Category Archives: Guest Post

Critical Filipinx Studies: Q&A with Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, author of “Caring for Caregivers,” by Series Editor Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

The Critical Filipinx Studies series has from its inception aimed to not only advance key questions in the interdisciplinary field of Filipino or Filipinx Studies but also to illuminate the issues and struggles on-the-ground Filipinx communities face daily. Inspired by the praxis of author and labor organizer, scholar-activist Carlos Bulosan, this series centers those who adopt a stance of care—ethical and political commitment—toward the people whose lives animate their work.

It is perhaps most appropriate that the inaugural book of the series is penned by Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez. Francisco-Menchavez is an award-winning scholar-activist, researcher, writer, and associate professor at San Francisco State University. Her forthcoming book, Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis, focuses on the experiences of Filipina caregivers, a demographic that Francisco-Menchavez knows intimately because many of her family members were employed as caregivers.

This aspect of her family history is ultimately what drove Francisco-Menchavez’s activism. Throughout her time in academia, Francisco-Menchavez has volunteered to support caregivers—and other care workers’—grassroots organizing efforts. This political commitment has shaped her scholarship; indeed, Francisco-Menchavez’s scholarship has served as another site for activism.

What follows are edited excerpts from a candid Q&A session between me and Valerie.

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez: Can you give me a brief synopsis of your book?

Valerie Franciso-Menchavez: So in my mind, Caring for Caregivers is one of the first sustained, sociological examinations of Filipino caregivers. For me, it was part memoir, part sociological research/academic writing. I was writing the book from my perspective as someone who grew up in care homes, whose family members—a majority of my family members—worked as caregivers. Doing research with caregivers for close to six years now, I felt like I was both using my sociological skills to analyze the industry while also writing down what many activists, organizers, and advocates already know about the industry. These folks don’t always have somewhere to point to academically that legitimizes what they have always known.

My book is an intimate look at what it’s like to be a caregiver, and it also serves these other purposes around advocacy, organizing, and activism. For me, this book is a really special piece of writing. To be honest, I feel like it’s the closest to myself that I’ve written. I feel like, “Oh, this is me,” as Val the scholar and organizer.

Rodriguez: Thank you. Can you maybe speak a little more to what it means that you wrote this book in a way that feels more like you, that it reflects your voice more? You mentioned that it’s also part memoir. How might have you been constrained in the past from writing in your voice?

Francisco-Menchavez: My first book, The Labor of Care, was my dissertation turned into a book, and I needed it for tenure. I really wanted to write close to the discipline and be legible to sociologists and Asian Americanists as well as women and gender studies scholars. I think what changed was, one, receiving tenure, then two, the passing of my brother-in-law, Bill. His passing gave me the courage and bravery to be more honest about what kind of writer and what kind of scholar I wanted to be. Bill’s passing was sudden and tragic. He was also a caregiver. In fact, lots of his family are Tongan caregivers. When he was alive, we would talk about what it’s like to work in that industry and how monotonous and exhausting it was. Showing up for him [through this book] is necessary work.

Real and sustainable change for domestic workers in this country requires intergenerational dialogue.

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez

I think of two particular moments in the book where I feel like I’m writing in my own voice as an author and not as an academic. First is when I reflect on what a morning looked like for my grandmother, who was a caregiver. I write from the perspective of my nine-year-old immigrant self. The second moment is the chapter on kwentuhan, which I’ve tried to develop in my scholarship, and refers to a talk-story method that is rooted in Filipino cultural practice. The kwentuhan chapter was me trying to say to fellow activists and organizers that social science methods like kwentuhan may not break down imperialist, capitalist systems, but it is a tool. It’s a tool that I know, from my experience as an activist, as an organizer, as a kasama (Filipino term for “comrade”), as a scholar, it’s a tool that can help build and bridge relationships in our community.

This kind of bravery, this courage to say, “I said what I said,” I’ve not had that in the past. I’ve not had that courage in the past. And I think my conversations with you, with [UW Press acquisitions editor] Mike Baccam, encouraging me to not have to rely on disciplinary frameworks for every argument made me courageous enough to write from a nine-year-old perspective, to write from a perspective of someone who has done the work of kwentuhan.

Rodriguez: You talk a lot about the kinds of ways that you bring your activist or scholar-activist self into this book. I wonder if you can come up with a few key takeaways that you hope community organizers or activists especially might take from your book.

Francisco-Menchavez: I love that question. I think one is that when organizers and activists want to be in solidarity and organize with migrant care workers, they must acknowledge that organizing practices have to center radical care. These care workers are providing paid care work and oftentimes underpaid, undervalued, waged care work for other people. They provide care work for their families in the Philippines. They group up in their churches, in their community centers, in their grocery stores, and provide care for one another.

Therefore, the way that we as advocates, as activists, scholars, and organizers should move with them is to center their humanity and their dignity. That might seem super basic, but I think when we’re trying, for example, to advance legislation for the health and safety of care workers, we don’t see them as people who actually need a ride to the meeting or who can also get sick. When we don’t recognize their vulnerability as human beings, then we sort of lose the essence of why we are doing organizing and activist work with them.

Number two, I really think that we (as activists, organizers, and advocates) need to put care workers at the center of decision-making. We need to really follow their lead on what leadership development looks like or what kinds of changes that they might want [for their lives].

Lastly, I believe that real and sustainable change for domestic workers in this country requires intergenerational dialogue. If we don’t include young people in the conversation about elder care or childcare or care work in general, we’re missing a generation or potentially many generations that will inevitably have care work as part of their lives in the future.

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University and author of The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age.

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is professor and chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis and coeditor of Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation.

Related Books

Fernald’s Radioactive Rebirth: Casey A. Huegel on the Atomic Nature Preserve behind ‘Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory’

On March 25, I went for my first hike of spring 2024 at the Fernald Preserve, a Department of Energy (DOE)–owned park located about eighteen miles northwest of Cincinnati, Ohio. I have been visiting this place for nearly a decade in the process of researching and writing my new book Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory: Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest—so I was not expecting any surprises. After getting out of my car and approaching the Weapons-to-Wetlands Trail near the visitor center, however, I paused when I realized that I smelled something burning.

