Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Stephen Sumida

Interview of Stephen Sumida (SS), conducted by Ken Tokuno (KT) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project via Zoom, on January 25, 2023. Stephen speaks about his education, his interest and contributions to the then-emerging Asian American and local literatures, the founding of the Talk Story Conference, and the early years of Bamboo Ridge. Stephen also recalls Marie Hara, Arnold Hiura, and others.

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Stephen Sumida (SS) on January 25, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Ken Tokuno (KT) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is one session in length.

Stephen Sumida and Ken Tokuno have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

KT: Okay, well, we are here with Steve Sumida. What we are doing is an oral history interview for Bamboo Ridge Press as part of our oral history project, and, Steve, if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you one question I had already asked you just for the record?

SS: Sure.

KT: Where and when were you born?

SS: I was born at what’s called ‘Aiea, which was a fairly small plantation town. Back when I was born there was a plantation hospital called South Shore Hospital, which was a little outside the town of ‘Aiea, near where the hospital called Pali Momi of Pearl Ridge is now. That was the local medical center at that time. Yeah, and that was in 1946, in July 1946.

KT: Okay. What kind of children’s literature were you exposed to when you were growing up?

SS: It was the books from a public library that many American children were growing up reading. I can’t remember much of it, except some of the series in the public libraries were, for instance, “Boxcar Kids.” I don’t know what else. I mean, what we had in school everybody of that time remembers reading and can joke about reading—“Jack and Jill” books in kindergarten, first and second grade. I think that’s where we got a grounding in how to read. But it got me to think later on about how different our reading experience was in Hawai‘i, when we were kids, from what it was for our contemporaries, our peers on the so-called mainland, anywhere on the mainland. To elaborate a little I can say that, for instance, whenever in Jack—the “Jack and Jill” books, for instance—Excuse me, they were the “Dick and Jane” books. Whenever they talked about the changing seasons, whether it’s autumn leaves, or snow, or coming of spring, there was no such thing in Hawai‘i. So reading for me growing up was pretty much fantasy.

KT: Oh, yeah.

SS: Even when our mother got us some sort of Asian theme books like the “Brothers Ping,” or something like that—

KT: Right.

SS: —who raised ducks in China, you know. But that, too, was an exotic place. I mean, that was outside our Hawai‘i experience. Pretty much one way or another reading was about outside, so what we read seemed to me not really connected with our everyday lives.

KT: Yeah.

SS: But that was learning how to read, and we learned a lot about things like the seasons that way. It wasn’t until, after high school, when I went away to college in Massachusetts that I saw the reality of changing autumn leaves.

KT: And so when talking about high school, what kind of literature did you read or write about in high school?

SS: Well, I gotta say that we had a pretty good curriculum when I went to high school at Mid-Pac, Mid-Pacific Institute. The English classes were quite diligent about having us read, you might say, the customary canon of American and English literature appropriate for high school readers. But again I must say that what we read and our relationship to what we read was nothing like what later on caught my interest when I was in college and I really took serious interest in, in literature and reading. In high school I just did the homework and enjoyed the English classes because the teachers were exceptional, in my experience anyway. So that was good, but we learned mostly to summarize plots and characters. We didn’t learn how to read analytically or understand that we were reading analytically, to say how and why the plots and characters were artistically determined and handled by the authors. Even if we were analyzing, we pretty much took the interpretations as given to us by the teachers.

KT: Yeah, hmm. So you didn’t really feel connected with much of the literature you read all the way through high school.

SS: Yeah. One of the few exceptions was, if you’re wondering about, how about Hawai‘i’s literature or something like that—the one exception might have been Bob Hongo’s Hey, Pineapple. It was a novel about Korean War vets and their adventures during the Korean war. That was by Hongo, Bob Hongo. It was popular in Hawai‘i, for its time, in the 1950s, because it was about Hawai‘i’s Korean War soldiers and vets, and it was like going out to see the movie, which was very popular, Go for Broke—

KT: Oh, right!

SS: —you know, with all the military emphasis and the rise of the veterans in Hawai‘i coming of age and becoming powerful in Hawai‘i. Well, that kind of writing was of interest to us, but it wasn’t as if we read that—wasn’t as if I read Hey, Pineapple and said, “Wow, there’s Hawai‘i’s literature” by Hawai‘i’s people. It was just something that the grown-ups passed on to me and said, “Hey, this is about us,” so we read it and we had fun with it.

KT: So what was the first time you felt like you were connected to something that you read?

SS: Well, a long time later, a long time later, in 1975, I was in San Francisco towards the end of summer, beginning of the fall term. I was returning to University of Washington for the fall term in graduate school, 1975. On the way, in San Francisco I went to City Lights Bookstore.

KT: Yeah.

SS: On the North Beach there, was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, and as I was coming up the stairs from the back basement of that bookstore, I look to my right. On the shelf that was alongside the stairway, suddenly there was this green spine of a book staring at me. It was a very skinny book, and it was All I Asking for Is My Body by a Milton Murayama.

KT: Murayama, right.

SS: And I look at this title and the author, I said, “Hey, I know this language,” and I pulled it out. I bought it and I read it in one sitting. It caught my attention. Of course it reminded me of Bob Hongo’s Hey, Pineapple simply because it was in Pidgin and mixed language. You know all that kind of thing, and it also was by somebody from Hawai‘i. So that connection kind of made me begin to think of there must be other works like this, too, you see.

KT: Hmm [affirmative].

SS: You see, and not only that, but it made me feel like, I can read this and I can read it critically without having to be told how to read it critically, because I know something of the contexts that are assumed within the storytelling and that really struck me. And it wasn’t until just after I read that book that—at University of Washington, back in grad school, I was introduced to something called Asian American literature. And I said, “Yeah, I got it. I got one book. Here, All I Asking for Is My Body,” and that was a beginning for me. When you ask, what was the first time I felt connected to something in literature, it was a different kind of connection from reading about Moby Dick, for instance.

