Guesting on the Uncle Nacho Podcast

Me, Uncle Nacho and Grandma Yo

There are potential big moves going on here at IDL headquarters and I haven't been free to write much here lately. I'll be excited to reveal all that's been happening as it closes in on being released, but for now I'm excited to share my recent appearance on the Uncle Nacho podcast.

Full disclosure, Jiro Ignacio Palmieri aka "Uncle Nacho" is my younger brother. He's been involved audio, media, and radio for a few years now. He had a radio show in the San Francisco bay area on KPOO radio. Now he hosts the Uncle Nacho podcast, which "examines the intersections between sports, politics, art, and culture." The interview is a great overview of how I came to lead An Interdisciplinary Life and what that's meant for me. It's sort of this whole site here compressed into an hour of story telling. So if you've enjoyed reading IDL think of this as IDL on the go, a chance to get your Berto time and also do dishes.

This is part one of our interview. In this episode I talk about going to elementary school as a vagabond in Europe for a year and comparing it to American public schools. We discuss racial identity, how flipping over a white water raft full of Deaf kids led me to a career as an interpreter, my dad teaching me how to make a zip gun, and the creation of "Your Mom is So Berkeley." We also touch on alternative educational paths, growing up with a single mother, and a Berkeley High School legacy I had totally forgotten about. Within all of that we do indeed intertwine sports, arts, and culture.

If you scroll down past the embedded podcast there's some expanded info on things we didn't have answers to during the podcast.
 

There was a question that came up about how my family ended up in Chicago. I asked the branch of the family that stayed in Chicago and got a great response relating to Japanese American history. From my cousins Midori, Vince, and Rea who are all amazing artists and writers. The block below is edited together from their responses to my question.

Because jobs and housing weren't available to Japanese Americans post WWII on the west coast a Japanese community developed in Chicago around that time probably to support each other. Vince and his wife were in Hattiesburg Mississippi and they heard there was more work in Chicago for JAs (editor’s note: Vince is my grandma Yoshiko’s brother). Also, the American government had already taken our family’s home and real estate. They came up and settled in Hyde Park/South Side along with many other friends from camp and Hattiesburg. Hattiesburg was the home of the 442^nd all Japanese Battalion. I'm not sure what Vince's first job was in Chicago before he became photo editor at Playboy. He only moved back to California once his job made that available to him. Yoshiko must have joined them at some point.

The folks who ran the camps were mostly liberal, though their good intentions generally did as much harm as good. They had an idea that you could solve racism by sending JAs out of camps into areas away from the West Coast, a few at a time and that they'd be accepted and assimilated if they kept apart from other JAs. This was obviously a terrible idea because (1) segregation wasn't a choice and (2) you try living among people who hate you without allies. So, there were serious programs to resettle folks out of camp, but the ones who left had to create new communities. The largest migration was to Chicago, which was possibly the most important JA city for a couple of years after the war, before everyone who hadn't made a stake there pretty much decided to go back to the West Coast. I think Larry's (another of Yoshiko’s brothers) JACL ties also meant a lot--there were some serious divisions among JAs about how to respond to incarceration and I suspect going to Chicago probably said something about you/your family.

Thanks for reading and listening. If you have any other unresolved questions from the interview let me know in the comments. I'll post the second part of the interview when it becomes available.

How I Became a Mexican by Chiori Santiago

This is one of my mother's most popular pieces. It was read aloud at her wake.

I can't find it online anywhere and I don't know where it was previously published. I'm putting it here for you all to enjoy. If a copyright issue comes up I'll take it down again, but I've done a lot of searches for it over the years and have come up empty.

My mother and Grandmother c.1975

When I was eight years old, I arrived in California. Within a week, I was Mexican.
         
Before I was Mexican, I was Pakistani. My family had just come back to the U. S. after four years of world travel, including two years in Karachi, the capital city of Pakistan. I started school there. As far as I was concerned, I was a Pakistani, with all of the wonderful fluidity of the culture as enjoyed by Western ex-patriates in the late 1950s: Camel rides on the beach, four o'clock tea on the lawn, gooey jam tarts and curry dishes that exploded through the top of your head, my brother chattering with the nanny in Urdu, his first language. When we returned to America I missed terribly what I thought was my homeland. For a year I cried and begged my parents to end our visit to this bizarre country so we could return to Karachi.

