In 2022, Not Fade Away Project founder Steve Yip undertook a dialogue/interview with Richard Aston, the author of Views From Gold Mountain: Voices, History, Memory. In his mixed-bag memoir and historical exposition, Aston unveiled some historical elements of the CML that trace back to Steve Yip’s own family. This interview also establishes a collaborative publishing schedule for the websites of Not Fade Away and Interstitial Media.

So when I heard about [your book] from Steve Louie, who I think you said you also know... I began that book last summer [note: 2021], and I had to put it down after a while... it was just so “vast.” My main interest was the question of Henry Tsoi, Lawrence Lowe, Eva Lowe, and that section of the Chinese community that had emerged during the 30s and 40s. It much more piqued my interest when you started naming addresses and locations. And I just said, “Oh my goodness!”

You had 1000 Wood Street, Oakland, California. You know what, that’s where I grew up. Where did you get all this information? This is what we are going to do today. You probably had seen my proposal.

[The book] felt that it was a very atmospheric book. Obviously, it was a labor of love, but I want to get into what compelled you to do this, how long did it take you? And then, I guess, what were you trying to accomplish through it? And you know obviously, maybe some of these questions we haven't been to consider but you were actually moved by certain things, but also very clear that you had a passion in terms of your relationship with the Chinese community, and in particular in this situation here. Since we're living in the United States, the Chinese American community. And I like to look at that going forward.

 We're kind of starting from the beginning! Like I'll let you go and I might just start peppering you with questions. I think the main thing is that: Who is the man, what compelled him to do this but I think what? Let's go back a little bit in terms of you came from United Kingdom.... You're from Britain, presuming from England. If I can recall, I didn't annotate your book. So, but my recollection tells me that so it's a very interesting journey.

 Okay, actually, I was born in Wales. But when I was young, I grew up in England. This all started quite by accident. When I was 14, I wrote in the book: one day, three Chinese kids arrived at my school. One was exactly the same age as me. One was older when was younger. They didn't speak a word of English, and I didn't speak a word of Chinese.

So the headmaster just put his head in the door during time in class, and asked, ‘Do any of you kids know where the Chinese laundry is at?’ So, I said, yes, sir. ‘So, you get out of the class.’So go out to the hallway, and there's three Chinese boys. There was no Chinese living in the town where I did. These were the first Chinese people I've ever met, ever seen, ever met. So he said, ‘Take them back to the Chinese laundry’, which is about a half mile away.

So I get back to the Chinese laundry. Father invites me in, he said, these are his three sons. They were actually born in England. But in 1936, their mother took them back to their village, which is near Toisan. And while they were there, the Japanese invaded, so they were stuck. So, in 1944, they've managed to come back to England. Again, they didn't speak any English, I didn't speak Chinese. I hated doing math. Chinese kids go to math because English wasn't required. So they did my math homework, and I did their English homework.

 We became friends for life. The last one died maybe six months ago. And I went back to England frequently. And they visit me in California. So that's how it all began.

When I was 16 I had the chance to emigrate to America. I know that I was coming to San Francisco, and they gave me a letter of introduction to a relative in Chinatown. When I met this relative, he turned out to be an extremely, friendly gregarious man, with many interests. He ran a grocery store on the corner of Washington and Grant Avenue. So I hang around there a lot. And he started introducing me to many aspects of Chinatown life. He actually found me an apartment on Jackson Street -- small apartment right across from the Chinese Hospital.

So I was right in the middle of Chinatown, and through him started meeting a lot of people from various walks of life. He was, in addition to being a groceryman, he had other interests. He was an agent for the Kuomintang...to provide, to purchase materials for them. He was an officer in the Suey Sing Tong. He was a gambler. He was a womanizer. He loved nightlife and drinking. And at 16 years old, he took me on his expeditions -- the adventure of a lifetime.

 This is the grocer you're talking about most. Was he white or Asian?

 A distant relative of my friends in England.

 So, through him, I made many friends. And eventually, he introduced me to a young Chinese American girl. We fell in love. We got married.. So after arriving in San Francisco. I worked a lot of odd jobs -- washing dishes, cooking in a restaurant. And finally managed to get into the Merchant Marine. So I made quite a few trips to the Far East.

 No, I would have been 18-19... So, in 1950, the end of ‘52, something like that, this friend of the friend of mine is... his name was Bill Hing. He took me to the picnic of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, which is a very big organization in Chinatown, still exists... At this picnic, I met a young girl, Chinese American girl. And that started a whole different part of my life.

 After a while, she said that your marriage can't continue if you keep going to sea, that you gotta get some kind of job.

Well, I never finished high school. So she said go to San Francisco State, they take anybody. And so I went to San Francisco State, took the entrance exam, and managed to pass it. Coincidentally, that very first semester, they offered the first Chinese language program. [The] instructor’s [phonetic: ‘tie your shoe’], who's been an officer in the Chinese Air Force. Moved to America, and now he's teaching. So I said, why not take Chinese. I know a bit of Cantonese already, but this was a formal class. So, I took Chinese. And after four years, I got a degree in international relations with a minor in Chinese.

