Friday, May 3 1996
Peeling back the layers of a silenced and concealed history
By Christina Shigemura
I have to give Ryan credit. He saw it coming before anyone else
did. Maybe marijuana confers the gift of prophecy. "You’d look good
with your head shaved," he said, "You should do it." I thought that
he was crazy, that I would never do such a thing. I’ve had long
hair all my life.
But hair isn’t really what I want to talk about. Let me get back
to the subject, here. I mean, there are so few columnists of color
that those of us who are in this privileged position have to make
good use of the space. We don’t have any words to waste.
My grandpa used to smoke like a chimney, and now he is dying.
The doctors took out his windpipe and made a neat, round hole in
his neck so he can breathe. He can’t go outside in the winter
because the Cincinnati air is too cold for his fragile lungs. He is
connected to oxygen tubes all the time now, so I know the end is
near. What I hate most is watching the life get sucked slowly out
of him before his heart stops beating. And when he gets sick (more
frequently now), he can’t speak and only wheezes.
I have a feeling that damn camel is mocking me, but everyone
says it’s only my imagination. (Ha, ha, hack, hack.) Maybe it is
not a camel but a WASP, CEO-man. Someone certainly found my
grandfather’s addiction lucrative.
My grandpa is being forcibly silenced; now I can only guess at
what he wants to say. The funny thing is that I keep having these
dreams in which my grandfather is trying to tell me something. His
lips move, yet no sounds come out.
But I have always been tenacious. "Persistent," my teachers
praised. "Stubborn," my father muttered. My grandfather is stubborn
too. He tries to talk. I try to read his lips.
I never know what to tell people when they ask what I will write
about in my next column. I have a plan; I just can’t summarize it
in a way that makes sense. Oh, well. You can’t talk-story in a
sound bite, anyway.
My friend Andy loves to talk-story. He sets the background,
expounding on tangents if necessary, while the story unfolds
slowly. Andy understands; context is everything.
Television news clips of Africa show us starving children,
rotting corpses, but never discuss how it came to be this way.
Deprived of a historical context, Africa appears to exist only in
its present state of poverty, famine and civil unrest. White
supremacists promote the idea that black people are naturally lazy,
violent and unfit to govern themselves because "they’ve only just
recently come down from the trees," as an Afrikaner earnestly
explained once.
Although we now have Black History Month (February, the shortest
month of the year), most of us learn about the African slaves’
contributions only in terms of the physical labor they performed.
As if there were no brains inside their bodies.
And yet there is substantial evidence that African slaves
brought highly-sophisticated, agricultural knowledge to the
Americas as well. How else could South Carolina planters have
learned the intricacies of rice cultivation except from their
African slaves? The planters emigrated from France and England,
places unsuitable for rice growing. Yet their slaves came from West
Africa, an area engaged in rice cultivation for at least 1,500
years.
The voices of the slaves were silenced, their history concealed.
Like my own. The reality of Asian Pacific Islander women has been
carefully hidden, the truth distorted.
What does it mean to be an Asian American woman?
"You Oriental girls are so pretty," he said, smiling at me.
White man strolling around Japantown in my home city. Out for a
romp with the simple, yellow natives. Reinforcing his position at
the center and mine at the margins.
Sex tourism in Southeast Asia has become a very lucrative
industry. White men on both sides  those who run the industry
and those who patronize it. Come to Asia for our many exotic
commodities  tea, bananas and the prostitute of your choice
for only $20 a night.
Do you believe that this is merely a case of ignorance, that
these men will stop exploiting and dehumanizing women if we simply
educate them? Or are they purposefully using their position of
power and privilege for personal gain?
I used to have a non-confrontational hairstyle. Long and soft,
the way women’s hair should be. I felt a silent complicity in the
lie. My great-grandmother labored in the fields to feed her family,
and my mother became a sheet metal worker at age 40. A lineage of
female warriors: I needed a haircut. So I cut off my hair, watching
it fall around my feet. I finished with clippers, revealing my
head. (Yes, I have one.)
So now I want to know. Can you summarize this column without
losing the meaning?
Shigemura is a third-year geography/environmental studies
student. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.