KT: Yeah.

SS: I mean, even when reading Moby Dick, it didn’t occur to us, nobody asked, “What does this say about the Pacific and the Pacific in the society, culture, history of America?” You see, I mean about the Imperialism and all of that. No, never connected until now. I could now look at the Pacific as a place that was a site of literature that I could read critically and begin to grasp the imperialism that Melville was implying without my being coached. Reading Murayama’s novel showed me this.

KT: Were you able to find other books like Murayama’s that got you connected to—?

SS: Well, what happened was that fall of 1975 when I returned to my graduate school teaching assistant position at University of Washington, Garrett Hongo, a nephew of Bob Hongo, found me in my office on the third floor of Padelford Hall. He saw my name at the door. Garrett is a very arrogant guy. He’s younger than us by a few years and he said, “How can there be a Sumida in the English department?” So he stuck his head in the door and introduced himself as the oldest yonsei writer in America, and announced why he was a yonsei because his great grandfather—something like this and that.

KT: Okay.

SS: His family was at Hongo Store, at Volcano, Big Island, and he talked about his Uncle Robert, the author of Hey! Pineapple. He proceeded to recite a poem of his. So—he just stuck his face into my face and he started spouting off this way, and he said he had come to Seattle to stir things up, to introduce Asian American literature and do I know what this is? I say no, but you got me interested. He brought to U Dub, beginning that year, writers like Frank Chin and Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, and many others. We brought in a whole bunch of writers. I say “we” because I partnered with him to help bring these writers there. Principally, first of all, Frank Chin and Lawson Inada introduced the idea that if I were to finish my Doctorate in the English department at U Dub, I could well be or become the first English department faculty member anywhere in the world who was researching, that is, studying and teaching Asian American literature. Well, you know, we were told in the English department at that time at U Dub that, when we choose our dissertation topics and when we write our dissertations, we should be making a contribution to the profession, to the profession of literary studies, and I was up to that time majoring, so to speak, in the British Renaissance, 16th and 17th century, which was so overwhelmed with interest from grad students in the field. You know, I was worried. I said, I don’t know if I can contribute anything “original.”

KT: Yeah.

SS: But I had my education. It was a fairly strong background and I thought, it’s incumbent on me to do something original, and then Hongo comes along, and then Lawson Inada and Frank Chin, and they tell me that there’s this field of literature that’s emerging and you owe it to your people to get involved in it, and nobody is doing this in an English department anywhere as yet. And I said, “Well, that’s what I’m supposed to do as a grad student in this department.” So I took it on. I said, yeah.

There was a research scholar who was also a lecturer, senior lecturer at the University of Washington at that time in English and in Comparative Literature. He was Sam Solberg, S. E. Solberg, who was originally a specialist, a PhD in Comparative Literature at University of Washington, in Korean Poetry, modern Korean poetry, and he had spent his years living and researching in Korea. He came back to Seattle, and he kind of stumbled upon Asian American literature he found in libraries. His interest was so keen, and at the same time so wide, to look at the literature by people of the place where he was at. He was at Seattle and he began to find in Suzzallo Library, the UW research library, references to Asian American writers. There was no other way to call them, except by their specific Chinese American, Japanese American, Filipino American, and so on, “identities.” Almost from a start, I was introduced to him and he took me under his wing, showed me his files and notes all on these writers, and I say, “Wow! I gotta read them.” At that time it was possible for me to look up, find and read every Asian American author and work that we knew of, so I set out to do that. At the same time Garrett Hongo had already applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant to hold an Asian American Writers’ Conference at the University of Washington, Seattle, and it would be the second such conference after the first one that took place at Oakland Museum in 1975. Hongo said in 1976 we’re going to have a conference here, in Seattle, a national conference of Asian American writers, and “And you’re gonna coordinate it.”

KT: Hmm [affirmative].

SS: I said “Me? Well, okay.” Why? Because he was too busy writing, and, doing his activist work, taking on the responsibility and the happy work, too, of directing plays, in the Asian American theatre group that had begun here in Seattle. The group had begun, before Hongo, as the Theatre Ensemble of Asians, TEA. Hongo renamed it the Asian Exclusion Act. This name deliberately evoked all kinds of ironic histories and ideas about us being “Americans.” So it was—the activity was just bursting out and I became the coordinator of the Pacific Northwest Asian American Writers’ Conference and also acted on stage.

KT: Okay, if I may I want to step back because we’re getting too far into the future. I know I already asked you about your undergraduate work off the record, but I’d like to go back and ask again about your experience at Amherst, especially your freshman composition class.

SS: Yeah, as I said, in high school, I had no major interest in literature, really. I liked it because the teachers were very encouraging. I thought I was in science and math, and I went to Amherst College thinking that, but even so, I was beginning to find that my grasp, my real understanding of math, and for that matter, science was rather shaky; that I was I again just depending on what I was told. I could not even begin to think, in high school, that I would need a theoretical understanding of mathematics and of physics, for instance. Now this was required of us at that time at Amherst College, and while we in the freshman class of 300 students were required to take Calculus and Physics, we were blasted. I mean, we were just blasted out of the water, and we had all come from top ranks in good high schools and for some of my classmates, top high schools in the country. We were in a whole different league when it came to the way that our professors in college taught us and what they expected of us.

It was really something. I was growing shaky there, but in the required English composition class, which to this day, to some of my classmates, is the most daunting of all, I began to find a kind of refuge. From the first class, the first day of college, we’re told in the English class that you gonna write three papers in this class every week.

KT: [Laughs.]