So you went through a very interesting journey and, which is why I'm trying, to like one thing I pointed out in my note to you, is that I was trying to get a composite picture of who the man was, Richard Aston... And then, was that after or before you went to the Merchant Marine.

 No, it was after. I'd already been going to sea for a couple of years before that... And because that in the 1950s, the United States didn't recognize China, didn't recognize Red China. But when I was sailing, I had a British seaman’s passport. And so when I went to Hong Kong, I could actually cross the border into China. So my first visit to China was in 1953, somewhere around there, only a short time. But, and then since then, I've been back many, many times.

 So we can transition a little bit. I think we established basically how you got to where you're at. And then at one point, you actually worked for the US government, it seems like.

Well, after I graduated from San Francisco State, the American government opened up a place called the East-West Center in Hawaii, which was a research center where they brought scholars from all over Asia. And they thought by putting them all together with Americans in the middle of the Pacific, they could learn a lot from each other.

That was a start of maybe a six-year journey. Where, from the State Department, and from the Defense Department, I was appointed a national defense scholar, which allowed me to travel all over Asia, interviewing people and doing research on different topics... So, during these six years, I visited almost every country in Asia. I had an airline pass good for any airline, anytime, anywhere in Asia. So I was hop skipping around from place to place.

 So, you did that for six years. And then, if I can remember... maybe we just do some jumping around, and then instead of going chronologically... I was most fascinated by your introduction, with people whom Him Mark Lai called the “Chinese Marxist Left”.

Before we go there, when did you start to, when do you start to decide, thinking about doing this book? And what was the compelling reason behind it? Obviously, there was a lot of things that confronted you to do this monumental work. I mean, it's monumental -- 700 pages. You know, so what's the story there, sir?

Well just over many, many years, I collected notes and essays that I'd written, and travel memories and diaries and all. And then when I retired, I figured, ‘Put it into a book!’ So it started, It was simply like the memoirs of Chinatown. But then it took on a life of its own and grew and grew and grew into the monster it became.

It took me at least three years I would think. That's when I quit working. So, do you want to start with how I knew Mark Lai?

 Yeah, let's move into H. Mark Lai [role which bridged] into the question of Henry Tsoi and Lawrence Lowe. And as I explained in my various emails, Lawrence Lowe basically was my father's mentor. And after he had passed, my father took possession of his grocery store -- West End Grocery [in West Oakland]. And at that time, I was probably in the sixth grade [in San Francisco]. Yeah, I was in sixth grade and we moved from North Beach over to West Oakland. So that was a big cultural transition for me. Coming from a more Chinese-dominated culture in North Beach, and then all of sudden you're in the middle of the Black ghetto. And cultural collisions, of course, ensued. But also, I think I learned a lot in that kind of situation. But please, tell us how that transition came about.

We can start with Mark Lai. And also just for your information, Mark Lai delivered the Chinese language eulogy for my father when he passed in 1998. So, his family and my family are relatively close.

Okay, so, I think in 1959, my wife was working at PG&E. And she and Mark’s wife, Laura, were the first non-white people to be hired by PG&E. So they were working at PG&E. At the same time, Mark was working right across the street at Bechtel Engineering. So after work, Mark and Laura, me and my wife, would walk up to Chinatown to Jackson Cafe for dinner... We get soup. Three dishes over rice, and tea, over $5. And we went there very frequently. So that was the initial meeting.

Okay, late in the year 1959. A house came for sale up on Union Street, small house. Both Mark Lai and his wife, and me and my wife, were interested in buying it. So we went up to visit the house and Mark said he wanted to buy it. So shortly, he bought it.

At the same time, Mun Ching had to close down. It had been investigated by the FBI. The FBI raided it, burglarized the place, got all the membership records, and were preparing to list it as a subversive organization. And they were preparing to arrest members of, I think, if I'm right, one member was actually arrested and convicted of subversive activities. So the others sort of dissipated before that.

So, in 1959, Mun Ching was closed down. It had a big library. So Mark's new house. They couldn't take all the books: all the English books Mark gave to me. And he took the Chinese books to the house on Union Street. At the same time, Mark dissolves Mun Ching. But started a new organization called [Hoi Yin 海燕].

 Yeah, I can't remember the Cantonese, but it sounds very similar.

 [Hoi Yin] is a bird - stormy petrel. According to legend, it never rests. It sails [the] stormiest seas and never rests. And Maxine Gorky wrote a book about that, which became very famous in China and in Russia. So that's where Mark got the name from. This homeless bird that never rests. So and so he tried to try to maintain that organization as best he could that way. But again, this was a time when the Un-American Activities Committee was investigating everybody.

And slowly, the members just frittered away. I mean it was just impossible to maintain the membership under the pressure at that time. I sent you a copy of their loyalty oath. Yeah, there were so many questions on there. The people who were in Mun Ching, for example, couldn't answer them without getting into difficulty. And so the membership just frittered down to nothing.

