Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

The "White" Part of Hybridity Enriching Tones of Brownness: Estelle Peck Ishigo & Anne Branigin's "White Father"

Recently, I came across two stories about the "white" part of hybridity and fusion that offer a different take than the usual template about white supremacy and domination...

The first story is about the life of Estelle Peck Ishigo. Estelle, a European-American, married her Japanese-American husband, Arthur, when "interracial" marriages were illegal in California, then insisted on following him into Japanese-American incarceration:

As a Nisei, Arthur was required to go while his wife was not. Though he wanted her to stay behind, she accompanied her husband first to the Pomona "Assembly Center" in California, then to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Throughout the war years, Estelle drew, sketched and painted what she saw, providing a valuable document of life in the American concentration camps.

"Strange as it may sound, in this desolate, lonely place I felt accepted for the first time in my life," she later wrote of her time at Heart Mountain.

She and her husband remained there in order to record the last days of the camp until the camp closed. They and the others who were left were given $25 and put on a train to the West Coast.

"I felt as if I were part of a defeated Indian tribe," she remembered.

The couple lived for several years in poverty in a succession of trailer parks until Arthur got a job as a baggage handler at an airport. After Arthur died of cancer in 1957, Estelle took a job as a mimeograph operator to make ends meet.

In 1984, fellow Heart Mountain inmate Bacon Sakatani found Ishigo living in dire poverty in a squalid apartment, both her legs lost to gangrene. Former Heart Mountain residents made her last years pleasant ones and oversaw the republication of her 1972 book of drawings, Lone Heart Mountain.

In 1990, film maker Steven Okazaki made a documentary of her life titled Days of Waiting. She passed away before seeing the film, which went on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Estelle's pen and ink drawings not only chronicled but brought a deeply human vision to American concentration camp life at Heart Mountain.

Filmmaker Steven Okazaki (who created this year's acclaimed The Mushroom Club) recreated Estelle's life story in his 1991 Academy Award-winning film, Days of Waiting.

The second story, "My White Father," by Anne Branigin was published in Philippine News Online earlier this summer. In contrast to the Ishigos' lives of fated suffering, Branigin, of a hybrid generation that has it easier, tells a story with a happier ending. I love how Branigin uses the "whiteness" of her father as a metaphor for deepening her "colored" Filipino side.

...I wonder too, then, of the task my father had in raising two Asian American children – who must see a society much different from the one he grew up in, through entirely different sets of eyes.

Now, at this point the reader might be asking, Is it really such a big deal? Aren’t there more and more biracial couples in America? And isn’t this white-father, Filipino-mother pairing pretty common in our culture anyway?

Well, yes. I am not saying this is new – or even newsworthy. What I’m saying is that there remains something very admirable in raising a child most people might not take to be your own. Before Angelina Jolie made it fashionable, my father was adapting to my mother’s culture, language and family; jovially taking the “puti” jokes, and being the best father he could be to his two little light-skinned brown children.

I identify myself as an Asian woman, to be more precise, a Filipino woman. I look the part, because most everything I was given, physically, is my mother’s. Just softer. The nose, the hips, the eyes – all Cardenas. Often, when friends meet my father, they are a bit taken aback at first. “I didn’t know your father was white!” they sometimes say after my father walks out of the room.

It goes to show that I often don’t acknowledge my white half to other people, simply because I do not feel I’ve lived my life through the eyes of a white woman. There are things I identify with simply being a minority in this society. Like any good woman of color, I’m quick to pull the race card – though I assure you that, most times, my tongue is lodged firmly in my cheek when I am doing this.

But when I make comments about fighting “the Man” to my more conservative friends, I feel my conscience tug as I recall, “Honey child, your father is the Man.” I forget how other people must see us, two seemingly unrelated parts that are, in fact, kin.

Yes, I identify myself as an Asian woman because that’s what people recognize in me, and it is the role I’ve come to play in a society that – regardless of what its inhabitants may say – does see in color. It is the box I check off during standardized tests and surveys, but not without a twinge of guilt. Because every time I check the box marked “Asian/Pacific Islander,” I feel as though I am leaving my father behind...

When we lived in the Philippines, my father would often be the only non-Filipino at the party. He, along with my brother and I, would be the only ones not privy to the candor and the gossip of the Tagalog tongue. He would smile politely and laugh at the jokes made in broken English, the attempts to accommodate him. He crossed not only racial barriers and cultural barriers, but language barriers as well...

...my father colored my brownness, to its brightest and richest tones.

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