SS: Every class meeting you gonna turn in a paper. For the entire year. And I tell you, you know, we—it was so astonishing that we couldn’t even think of what we’re being told so we just thought basically that we know how to do this. You know, we gave our valedictorian talks right? And it took me just overnight to write that first paper. Big deal. We were just hack writers and, boy, the professors let us know right away. Who are you? 18 years old? You can talk of—you think you can talk about humanity and humankind and society and about what the world needs and how to understand the peoples of the world—all this valedictorian talk that we had either spoken ourselves or had thought we admired when our valedictorian said so at high school graduation.

The next, the second and the third class meetings, were all out. I mean, the English professors just threw our papers out. I should say, when the first paper came back to us, not one of us was proud. But I soon found a way to write such that it was my outlet. It was my way to express and to deal with the intense homesickness that I had, really it was homesickness, and in about the second week of the term, the second week of the course, our professor, who happened to be the chair of the English department, of our small section of English composition said, “You know, you guys think you can tell me about what society is and what it needs in order to be a civil society or something like that. But how do you know any of this? How do you know anything you’re saying? How do you know? What do you know?” You know? And he happened to let slip—I think it was kind of imprudent of him to say so, so early in the course, “All you have is your personal experience. You know about how to interact with other people.” And the word in question at that time, in the course, was “sincerity.” What do you mean by “sincerity,” and how do you know what sincerity is? and we all write, “According to Webster, ‘sincerity’ is—” you know, blah blah blah, like that. Some students would note that Noah Webster was one of the founders of Amherst College, in 1821. They were trying to show off their knowledge, just the same as I’m doing now. The English professors weren’t impressed. They themselves were required to know the history of the College and all about Webster.

KT: Okay.

SS: “But what is your experience? Were you ever sincere in your life?” And so we try to write about that. The next assignment was, what then is “insincerity”? “Write a paper about that,” the assignment commands. And by then I just caught on. So, okay, I’m gonna write about the last conversation I had with our neighbor woman on our farm in ‘Aiea and it’s the Sumida Watercress Farm and the neighbor was the Wong family. I talked with her because Bishop Estate, at that time, had not renewed their lease. It’s all lease land and the Sumida Farm too. It’s all lease land. In 1960, Bishop Estate had given the Wongs’ lease to my father to make a bigger development out of our one farm. The Wongs had to move away, and in 1964 that was my last conversation with Mrs. Wong, who had kind of, you know, been an aunty to us three small kids on the farm, my brother and me and the one neighbor boy. It was a difficult conversation, because Mrs. Wong and I knew but couldn’t say that we, our family, my father was taking over their lease, and we just said our goodbyes and it was really sad. But I wrote about that and the professor then—it was then into the second week of the course—got my paper mimeographed for all the students, my classmates, all 300 of the freshmen, to read in their sections of class, for the professors to read this to the class, my paper, and I was so embarrassed. I mean, I said oh, man, am I a super example of what not to do? This was routine for the English composition course. Every class meeting, sample papers were given anonymously to the writer’s section of the course. We called these the “Shit Sheets.” I was the Big Shit, I thought, that day.

To my surprise, the professor said, “Somebody now understands what we’ve been asking you to do. How do you know what sincerity is? How do you know what insincerity is? You know from your own experience, and you should tell it to us. Tell it in what else you know, which is your own language.” So even though I wrote in pidgin—some of the paper was a dialogue in pidgin—that was okay. I wrote totally in the first person, and that was okay. Professor was telling everybody that somebody understands “what we’re asking you to do,” and from and there, I enjoyed the English course as much as possible. I mean it was tough, it was really tough.

But I wrote those three papers a week, and I thought it over and I said, I’m not doing that well in Chemistry. I’m not doing well at all in Physics, and none of my classmates seem to feel confident about their abilities either. I came to Amherst declaring I was in pre-med. I said, I’m going to pursue this English thing. So that’s how I went on to the next course, which was a study of literature, Intro to British and American Literature, and there I stayed. What I liked was that these literature courses, and in a way the composition course too, told me that “Hey listen. There’s something serious going on when a writer sits down to write what the writer wants to be taken seriously, even in humor. Even Mark Twain wanted to be taken seriously.” So we have to try to understand the writer as another human being, not simply impose our own opinion about what this writer was writing about.

I said, hey, man, you mean to say I can look at a line of poetry—as in your poem, Ken—and I can see how the words relate to one another and how the first line and the last line of your poem contrast and if by contrast, relate to each other, and there’s a story from line A to line Z and what that story is inside your poem. I said, wow, you know, you can actually take this poem apart and put it together in an insightful way, which is to say in my understanding you, not just my vague impression of you, you know, not just a reflection of my own impressions. I really liked that. It was no longer just the mysterious thing of oh, yeah, about literature anybody can say anything you want to say about a work of literature. I said, a human being is actually trying to say something to me that I may not know, and I gotta try to learn from that person. And, you know, to this day that’s about it.

KT: Yeah, I might’ve actually started touching on this already, but how have your mainland experiences and your undergraduate years shaped your perceptions and appreciations for Asian American and especially Hawai‘i-based literature?

SS: Yeah, okay. Garrett Hongo, Frank Chin, Lawson Inada, Hisaye Yamamoto—writers like that introduced me to Asian American literature, and they kind of gave me a mission, what I need to accomplish as a doctoral student and finally, a person with a PhD. I told them, you know, “I will join you in this venture, but please don’t treat me as if my education up to this time has been irrelevant. I don’t know anything about Asian American literature yet, but I know something about British and American literature, and it’s invaluable to me, you know. I take it seriously: What I know and how I know it, and please don’t treat me as if my education has been irrelevant.”

They said, “Hey, we’re the same as you. That’s the same education we had and yet something happened to each of us to see that our own experience also mattered enough for us to write about it.” Lawson in particular said, “Yeah, I love that seventeenth-century British literature, and all the sonnets, and all that kind of stuff.” Lawson and I would talk about really obscure British poets of that time and I asked, “You know about these guys?” He said, “Yeah, that’s how I was educated.” So I said, “So we’re not all that different in our interests, after all.” He said, “Yeah.” He fully meant it too, “We are American.” And somehow out of that, we’re trying to create a literature. We’re trying to create a literature to add to what we were confined to during our prior educations, and that those backgrounds were where we came from.