 I actually remember that library myself. It was there when we were younger [and] during the Vietnam War, we would have vehement debates among the offspring[s] about the right and wrong of the Vietnam War. Go ahead, sir. What were you do it professionally at this time?

That time mostly going to San Francisco State, working at PG&E at night. Just for those four years. So, Mark and Laura, [we] became very friendly. So, at the end of his life, just a few weeks before he died, he came to my house and had dinner, with Laura. And then I came straight out and asked him: “Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?” And he said, “No.” And I'll explain why. So many people. He said, “I was being groomed to join the Communist Party, but I never did because of the loyalty oath.”

Appreciating the Friendship with H. Mark and Laura Lai

Because of the loyalty oath, the Communist Party decided not to register any more members, so that people could not be accused of being subversive. So everybody knew who would be a communist, but they would never officially be ‘communist’. And he fell into that category. So, he was a communist in his spirit, but at least not legally.

And again, I was friendly with him. I was friendly with Laura Lai. She died like two years ago, I had lunch with her like a week before she died. We stayed friends for that long.

 My sister Shannon was about to sit down with Laura just before she passed. And that was after Mark had published that autobiography he had. And my sister was trying to get hold of Laura... Yeah, that was a great loss, it was kind of shocking, so quickly after Mark had passed.

 You know she was so vibrant right and up until the end, full of life, you know, every time I go... Every other week: “Let's go for lunch, out for dim sum.”

 She loves driving. So, were you aware of Mun Ching when you guys were socializing after work?

another aspect now to my knowledge of Chinatown. My wife had a friend, and we became very friendly. So, she came from a large family. And one of them, her eldest sister married the son of [Choy Suht Chiu], [Choy Suht Chiu] was the oldest of three brothers. The second one was [Choy Char-ming]/[Choy Fa-Joe], which was Henry Tsoi. The third brother was [Choy Chungming], who was Lawrence Lowe.

 We use to refer to Henry Tsoi as [phonetic: 

So, because her elder sister was married to the son of the eldest Choy, the Choy brothers. We became, she became very family. So she, she got to know Eva very well, she got the note.

Helen, my second wife, her sister was a cashier at World Theater. My wife babysat Henry Tsoi’s youngest daughter, Cynthia. And was friendly with Henry Tsoi’s oldest girl, Lillian. So that's how I came to know Henry Tsoi and [Choy Suht Chiu], Henry Tsoi and Lawrence Lowe. Lawrence, I never met.

But, Eva we met frequently. Once again, up until, up until almost the day she died, we were over to her apartment on Powell Street. I was there... I think you mentioned that you were at the 90th birthday celebration at the Imperial Palace.

 Was this when you said you were going to San Francisco State, and you're working at PG&E at night?

This came later, after I'd come back from the Far East.

 So this is after you finish your little stint with the State Department.

Well, no, because when I came back towards the end, I was enrolled at UC. In addition, in the Ph.D. program, which meant I didn't wasn't taking classes. I was just working on my dissertation, which meant I could take off for, go to the Far East for a month to do some research, and then come back.

And then during those trips back to China, that's when I met Henry Tsoi at the China Travel Service. And sometimes I go with my wife, sometimes alone. But then he would arrange for us to go into China. I've been to the Choy family home in China several times when Henry and his brothers grew up.

And so, again, I must have seen him... just last summer saw Henry Tsoi maybe a year before he died. A couple of years earlier he came over to the United States for a visit. And I met him then, and then Lillian came over for a visit, then Cynthia came over to live. I saw Cynthia last, maybe a year ago. So, my second wife was very friendly with the whole family.

Stepping Away and Rejecting the Loyalty Oath

 All this time, and you're making visits to China. Did you perceive it to be a conflict that you had a certain relationship, an employment relationship with the State Department or doing research, or is what you're doing for your Ph.D work?

 That was where I was trying to get at. Then, how do you feel about that?

My political views didn't have anything to do with what I wrote. I could write objectively about conditions in various Chinese communities. Like visiting Chinese communities all over Southeast Asia, and made assessments of their attitudes and living standards and such. So, there was really no conflict.

The only time that conflict came up was in 1969, when suddenly, you know where Sproul Hall is on UC campus? 

where every month I went to pick up my check from the government. So I went there one day and what ‘69 or something. And they said, “You haven't signed the loyalty oath.” I said,“So what's that?” “Oh, this is something new” So they gave me the list of questions, and answer these. Well, there's no way I could answer them without getting into problems. So that ended my stint at UC. I just had to drop everything and forget about a Ph.D.

 Wow, which actually... now that that issue’s being brought up. How did you perceive, and you talked about Mun Ching having to close down through that era?

Because I knew there was a lot of pressure on a lot of people, and couple of people like you said, were arrested. One person was convicted. I know, maybe possibly one or two were deported... I do remember one time the FBI came by and knocked on the door, and this and that, and that and this. So, even as a youngster, I knew something was up. How did you perceive that particular situation, in terms of how it impacted on people that you knew on a very personal level?