As I continued down the trail, I realized the landscape around me was scorched from what must have been a considerable fire. Forty years ago a fire at Fernald would have sent the community into a panic, and rightfully so, because at the time the site was operating as the Feed Materials Production Center, a uranium processing plant that served as a key facility in the sprawling Cold War nuclear weapons production complex. After a highly publicized uranium leak in 1984, the plant’s neighbors were perpetually on edge as they anticipated the next potential accident amid near daily newspaper coverage and government investigations that gradually revealed that Fernald was a dangerous place to work and the third most polluted nuclear wasteland in the country.

The aftermath of a prescribed burn at the Fernald Preserve, March 25, 2024. Photo by author.

With this history in mind, my surroundings looked a little apocalyptic, but I also knew better. Rather than a nuclear disaster, the scorched earth I experienced was the aftermath of a prescribed burn, which will strengthen and diversify the preserve’s prairies in the years ahead and continue the DOE’s commitment to protecting human and environmental health at Fernald. Over a ten-year period, a $4.4 billion DOE remediation project transformed the site from a nuclear wasteland into a public park in the wake of the Cold War. This surprising change in mission from producing uranium metal products, or “feed materials,” for plutonium reactors to environmental stewardship was what first inspired me to tell Fernald’s story. Grab a pair of binoculars and go for a walk there this summer. You will see what I mean.

As I argue in Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory, however, the greening of the DOE’s institutional culture was not a natural result of the Cold War’s end. During the 1980s, the department was better known as a secretive and notorious polluter. Through the protections of the Atomic Energy Act, it self-regulated its radioactive materials and fought tooth and nail to remain insulated from the nation’s environmental laws and denied any responsibility for harming human or environmental health. Only through a grueling, multi-decade campaign by grassroots activists Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH), unionized nuclear workers in the Fernald Atomic Trades and Labor Council, and their political allies in Ohio and Congress did the bombmakers budge and begin to adopt the tenets of environmentalism.

The 1980s was a difficult time to launch an environmental movement, especially one battling the federal government. The Reagan administration had worked to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency at the same time it waged the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. This process ramped up production in Fernald’s outdated factories during a period of renewed Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this challenging political environment, FRESH was determined to hold the DOE accountable for its negligent radioactive waste disposal. Led by Lisa Crawford, a self-described housewife who became an activist after discovering her family’s well water was contaminated with Fernald’s uranium, FRESH centered its movement around the interests of working people and never wavered from the community’s commitment to jobs and a clean environment. Through this inclusive approach, FRESH cultivated progressive and moderate allies and learned to fight the DOE locally and nationally.

Fernald’s environmental movement was ultimately successful, and they secured many notable achievements along the way: the firing of Fernald’s unpopular operating contractor National Lead of Ohio; securing a class-action settlement and medical monitoring program for community residents; passage of the Federal Facilities Compliance Act of 1992 that forced the DOE’s compliance with hazardous waste laws; and, of course, Fernald’s cleanup, which ensured that former production workers were retrained for remediation jobs. But FRESH also understood that in the politically partisan decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the results of their efforts were going to be mixed. The Fernald Citizens Task Force—a citizen advisory board formed as part of a national DOE public participation program to guide local cleanup efforts—ultimately accepted the onsite encapsulation of nearly three million cubic yards of low-level radioactive contaminated soil and building debris. This consensus, though difficult to achieve, was reached through two creative approaches to environmental compromise: a board game called FUTURESITE, which simulated the high costs, technological limitations, and political restraints of radioactive waste disposal, and dialogue between nuclear-contaminated communities that helped educate each other on the principles of environmental justice. If Fernald’s waste was not kept onsite, it was going to be dumped in somebody else’s backyard.

At the Fernald Preserve ponds fill the former foundations of uranium plants. The earthen mound in the background is the On-Site Disposal Facility, March 25, 2024. Photo by author.

Along the Weapons-to-Wetlands Trail, a platform looks out onto Fernald’s former production area. It is the perfect spot to reflect on the important transformations that have happened here and the challenges environmentalists face going forward. Waterfowl now congregate on ponds where uranium production plants once stood, which represents the downsizing of the nuclear weapons production complex and the DOE’s improved focus on environmental health and safety in the wake of Fernald’s movement. Looming on the site’s eastern boundary, however, is the massive on-site disposal facility, where the remnants from building demolition and contaminated soil from the production area are entombed. It is a stark reminder that this site must be continuously monitored for public health and environmental health, and despite the massive mobilization of resources and energy by federal and state governments, corporate contractors, organized labor, and grassroots activists, the Fernald Preserve cannot be made clean, only safer. The bomb’s environmental legacy is Fernald’s to keep indefinitely.

In a 1999 oral history interview with the Fernald Living History Project, Lisa Crawford reflected on Fernald’s complicated legacy. As a site of public history, Fernald’s contaminated landscape lives on as an indispensable warning so “something like this never happens again.” But its powerful environmental movement also offers hope. “One hundred years from now I really hope people will come back and say . . . ‘gosh, look what happened here, but they fixed it.’ Maybe not 100 percent but they did what they could at that point in time, and that will be our legacy.” For partisan times like ours, these are important lessons on how creativity, compromise, and environmental justice can help solve large-scale environmental problems, even if imperfectly. I invite you to read Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory and consider how these stories can help us build a safe and sustainable future.

Casey A. Huegel is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Cincinnati and a public historian with the National Park Service.

More from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series

Reimagining Taiwan Lives: Series Editor James Lin on Launching Taiwan and the World

Taiwan, a society of twenty-three million people in Asia, can be thought of as living two lives. From one perspective, it is a bright, vibrant democracy at the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights, avant garde art and film, and student activism. On the other hand, it is a geopolitical hotspot, caught in a great power rivalry and a lynchpin of the semiconductor industry, critical for global supply chains and militaries around the world. Between these two poles exist countless social, cultural, and political issues that animate Taiwan and the field of Taiwan studies, rich for scholarly excavation.

These issues drive the field of Taiwan studies at large and encouraged me and my colleagues, William Lavely and Madeleine Yue Dong, to launch a new series: Taiwan and the World.