With that beginning, I’ve always thought it important that my students, too, should look very comprehensively at literature, and not exclusively and in an exclusionary way, saying, I’m only interested in Asian American because I am Asian American. No. Not that at all. Not that at all and I felt that this was the way by which other people of other races and ethnicities and, in life, can of course get into the field too. But this, this position that I took, too, has been controversial. I mean at that time there were lots of people who said, “You’re talking about Asian American literature because you’re Asian American.” It means that only Asian Americans can be interested in and can understand this literature, and I really resisted that idea.

KT: That kind of ties into my next question: To what extent do you think literature is political, and how has that shaped your work?

SS: Well, I know it’s a cliche in a partisan way to say that “Well, of course, literature is political.” Everything social is political, you know. But the study of Asian American literature got me connected and interested in not only analyzing the lines of poems like yours, Ken, but also in the context, the historical context for instance, and that involves society, and an integral part of that is the politics, and so literature is political. All of it is stuff that human beings do when they engage in social activities, and literature to me is social activity, and of course, politics is involved in that. Yeah, and it was the study of Asian American literature that got me to understand and to practice this notion, of how society and politics and especially history are involved in literature, both the writing and the reading of literature.

KT: Yeah, and to personalize that question in a way, how has your identity as an Asian American influenced your scholarly choices and directions?

SS: Yeah, it did in that, you know, in the follow-up, immediately after I said to these Asian American writers that I think my prior education in literature has to be relevant to what we call Asian American literature now, so it’s not just a matter of limiting my identity as a Japanese American or an Asian American, but if and when I enter this field, the next step is for me to make my contribution and I’m going to make my contribution researching and writing about the literature that I don’t know yet; that is the Asian American literature of Hawai‘i. That will be my contribution to the development of the field of Asian American literature. So, immediately I got into that. I did say because Hawai‘i is a special interest to me. Yeah, because of who I am, but I’m going to study this the way I learned to study other literature, yeah?

KT: Thank you. Moving towards Hawai‘i, how did you come to conceive of the 1978 Talk Story Conference and how did you know Marie Hara? What was her role in that conference?

SS: Okay, okay. So we put on the Pacific Northwest Asian American Writers Conference in the summer of 1976. It was a very big thing, written up in local press media, also because it was America’s bicentennial and here, we’re making a statement with Asian American literature about the Bicentennial of the United States of America. This is the country we are now, and we are Americans. We are Asian Americans, which is not a simple notion. One of the people who attended the conference from Hawai‘i was Arnold Hiura. Arnold and I were already very close friends and fellow literature grad students at the University of Washington. He got his master’s degree in the English department, and it was in American literature. We met in 1975, I think so. Same time I met the Asian American authors and Arnold and I became colleagues and peers at that time. He got his master’s degree and he left Seattle, went back to Hawai‘i, and was teaching there at University of Hawai‘i as a lecturer, which was very nice, and then we had the Pac NW conference in the summer of ’76. He came back to Seattle for that, and he was very excited about it and was very excited that he was participating because we were so close, then he said—we both said, “Hey, we gotta do this in Hawai‘i, too. So why don’t we plan to do this?” I said, is anybody else there interested in this kind of thing: Asian American literature? Or Hawai‘i’s literature within the category of Asian American literature, or vice versa: Asian American literature in a category of Hawai‘i’s literature, whatever? Anybody interested in doing this? He said, “Yeah, there’s another instructor in the English Department. Her name is Marie Hara.” Arnold and Marie had already begun talking about this kind of literature. He introduced me to Marie, when I returned to Hawai‘i myself, after the Pacific Northwest Asian American Writers’ Conference. This was in late July 1976. I returned to Hawai‘i, thinking that I would stay there and do my research in Hawai‘i’s literature and write my dissertation and be teaching part time at University of Hawai‘i while living and working somehow on my family’s farm. Arnold introduced me in person to Marie and the three of us started working together immediately to plan what we’re gonna do to hold a conference like we had in Seattle.

Now this is how Bamboo Ridge comes into it. I said, “Hey, besides Milton Murayama, who participated in the conference in Seattle; besides him I know of and have written about and talked about in the conference another writer. That’s Darrell Lum, because he had published his story in a literary journal at the University of Hawai‘i, the story called ‘Primo Doesn’t Take Back Bottles Anymore.’” And I said, “This guy Darrell Lum is around here someplace. We ought to go look up this guy Darrell Lum and, you know, beginning with that, find other writers who are at work today.” And through Darrell, we found immediately Eric Chock. You, see? And it went from there and they were primed and ready. Yeah, we got all these other writers we learned about, too, but weren’t organized. We just know each other and there’s no, well, there’s no academic foundation for what we’re doing. We just do it on our own. And we each said, “Well, I don’t know if we’re doing academic stuff, but you know, we just want this conference.” We began to gather the writers up and learn who they were and we just had a blast. We decided that it would take us two years to plan this conference because it hadn’t happened in Hawai‘i before. It was such a bare beginning that we laughed.

It was Marie’s husband, John Hara, in our initial meetings, who was always there, thinking critically and speaking critically. He said, “Look, you guys are talking about having a literary conference. Up to now the words ‘literature’ and ‘Hawai‘i’ have never been put together in one single sentence before and you guys started trying to do this thing that Hawai‘i has never heard before? Hawai‘i’s literature. Are you crazy?” John challenged us. “You can’t call it ‘Hawai‘i’s literature.’ You gotta call it something else.”