There was a major division with those Chinese Americans who felt some affinity for Communist China. They thought that by going back they could help reconstruct the country, and their expertise in various fields was of value.

There were others who were more secure in their ties with America, you know -- grandparents, grandchildren, who thought, well, we can stick it out here. And so there was a whole range of attitudes. I mean there was, there were some Chinese Americans who were very much in favor of the Kuomintang.

So you had the whole, whole range of a number of speakers that would come to Chinatown -- Kuomintang generals, middle of the road generals, and almost-communists, were quite a few communists that were... came as part of the end of the war, the treaty that took place at the Opera House, I forget the one... The

 Did you perceive the stress level among those people that you're already being associated with like Mark and Laura, because it was a very, very tense period. It was also the McCarthy era. For example, people like my father, for many years could not leave the country. He actually was a paper son, as I discovered later on. And so, for them to even step out would actually be a big risk of not even coming back into the border. I just want to know how people survived that kind of stress? They were under death threats from the Kuomintang as well as from the Chinese Six Companies.

And then with the loyalty oath thing. People who took it, and then charged with lying on it, or again, potentially paper sons who were arrested, not arrested but interrogated and said, you know: Give up three other people so you can stay... And I know some people worked at [the Bechtel Group, later the Bechtel Corporation]. Because Bechtel worked on government projects, there are a number of them that could sign the loyalty and they would quit and be forced to leave. So the whole 50s and 60s was a very tough time fraught with anxiety amongst many, many Chinese Americans.

 Did you feel yourself in danger of being demonized, or even accused of being associated with people who were being targeted are mostly from the Left?

It was the whole society... like the longshoreman's union... I was in the longshoremen's union. Dozens of those were put out of work because they couldn't sign the loyalty oath... people who worked for the post office were in the same position.

 It was literally thousands of people all over America, as I mentioned in the book. Would you believe, Tennessee passed the death sentence for anybody found with a piece of Marxist literature. That was the depth to which this paranoia would [??] in America.

 Yeah. It's kind of going that way right now. It's we're moving into very dangerous territory right now politically as we're looking at it. So, are you done with this particular session you have any other thoughts, because I want to at least transition that to something that's related more with you.

A lot of ingredients you actually surfaced in this book. And it was kind of mind-blowing for me, because you can get some generalities reading Mark’s [materials]. He wrote at least one to three pieces about Mun Ching and the Chinese Marxist Left, but he wouldn't go beyond certain parameters. I remember one time when my daughter was in college, she called him up and tried to talk to him about it. He wouldn't talk. And it's sort of like ‘go read my articles.’

Basically, but you went much deeper. How was that achieved and how comfortable were people? ...You are talking with Eva Lowe. And that you've got permission to actually surface this information. Can you verify that and also tell us more about that?

There were limits to what Eva, for example, would talk about. She was very... Eva herself was very hesitant to talk about anything political. Even though through other sources, I knew that she had participated as an active member in communist activities while she was in China. And then, particularly when she was in Manila, putting out a newspaper for the Chinese Communist Party. But she refused to talk about that.

 But you somehow, then how did that information surface?

Actually, the thing about the newspaper, I found out, by a woman who wrote a letter to Mark Lai. And it's in Mark Lai’s file at UC.

[Note: We discussed certain social issues within this movement that involved the activist Ben Fee, who was president of the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association and leader of the Chinese section of the CPUSA.]

He moved to New York. There are three Chinese that I know of... Okay, the communist party of any nation maintains if a communist moves from another country, like a communist who comes from another country, to America, they must join the American Communist Party. The Chinese didn't want to do that. So they were allowed to set up what was called the Chinese Fraction. And over a period of time the head of the Chinese Fraction was Benjamin Fee, who in the 1930s had gone to the Soviet Union for training. Then come back to America, and had...

Ben was one of the heads of this Chinese Fraction there was another one before I can't remember. The second head of the Chinese Fraction was Henry Tsoi. The third head of the Chinese Fraction was Lawrence Lowe. So there is no doubt about it, that they were high up in the Communist Party.

And then... some of this is from Henry Tsoi’s biography. I tried translating it and I actually had to give up, and have somebody help me with it. And it was... he was quite forthright in his acknowledgment of the road he’d taken.

 Yeah, my sister sent a page of this bio; she stopped cuz she's an ABC so she wasn’t able to understand most of it. I reiterate that those names constantly come up in our family discussions: Henry Tsoi, Lawrence Lowe, and all these people... trying to connect all the dots constantly. So was the Lowe family aware of your assembling of this information and putting it into print?

No. I never met Lawrence before he died because he was, ‘shall we say’ murdered?’

 This was in a car accident on the Bay Bridge.

United States

A Conversation with Richard Aston, author of “Views From Gold Mountain: Voices, History, Memory”

“We rode through seventeen miles of alfalfa fields and greasewood-covered desert...the Central Utah Relocation Project was stretched out before us in a cloud of dust. It was a desolate scene. Hundreds of low black barracks covered with tar paper were lined up row after row. A few telephone poles stood like sentinels, and soldiers could be seen patrolling the grounds.”

