind a simple signature on this seemingly ordinary landscape.
Ghosts inhabit our family history; their collective voices contribute to a perspective that shaped my upbringing. They pass on lessons I struggle to understand, sometimes rejecting, other times surrendering to their value, but never ignoring them because they haunt my memories: a worn shovel, a bent peach limb, the twisted trunk of an old grapevine, a family photo, a Buddhist altar—all trigger a rush of stories that can overwhelm.
Memory and reflections fill this book as I learn more about my family’s past. We were immigrants from rural Japan, Kumamoto on my father’s side and Hiroshima on my mother’s side. We were destined to become farmers like generations before us, scratching out a living while carving a niche in the earth. We were Buddhist in a Christian land, settling in the isolated countryside outside of Fresno, California. We were farmworkers, then later farmers of organic peaches, nectarines, apricots, and grapes for raisins. Because of our legacy as immigrants and the incarceration my family endured during World War II, we lacked collections of artifacts. I inherited only a few haunting sketches. Often reserved, we were not a family of storytellers. A silence hovered over family gatherings as I learned to accept and explore the unspoken.
Memories can and should change. Our own stories are fluid, reimagined with new information, corrected with facts, yet anchored in a past as we try to honestly recall and yearn to remember. Documenting these stories forces me to ask: What is the truth and why does it matter? And most importantly, how deeply does one explore dark family issues yet respect distances with a historical tenderness?
One of the ghosts who inhabit our farm is Shizuko, an aunt with an intellectual disability whom we only recently reconnected with. Like a grapevine’s wandering canes and tendrils that twist and curl, searching for attachment and support yet reaching for sunlight to strengthen and extend their growth, her story unfolds as an evolving tale buried in the history of immigrants, the saga of racism and discrimination, the deplorable treatment of people with disabilities, and the shroud of family hidden stories, all the while working the earth and trying to plant and extend our roots in American soil.
I am not speaking for Shizuko. I do not speak on behalf of disabled people. Too often many have assumed they know what the disabled community knows and thinks. I remain inadequate to write that story; Shizuko has her own voice and her own way of communicating that I am only beginning to grasp. I try to capture the mosaic of her life as told through family stories combined with research, visits, and interviews.
I cannot fully complete her portrait because of the gaps in her life story. Instead, I can only attempt to grasp the significance of the lost years and decades of her survival and thriving resilience. I am haunted by gaps in family memories, nebulous responses and twisted behavior that must be examined within the context of history—not to uncover excuses but rather reveal family baggage we all must carry and learn to live with. Much of her story continues to be found in a world of secrets to be explored.
I carry the weight of troubled memories. Some are stirred by wondering; others are involuntary, stimulated by the feel of the dirt and sweat on our farm or the aroma of a ripening peach. I attempt to organize them into a narrative but accept the impossibility of the task. No one has a monopoly on the truth, the ghosts of one-hundred-year-old grapevines remind me.
Family stories fill gaps in my sense of history, how I was raised and what I am to become. All families carry the weight of secrets: they can both burden and yet define us. We may deny their existence or seek transparency. Most of the time they linger like baggage generations carry, fully aware of their presence—or not. I search for information, insight, and resolution—or not.
The ghosts in this book are serious and quiet, yet alive. They laugh with a twisted humor and lighter moments, even while showing me that I’m asking the wrong questions.
“Just listen,” they seem to whisper to me.
“Just listen.”
PART ONE
ARRIVAL

1
The Call—I Thought I Knew My Family
February 2012
Shizuko is sick, sick to death with this long agony. She lays still, her ninetyyear-old body motionless. Her wheelchair sits empty. A head pokes in, checking. Waiting for her to die? Or do they look because they care? A roommate whines in the next bed, but Shizuko should be the one requesting help. Now a stroke. Senses leave her body. Rest. The sentence complete. Sleep. Alone again, naturally.
Shizuko was assigned to hospice after spending thirteen years in Golden Cross Nursing Home. Before, she was housed at various state-run institutions, the type you’d see in movies with hundreds of forlorn bodies wandering long, dingy white hallways and rows and rows of beds. For decades, she roamed these halls ceaselessly. She outlived all her roommates.
Her family came as immigrants, picked peaches and grapes in the fields of California, found poverty and racism and yet stayed while struggling to build something. Shizuko avoided the Japanese American internment camps of World War II because she was classified as “retarded,” a derogatory term unfortunately commonly used in the past. Her life was branded with confusion.
A tiny woman,