As it happened, in September of 1976, just as soon as Arnold, Marie, and I, and John Hara, too, in the household, got together like that, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was released with publicity in Hawai‘i. I went to the book signing, her first book signing ever, in a bookstore in Mō‘ili‘ili, and when I went up to her, she said, “Yes, who do I sign this to?” I said, “Oh, my name is Steve Sumida.” She said, “Oh, I just got a letter about you.” I said, “Yeah?” She said, “Yeah, Shawn Wong wrote to me because he found out that I was publishing this book and he was writing to any Asian American writer who came onto the scene and he said that in Hawai‘i I’d probably meet Steve Sumida and this is who he is.” Like that. She continued, “Oh, so you’re Steve Sumida?” I said, “Yeah, hey, you wanna join our group?” and I told her and so she joined us. And because of it—And here was John Hara saying, “You can’t talk, tell, call yourselves under the name of the ‘literature of Hawai‘i.’ There’s no such thing in people’s minds. You gotta invent some catchy name.” You know, like the comedy group at that time was Booga Booga.

KT: [Laughs.]

SS: Yeah, Booga Booga, right? That doesn’t mean anything, but people identify with it ’cause they made it, you know, part of the lingo, part of the Pidgin of the time. So I said, “Hey, how about ‘Talk Story’? Let’s call ourselves Talk Story.” And I said, “If you want that to be ‘legitimate,’ let’s just say that talk story occurs again and again in Maxine Hong Kingston’s bestseller, The Woman Warrior.” So it’s a known word now and everybody said, “Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re talking story.” So we called it Talk Story. And that was in the beginning.

KT: Yeah.

SS: That was in the beginning, the inspiration, the background, for our work on a conference. That’s how Marie was involved. Yeah, she was like, oh, how can I say it? I mean, this sounds, you know, I don’t mean this—of course I don’t want to mean this in any male chauvinist way, but she really was like the person among us three—Arnold, Marie, and me—who was like the arms that embraced the entire group. She was the one who, because of her social standings, through the professional status of her husband John Hara, the architect, and also his father, the architect, and because of their Punahou backgrounds they were kind of up there in social circles of Hawai‘i, so it was she who could say, “Huh! We should get so and so, and so and so interested in what we’re doing.” So she was the person who said eventually that when we incorporated ourselves as Talk Story, Inc., we’ll set up a board of directors and we’ll have an honorary chair of the board, and we’ll ask Jean Ariyoshi, first lady of Hawai‘i at that time, to be our honorary chair.

KT: Okay. [Laughs.]

SS: Jean Ariyoshi said, “What are you guys doing? What do you call yourselves? Yeah, I’ll do this.” So Marie could do this, and when James Michener and his wife were said to be in town, she went to the place where he was being interviewed and talked not to him directly, but to his wife. Marie told her that we’re gonna have this writers’ conference and think that Mr. Michener might want to be there so can he participate. And she said, “Yeah, well, how much you gonna pay him?” Marie says to her, well, we ain’t got any money and this is all pro bono, you know, pretty much. We can offer travel for a reasonable itinerary if the person is coming from the mainland someplace.” We can pay for the travel because we did have a grant from the Hawai‘i Committee for the Humanities and money from our fundraisings, and we can put them up in a Mid-Pacific Institute dormitory, where the other, you know, Asian American writers from the mainland would be staying. It was all kind of good fun, the way Marie reported to Arnold, Darrell, Eric, Jody Manabe, and me. Right. And, boy, missus was not happy. She said to Marie, “I don’t think Cookie will stand for this, so the answer is no.” Marie said, “Cookie?” The missus said, “My husband.”

KT: That’s funny!

SS: And that was the end of the conversation, so at least we could say, Hey! We tried personally to recruit, to introduce James Michener to this, so you cannot tell us that we excluded him. No way did he and his wife accept Marie’s invitation themselves. Yeah.

KT: Well, I think I want to inject here the fact that Marie’s passing a couple of years back [2019 -Ed.] really provide some of the impetus for this whole oral history project because we started to realize that we needed to get stories from people that were getting pretty old, so okay, present company included. What else do you remember about Marie?

SS: What, you want more?

KT: Yeah. What you remember about Marie.

SS: I’ll give two what seem to be little anecdotes, but because I tell them to you in this interview, maybe it’s not anecdotes anymore, but it will be research evidence, data. It will be data in, you know, Donald Carreira Ching’s research. One was when we actually had the conference finally, with all that kind of help that Marie provided, and her continuing to teach, to include Hawai‘i’s literature and Asian American literature in her syllabi at the University of Hawai‘i English department. Yeah. All of this is what she did. The time came late in the week-long conference in 1978 when we’re kind of wrapping things up and putting things together and I told her, “Well, thanks, Marie, for all that you’ve done,” and she told me, “You don’t have to thank me. In fact, don’t say thanks to me. It makes me feel like an outsider. You understand? You don’t have to thank us, ourselves, ’cause we’re in this deeply together. Okay?” And that, you know, shook me a little bit. I said, “Oh, I cannot even say thanks for your telling me this.”

KT: [Laughs.]

SS: She really caught me, but it was, how can I say? Very valuable. It was worth it, that she said this to me. Worth it for herself as well as for myself. Now, to end the programs of the conference, she herself arranged for a Kahuna to come to do a ceremony at the end, to lead a closing ceremony. The closing ceremony is what in Hawaiian is called the Ho‘oponopono. If it were family who was having the Ho‘oponopono, it would be after a gathering where, like in a Christmas party, Thanksgiving party, or whatever it is, the family all gets very talkative, and everyday politics and religion and stuff like that come on and then the arguments start happening, and everything. And we certainly had controversy and arguments at the Talk Story conference. That was a prominent feature at some point during the week and was really important to us. So we had to have this Ho‘oponopono to bring people together again. People who have been in conflict with one another. One of the lines of conflict being the California guys, being all snooty about us Hawai‘i guys, you know. Arnold gave this conflict a name: “Mokes vs. Kotonks.”

KT: Oh [affirmative].