Citizen 13660, discussing the bus trip to the “Central Utah Relocation Center,” the euphemism for the Topaz Concentration Camp

Part One: Salt Lake City to Park City to Delta

The last time we visited Salt Lake City was in 1975 during our cross-country road trip relocating from the Bay Area to the Big Apple. Already young veterans of the definitive 

movement, we were radical community activists rooted in the Chinatown, Manilatown, and Japantown communities. With New York’s Chinatown in our line of sight, we were excited, nervous, and full of anticipation for a new life in an unfamiliar place.

Of course, this uprooting came with trepidation: What kind of impoverished environment would play host to a gang called the Crazy Homicides? 

 I thought that having encounters with Chinatown street youth and other “close calls” would be enough preparation. (Some of those days, some of us would be armed.)

My sister saw us off from our hilly alley flat on Bernard Street, just north of Chinatown. Janet and I got into our 1973 Datsun 610 and crossed the familiar Bay Bridge, making short requisite stops in Oakland and Sacramento to say goodbyes to our families by way of Interstate 80 and its tributaries. Janet would always be teary-eyed leaving her close-knit 

 (Japanese American) family. And then off we went, straight east. Although she and I had traveled to Phoenix to see my mother’s family after we had married, I had never traveled beyond Nevada that far north. At the time, I-80 was the northernmost West-East cross-continental highway in the United States and it would eventually lead us to New York City. I opted against traveling the more southerly transcontinental route because the South in those days was still very much 

. My gas mileage was about 20-odd miles per gallon, and memories of the 1973 gas crisis were still fresh. We were guarded, yet felt relatively comfortable. Still, as Asians, we often felt like oddities at gas stations, restaurants, and truck stops.

After crossing the Sierra Nevada (and the infamous Donner Pass), our first proper overnight stop was Salt Lake City. Arriving late in the evening from the west, looking down on the Great Salt Lake as rain danced on the windshield and lightning flashed in the distance. Burning the brakes down the mountain road, the eerie panorama of a well-placed movie scene. In those pre-GPS days one used an AAA Triptik for precise directions. Janet and I were amidst our own journey of a lifetime, just like a movie, and with dramatically placed distant lightning at that!

To make a long story short, our road trip and arrival to New York City indeed was a memorable experience replete and populated with stories of struggle and activism. Janet and I homesteaded ourselves in the Lower East Side and became New Yorkers. Our relationship with our families in the West was never broken while we expanded our own family on the East Coast.

The flight from JFK landed two hours later than scheduled at Salt Lake City International Airport due to a forced layover in Denver after all the onboard restrooms failed. Picking up the rental car at the airport, we traversed the Wasatch Back region of the Rocky Mountains, towards Park City, a ski resort community 32 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The old mining town sits at an elevation of 7,000 feet above sea level, but these days it’s most well-known for Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. By the time we arrived, Bay Area members of the 

 side of the family had already arrived and settled into their rooms at the hotel.

This trip was a four-year effort in the making—a pilgrimage to the site of the Topaz concentration camp, euphemistically named by the U.S. government as the Central Utah Relocation Center. An endeavour spearheaded by our daughter, we were ultimately able to meet up with our extended family of 

, Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese from Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, and various points in California. The gathering was a highly anticipated opportunity to commemorate my 

Part 2: A Desolate Memory on a Foundation of Dust

Four years ago, before the pandemic, bringing up a family journey to Topaz would inevitably trigger a series of conversations ricocheting between the East and West coasts. There always was a quiet persistence when the topic was broached by our adult children. Topaz concentration camp is the site where both of my wife’s 

 (first generation) grandparents and her 

 (second generation) parents were incarcerated along with over 7,500 other people of Japanese descent.

Around that time several of Janet’s younger cousins, along with comrades and veterans of the Asian American movement, had recently passed. Always in the background of any family conversation was an understanding that Asian American demographics had significantly changed since the 1970s, as well as the recent unsettling rise in violent anti-Asian sentiments. When it came time for things to manifest there was an unspoken resonance to the significance of a pilgrimage to Topaz.

Pulling it off would be an achievement of logistical tenacity weighed with profound emotional and historical gravity. Excitedly, I shared the plan with my colleagues, my doctor, and others as I prepared to retire from professional life. Of course, that was in the months before the pandemic.

It is a disturbing reality that, to this day, most Americans are unaware that after the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government openly violated professed constitutional protections and cruelly targeted persons of Japanese descent. This manifestation of an imperialist, geopolitical struggle between two empires—the Japanese and the American—contesting Indo-Pacific dominance, would irreparably scar the Japanese American people.

In 1942, over 125,000 Japanese Americans residing along the West Coast were interned under Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The majority were native-born U.S. citizens and their 

 parents, who were forcibly removed from their jobs and schools, then suffered the indignation of having their farms and businesses confiscated, and their community and faith institutions shut down, before being herded onto trains and disappeared into the desolate wilderness of the internment camps.