Chiori c.1955

Before I was Pakistani, I was part of the Census Bureau's complex multiracial nightmare (that's according to a headline in the San Francisco Examiner published at the time of the 2000 census). I was the taboo post-war baby of Yoshiko Tajiri and Chester Fuller Roberts Jr. My parents met in occupied Japan. My mom was the civilian editor of the Army newspaper, the Tokyo Stars and Stripes, and she was my dad's boss. My dad, a private first class, was a reporter and copy editor. The way my Mom tells it, they spent long hours putting the paper to bed, and eventually they followed suit.

Yoshiko and Chester

When they decided to get married, their commanding officer forbid the marriage on the grounds that American G.I.s weren't supposed to fraternize with Japanese civilians, overlooking the fact that my mother was an American citizen who'd grown up kicking butt in South Central Los Angeles. So when my mother got tired of waiting, she marched into the CO's office and threatened to kick his butt if he didn't approve her marriage, and he was so shocked by this metamorphosis of Madame Butterfly to Killer Bee that he gave in. My parents eventually moved to Chicago, where I was born and in due course, my two brothers and a sister.

That's all by way of explaining that our becoming Mexicans in California was something of a surprise for everyone in my family. It didn't happen all at once. It was more of an evolution. It started with a question, the question that all happas know, the question that binds us all by a common thread. That question is:

"What are you?"

When my brothers and I got to California and began hearing The Question on a regular basis, we would launch into this long explanation about our Italian great-grandmother and our Anglo pioneer grandfather and the relatives in Japan, as our mother had coached us. The questioner's eyes would glaze over and invariably they would stare down at us (because they were almost always grownups) and say firmly:  "You're not Japanese." Then they would tell us what they believed we were.

Now, my Mom had been evacuated from California along with tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War Two. She knew very well the sort of racism we could encounter on the liberal West Coast. One of her worst fears was that one day we would come home and ask:  "Mom, what's a Jap?"

She was completely unprepared when I came home and asked:  "Mom, what's a spic?"

Chiori c.1977

This may be the most difficult aspect of interracial romance. You're brought together not by your differences but your commonalities, and let's face it, the whole proposition is easier than you've been led to believe. So you start to think, hey, we've built a bridge between cultures, and our children will reinforce that bridge, and we'll all link hands and cross that bridge into the 21st century, and you hear a John Williams overture swell in your head and you get all misty-eyed, you imagine little white children and little black children being judged not by the color of their skins and blah, blah.


So that's cool. Then you wake up and boom! You have a houseful of little tiny people who are some other race that you never even imagined, like a bunch of illegal immigrants who've sneaked in and are squatting on your neatly defined racial territory.

 In my case, I realized that my race had nothing to do with my DNA or with my parents’ ethnic histories. My race was defined by my face, which I guess is pretty obviously inscribed by the memory of my Klamath Indian ancestors and my Mediterranean great-grandma Mimi. Basically, I have "mestiza" written on my forehead.

Viejitas yelled at me in the street when I couldn't respond to them in Spanish. As I got older, white people began to greet me with a "Como esta" and then proceed in broken English to ask for my delicious and authentic recipe for chili beans. My high school Spanish teacher accused me of taking the class for an easy A, because of course my family already spoke Spanish at home. In college, I tried to join the Asian Students Union but was rejected because, I was told, "race goes through your father's blood, so you're not Asian." Meanwhile, the La Raza Students Union kept asking if I was a vendida, a sell-out, because I wasn't a member.

Chiori c.1983

Finally, I gave in. Refusing to be bothered by identity confusion I became— Chicana! Viva la raza! I became an angry movimiento chica. And I had a lot to be angry about. After all, the minute I became Mexican, my IQ plummeted. Had I remained Asian, I would have been just another obedient college-bound student with Coke-bottle glasses. But as an official pocha, I instantly became slothful, unemployable and prone to passionate outbursts. On the plus side, I suddenly gained a sense of rhythm and was able to dance the mambo.


Maybe all these people knew something I didn't. After all, I am a daughter of the Nisei equivalent to La Malinche. (She was the indigena who guided Cortez's men on their conquest of the Aztecs, and gave birth to the first mestiza.) That heritage makes me suspicious to everyone of all my races. When navigating the multitude of racial boundaries in this country, I'm constantly asked for my passport. People really need to know to which tribe I pledge allegiance. Do I have a green card that lets me dance the Electric Slide or eat Sunday dinner in the basement of an AME church? Is my visa up to date for a taste of pansit or hourdomsamsee? Do I have the stamp of approval that allows me to partake of Passover or dance Tanko Bushi? And why can’t talk story be my second language?