SS: We actually had a program that was called “Mokes.” You know, us Mokes. Okay? Us Hawai‘i Mokes versus the Kotonks, and the Kotonks couldn’t understand what this language was. Why, we’re doing this like that and they considered us apolitical. It’s just that their politics were so differently spoken and understood in their way. You see, they couldn’t understand what our politics were. Anyway, that kind of conflict had to be put to rest at the end of the conference. Not necessarily really resolved yet, but for further discussion, at least, so Marie asks Mrs. Mornah Simeona, a well-known Kahuna, to come and perform Ho‘oponopono for us. She comes into what was then the social hall of the Boys’ Dormitory Mid-Pacific Institute. She has, oh, maybe a hundred of us in that last session at that time, at the end, very end of the conference, stand in a circle and just hold hands. And she says, “Okay, now just close your eyes and be quiet and let all of the talk, all of that talk. All, of whatever argument, whatever love was expressed, whatever joy and harmony, whatever discord there has been in the past week, just let it all drain out. Down your shoulders, down your arms, down into your hands, down into each other’s hands, down through your body, into—just let it drain off, okay, and you don’t have to say anything, just do this in silence.” So we had a long moment of silence. Now, I gotta say the newspaper reporters were there and they were there in order to report on how, in this final Ho‘oponopono, we would fight with each other. It will be at the ceremony for us to vent, right? But Mrs. Simeona said, “No, no venting, just letting it go. Just letting it go.” The reporters were dumbstruck, their mouths open. That’s all. Then they too closed their eyes, and especially Mr. Ishii, The Honolulu Advertiser photographer who covered the conference for that week. He had been visibly moved by some of the sessions, and he was among those of us who were weeping in the Ho‘oponopono. I saw him put down his camera at his side, and he was crying. This surprised all of us, because we all expected to fight it out with our mouths in that last ceremony. But instead it was so—everything just lifted off. It was, it was incredible and that’s the kind of thing, if she allowed me, I would have thanked Marie for. ’Cause she had the vision really to end our conference in that way. That was really something.

KT: Okay. So now we’re going back to Arnold Hiura. You and Arnold published the prototype bibliography of Asian American literature. What were your reasons for doing that and what do you now see as the impact of that collection?

SS: Okay. What I have to say will have to do with a cluster of questions you have given me to think about so here goes. From the beginning of our work together, that is Arnold, Marie, and myself, I had a vision and plan for what we were setting out to do, and that is, when we named ourselves Talk Story, we did get incorporated and we did have a description that was like a mission statement for ourselves in Talk Story. The mission was to research, to study, and to promote, the further creation of Hawai‘i’s literature, the creation and publication of Hawai‘i’s literature.

So the first basis for planning the Talk Story Conference was to do the research. Research included finding out who the living authors are, and that was for the Talk Story conference. We spent two years holding literary readings, “Talk Story” readings publicly to get people interested. We had an automatic feature that was a point of interest to draw in the audiences, because the writers were young local writers. That is to say, they had families, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, schoolmates, in Hawai‘i. So when these young people put on a reading, all these people would come out to attend and we had audiences of fifty people or more—for poetry reading? Up to then we had never even heard of what a poetry reading might be. Then from the start we began serving pupus and drinks. It became that kind of social event. That was part of our research, though.

Don’t let anybody tell us that we were just throwing parties. No, it was for the purpose of finding out what literature was there, and we would have further research projects. One would be to compile a bibliography of what had been written from the past into the present. The study would be in our teaching, in our courses at University of Hawai‘i, and Arnold moved on to teach at Punahou, and so in his Punahou courses the literature was read and discussed, with great enthusiasm, by the way, and further creation was by the living authors themselves, being among our group, who were then encouraged, inspired to write more and continue this as a lifetime avocation.

So the plan was to do all of this in gearing up for Talk Story 1978, and afterwards Arnold and I would conduct year-long research of all the Asian American literature that we could find in Hawai‘i’s public collections, especially the University of Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i-Pacific Collection. We spent most of our time there in 1978–’79, following the Talk Story Conference of ’78. We also went from island to island to ask old timers whether they could remember any writers from their school days and thereafter. Again we had fun doing this. The people would say, “You guys just using this grant money to have fun.” Doing this kind of thing, going from place to find out where the best saimin is in Hawai‘i or something. I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do that.” But we were actually talking to people and finding out things, and we actually would hear about—well, people will remember even high school classmates from long time ago who were aspiring writers. And these very people showed up in our research in the Hawai‘i-Pacific Collection. We saw in that year how this is coming to something pretty solid. I mean, we got names and titles to put down in our bibliography, so that was our year-long research. We found, read, and commented on about 720 works of fiction, poetry, and drama by Asian American writers of Hawai‘i in the twentieth century. All of it was in public collections, libraries. But we were told for generations that Hawai‘i people did not write any “literature,” too busy surviving, too uneducated, too lazy to write. Our bibliography showed that this was a lie. The book that was published—we printed only about 200 copies as stipulated in our grant. That was part of a federal grant, a U.S. Department of Education grant for ethnic literary research in America. And we did this in a year and published it. The 200 copies were so that main libraries in Hawai‘i could put it in their collections and make it available to the public and, also, we ran two or three seminars. Arnold ran one, I ran one, maybe just the two of us, with Maxine Hong Kingston serving as a guest speaker. The seminars were on how the schoolteachers in Hawai‘i would consult this bibliography for their research and courses in high schools and in any place in Hawai‘i’s education.

KT: I see. Yeah.

SS: We had a great time doing that. It was planned and methodical, and this kept us on track. I also needed to do this to research for my dissertation. I thought, well that’ll be another thing. I’m going to contribute my dissertation to this research effort in Asian American literature, and that’s why I returned to the University of Washington to work further on my dissertation and to complete it. And this became my book on Hawai‘i’s literature eventually.