The forced displacement and incarceration were accompanied by racist, virulent demonization in the mainstream press coupled with rabid, physical attacks on persons and property. Much of the hatred was 

inflamed via William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire

, which had historically agitated the threat of “Yellow Peril” using a carefully curated assault of editorials, columns, articles, and political cartoons that “cultivated vicious hatred of the Japanese.” Racial hostilities made the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans not only possible but a crushing reality when Roosevelt authorized 

This waking nightmare left indelible impressions on future generations of documentarians, authors, artists, and social scientists who eventually emerged out of the dust of Topaz. Among the survivors were children’s author Yoshiko Uchida, artist Miné Okubo, author and illustrator of

 poet Toyo Suyemoto, and sociologist Harry Kitano, who brought living testament of the indisputable narratives from Topaz camp and contributed to the rich body of work about the incarceration through their own experiences and creative catharsis.

As the coronavirus pandemic began to wane and spike as it mutated into new variants, the various households within our family diaspora made sacrifices to ensure they would all be able to attend—the baby boomers and their spouses, as well as the 

 (fourth generation) children, their spouses, and children. Months in advance, the various families were juggling life, rearranging schedules, and confirming dates across the continent via group emails and video chats. I was anxious to make sure that our New York and Philadelphia-based branch of the family would be in good condition for this emotional journey after several bouts of COVID.

Collectively, we were cognizant that anti-Asian hate and violence agitated by and reverberated from the pinnacle of U.S. political power (Let’s call it out: Trump and his fascist minions) was running rampant from coast to coast. We were disgusted and alarmed when Michelle Go, a young Asian woman was pushed in front of an oncoming subway train and killed in New York. Her murder was but one of many news stories of verbal abuse, unprovoked attacks, and random acts of violence inflicted upon Asian people from both coasts.

Living in relatively self-contained Asian ethnic communities in San Francisco or Oakland during the 1960s left a disarming feeling once you stepped out into the world of work or school. When I attended Oakland High School in 1969, it was 20 percent Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino). But being conspicuous didn’t insulate me from being continually reminded that anti-Asian agitation had deep historical roots in white supremacist traditions. It’s not easy to shake off the experience of being a 14-year-old Chinese kid getting chased off a North Beach basketball court by a bunch of white kids hollering, “Get off the court, don’t you know who won the war!”

Even during my college days, in the heat of the Indochina war, I remember classmates who made a point of packing heat when traveling those few miles to “remote,” white East Bay enclaves like Fremont and Hayward, or even to the South Bay city of San Jose, which had its own Japantown. Can we even say: “Those were the days...?”

Fast forward to recent times: 2022 Park City, Utah.

To get to the Topaz camp from Park City, we had to travel through Delta, Utah, a backwater agricultural and industrial town in the middle of the desert and home to the top-notch Topaz Museum. The Topaz site was so named due to the pale blue, golden brown, yellow and orange variants of the gemstone found in the surrounding mountains. The desert has changed only as deserts change. Of the campsite, acres and acres of abandoned land, retaining only the skeletal remains of the prison colony, lay desiccated in the sand.

Neither Topaz nor mass incarceration is a notable feature, let alone mentioned, in any of the tourist materials. If you consulted an AAA guidebook today, Delta is not mentioned at all. And what of Topaz? It didn’t warrant any recognition in America’s most comprehensive roadside travel guide either, even though a U.S. Park Service monument stands at the foot of the entrance to the preserved site.

Yoshiko Uchida, who documented and processed her experiences through children’s books, painted a most distressing picture of the bus ride to Topaz after disembarking the train in Delta in her 1982 post-internment memoir 

Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family

...after a half hour...there was an abrupt change. All vegetation stopped. There were no trees or grass or growth of any kind, only clumps of dry skeletal greasewood…In the distance, there were mountains rising above the valley with some majesty, but they were many miles away. The bus made a turn into the heart of the sun-drenched desert and there, in the midst of nowhere, were rows and rows of squat, tar-papered barracks sitting sullenly in the white, chalky sand.

Our seven-vehicle caravan drove deep into Topaz towards Block 27-42, where my wife’s family once “resided.” Sparse patches of sagebrush poking out of the ground provided minimal texture to the desolation. We planted our feet on the gravel roadway, and then to the pebbled, crunchy ground. Just beneath the topsoil, thousands of nails, nuts, bolts, and pieces of wood lay embedded in the dirt. Isolated signage identified where the different lots were positioned around the barracks, canteens, and communal bathhouses. Canvassing the area freely, we listened intently to the solemn insights of our tour guide, Jane Beckwith, a board member of the Topaz Museum and a wonderful resource on the history of concentration camps.

My sister-in-law, Barbara, aptly described the landscape and ambiance. "No buildings remain...but a dedication monument and a map showing where buildings were located. We saw the foundations of buildings and the outlines of entryways to some of the barracks and communal bath and restroom facilities and mess halls... What we could feel…and see is how desolate the location was, the clay soil with dust storms during summer and thick, deep mud during winters.”

