President Obama today signed legislation at a White House ceremony to collectively award the soldiers of the 100th battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team the Congressional Gold Medal. Individual members had been awarded Medals of Honor but as a group, this is the first time the bravery of the mostly Japanese American troops of the 100th/442nd has been acknowledged with such an honor.
Outside of Japanese American and Asian American circles, and probably military history buffs, I bet not many people know of these soldiers. The 100th/442nd, nicknamed the “Go for Broke” regiment, is the most highly decorated military unit for its size and length of service in the history of the United States.
The family of Fong Lee, a Minneapolis Hmong teenager who was killed in 2006, is holding a press conference and rally this weekend to announce they’re taking the fight for justice to theSupreme Court of the United States.
They say that Lee, who was 19 years old when he was shot by a Minneapolis Police Department officer, was wrongfully killed when he was riding his bike with some friends. Lee was shot eight times — five after he was already down on the ground. The MPD claims Fong was selling drugs near an elementary school and pulled a gun on the cops.
The officer, Jason Andersen, a rookie at the time, was later accused of unnecessary force in another case, and has been fired twice from the MPD. An all-white jury found that Andersen didn’t use excessive force, and the family appeal was denied. So now Lee’s family is taking their wrongful death case to the Supreme Court.
There are a lot of hinky elements to this story. The family claims the police planted the gun, which was in the possession of police from an earlier robbery. There are clips of surveillance video at the school, which shows Andersen in pursuit of Fong, and Fong doesn’t appear to have a gun. The shooting happened out of the camera’s range. There are no fingerprints on the gun.
The large Twin Cities Hmong community is understandably upset and rallying behind the Lee family, and even the media are questioning the official version of the killing. This will be a SCOTUS case to follow.
If you’re in the Minneapolis area, you should try to make the announcement and rally on Saturday. It’s being held at 2 pm at the elementary school where Fong Lee was killed: Cityview Elementary School, 3350 North 4th Street, Minneapolis.
Here’s the full text of the press release announcing the rally:
I’ve written before about Japanese anime, or animation, as well as the genre’s characters and their large eyes, and wondered if they symbolize a desire to look more Caucasian.
Abagond makes the case that Americans (white people) think Japanese draw anime and manga characters to look Caucasian, but that’s a Western construct, and that “Americans” (he conflates nationality with ethnicity, a common slip in race/culture conversations, even by well-intentioned people and often by Asians) see everything in terms of white unless there are stereotypical symbols that identify a character as another ethnicity.
Since we’re such foodies, people think Erin and I eat out all the time. But the fact is, we cook a lot at home too. Last night, f’rinstance, I grilled chicken breasts rubbed with homemade spinach pesto, served with Caesar salad with homemade dressing (Erin makes the BEST Caesar dressing) and wild grain rice, drizzled with homemade Argentinian Chimichurri sauce.
OK, so it ain’t Asian. We cook a lot of Asian dishes too, not just Japanese but also Korean and Indian and Chinese. We often start with recipes but hardly ever stay true to those recipes. We tweak and customize everything — mostly, we add a lot more garlic than the recipe requires.
Now we have another source for Asian recipes: Asian Supper.
The media are reporting on how Muslim Americans are braced for attacks this weekend, because of the 9/11 anniversary. I know what that’s like, unfortunately, though not on the scale of violence and hatred Muslims are facing today.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of American “patriotism” that Japanese Americans still get nervous every December 7 because we grew up with racial slurs of “go home, Japs” and “Remember Pearl Harbor!”
Such are the deep emotional scars that form after a national trauma, and ethnicity and religion add layers of fear and complexity. It’s understandable in a way, but also unjust — Japanese Americans had nothing to do with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor any more than German Americans had to do with the blitzkrieg of London. And Muslim Americans certainly had nothing to do with the awful attacks of 9/11. It’s too bad that so many Americans can’t understand such a basic fact and separate nationality from ethnicity, faith from fanaticism.
The book on its surface is a simple idea: A memoir of Rizzuto’s 2001 trip to Japan, paid for by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to research the stories of Hiroshima bomb survivors, a group that shrinks each year as the generation passes away, in the city where her own family roots are planted. Rizzuto lived there for eight months to find people to interview, so she could write her second novel.
Instead, she came out of the experience with her life changed profoundly, and this memoir came first before the novel, which is finished but incubating a bit before she sends it to editors under the name “Shadow Child.”
Until the novel comes out, readers can devour “Hiroshima in the Morning” and marvel at Rizzuto’s craft and literary approach to telling non-fiction stories, as well as her brave willingness to expose the emotional evolution she undertakes by the end of her fellowship.
Her ability to write literature as if it were non-fiction is what set Rizzuto’s first novel, “Why She Left Us,” which won the American Book Award upon its release in 2001, apart from other books based on the Japanese American internment.
Rizzuto, who is half-Japanese, based that first book in part on her mother’s experience of being interned at Camp Amache in Colorado during World War II. But she interviewed many former internees to collect observations, details, relationships, experiences and story lines that she wove together into fiction that rang with the power of truth.
She wrote the novel in the different perspectives and voices of its main characters, and jumped through time and space in ways that masterfully held the reader on track, following the devastating legacy of internment on generations of one family. It was unorthodox, artsy and literary, and a riveting read.
I look forward to seeing how she uses the research in Hiroshima as fuel for her fiction, especially after reading “Hiroshima in the Morning.”
There are a lot of hinky elements to this story. The family claims the 
I’ve written before about 
The media are reporting on how 
Rizzuto, who is half-Japanese, based that first book in part on her mother’s experience of being interned at 