I can't blame people, really. Hello young lovers, wherever you are---I am one of your kids, and we are your multiracial nightmare. Because we are as elusive as refugees under cover of darkness. We cross borders at will---shape shifters, category dodgers, screwing up the neatly laid-out subdivisions of your suburban census.

Chiori and sons c.1990

Personally, I don't believe in interracial dating, so I ended up with a guy just like me: an Italian Afro-Puerto Rican raised in an all-white section of Long Island. I mean, he grew up listening to so much Aerosmith and Abba that when we met I had to give him Latino lessons. We’ve raised a couple of kids who are basically the same race as Tiger Woods. I use chopsticks when I fry tostones, and when no one's looking, I pour tonkatsu sauce on the lechon con arroz blanco.


Not long ago a friend of mine asked, "Y porque no hablas más español?" And I tried to explain, to give my old happa rap and to tell her that I only turned Mexican, I wasn't born this way.
She looked at me as if I was crazy and said:  "Pero no, no, no puedo creer que eres japonesa, tu eres pura, pura latina." You're totally Latina.

I think, that's what love is. You're born into the world and sometimes, your family finds you. Thank god I became Mexican. When I became Mexican, I got a name, a point of reference and a sense of belonging. I got una familia that opened its arms and adopted me--no questions asked.

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You can read another of Chiori's pieces on ethnic identity here: "My Inner White Guy" by Chiori Santiago

Chiori was also featured in "The Global Me" you can read an excerpt about her HERE.

The Love of a Good Man

I should be grading, but I'm not. I was grading on Sunday when I learned that one of my closest friends had died. His wife called me to tell me, and ask that I help inform our friends.

Afran was young. Too young to be lost like this. His children are too young to have lost him. His wife is too young to be a widow, and a suddenly single parent. They are all too young to face the enormous task of living a world without him. They are all forever changed.

Over the last week I've been asked to help with some small tasks for the family. Part of that has led me to have contact with many people in Afran's life who I either did not know, or did not know we had in common. The common refrain from all of them is that Affy was a bright, charming, witty, wonderful person. They're not wrong. He was also a man who liked to play the fool.

This was a guy who could have what, on the surface, appeared to be a very knowledgeable conversation about literature, when the truth was that he spent time memorizing the synopsis and analysis on the dust jackets of important works. He could have read the books. He would have understood them, and likely come up with insights and connections to other works that I would never have figured out. But he was busy playing Madden.

If you met him at the right time (say, after a dust jacket binge), you'd think he was Will Hunting. If you met him at the wrong moment you'd think he was a living, breathing Homer Simpson. Here is how he described himself in a Facebook note a few years ago:

"11. I got 760 on my GRE in Math (99th percentile). I’m not a dumb as I pretend to be.

12. That’s not true. I can be quite dumb on certain subject matters, and astute on others. Depends."

What it usually depended on was whether he wanted to do the thing or not. If he didn't want to do it he'd pretend he didn't understand it. I once found him washing a cereal bowl by holding it under the faucet, filling it with soap, and then dumping it out and putting it in the drainer. No scrubbing, not even using two hands. After that I never asked him to do dishes again. Point, set , match, Affy.

I loved Affy. And he loved me. It was a very real example of platonic love. Love that could be expressed openly and honestly and physically. One of the other things people have talked about recently is how much they'll miss his hugs. They were epic and comfortable hugs. Affy was a moderately large man, and when he hugged you knew you were being hugged, and you knew what was behind it. (I am happy that I can say this about many of my friends.)

The physical expression of love could also be wonderfully violent. Another random fact from Affy's Facebook note:

"8. The worst fist fights I had in my life were with my best friend Roberto. A drunken brawl outside Albany Bowl was, in my mind, glorious. That said, never doing that again. Ah, teenagers."

To me this was platonic love at it's best in young men. The desire to fight and wrestle, but with the ability to end it, bloodied and battered, with hugs and drinks and composing heroic poems about each other. Keep in mind this was several years prior to "Fight Club" coming into the wider public consciousness. Often we would have these fights over the course of a night out, and then go into work together the next morning full of silly pride.