As far as the further creation of Hawai‘i’s literature is concerned, of course we got to know the writers. The writers were our greatest resources all along. Then Eric and Darrell told us they wanted to establish a journal and to call it Bamboo Ridge. They told Arnold, Marie, and me. This was in 1978, before the Talk Story Conference took place, and we said, “Terrific, terrific.” Now we have a journal and I’ll tell you, Ken, for me specifically, why this was so important, because there was an English department faculty member who told me, “Oh, very nice. You guys do this kind of thing, this conference, for celebrating Hawai‘i’s writers. So you have a conference. A conference like that doesn’t mean anything in the long run, you know. The only thing that matters is publications. You gotta have a journal. You don’t have a journal. So this is just a flash in a pan,” and so on. Eric and Darrell said they’re gonna create a journal. I said, “Aha!” That was our response to that English department faculty member and others like him, who resisted what we were doing. Yeah. So Bamboo Ridge not only got started, but it became the perpetuation of what we were doing.

SS: Another who went on to take interest obviously is Donald Ching’s advisor, Craig Howes.

KT: Craig Howes, yeah.

SS: But these people were not directly involved. One of the English department faculty who was involved was also a lecturer at that time in creative writing, Frank Stewart.

KT: Oh, yeah.

SS: He was much involved at that time, but when it came to the bibliography it was just Arnold and me. It was sort of like us as partners from the—our English grad student time, you know, from student collaborations back at University of Washington.

KT: So how did you first meet him? You said you knew him before he came to Seattle, right?

SS: No, I met Arnold at the University of Washington. I can’t remember exactly. We have a friend there, whose name is Wilfred Hasegawa, from Kohala. He was a teacher, a special ed teacher in Seattle. Somehow Arnold knew Wilfred. We got introduced to one another. You might say it was through Hawai‘i Club kinds of connections at the University of Washington. We met and got involved with the Hawai‘i Club a little and also collaborated in our American literature interests. Arnold told me some things about what he was working on in the grad program. That was really insightful to me and it sparked some very sharp interest in my mind about how to carry on with the research and, it’s fair to say, scholarly, critical writing about the literature.

KT: You remember some of the things you had in mind? Something like you—

SS: Well, specifically, what he told me about was that he had written a paper in an American literature grad course where he discussed Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Okay? As a kind of critique that, in Arnold’s mind, would connect with Hawai‘i. That is, it’s like a Connecticut Yankee in Kamehameha’s court.

KT: [Laughs.]

SS: Or in the court of the Kamehamehas’ in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in the 1800s. Okay? And Arnold’s angle, however, was that it’s not that this book is critical of those primitive, ancient people. It is, Arnold thought, a criticism of the Connecticut Yankee. The Yankee thinks that the people of King Arthur’s realm are beneath him so he can run over them any way he wants, right? Because he’s a modern man with the power of modern technology?

KT: Yeah.

SS: But Arnold just told me. He said, “No, that’s not it at all. It’s that this guy is an Imperialist in an island.” That caught me. I said, “That’s it, that’s it.” So then, in my research, I soon found out that Twain had been in Hawai‘i, had written about Hawai‘i, had written a manuscript for an entire novel set in Hawai‘i, a manuscript that he dumped. He decided not to publish it, and I could argue that this is what became A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. That’s where he put his social criticism of this Imperialist coming to an island and thinking he can take over because he knows so much better. And, you know, it was a great argument. That, specifically, is how Arnold got into my head. He really got into my head.

KT: Anything else you want to say about Arnold? Do you know what he did after he—?

SS: He went on to pursue other endeavors. He went on, into the entertainment industry in Hawai‘i when he and James Grant Benton partnered and set up a comedy club called “Crack Me Up” some place in the Ala Moana, Ward district. He had that comedy club for a while and he went on from there to other things. One of his big projects was the Smithsonian traveling exhibit on plate lunch in Hawai‘i. That is, the multiculturalism in Hawai‘i represented by plate lunch culture and history. That exhibit went all over and was shown in Japan as well. So he got into this kind of history writing. He was—he might have gotten his doctorate—I don’t know—in American Studies at University of Hawai‘i, and he was doing work like that. Of course, more recently, he’s continued as a food history writer. Well, he’s a writer for some of Sam Choy’s cookbooks. You might say ghost writer, but you know he’s pretty prominent as a writer, professional writer that way. Then he wrote his book Kau Kau about the development of Hawai‘i’s food culture, multi-ethnic food culture, I should emphasize. And then now in his retirement—but you don’t exactly “retire” from a career like that. He’s gone on to be the director of the Hawai‘i Japanese History Center in Hilo. And so he went back to his native Big Island to stay and he’s there now. I think he moved from interest to interest—all of them related—and that’s why probably today, if you ask him about, well, what happened in 1978 with Talk Story and Bamboo Ridge, he might say, “Let others remember.” ’Cause Arnold went on to other things.

KT: In 1978, you, Arnold, and Marie founded the Hawai‘i Ethnic Resources Center Talk Story Inc. Why did you decide to create the Resource Center and what kinds of things did it do?

We felt compelled to assume that there was a lot more Asian American literature of Hawai‘i, because we thought it axiomatic that if we really did have a “local” culture in Hawai‘i—a term already much used by the populace—that culture has to have had a “literature,” whether written, oral, or both. No brainer. But where was the literature? Who wrote it? That’s what planning the conference required us to do—to find the stories, poems, and dramas, and to find and convene the authors. I think Marie knew of Eric Chock and Poets in the Schools, which Eric directed. I knew of Wing Tek Lum in connection with “Asian American literature” published in anthologies, in the Mainland, and I connected him with Hawai‘i, and we found him, a businessman in Honolulu. You must know this, about Wing Tek, about how he was among the vanguard of Asian American authors of the mainland back then. You know? He led Marie, Arnold, and me to Bob Char, Lowell Chun-Hoon, and others. You must know about how these Ivy League guys were involved in the founding of Amerasia Journal at Yale, in the early ’70s. I mean—no one has bothered to research this? Eric brought his circle of young poets and fiction writers to us: Jody Manabe, Muffy Webb, Wayne Westlake, Mad Dog, Elizabeth Shinoda, Tamara Wong, Dana Naone, the group grew and grew, thus, and it incorporated Hawaiian haku mele, kumu hula, and artists who the public was viewing as “entertainers,” some of them. Plenty people, plenty artists. I’m letting all this gush out of me, surprised big time that you and others haven’t known, and BR people are among those who don’t know or have forgotten.