Yoshiko Uchida concluded the epilogue of her 

 with the value of passing on her experiences. “[A]s a writer of books for young people, I often speak at schools about my experiences... celebrating our common humanity... I tell them about the 

 who persevered in a land that denied them so much. I tell them how our own country incarcerated us—its citizens—during World War II, causing us to lose that most precious of all possessions, our freedom.”

 reminds us that the loss of liberty could have mortal consequences. Incarcerated as a 30-year-old, among the revolting experiences she documented was the killing of James Hatsuaki Wakasa, a 63-year-old chef who was shot and killed by an MP while walking his dog inside the Topaz barbed-wire fence on April 11, 1943. The 

 reported that Wakasa had been shot while trying to climb through the fence. An error that was never corrected. James Hatsuaki Wakasa's murder is remembered and observed every year in Salt Lake City and at Topaz.

Today, Asian Americans continue to straddle two cultures simultaneously. Whether we are conscious of it or not (or even several generations removed from Asia),we are communities in deep angst, continually concerned about our place in these United States.Long regarded by the dominant culture and its media as a “model minority,” the convergence of recent events—the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the January 6th capitol riots—has thrust our community into convulsive contention.

The onset of the pandemic in early 2020 marked a sharp rise in anti-Asian violence agitated by then-President Trump’s overtly racist, tasteless, xenophobic hate speech. His continued use of pejorative propaganda like “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” served not only to manufacture suspicion about the Asian American connection to COVID’s source, it inflamed long-simmering fears of China’s emergence as the primary global competitor to U.S. imperialism.

In the summer of 2020, a surge of protests swept across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. The scenes in the streets stirred an emotional and moral conflict within Asian communities over the persistence of anti-Black prejudice in Asian ethnic and immigrant communities. The conflict was all the more poignant because two of the four officers convicted of abetting the murder were 

Asian American representation and integration have increased significantly in recent years, as has the perception changed in the eyes of most Americans. While "Asian America" was historically limited to the Western states along the Pacific Coast and inland, today significant Asian American populations exist in rural, suburban, and urban settings across the country. After California and New York, more Asian Americans now live in Texas than any other U.S. state. High-profile East and South Asians have succeeded in journalism, in the media, and in the public square. We are invited to speak as topical experts and political pundits on national talk shows. And yes, we inhabit the highest echelons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. An Asian American woman is now the general manager of the Miami Marlins baseball team. And there are Asian Americans competing in the Olympics in numbers unseen before.

They say times change, and we change with them, but anti-Asian sentiments dating back to the 1850s continue to proliferate today. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is largely behind us, Asians and Asian Americans continue to be subjected to vicious physical and verbal assaults perpetrated by white supremacists and racist people of colour.

 experience in the U.S. came with a serious cost. After feeling the desolation of the land used for “relocation” camps, we as a family affirmed a solemn vow to educate, inspire, and empower younger generations to learn from this historic outrage whose dangers still permeate American society. But how do we extrapolate value from the deeply uncomfortable lessons from our historical traumas?

The forcible evacuation of Japanese Americans was a wholly racist miscarriage of justice (with the potential to become genocide) that denied an entire people their rights of due process, their land and their humanity, exercised through war hysterics. How, given today’s political climate, can we rationalize that a liberal Democrat signed Executive Order 9066 ordering the detention, removal and indefinite internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans?

Again, at a time when the rise of the African American struggle for human rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement converged and inspired the rise of the Asian American movement on the West Coast, the Japanese American community was also shaken awake in the 1960s and early ‘70s. For it was the 

, who broke through the wall of self-imposed, post-incarceration silence and forced a conversation that helped people come to terms with the incarceration experience. These conversations infused and informed an emergent Asian American movement with a militant edge that advocated unapologetically for Asian American empowerment and social justice in solidarity with the Black liberation struggle.

Propelled and inspired by the African American community’s resistance against racist oppression and historical denial, the Hedani sisters participated in the Third World Liberation Front strikes for ethnic studies, Barbara at San Francisco State and Janet at UC Berkeley. Their generation wrote op-ed pieces in the ethnic community press, organized community forums on Japanese internment, and linked it to imperialism and the Vietnam War. That process injected both social consciousness and controversy into community relations in local Buddhist Churches and neighbourhood venues. The zeal and determination of the 

 (aided by many other Asian Americans) brought waves of controversy by challenging convention and bringing to the surface taboo subjects like the resistance within the concentration camps and lionizing the “No No Boys”, inclusive of those who rejected the draft while interned inside the camp. They rehashed unsettling memories and sparked uncomfortable conversations, but it was necessary to drag the past out into the sunlight.

Compared to the galvanizing atmosphere of the late '60s and early '70s, when positive cross-ethnic dynamics was a source of pride and inspiration, where will “Asian America” stand on violent police suppression and genocidal rhetoric directed at Black, Brown and Native, and other oppressed communities? And where affirmative action and the teaching of ethnic studies have come under vicious attack perpetrated by white supremacists 

Today there are localized efforts to introduce Asian American history and studies at the grade school level. At the same time, fascist forces like Mothers for Liberty and their ilk are seeking to ban books and critical thinking nationally in order to seamlessly erase the genocide of Native peoples, slavery, and the African American experience from school curriculums, libraries, and history.