I loved Affy. And he loved me. As I noted in one infamous speech, his wife thought he and I were a couple when she first met us. Affy and I shared things I haven't shared with most other friends, at least not to the same extent. At various, and occasionally overlapping, times we shared jobs, apartments, girls we'd made out with, enemies, a phone line and game consoles. I've never before or since gone halfsies on a video game system, but Affy and I had both a Sega Genesis and a Super Nintendo that we shared. We were so comfortable together that I'd sometimes wake up and find him perched at the foot of my bed playing Donkey Kong Country, even when I wasn't alone. It didn't phase him, and eventually my girlfriend got used to it.


I loved Affy. And he loved me. Our friendship was born out of a love of theater and poetry. We fancied ourselves romantics. I even dabbled in writing poetry because he inspired me. None of mine was very good, which I learned when we did a reading together for his poetry class his senior year of high school. They hated me. It was fine, because I'd done it with Affy, and he supported me.

One year, just before Christmas, we were out shopping together. We'd been up to Telegraph, and down to Fourth Street. We were at the Barnes and Noble on Shattuck Avenue when we decided to call it a day. We walked outside, and then Affy dashed back in asking me to wait. He came out with a Yale University edition annotated complete works of Shakespeare, which he presented to me as a gift. He had this amazing, self satisfied smile. The kind you get when you know you've done something great for someone else. I had 30 pound book and a long walk home. And that was Affy, equal parts thoughtful and careless.

Over the years our friendship grew from a foundation of literature and drinking and video games, to one of sharing marriage tips, and parenting tips, and drinking, and playing video games with our kids. Still, we knew we could see each other when we needed to cry. Or when we needed to be told we were full of shit. Or to go and seriously geek out because we knew we were going to sing our way through "Mama Mia" no matter what the rest of the people in the theater thought.

In the wake of Affy's death another friend of ours told us that he had a copy of a book of poetry that Affy had written. This was years ago, when we were all in our early twenties, and I had forgotten about both the book and its contents. But I remembered one poem, one that my cousin had liked, because it was about me. I remember not being able to even really think about the poem when it was written. I think it was too much for me at the time. I wasn't ready for it.

I've struggled with the idea of sharing it. I don't want to seem narcissistic. But I do have another point to make. Here is Affy's poem about me, written almost exactly twenty years ago, a poem about a younger, more perfect version of me.

The Importance of Being Santiago

by Afran Hirsch

The importance of being Santiago is not obvious

But essential to understand.

Though I do not know his heart,

I know his actions

And thus I have speculated on the nature of his being.

The importance of being Santiago is this:

The genius Santiago is is smart enough to know

That if one is not the victimizer, one is the victim

And yet understanding this

Is compassionate enough not to make victims

Of those he keeps company with....

The genius Santiago is hilarious enough

To always be the center of attention

But always destined to be under appreciated

For his genius is constant

So that his praise is not......

The genius Santiago knows

Better than anyone

That the world needs a good laugh

So he plays the jester

Even at the expense of his reputation

Because I believe he dreads a silent dreary existence

Even more than I do...

The genius of Santiago

Is resigned to his commision

Liked by all, loved by few,

Understood by even less....

Yet Santiago himself likes few things

Loves most, and understands it all...

Even in harshness, Santiago is compassionate enough

To mix jest with villainy, because he has looked at the sun

And not been blinded. And never aims to steal vision

With self-inflicted tears, from others...

Santiago knows life is a stage

And is the best player

This writer has ever known

And loved.

The importance of being Santiago

Is as important as the meaning of life.

One may never learn it

But seeking its meaning

Makes one a better person

Than had they left the dilemma unchallenged.

Thank you Santiago, for allowing me to travel

The path that is you

With the person that is you...

Love is a secret

Cloaked in obviousness

And one of the truer paths there

Is to know the importance of being Santiago.

I don't know much about poetry. I don't know if this poem is good as a piece of poetry, but it's important to me. Reading this for the first time in over fifteen years, it's important to me for reasons beyond it being a nice thing to have someone say. I have struggled throughout my life with believing I was worthy of being loved. So many people have loved me, and I've ruined so many relationships because I didn't believe them. I didn't see myself as being worthy of that kind of love and so I thought they must be lying. It's prevented me from loving people as much as I've wanted. It's prevented me from showing people how much I love them. Reading this poem, written to a 16 year old me, from an 18 year old friend helps me realize how wrong I've been. Even with all the crappy things about me. The stupid things I say. The stupid things I do, or stupidly fail to do. Even with all of that, I am worthy of this kind of love.