In 2018, after the founding of the Taiwan studies program at the University of Washington, we worked with Lorri Hagman, then UW Press executive editor and now executive editor of special projects, to start a new monograph series that would highlight the groundbreaking humanities and social science scholarship about Taiwan. We see the field as having rich potential, not just for illuminating the issues that are unique to Taiwan, but serving as a cauldron for the larger social and political changes the world is seeing.

We are proud to announce the launch of the first book in our series, Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History by Niki J. P. Alsford. The book explores two dozen individuals from all walks of life—politician, popstar, doctor, prisoner, diplomat, hawker, just to name a few—from the nineteenth century to present. Each of them touches upon a significant event or social transformation in Taiwan, whether its serial colonizations under foreign empires, the White Terror period of martial law, or its transition to democracy. Through the windows of these individual lives, Alsford weaves together a narrative of the complexities of Taiwan’s history. Most important, it centers the voices of the Taiwanese themselves.

Alsford’s groundbreaking book represents the ideals that our series hopes to achieve. It offers a new perspective in approaching Taiwan—in this case, from the ground up, and from the perspective of ordinary and sometimes marginalized peoples. This “people’s history,” as Alsford explains, presents accounts from “the common people,” thus “accentuating the island’s interconnectivity and cultural complexity.” It is also meant to make Taiwan accessible to broader audiences. Focusing not on the geopolitical conflicts of statesmen and wars, Alsford instead brings to fore the lived experiences that readers inside and outside of the classroom can appreciate and relate to.

Taiwan Lives will be followed shortly by the second book in the series, Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule by Fang Yu Hu. Examining the complicated period of Japanese imperial rule in Taiwan (1895-1945), Hu explores how Japanese colonialism shaped social roles and cultural identities of women. Hu’s careful historical research offers rich oral history and archival accounts for readers interested in the intersection of education, gender, and empire.

As our series grows, we hope to explore the numerous issues that locate Taiwan on the frontier of social, cultural, and political concerns. As a series of islands situated in the Pacific, Taiwan has been interlinked with maritime communities and is exposed to the same pressures of climate change and ecological interactions as many other Pacific Island communities. Its society is a melting pot of Indigenous peoples, settlers from colonial histories, and newly arrived immigrants seeking better economic opportunities. Issues of indigeneity, identity, and race intersect with concerns of justice and rights. Taiwan has been in the vanguard of LGBTQ+ movements in Asia and has broken the glass ceiling for the highest levels of political office. But beneath the veneer of success also lie complexities over gender and equality. And as Taiwan’s complicated sovereignty is increasingly drawing the attention of nations around the world, its potential for conflict draws eyes to its politics on the largest geopolitical fault lines.

In the coming months and years, we are excited for books in the pipeline that explore Taiwan’s colonial past, its environmental and economic present, and its contested political future. We also welcome monograph submissions from interested authors who see their research and writing breaking new ground in Taiwan studies and who hope to reach wide audiences of students, educators, policymakers, and the general public. We intend for our upcoming books to redefine the frontier of Taiwan studies and emphasize the importance of Taiwan for understanding the major themes and problems in our world and society at large.

Interested authors should send book proposals to acquisitions editor Caitlin Tyler-Richards at ctylerri@uw.edu.

James Lin is assistant professor of international studies at the University of Washington and a historian of modern Taiwan. His research examines international agrarian development, from early twentieth-century rural reform and agriculture in China and Taiwan through its reimagining during later Taiwanese development missions to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Upcoming Event

The UW Taiwan Studies Program welcomes Professor Niki J. P. Alsford to discuss his new book, Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History: March 6, 3:30–5:00 pm at UW, Thomson Hall Room 317. Register to attend online or in person.

Niki J. P. Alsford is professor in Asia Pacific studies and director of Asia Pacific Institutes at the University of Central Lancashire. In addition, he is a research associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS, the University of London, and an associate member of the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oxford. Alsford is the author of Transitions to Modernity in Taiwan: The Spirit of 1895 and the Cession of Formosa to Japan (Routledge, 2017).

This event was made possible by the generous support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

The Role of the Arts and Artists in Social Justice Movements: Editor Laura Kina on the Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture Series

The Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture series encourages innovative interdisciplinary antiracist work that challenges and transforms our understandings of race, ethnicity, and the visual.

As we prepare for the College Art Association (CAA) annual conference, taking place in Chicago from February 14 to 17, we are pleased to announce the inaugural series publications: Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific, edited by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields, an interdisciplinary collection featuring historians, anthropologists, artists, and activists who explore the multifaceted forms of resistance to nuclear regimes; and Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art by Andrew Gayed, building on global art histories and transnational queer theory to illuminate contemporary understandings of queer sexuality in the Middle Eastern diaspora.

Below, series editor Laura Kina shares more about what critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture and how books in the series explore the role of the arts and artists in social justice movements, as well as the kinds of projects that will be considered and how to get in touch.

I am trained as an MFA visual artist—a painter who has been working in Asian American/Asian diasporic arts communities for over thirty years where the dividing line between artist, curator, activist, organizer, and community historian has long been blurred.

My entry to writing and editing grew organically through curating shows of fellow artists and working on public scholarship and archival work with my DePaul students for the Asian American Art Oral History Project and the Virtual Asian American Art Museum. I have since had the privilege of working with the University of Washington Press for two co-edited anthologies—with Wei Ming Dariotis, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and with Jan Christian Bernabe, Queering Contemporary Asian American Art.

How can we decolonize artistic practices, pedagogy, curatorial, and art history? How can we use the arts to work towards land back; rematriation; reparations; abolition; and boycott, divest, and sanction movements? What should be made visible and what must remain opaque or only shared within specific communities? . . . These are some the challenges critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture and that we look forward to exploring in the series.

Laura Kina

Coming out of community arts that center collaboration, I began to see intersectional and interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture from social justice movement building and BIPOC knowledge making its way into the academy and popular culture. For example, terms such as settler colonialism, anti-Black-racism, structural racism, and decolonization have entered our everyday lexicon through diverse political movements including the 2016–17 #NoDPL Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, the 2020 racial reckoning in the US led by Black Lives Matter, and the current protests against the occupation of Palestine and the war in Gaza. In the last few months, Palestinian symbols of resistance—like the kufiyah, watermelon, and white kite—have also entered mainstream visual vocabulary. In the art world, questions of labor rights, censorship of artists, and questions of who is behind funding art institutions and their accountability has made headlines.

