Who I am

I am known as TimFromLA, liberal and Japanese American. My liberalism started after graduating high school because I barely graduated high school. According to my high school transcript, I graduated in 1984 (after attending summer school) with a 1.3 GPA. I was lousy at math (still am), English (and I'm blogging???) and forget about every other class minus P.E. I was a dummy or lazy..or was I? I don't know about you, but in elementary school, I did well as well as jr. high (middle school). But I got bored. Bored because I heard the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over ad nauseum ad infinitum. What did I learn? Columbus discovered America (yup in the Caribbean), Pilgrims, the 13 colonies, Boston Tea Party's taxation without representation (wrong), the Wagon Train, slavery, WW1 and then WW2, then I had to go to the next grade up and start all over. For 12 years, I had to learn the same thing over and over and over again. Gets kind of boring. Until one day, I was watching my local PBS about Japanese Americans.

This caught my attention. Being 14 years old, I never heard of this. I never heard about the contributions the Japanese immigrants made. I never knew they had to work so hard to get where they are going. I never knew about the concentration camps. My parents knew about this but I never did. Why? I don't know why. Maybe they wanted to shelter us (older sister and younger brother) from the past and do well in school...which I never did. But why the push to do so well? In the Japanese culture, there is this word: Shikata ga nai (pron: She kah-tah-gah-nigh). or cannot be helped so we had to gaman (pron: gah-mahn) or endure. And this was accomplished by doing well in school. But why did I have to endure? To get that dream job? To get that job where I can raise a family? Have a home? And live happily ever after? Well yeah, but something else. What is it? To prove we are Americans,

As many of you know, more than 100,000 Americans and Japanese nationals were placed into concentration camps, because, we were considered enemy aliens. So to remove that stigma, we had to work that much harder. The model minority myth was then created. It was used to divide and conquer Asian with other minorities in the workplace, education and so on. Asian and Asian Americans were no smarter than anyone else, but our strive to be accepted was truly counterproductive. Does that mean Asians should give up? No, but it does tell us that we are as only as good as permitted. Permitted by our schools, work, government and so on.

But with all that, when I graduated high school or better adjective, released, I was released into the world, I went to work. I worked in a martial art supply store. My boss was cool and taught me about being Asian American (something that bothers me is the word Asian-American. The hyphen. When are we a compound adjective?). I called myself Oriental and he said that you are not an oriental because you're not to be stepped on. That made sense. I then attended college and

"Remembering Hiroshima" by TimFromLA - Part 1

hschulein



And

"Remembering Hiroshima" by TimFromLA - Part 2

hschulein

I then realized that we are not smarter than blacks or Hispanics. That the goals we strove for was an exercise in self-indulgence and to assimilate so that what happened to my father would not happen to us. Though the intention is noble, the way to go at it was wrong. We should not submit and assimilate, we need to be unique yet stand together collectively to create a salad bowl or as Rev Jesse Jackson says: a quilt and not a melting pot so that everyone can see our uniqueness to cover us and keep us warm. I like that