Midwesterners tell me about Japanese Americans they’ve known. The Japanese American favorite aunt. The Japanese American classmate who got the girl in the end. The Japanese American classmate who was elected student body president and homecoming king, yet who could not find a prom date. The Japanese American teaching mentor who taught with a sense of social justice forged in his prison camp childhood. The Japanese American neighbor who cheerfully returned winter Pearl Harbor day greetings with summer Hiroshima day greetings every year. I may be the only person who writes about them. I may not remember these stories accurately. Yet the impression remains: Japanese Americans enter the frame of everyday Midwestern lives. They lodge in memory to reemerge in conversation. Sometimes Japanese Americans remain in the frame they entered. In rare cases they change that frame. But they usually leave just like they came, a sudden or gradual change in circumstances for themselves or the storyteller. Their presence in the frame is usually unexpected in Middle America, here meaning not simply the Midwest but also a white-normative middle-class mindset commonly accepted as traditional.
Sometimes I feel like people don’t expect me in their frame. My twenty-first century life can feel like the set of a 1980s John Hughes movie. One pre-rush hour afternoon I was crossing the intersection of Cleveland and Ford Parkway in Saint Paul when an elderly white man grinned, tossed me a confident “Konnichiwa!” and disappeared. At the time neither of the two Asian restaurants at that intersection were Japanese. I found myself shoved inside the frame of a single story only to leave that frame before I even realized I’d entered it. Technically I was less than two miles from home. Times like those I used to wonder what I’m doing in this land where I’m always a novelty despite being of the third generation born on US-controlled soil.
Now those times of public ignorance seem idyllic. As much as those encounters irritated me, they did not dramatically reduce my odds of growing old. I write now in the time of a pandemic for which many people continue to blame people who look like me. Just over a month ago, an Asian American man in a Minneapolis suburb had his car vandalized and means of livelihood stolen. And in this time of pandemic-enforced isolation other communities of color march into the frame as has not been seen since the 1960s. Less than two weeks ago Amir Locke was deprived of his right to grow old in Minneapolis. Outside ICE facilities in downtown Saint Paul immigrant rights activists assert the right for families to grow old together. In greater Minnesota Indigenous activists and allies remind us that if we do not protect our water together, none of us may grow old.