How, where, when, and who tells the stories of these complex histories through the arts? How can we decolonize artistic practices, pedagogy, curatorial, and art history? How can we use the arts to work towards land back, rematriation, reparations, abolition, and boycott, divest, and sanction movements? What should be made visible and what must remain opaque or only shared within specific communities? How do we engage visibility without falling into the trap of neoliberal visibility politics?

These are some of the challenges critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture that we look forward to exploring in the series.

The first two works in the series, Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific and Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, reflect the goal, as outlined in our 2020 call for book proposals, to focus on art, new media, art history, visual anthropology, visual culture, craft, fashion, and other forms of cultural expression that brings together works that take up decolonization and social justice with an interdisciplinary and intersectional emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, and gender.

The series is committed to featuring books that center visual arts and media by, for, and about people of color, with themes of anti-capitalism, reparations, abolition, sovereignty, and the afterlife of slavery. Books in this series will feature critical work on white supremacy, settler colonialism, land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural appropriation.

Aligned with the dynamic character of critical ethnic studies, the books in this series engage themes of borders, migration, diasporas, and transnationalism, and the relationship of the visual to these movements.

We welcome books that highlight not only the work of artist-activists and the role of the arts in social justice movements but books that bring together art with critical work about artistic practice. We especially encourage single-authored books, including monographs and accessibly written books that cross disciplines and reach out to wider audiences, including artists, students, and other readers interested in visual topics. We will also consider well-crafted and innovative anthologies and edited volumes.

Please send book proposals to Larin McLaughlin at lmclaugh@uw.edu.

Laura Kina is an artist and a Vincent de Paul Professor in The Art School at DePaul University. She is the coeditor of War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art and Queering Contemporary Asian American Art.

The Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Cultures series advisory board includes: Iyoko Day, Mount Holyoke College; Sarita See, University of California, Riverside; Guisela Latorre, The Ohio State University; and Amy Lonetree, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Related Books

Behind the Covers: Author Greg Robinson on ‘The Unknown Great’

My new book, The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History, cowritten with Jonathan van Harmelen, is a collection of short pieces on remarkable people and things in Japanese American history. Beyond being interesting in themselves, when put together, the stories constitute a counter-history of ethnic Japanese in North America, refuting received ideas about the group.

When it came time to think about potential covers for the book, I was not sure what to propose. As the partner of a graphic designer, I long ago learned that producing an acceptable book cover is one of the most difficult aspects of book publishing. The designer must be able to come up with something that will please the author, the press’s marketing department and—one hopes—themself. The design must immediately express the idea of the work and attract the potential reader into choosing it (the old saw notwithstanding, many many people do in fact judge books by their covers!). The author can be as much a hindrance as a help. If an author proposes images for which the rights cannot be obtained or which are not sufficiently clear or high-resolution, it just makes life difficult for the designer.

Especially tricky is producing a cover for a book like The Unknown Great that revolves around a variety of themes. Whether such a cover is typographical or illustrative in nature, the same problem remains: How can the cover designer choose just one aspect of the book to express? How can the contrasting themes be dramatized in a way that leads to a unified presentation? To be sure, my previous collection with University of Washington Press, The Unsung Great, had a cover featuring a mosaic of portraits, and I found it most satisfying. Still, I did not want a cover that looked too similar to that one. On the other hand, none of the photos that I had found to illustrate the individual articles was powerful enough to carry the weight of the entire book’s meaning by itself.

It was then that I hit on the idea of proposing for the cover a striking image that I had just come across. In 2021, my collaborator Jonathan van Harmelen and I wrote a two-part article on the great photographer Toge Fujihira, and in the process of research we interviewed Fujihira’s two children. Toge’s daughter Kay Bromberg graciously invited us to visit the extensive archive that she maintained of her father’s work.

Sometime later, I accepted Kay’s invitation and visited the archive. I was bowled over by the variety and depth of Fujihira’s photography. While reviewing his work from the wartime period, which he had spent in New York City, I discovered a set of snapshots he took in the mid-1940s, at a beach on what looked like Long Island. In the snaps were a number of Nisei men and women in bathing suits; he photographed them alone and in teams—even one with them all together, piled on each other in a pyramid. While the majority of the images were of women, my eye was caught by one that featured a pair of smiling Japanese American men in bathing suits, happily embracing. Their affection for each other and the obvious ease they felt in holding their (shirtless) bodies against each other shined through.

Fujihira’s photo . . . expressed so many of the “marginal” stories and themes I had discovered in Japanese American history: Nisei outside the West Coast; the postwar lives that Japanese Americans built following their wartime incarceration; the presence of creative artists, including photographers, in their communities; and yes, Japanese American sexuality.

Greg Robinson

The photographs did not list any of the names of the people involved, and neither Kay nor I was able to identify the men in the picture. It was unclear whether they were friends, colleagues, or brothers, or whether they were romantic partners (though homosexuality would have generally been considered taboo in the United States at that time, and an openly gay couple shocking). The very mystery of their identities and connection to each other heightened the both the power and ambiguity of the image: Was it homoerotic, homosocial, or fraternal? Whichever the case, it was clear that in an era when Nisei, like other American men, were conditioned to restrain their emotions, at least in public, an image showing such open warmth between them was exceptional.

Kay generously gifted me a duplicate print of the image and agreed to let me publish it. At first, I wasn’t sure in what context I should present it. While it was unlikely that the men in the photo were still alive, some seventy-five years later, I worried whether they might have descendants who would criticize me for misrepresenting them. When I had the opportunity to propose a cover image for The Unknown Great, I realized that the image of the men from Fujihira’s photo would be perfect. It expressed so many of the “marginal” stories and themes I had discovered in Japanese American history: Nisei outside the West Coast; the postwar lives that Japanese Americans built following their wartime incarceration; the presence of creative artists, including photographers, in their communities; and yes, Japanese American sexuality. Yet it evoked these themes in symbolic, not representative, fashion.