Asian Americans may have greater visibility with more elected officials in local and national government, more representation in the arts and entertainment with famous actors, comedians, journalists, talking heads, and pundits, yet even this demographic is not immune to discrimination, prejudice, and threats of violence, contained in a volatile geo-political climate as the U.S. wages a proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine, and upticks its competitive, saber-rattling threats against China under the guise of defending Taiwan. And at the same time, there are those Asian Americans who seem to have willingly embraced white supremacist ideology, either out of grave fear or internalized racism.

We are living in dangerous, uncertain times where the inequality in society has not abated and a juggernaut of hate and intolerance has been unleashed against immigrants, LGBT people, and women (most recently to reproductive freedom). Some misguided sections of our communities have guzzled the poisonous kool-aid, aligning themselves within the most retrograde, reactionary, racist political spheres, and I wonder if the pressure to be more “Americanized” may have contributed to the two shocking and unprecedented mass shootings carried out against Asian Americans by Chinese immigrants in the recent past. I refer to the massacres at Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, which took place two days apart in January of this year. Might these acts of mass violence be indicative of psychosocial convulsions occurring within various Asian American and Asian ethnic immigrant communities?

The Asian American experience, while somewhat individualized within various ethnic community experiences, shares much in common with global struggles against racist violence, prejudiced exclusion, and overt denial of basic civil rights. Like the pogroms unleashed on Chinese miners and railroad workers in the West, Filipino farm workers struggling against vicious backbreaking exploitation, and organized historical labour strikes elevating working class militancy, these events along with the Japanese American incarceration have been key moments in U.S. history that many Asian Americans of my generation have integrated into our collective identity. These legacies are in danger of being wiped away.

For the Hedani family, the pilgrimage to Topaz was not crossing off a bucket list, it was a latent mission to excavate this historic reality of national betrayal and contextualize it for the new realities our grandchildren are facing—to ensure that it will not fade away. Its lessons cannot be relegated to a frail lament recalling a “difficult” period in Asian American history, and then forgotten.

 “Not Fade Away: Preserving Overlooked AAPI Experiences”

 has been incubating for some time as I, a Chinese American of mixed generational backgrounds, readied myself to retire from professional life after working 23 years for the largest, and one of the older, Asian American nonprofit service organizations in New York City. Future segments of this series will highlight and feature interviews and living AAPI stories that cannot be allowed to face historical extinction.

Part 5: NO! THERE WERE CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN AMERICA, THAT IS THE TRUTH!

I was in the first or maybe second grade; 6 or 7 years old. A group of us in the
schoolyard. My parents and other relatives moved from Poston, Arizona to the inner city of Denver. So, this group in the playground was lower working class made-up with Blacks, Mexicans, whites and me, the Japanese American…

From someone in this group: “Where were you born...?” “This hospital. This town. That city. That state…” Then this rush to offer personal birth declarations came to me, saying that I was born in a camp that my family and other Japanese were put into during the war. An eruption of shouts, jeers, indignant screams filled the air, changed the level of kid-banter and youthful challenging.

Turning into a mob mentality...
“LIAR”, “YOU LIE”, “LIAR, LIAR!”
“THAT NEVER HAPPENED IN THIS COUNTRY!”
“WE DON’T DO THAT IN AMERICA!”
“WE DON’T DO THAT IN AMERICA!” bombarded throughout the schoolyard.

My parents and my aunts and uncles told me of the camps; they even showed me photos of the family sitting in the desert of Arizona. The next day several of these boys said they asked their parents, who all said that I was telling the truth and that the camps did happen in America. For years, I have thought of how powerful is the statement: "WE DON’T DO THAT HERE IN AMERICA!!!”

Over the years in talking with other Japanese Americans they were also confronted with similar attacks, distortions, and lies about their past. To get a deeper understanding of the U.S. role in establishing concentration camps, look into the American Crimes Series 89.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my brother-in-law Dean Hedani. A founding partner of the San Francisco law firm Hedani, Choy, Spalding & Salvagione, he will be lovingly remembered as the father who ensured family continuity with the passing of his partner Melainie. Dean was a big sports fan of the Warriors, Giants and 49ers, however, this enthusiasm was unmatched when compared to his passion for the 2022 Hedani family pilgrimage to Topaz, which is recounted below.

Special thanks to Stan Nishimura, who was born in internment in 1943 as depicted in the “Drawing Construction” visual piece. After graduating with a MFA in painting and sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s and completing an MA in music composition and performance from Wesleyan University in the early 1980s, Stan spent decades exploring the interconnectivity between visual arts and music.

Journey To Topaz

A collection of coast-to-coast community-sourced interviews and narratives of Asian American and immigrant experiences. The Project works to ensure that potentially forgotten Asian American social movements, stories, and experiences are adequately preserved and accessible through oral history documentation that has appeared through multiple platforms, including InterstitialMedia.org and its own Not Fade Away website.