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11 March, 2002
KWAN'S
QUANDARY
The Seattle Times newspaper fell all over itself in recent weeks, apologizing for a faux pas in one of its Olympics-coverage headlines.
| Kwan's quandary is an echo to some -- hell, many -- Japanese Americans of misperceptions directed at them before, during and after WWII. |
The newspaper ran the banner headline "Hughes as good as gold" the morning after underdog Sarah Hughes won the gold in figure skating. That was fine. But unfortunately, the subhead underneath was, "American outshines Kwan, Slutskaya in skating surprise."
Oops.
Someone forgot to tell the copy editor in charge of slapping the catchy headline on the late-breaking story that Michelle Kwan is American as, er, well… as American as Sarah Hughes. The paper's executive editor has apologized for the error.
Screwups happen in newsrooms, especially when late-breaking stories are filed against a deadline and have to be copy-edited and molded to fit into a pre-assigned space. I know this for a fact, because I've seen it happen before, and I've made some dumb mistakes myself, even without the pressure of a looming deadline.
But the Kwan gaff is bothersome. I don't doubt that the copy editor who wrote the headline knows for a fact that Kwan is Chinese American. She was crowned "Queen of the Ice" by most if not all of the US media, from newspapers (I bet including the Seattle Times) to NBC, the TV network that broadcast the games and had access to all the athletes. The level of attention given to Kwan as the reigning US champion and her visibility as an interviewee and feature-story fodder made it all but impossible for any American reporter or editor, especially in a city as attuned to Asian-Americans as Seattle, to know that she is an American athlete.
But in the heat of the moment, under the stress of a deadline and faced with a major breaking story, the editor typed the first thing that came to mind: That an American had beaten an Asian and a European. The headline betrayed a sentiment that may lie beneath the surface of the enlightened political correctness that we assume people in the media live and work by.
I'm not saying the copy editor was racist, or even that the editor was dumb (OK, I take that back - it's a dumb mistake, dumb enough for the Seattle Times' executive editor to apologize twice). But I wonder if underneath the civil veneer, some Americans still feel that if you don't look like them, you're not really one of them.
Most sadly for Kwan, this is NOT the first time she has had to accept this slap in the face from the media. MSNBC made the same error back in 1998 when the news organization's Web site crowed about Kwan's defeat at the feet of another young Caucasian upstart, Tara Lipinsky: "American beats out Kwan."
(As a side note, the Denver Post's star sports columnist, Woody Paige, called Kwan "the young Japanese-American blossom" in one of his reports -- a mistake that falls into the "They all look alike" category.)
Kwan's quandary is an echo to some - hell, many -- Japanese Americans of misperceptions directed at them before, during and after World War II, about what makes an American.
Joyce Hirohata Gonzales knows this quandary. She's undertaking a wonderful project called "Orations & Essays," an update of a book published in the 1930s by Gonzales' grandfather, an Issei journalist who wrote for the Japan Times, Rafu Shimpo and Fukuoka Mainichi newspapers.
The original volume, long forgotten except for the few copies in the possession of the Hirohata family, was a simple concept: A collection of graduation speeches given by 49 Nisei high school students throughout California. The book was titled "Orations & Essays by the Japanese Second Generation of America," and was published by the Rafu Shimpo, then called the Los Angeles Japanese Daily News.
The speeches collected by Paul Tsunegoro Hirohata include the thoughts of valedictorians, and cover the gamut of topics from the horrors of war and the role of women in maintaining world peace, to citizenship in America; from the gifts of the US educational system to the joys of Japanese festivals. The speeches aren't always profound - they're the work of children, after all - but they are ripe with the hope and eagerness of emerging adults planning to prove themselves in a land of opportunity.
Once read before their graduating peers, these words fluttered off into history, except for the book. Some of the students weren't even aware their words had been frozen in time, but Hirohata felt that preserving their speeches was one way to bridge the cultures of his home country and his adopted country, and show how the next generation of Japanese Americans have embraced the United States.
Two generations later, Joyce Hirohata Gonzales is picking up where her grandfather left off. An Oakland-based graphic designer who just earned her MBA, Gonzales decided to pay tribute to her grandfather by updating the book with the stories of the speechmakers' lives since high school. She's devoting herself to the project fulltime, and has so far (with the help of some supportive media coverage in California) tracked down all but a few of the former students. This is not your average "Where Are They Now?" trivia exercise -- some have died, some don't want to talk about their lives, and some of the subjects have shared powerful, moving stories for the new book.
Gonzales' project is made even more powerful because within a few years of the original book's publication, they were rounded up and interned during WWII.
The tragedy of the hopeful future envisioned in the speeches followed instead by years of dislocation and loss is shattering, and explains why some of the people have refused to cooperate with Gonzales. For these Japanese Americans who were chosen to speak on behalf of their graduating classes, believing in their country and being born citizens weren't enough to make them accepted as American.
In a small but not insignificant way, Michelle Kwan's still suffering from the same lack of acceptance as those graduating seniors of 70 years ago.
NOTE: You can learn more about the Orations
& Essays Project and contact Joyce Hirohata Gonzales if you can help her
tack down the final students at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~hirohata/index.html