In the end, it worked out superbly. Heng Wee Tan, the cover designer, agreed to incorporate the Fujihira photo into his design. Meanwhile, he had the happy idea of putting the type on a slant, which makes it appear that the image is in motion, passing from the margin toward the center. The color is an unusual shade of orange, marking the unorthodox nature of the contents. All these elements work together to highlight the book’s examination of the margins of Japanese American history.

Author’s Note: After writing this post, I received a message from the writer Susan Kiyo Ito, who identified the two men in the photo used on my book cover. They are, respectively, Kiyoshi and Asao Inouye, two native New Yorkers who were the older and younger brothers of Susan’s mother, Kikuko Inouye Ito. Toge Fujihira was a friend and basketball teammate of both Inouyes. Susan also identified the location of the photo as Lake George, New York. Susan believes that her father, Masaji Ito, who was a photographer, may have taken the photo in question. I found the image amid a series of photos in Fujihira’s archive, but I am unable to state definitively that it was his work. If it was not, I regret any unintentional misattribution.

Greg Robinson is professor of history at l’Université du Québec à Montréal and author of several books, including The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans and After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life.

Related Books

Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales by Elizabeth A. Nesbitt and David B. Williams

In the newly released Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State, published in partnership with the Burke Museum, renowned paleontologist Elizabeth A. Nesbitt teams up with award-winning author David B. Williams to offer a fascinating, richly illustrated tour through more than a half billion years of natural history. Ahead of their book launch at the Burke Museum on November 8, the authors share what inspired them to write the book, as well as a few fossil stories.

Washington State regularly makes the news for its geology. The eruption of Mount St. Helens, the Oso landslide, the Nisqually earthquake. We are also well-known for our mountains—the Olympics and Cascades—as well as the Missoula floods, arguably some of the greatest, most dynamic events in the planet’s 4.8 billion years of history.

We are far less famous for our fossils, and yet no matter where you wander in Washington, you are never very far from the past and the evidence of the plants and animals that came before us. You can find trilobites near the Idaho border, primitive horses on the Columbia Plateau, exquisite flowers in Republic, giant bird tracks near Bellingham, and curious bear-like beasts on the Olympic Peninsula. With abundant and well-exposed rock layers, Washington has fossils dating from ice age mammals only 12,000 years old back to marine invertebrates more than 500 million years old.

Despite the wealth of fossils, no one has ever written a guide to the state’s past life; the only exception is a small pamphlet produced in the 1960s. Certainly there were and are many paleontologists finding fossils and describing them but nearly all of the information appeared in scientific papers or, rarely, in a newspaper. In Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales, we bring years of knowledge and a deep passion for fossils to share the stories of life in Washington’s past.

At the heart of the book are twenty-four profiles. Organized chronologically with the youngest profile first, they allow the reader to dig deeper, unearthing stories, strata by strata. Each profile focuses on a specific plant, animal, or environment, often weaving in human history and geology, and always with a goal of fleshing out details necessary for a better understanding that will help make the fossils come to life. Ultimately, our goal is for you to come away with a more thorough appreciation of the state’s spectacular paleontology and geology.

We also highlight the stories of those who found the fossils. Many were discovered by paleontologists, but numerous fossils have been found by nonprofessionals, people who were simply observant and paying attention to the natural world around them. For example, Bette Willison, a schoolteacher in Clallam County, unearthed a partial skull with the roots of several teeth, that researchers determined was a carnivore new to science; in the Seattle area, many Ice Age mammal fossils have been found in the excavation for construction projects.

One of the exciting aspects of writing about paleontology is that the field is in a golden age. In particular, a diverse array of scientists are taking advantage of new technologies, such as DNA analysis, geochemistry, data modeling, X-ray computerized tomography (CT scans), and 3-D scanning and printing. This has allowed paleontologists to focus on understanding the plant’s or animal’s place in an ecosystem and how they related to other species they lived with and with other species past and present. In essence, their work helps visualize the extinct plants or animals as they were during their lives.

But paleontology is not simply about the study of the past. Researchers also have their eyes on the present and how they can help inform the issues of the future, including extinction and climate change. It is truly an exciting time to be a paleontologist and to share with the public the stories that fossils tell, particularly the stories of our state.

With more than a half billion years of history, Washington State has an enviable diversity of fossils. Each is unique. Each is interesting. Each tells a story of natural and human history. You don’t have to travel to exotic locations to find exciting fossils and do exciting science. It’s all right here.

A Million-Year-Old Migration – Oncorhynchus nerka

In August 2000, while fishing along the banks of the Skokomish River in Mason County, Jeff Heinis and Summer Burdick found a dead salmon. It had died about a million years earlier. Based on chemical analyses of the bones, pollen studies, and the abundance of other nearby fossilized salmon—full bodies and skulls, now housed at the Burke Museum—the salmon appears to have been trapped by an ice dam during its spawning migration. Based on the sedimentary evidence, salmon spawned in this river for about seventy years, leaving behind a legacy of a life history that continues to this day.

Cast of a complete sockeye salmon, Oncorhynchu nerka, made as a composite 28 inches (70 cm) long of four specimens of the salmon skeletons collected from the Ice Age lake beds near Shelton. The hooked jaw of the salmon and the abraded tail indicate that the fish were spawning in the lake. Individual bones and scales can be seen. Photo by Michael Rich.

Stonerose – Florissantia quilchenesis

Venture up to the Okanagan Highlands, in north-central Washington and adjacent British Columbia, and you can find leaves, fruit, and insects from plants and animals that lived 50 million years ago. They are some of the state’s most beautiful and exquisite fossils. At the time, this area was a high-elevation region dotted with active volcanoes, lakes, and forests of conifer and deciduous trees and shrubs. The stunning preservation occurs because volcanic rocks and ash accumulated in the lakes trapping layer upon layer of plants, fish, and insects, some so detailed that they look as if the animal or plant had only recently died.