We all are. You are. The people in our lives are worthy of this, and we have to show it to them. We have to remember that how we feel is not unique. We share common insecurities. We have to get past them in order to love each other with our whole selves.

If Affy had known this he might still be with us. If he could have known for sure that he was worthy of love he might still be here. Of course it's infinitely more complicated than that. But those of us who are left behind have to try to find something in this we can use. We need something we can salvage so that it doesn't just seem totally devoid of reason.

I loved Affy. And he loved me. And now I finally totally believe it.

Thank you for the gift that has been your life Affy. I will miss you forever. I wish I could have helped you understand the things you've helped me to know. I am forever changed.

Who's it For?

I have a new hobby. More on this in a minute.

Isn’t the internet great? It’s great. It is probably the greatest media invention ever. Well, maybe not. It’s more like mortar. I mean bricks were a great invention. They were better than building with rocks, but they didn’t become way better than rocks until the invention of mortar. Hell, mortar was such a great invention it even made rocks better for people who couldn’t afford bricks. The internet is the mortar of media. It takes all the other bits we use to build our understanding of the world and not only connects them and holds them together, but forges them into a stronger cohesive whole. Damn I love the internet.

Which brings me to my new hobby; as soon as I finish watching a movie I head to the computer and look it up a wikipedia to learn more about it. I was looking up “The Hurt Locker” recently and the thing that stood out for me was the section detailing Iraq War veterans’ impressions of the film. Unsurprisingly they basically panned it. They also seemed to feel it was the best movie about the war to date. So there it is, it’s unrealistic to the point of being absurd, but it’s also the best one yet. What struck me about this perspective is how familiar it felt. It’s the exact same sentiment the rugby community had about “Invictus.” It’s roughly the same reaction people from Berkeley have towards NBC’s “Parenthood.”

This is when I had this month’s “aha” moment. These works aren’t made for “us” they are made for “them.” Who the “us” and “them” are depends on what who we are and what we do. Confused? I didn’t think so. For “The Hurt Locker” “us” is Iraq war veterans and embedded journalists. For “Invictus” “us” is the rugby community and South Africans. For “Parenthood” “us” is people from Berkeley. See where I’m going? It thought you would. The thing is, making movies and TV shows that resonate with the demographic depicted is almost impossible. The people who are the real people who are being fictionalized and depicted in popular media are too close to the subject matter to ever really be satisfied.

Even “reality” can leave a bad taste in the mouths of the “us.” In 1994 PBS spent a year at my high school filming a documentary about race relations called “School Colors.” Whiff. It was terrible. The filmmakers clearly had an agenda and ignored anything that didn’t fit the narrative they wanted before they arrived. The documentary depicted Berkeley High as completely racially segregated in every way resulting in a powder keg of race related tension and violence. I don’t know anyone who attended BHS at that time who had the experience depicted in “School Colors.” Yet everything in the film actually happened so I guess in a way it was real. It just wasn’t real enough for “us.” (For a much more resonant depiction of BHS in the mid-1990s check out “Yellow Jackets” by Itamar Moses.)

Here’s the truth that the “us” has to embrace, if these works were made with an eye towards resonating with “us” they wouldn’t appeal to “them” or anyone else. And there’s a lot more of “them” than there are of “us.” Media made for “us” is so specific and has so much potential to get caught up in little details while making assumptions about shared knowledge that the vast “them” would feel lost and left out. Besides, the “us” is already in. We’re already invested. We get it. The goal of the creators isn’t to draw us in, it’s to draw everyone else in. The goal is to provide a glimpse of our world to the masses. In doing so it’s going to change, sometimes to the point of seeming foreign to “us.” But if “Invictus” got a few people interested in rugby, or social justice then the film will have accomplished the goals of both the filmmakers and the rugby community. If “The Hurt Locker” helps people understand the stress and chaos of war then it’s served its purpose. Even “School Colors” was right in that Berkeley is not the race relations nirvana people dreamed it would become back in the 1960s. The point is that the “us” need to be satisfied with the details. The Bravermans from “Parenthood” are A’s fans, it’s a nice touch. The show is still pretty detached from the Berkeley I know, but they have drinks from Peet’s so I tolerate the inaccuracies. I think that’s the most we can hope for in service of the greater goal of bringing our passions exposure to a wider audience. So maybe it’s time for “us” to take a new tack and appreciate these works for what they are and what they bring to “them.”