Kaori Tanegashima proved instrumental to establishing and/or embellishing Asian Studies programs at USC, UC Irvine, and East Los Angeles College. Her fight, as a Japanese immigrant, to overcome sexism and racism in academia makes for compelling drama in the fascinating memoir, ‘Daughter of a Gun,’ which the author and Palisadian will sign August 21, 7:30 p.m., at Village Books. ‘Every semester,’ writes the career educator, ‘my students, who come from many different countries, ask me, ‘What is your nationality?’ My standard short answer is, ‘I am Chinese by birth, Japanese by heritage’American by choice.’ As Japanese living in China before World War II, Tanegashima’s family enjoyed what the author calls an ‘idyllic life,’ living in harmony and geomancy with natives and fellow Japanese ex-patriots in Beijing. Her father was a successful executive with the Manchurian Railroad Company. The Tanegashimas welcomed into their home friends and strangers, such as Russian Jews fleeing Stalin’s pogroms. All that ended at the close of World War II. The Chinese evicted its Japanese residents, forcing the Tanegashima family to relocate to Japan. A confluence of complexities drove Tanegashima to leave the country. Her mother had died when Tanegashima was not even 10, and Tanegashima had spent her teens living in Tokyo school dormitories. ‘My first English teacher was from California,’ Tanegashima, 69, tells the Palisadian-Post from her Alphabet streets home. ‘He showed me slides. I was sold. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going there.’ I wanted to get out of [Japan] because I just didn’t fit in. Women being smart is not very acceptable. I knew I would fit better in this society. I had a stronger chance of succeeding here.’ In 1958, 19-year-old Tanegashima told her father that she’d be moving from Japan temporarily’and she never came back. Tanegashima settled in California, where she pursued a career in higher education while instructing teens: ‘Teaching [high school] in Watts and Hollywood in the turbulent late 1960s,’ Tanegashima writes, ‘[was] one of the most valuable experiences of my Americanization’My own life passing through Japanese public schools had been one of extreme discipline. I could not help resenting the casual disrespect and mischievous treatment American secondary teachers are used to.’ Tanegashima recounts in ‘Daughter,’ with soul-crushing detail, how race and gender hindered her application to teach college-level at USC when she met with one Dr. Thompson, chairman of USC’s Asian Studies: ‘Reclining in his chair with his legs resting on his desk and smoking a pipe, Dr. Thompson said between puffs, ‘Well, if I were you, I would go home and have children.” Fortunately, Dr. Meiko Han (Japanese and married to a Korean) replaced Thompson by fall semester. Tanegashima came aboard as her teaching assistant. ‘In Dr. Han, I had met the one person in America who would have the deepest and most lasting influence on my professional career,’ she writes. ‘She was a pioneer in Japanese language and the author of the first academically recognized Japanese language text books.’ Thompson loyalists ousted (and humiliated) Han, who spent two years suing USC for discrimination and won. But with Han’s departure came Tanegashima’s. Joining UCI in 1972, Tanegashima gazed out her office window and saw cows grazing on open land’not exactly the tony, upper-middle-class Orange County suburb Irvine has since become. Many Southern Californians may not realize that the incorporated city of Irvine, established December 28, 1971, is not even 37 years old. UC Irvine’s formative days coincide with those of Tanegashima, who battled, as a college educator, to create UCI’s Asian-American studies program. But when Tanegashima turned 33, her age lived up to what superstitious Japanese deem a year of calamity. She lost her teaching position in 1975 when UCI’s white hierarchy deemed the Asian program inconsequential. ‘For 10 years after my departure, no Asian language or culture courses were offered at UC Irvine although Asian enrollment kept increasing,’ she writes. ‘There were Asians on the board,’ Tanegashima tells the Post, ‘but they didn’t want to get involved because they didn’t want to lose their job. But 2,000 students petitioned to keep me, it was very touching. It was a very hard time. Mentally, I was at my lowest.’ Tanegashima weathered unemployment and her tenacious father, who, after failing to convince his adamant daughter to return to Japan, wrote her off as teppoo musume (‘a bullet that once it leaves the gun will never return’). ‘In Japan, it would be considered all but immoral for one single woman to occupy [an apartment] all by herself,’ Tanegashima says. ‘Don’t be deceived by the skyscrapers and technological advancement. Their [mentality toward career women] hasn’t changed. We still have a monarchy.’ With delightful prose, ‘Daughter of a Gun’ offers an immigrant’s story of survival and striving for the American dream against all obstacles (which, ironically, often include racism in a country that espouses multiculturalism). Such against-all-odds struggles, even as relatively recent as Tanegashima’s, unfortunately never disappear, as the sanguine Tanegashima’s memoir reminds us, sans bitterness. In 1978, Dr. Han’s husband had found Tanegashima a position at Tanegashima’s alma mater, East Los Angeles College (ELAC), to the chagrin of her dismissed Caucasian male predecessor. ‘When the semester opened, he refused to vacate his desk,’ she writes. In 1986, what seemed like d’j’ vu occurred when ELAC attempted to scrub its Asian Studies department. Tanegashima and her students protested and the program was spared. Interspersed with her travails were good times, such as in 1968, when those wanna-Beatles pop group The Monkees needed Japanese lessons before touring Asia. Tanegashima was summoned to their TV sitcom’s set. ‘I taught the four of them together, but then it was easier to instruct them one-to-one,’ Tanegashima says. Of the quartet, Peter Tork caught on quickest. ‘In fact, he’s the only one who continued [taking lessons].’ ‘Daughter’ describes her travels to Europe and Asia, which includes a brush with the Hoaren [aboriginal people of eastern Taiwan]. Tanegashima also details her personal relationships, including one with a younger student and her failed, problem-riddled first marriage (an antagonistic mother-in-law, her husband’s heart attack, a serious car accident). ‘It is sometimes suggested that traveling together is a way to test a relationship,’ Tanegashima writes. ‘We failed this test.’ Tanegashima has enjoyed better luck meeting the man who would become her second husband, Joel Busch, a political science professor also at ELAC. Busch had just emerged from a draining ordeal as his first wife succumbed to multiple sclerosis. ‘Daughter’ skillfully describes their awkward-yet-tender first dates, and the comedy of cultural differences between this Japanese firebrand and the German-American gentleman when the couple visited their respective countries of origin. ‘How did you manage to eat natto (a soybean-and-raw egg concoction)?’ she asks Busch in the book. ‘Easy,’ came the reply, ‘I hypnotized myself to think that I was eating peanut butter.’ Today, Tanegashima is a semester shy from retiring after teaching at ELAC for three decades. And the erstwhile Monterey Park resident loves Pacific Palisades. ‘My husband has lived here [since the 1960s],’ Tanegashima says. ‘I moved here about 17 years ago. We had our 17th wedding anniversary on August 4. ‘This is a wonderful place. I can walk everywhere. It’s a very safe and healthy atmosphere. A friend of mine calls it ‘Pacific Paradise.” Tanegashima will devote her retirement to translating ‘Daughter’ in Japanese and retrieving her long-neglected paint brushes. ‘I don’t expect my retirement to be boring,’ she says with understatement. Although Tanegashima never returned to teach at UCI, she ultimately won her battle when the university, unable to resist Irvine’s changing demographics, reinstituted Asian Studies: ‘It took them 10 years to replace me. Now they have so many teachers and it’s very successful, I hear. I feel vindicated.’ Tanegashima quotes her conservative father, who liked to employ a railroad metaphor, which, in retrospect, suits his trailblazing daughter: ‘The hardest thing is clearing the land for the rails. After that, it’s easy.’
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