This fossil flower, Florissantia quilchenensis, the size of a nickel, is an extinct member of the extensive Malvaceae family of plants that also includes hollyhocks, hibiscus, okra, and cotton. Paleobotanists propose that the flowers hung down from the stalk and were pollinated by insects or birds. Photo by Michael Rich.

Spirit Whales – Sitsqwayk cornishorum

Washington State is famous for its whales, fourteen species of which spend part of the year along the coast, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, or in Puget Sound. All are members of one of two groups of living whales: the odontocetes, or toothed whales, and the mysticetes, or baleen whales. Paleontologists have long sought to understand the evolutionary relationship between the groups. Only in recent years have they found the fossils to help them tell the story, in part because of fossils found in Washington including Sitsqwayk cornishorum, a named derived from the Klallam word that means “a powerful spirit from across the water said to bring wealth.”

Reconstruction of the oldest mysticete whale, Sitsqwayk cornishorum. Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto commissioned for the Burke Museum, used with permission.

Plotopterids of the Past – Tonsala hildegardae

Penguins in Washington? Doesn’t seem possible but it was 25 million years ago. Technically, they were penguin look-alikes but the state’s large, flightless fossil birds did have a common ancestry with penguins. First discovered in 1977 on the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, Tonsala hildegardae (the specific epithet honors pioneer avian paleontologist Hildegarde Howard) was a strong, two-meter-tall diving bird related to gannets and booby birds. They are just one of at least five species of extinct plotopterids (swimming wing) fossilized in Washington rocks.

Reconstruction of numerous plotopterid birds on the beach. These large flightless birds had an upright gait and swimming style similar to that of penguins, but they are more closely related to cormorants and darters. The fossils have been found only in the North Pacific. Artwork by Mark Witton.

Elizabeth A. Nesbitt is curator emerita of invertebrate and micropaleontology at the Burke Museum and associate professor of earth science at the University of Washington. Her distinguished scientific contributions to the paleontology of the Pacific Northwest have earned many awards and honors, including having a whale named for her, the Maiabalaena nesbittae.

David B. Williams is a naturalist, author, and educator. His many books include the award-winning Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound and Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography.

Elizabeth A. Nesbitt. Photo by Tim Kenney
David B. Williams. Photo by Andrew Croneberger

Upcoming Events

  • Book Launch. Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 7:00 PM at the Burke Museum, Seattle. At the kick-off event, coauthors Nesbitt and Williams will give a lively presentation complete with a slideshow and fossil specimens, followed by audience questions and a book signing. Books will be available from the Burke Store. Space is limited so registration is required.
  • Author Talk with Quimper Geological Society. Saturday, November 11, 2023, 4:00 PM at First Baptist Church, Port Townsend and via Zoom. Nesbitt and Williams will provide background on the process of writing the book and share some of the new science that has allowed paleontologists to tease out the 500-million-year-long story of life in the Pacific Northwest.
  • Author Talk with Port Townsend Marine Science Center. Sunday, November 12, 2023, 3:00 PM at Fort Warden Chapel, Port Townsend. As part of The Future of Oceans lecture series, the coauthors will discuss the book and highlight some of the marine organisms featured, including several unusual whales, a six-foot-tall bird that resembled a penguin, and the state’s oldest fossils, trilobites and archaeocyaths.
  • Holiday Bookfest with Phinney Books. Saturday, November 18, 2023, 2:00–4:00 PM at Phinney Center, Seattle. The annual Holiday Bookfest is an opportunity to meet and mingle with twenty-six celebrated local authors—including Nesbitt and Williams—and get their latest books signed. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Bureau of Fearless Ideas and the Phinney Neighborhood Association.

Visit our events calendar regularly for details on more upcoming events.

Related Books

Essential Workers and the American Labor Movement: Harvey Schwartz on “Labor under Siege”

“I can’t stay home. I move the world’s cargo,” declared Rudy Moreno of Los Angeles/Long Beach ILWU longshore Local 13. His words were later memorialized in The Dispatcher, the union’s newspaper, in the January 2021 issue dedicated to Moreno and other members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union who had already lost their lives to Covid-19 because they risked staying on the job. In the first year of the pandemic, as many as 40 ILWU longshore and several warehouse workers braving the risk of disease fell to Covid; as of today, some 50 ILWU members have died.

Early in the Covid pandemic, ILWU waterfront workers greeted and docked the 1,000-bed United States Naval Ship Mercy when it came to Los Angeles to help relieve the burden of the disease on local hospitals and medical facilities. And like many other workers in “front-line” industries whose ranks have been diminished by Covid’s ravages, ILWU longshore and warehouse members have continued to show up, to persevere through grueling round-the-clock shifts, and to risk their lives and health while moving and storing critical cargo—food, medicines, cars—that America depends on. In October 2021, current ILWU President Willie Adams met with President Joe Biden to address ongoing supply chain issues brought on by the disease. Since then, ILWU leaders have met repeatedly with public officials and shipping executives to help unjam pandemic-caused backups in West Coast ports.

Over the past two-and-a-half years, many “essential” workers have been publicly celebrated for their courageous efforts to keep hospitals and basic businesses functioning and the supply chain moving despite the perils of the Covid-19 pandemic. But celebrated or not, when workers have tried to unionize, their efforts have often been fiercely opposed. Despite some surprising successes in the 2022 organizing drives by employees at Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple, workers’ gains in these industries have involved ferocious battles against entrenched company resistance.

Under its long-serving president, Robert McEllrath, the ILWU’s struggles over the past two decades, described in Labor under Siege: Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era, reflect the difficulties faced by all unions in a challenging era for organized labor. Narrated in participants’ own words, this oral history will inspire workers in other industries now organizing and rejuvenating the American labor movement. With the ILWU’s long tradition of championing civil rights, social justice, equal opportunity, respect for diversity, and domestic and international labor solidarity, the union has endured numerous attacks going back to its founding in the 1930s. During the twenty-first century, the storied West Coast union has persevered despite serious threats from hostile corporations, government officials, and law enforcement agents. “As labor reasserts itself,” Laurie Mercier, professor of American history at Washington State University, recently wrote of Labor under Siege, “it can learn from those who recall the importance of effective leadership, maintaining solidarity locally and internationally, supporting social justice causes, and upholding the ILWU motto, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.'”

Harvey Schwartz is curator of the Oral History Collection for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union library in San Francisco. He is the author of The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938 and, with the University of Washington Press, Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU; Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Workers’ Oral History; and, with Ronald E. Magden, Labor under Siege: Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era.

Related Books

The Hauntings of Local History: Peter Boag on “Pioneering Death”

Admittedly, I see the world in terms of darkness rather than light, and in history as in life, I am drawn more to stories of human pathos than to tales of human triumph. I am bemused by “rosy retrospection”—the penchant of many to reflect on the positives of the past rather than on the negatives and to also, therefore, see the past as somehow better than the present.

Darkness, pathos, and the folly of rosy retrospection comprise the foundation of Pioneering Death. It tells the story of Loyd Montgomery, an impoverished eighteen-year-old who shot and killed his parents and a visiting neighbor on his family’s farm near the western Oregon town of Brownsville late on the fair autumn day of November 19, 1895. Little more than two months later, on a cool morning and just as the rising sun gilded the eastern sky above the Cascade Range, Loyd met his own end on gallows erected adjacent to the Linn County jail in the county seat of Albany.

I first became aware of the Montgomery murders when, back in the early 1980s, I began researching my own family’s history as connected to Brownsville, a community whose origins are rooted in the arrival there in the 1840s of its first white American settlers who came by way of wagons on the overland trails. When I began my work, local historians, the librarian, and museum docents who befriended me mentioned the murders. Given that the Montgomerys were among the most esteemed early American settlers of the area, when these local authorities spoke of that past tragedy, they did so more in hushed tones and as an aside to the official, celebratory “pioneer” history of that community. Clearly, Loyd’s grim tale haunted Brownsville long after it had happened. It took me close to four decades of intermittent research and unremitting reflection to figure out why.

My own digging, so-called, into the Montgomery murders began by accident on January 10, 1987. It was a dreary and rainy Saturday morning when I appeared at the Linn County Historical Museum in Brownsville to conduct research in its collections for my doctoral dissertation. That project later became my first book, and it focused on the environmental history of the southern Willamette Valley. (The reader will detect a clear pattern by now: my preoccupation with history—my need to make sense of its shadows—has taken me back time and again to Brownsville.) The gloominess of that January day and the relative darkness of the room in which I labored provided an atmosphere fitting for what I chanced upon—a photocopy of the special edition of the Brownsville Times for November 20, 1895. Its sole article is entitled “A TRIPPLE MURDER.” It was the first account of that crime to appear anywhere. It was also the one written closest to the event and by someone whose very eyes beheld the aftermath of the tragedy within hours of its commission. Sadly, only random issues from the 1890s of that newspaper are preserved. No issue among those, other than this fragment, comes from the period when the Montgomery murders otherwise lit up the headlines of papers in communities up and down the West Coast.

Albert Cavender, its writer, was the editor of the Brownsville paper. It took some time for word of the violent killings to make its way to his offices. By then, night had already fallen. But the resourceful newsman reached out to local boys—similar in age to the murderer—who, on horseback and with lanterns they must have grasped as tightly as anxiety gripped them, illuminated the way for the journalist as he headed up the country lane into this local heart of darkness. Cavender’s description of the landscape of death that he found there beguiled me—the bodies and the blood; desiccated hop vines in surrounding fields yet clinging to their poles long since the late summer harvest had ended; the Montgomery family’s forlorn and weathered house sitting beneath the sprawling limbs of an immense maple tree; and the canine companion of the neighbor-victim that took up vigil at his slaughtered master’s side, refusing to be lured from it. Those forbidding images and so many others in that two-page document bespoke the poverty, tragedy, darkness, and pathos not just of the victims and the boy murderer but of their community, the larger region, and even the nation.

Cavender’s story had nothing to do with my dissertation’s subject. But it so haunted me that I took a copy of it, promising myself that one day I would do something with it. For the next three decades and more, Loyd Montgomery became an unwelcome companion to me as I struggled to piece together who he was, what he did, how he and his violent actions fit into history, and how to craft a coherent story from it all. As it turned out, I needed those years—time spent at four universities, countless hours in the classroom, and intervals for producing three other books on quite different topics—to collect the research and, more, come to comprehend why Loyd haunted me as much as he did the community that he was more a part of than he was apart from.

Apart from rather than a part of community history is how local memory preferred it. The vast literature that exists on matricide and patricide, moreover, fortifies that construction. That is, psychology, criminology, and other social sciences that dominate parricide studies are by nature disciplines that, with rare exception, are disinterested in the larger, historical forces that I have come to understand contribute mightily to why children have more than occasionally killed their parents. Local tradition and the traditional approaches to explaining parricide had worked together—intentionally, defensively, or both—to bury the truth so deeply about Loyd that I simply needed the time and the education that time affords to unearth it.

As I excavated Loyd’s life, slowly peeling back the accumulated layers of historical and disciplinary sediments and sentiments, a much darker tale revealed itself than simply that of an isolated, though horribly gruesome anecdote. His story is really the underbelly of so many a local Oregon history (and local histories elsewhere in North America) that celebrate the “pioneer” foundations of community, state, and nation. Constructing these histories involved willfully burying the truth about the brutal, murderous, and even genocidal nature of them. But more, the violent expressions within Oregon “pioneer” families were in reality and are in the very wanton act of trying to forget them, an integral part of the story of American-settler violence against Indigenous people. The messy, unresolved, and troubling tension between the darkness of reality and the human need for rosy reflection in all this is just one of the many stories that Pioneering Death exhumes from our haunting past.

Peter Boag is professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He is author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, and Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon. His latest book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon is available now.

From The Street Smart Naturalist: Spring is Nigh

I am big fan of spring. I love the unpredictable weather, the reemergence of plants and beasts, the frisson of reproductive potential and have long enjoyed watching for signs of the vernal world. Recently, I have been inspired by an unlikely source: George Orwell. (I plan on writing about him in the future so won’t say much now.) In a splendid little essay titled “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” he wrote (in April 1946):

The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London.

Orwell then asks if it’s “wicked to take pleasure in spring,” considering the challenges of the world, which were certainly epic and severe in post–World War II London, and sadly still are now. Shouldn’t people be more focused on more serious issues than whether a toad appears and pursues his or her life? He categorically rejects those who hold such a view and offers a wonderful sentiment: 

I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and—to return to my first instance—toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

Here then are a few observations reaffirming the beauty, resiliency, and healing power of spring, in my fair city of Seattle.

Varied thrush – Graham Gerdeman, Macauley Library.

Varied thrush (Ixoreus naevius) – For the past few weeks, I have been thrilling to the trilling of varied thrushes. These orange-necked, black-bibbed cousins of robins typically start calling at dawn in a haunting, monotone whistle suffused with the mysteries of a mountain forest. Summer residents of higher elevation, they migrate down to hang out with we lowland dwellers from late fall to spring. Oddly, this year is the first that I have noticed varied thrushes in spring—they typically visit our yard in autumn—so it has been an exquisite joy to hear them. The trilling notes feel not only like a rejoicing of spring but also a call to turn one’s thoughts to the mountains.

Crocus (Crocus sp.) – Found in hundreds of locations around the city, these lovely irises are one of the first to provide a nourishment of early season color. With a name derived from the Greek term for saffron, crocuses come in scores of species and originally grew from Portugal to western China. Horticulturists have cultivated about thirty varieties of which five are considered to be commercially important. The best known, saffron (Crocus sativus), comes from the three thread-like stigmas, between 5,000 and 12,500 of which produce an ounce of the fragrant spice. Cultivated by Egyptians and Romans, saffron reached China in the seventh century, and by the fourteenth, it had permeated England, France, and Germany. By the way, you can grow C. sativus in Seattle, though you will more likely encounter one of the many cultivars heralding spring in yards across the city.

Camas, Charles Knowles, Wikipedia.

Camas (Camassia quamash) – Many years ago when we bought our house, I planted a few camas bulbs. Since then, they have spread across our yard, emerging in spring like green signposts of the bounty to come. I am not the first to encourage the growth of these edible roots. For generations, Indigenous people of Puget Sound burnt the prairies south of Tacoma around Nisqually and Fort Lewis and on islands in Puget Sound to foster camas growth, which they harvested in spring. One had to be careful though. As botanist David Douglas noted in April 1825 about camas bulbs: “assuredly they produce flatulence: when in the Indian hut I was almost blown out by strength of wind.” In contrast, botanist William Fraser Tolmie of the Hudson’s Bay Company wrote of the “rich and level prairies . . . [their] surface enamelled with a profusion of blue flowered kamass.” Our camas certainly don’t compare, but I still rejoice when the flowers blossom and blue ponds of shimmering light grace our yard. 

Red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) – Noisy, territorial, and garnished by vivid red epaulettes, red-winged blackbirds have been out chattering of late with their distinctive konk-la-ree calls. They are denizen of watery locales, such as Green Lake, the Center for Urban Horticulture, and Echo Lake, where males flaunt their garish shoulder patches as a sign of territoriality. Studies have shown that if the birds intend to fight and protect their turf, they will display their badge of red, but if they are merely “visiting” or “testing” a new territory, they may not display and wait to see what the present owner does. Perhaps we could take a lesson. Be patient and sport red epaulettes but only flare them when necessary. Otherwise, chill out.

David B. Williams is a naturalist, author, and educator. His many books include the award-winning Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography, Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City, and most recently Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound. Subscribe to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind.

Can You Hear the Voices of the Girls?

One Left and the Korean “Comfort Women”

Almost a year ago six Asian women, four of them Korean, were shot and killed in Atlanta. More recently, here in western Washington, we have learned of human trafficking centered in a massage parlor. For us, this violence perpetrated against women echoes the victimization of the more than 200,000 Korean girls who were coerced into sexual servitude by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Coincidental with the attack in Atlanta, the ongoing controversy about the circumstances of the Korean “comfort women”—the euphemism by which these girls have come to be known—was rekindled in an essay by a Harvard law professor claiming that the girls were recruited and contracted as sex workers. This essay and the ensuing outrage drew extensive media coverage nationwide.

As the translators of the first Korean novel to focus on the “comfort women”—Kim Soom’s Han myŏng, published as One Left by the University of Washington Press in 2020—we feel it is crucial that the voices of these girls be heard alongside that of the Harvard professor. And it is precisely those voices we hear in the novel, much of the detail based on the documented testimony of the Korean women who survived sexual servitude during World War II but did not break their self-imposed silence until the 1990s. By allowing us to hear of their experiences in the “comfort stations” as girls—some of them had yet to reach their teens and were premenstrual when taken from their ancestral villages in Korea—Kim Soom has restored to historical memory the overlooked and disavowed stories of a marginalized group of women, and by extension countless other victims of human trafficking. It is not just Korean girls who were taken to the “comfort stations”—if we add girls from China, Southeast Asia, the Netherlands, and Japan itself, the number swells to an estimated 400,000, according to scholars. In recent decades we have heard news reports of similar atrocities perpetrated against girls in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Contrary to the presumption of some observers of Korea-Japan relations and the “comfort women” controversy, One Left is not an exercise in Japan bashing. Instead, the novel attempts to remind us that each of the 200,000 girls taken from their homes in Korea was someone’s daughter, sister, and playmate, that the pain of their seizure was felt by families, villages, indeed by an entire nation. By allowing us to hear the voices of these girls, their testimony cited in more than 300 endnotes in her novel, Kim Soom offers us an opportunity to exercise our capacity for empathy and thereby work for reconciliation, healing, and closure.

Please listen to the voices of the girls in One Left and then take note that only 15 survive today. Let us remember these 200,000 girls not as an anonymous group of victims consigned to the remote fringes of our collective memory but as individuals who, like all of us, were each possessed of identity, agency, and family. And let us hope that by hearing their voices we can, in some small way, work for a more humane and a less contentious and divisive future.

Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are longtime residents of Seattle and translators of modern Korean fiction. Ju-Chan Fulton worked for thirty years for Northwest and Delta Airlines. Bruce Fulton teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of British Columbia and is the editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, scheduled for publication in 2022. One Left is available now.