Arnold, Marie, and I got going really swiftly after I returned to Hawai‘i from Seattle, after the PacNWAsAmWriters’ Conference, in late July 1976. I returned by airplane from Seattle the day that the Hōkūle‘a returned from Tahiti. It to me was a good omen. Marie led us to Eric, I recall. He led us to Darrell. As I said before we had heard of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and in it she uses the term, “talk story.” Right away everyone agreed on our name: Talk Story. And then we thought and came up with this: for purposes of applying for grants, to plan and put on our Talk Story Conference, we’d have a haole name too: the Hawaii Ethnic Resources Center: Talk Story, Inc. I went to a government office to see about incorporating us and registering “Talk Story” as a trademark name, or whatever. I was told it was “common usage” or something, so common a term in Hawai‘i that it couldn’t be trademarked. Okay. We did incorporate, legally—by-laws, 501 3-C and all—as the Hawaii Ethnic Resources Center: Talk Story, Inc. [Note that the ‘okina in “Hawai‘i” was not yet commonly used. My book in 1991 was one of the works that established the use of the ‘okina and kahakō, because Larry Kimura advised me to do so and UW Press diligently complied with my insistence, taught by Larry and other Hawaiian language scholars, that words in Hawaiian be printed with these correct spellings, as in Nā Mele o Hawai‘i Nei: 101 Hawaiian Songs, UH Press, 1970. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian publications didn’t use the ‘okina and kahakō much, because at that time both writers and readers of Hawaiian knew where they applied without having to indicate them visually. I explain some of this at the front of my book. -SS] Eric and Darrell were so involved with our doing all this stuff in 1976, 1977, and 1978. So was Ozzie Bushnell. And Maxine Hong Kingston. And many others who were at the founding of BR, within this context of Talk Story, Inc., and our work on the conference. I spill all this out with surprise, right now, because all along, since those times in the late ’70s, I assumed, evidently wrongly, that all this was known or at least understood, perpetuated by our legacy that’s called “Bamboo Ridge.” And the View from the Shore, one of my books, is a legacy of Talk Story too. It was in the plan and vision since 1976, and it’s been realized as planned. Long time ago already.

KT: You already talked about how your—why you went back to the University of Washington. Can you explain a little bit about your dissertation?

SS: Oh, my dissertation was what became my book, And the View from the Shore, the varied “literary traditions” of Hawai‘i. I should say that another person who gave me insights into this was Richard Hamasaki. I have no idea what Richard is doing these days, but back in those days he was a sharply critical-minded guy himself and he was getting very interested in Pacific Islander literature. From his point of view of Pacific Islander literature, Hawai‘i’s local literature was another area besides Pacific Islander and what he called tourist literature of the Pacific. Hamasaki taught me that here is all this mostly tourist stuff that, for example Michener’s Hawai‘i, the public, more or less knew. But he said the public doesn’t know yet what “Pacific Islander literature” is and doesn’t know what us Talk Story guys call “Hawai‘i’s literature.” Richard broke all literature of the Pacific down into those three categories—indigenous, multicultural local, and tourist—and that got to me. I said, “Ah, I think this is going to be useful in some study of Hawai‘i’s literatures,” and so he was an influence on me. That was a framework for my dissertation. It became my book And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i. I finished my dissertation, got my PhD in 1982 at University of Washington. But it took all that time from 1982 to 1991 for University of Washington Press to take its turn at publishing my book, my revised dissertation, after it was rejected by University of Hawai‘i Press.

KT: Aww [negative]!

SS: It was assumed that University of Hawai‘i Press would have first refusal rights, right? on a book on Hawai‘i’s literature. But a ridiculous thing happened to my manuscript at University of Hawai‘i Press. It was really ridiculous, it was insulting, in fact, and it took all that time to go from there to University of Washington to say, “Okay. They rejected it. Good! Our turn.” From there to develop the dissertation into a book would be another few years. By then it was 1991 when the book at last came out. I don’t want to recount necessarily what terrible things happened.

KT: Did the UH Press explain exactly why they rejected it?

SS: I didn’t even ask for them to accept or reject my manuscript. I just had it, my finished dissertation in hand in 1982. I asked at UH Press, “What can I do with this now? Can you advise me? I don’t know any book like this. Okay, so what can I do with this? UH Press publishes works about Hawai‘i. So what can I do with this?” And out of that, after months and months of delay, I find out that they actually sent it out for review and it was rejected by the reviewers. I had deliberately asked not to evaluate the manuscript for possible publication yet. I was told that the final, deciding reviewer said, “Wow! This book is supposed to be about the literature of Hawai‘i but it’s very eccentric,” and I said, shocked, “You know, this book is about writers of Hawai‘i, in Hawai‘i, by Hawai‘i, for Hawai‘i. How can that be ‘eccentric’?” I mean, I take words pretty literally, too. “Eccentric” means off-center. How can this study be off-center in Hawai‘i? Then at the University of Washington Press, the editor, Naomi Pascal said, “Good. Give it to us.” [As the UW Press editor, Naomi was much involved in publishing books in Asian American studies. -SS] She said, “We’ll work on this thing.” Yeah, that was basically what happened. It was like UH Press saying, there’s no such thing as literature of Hawai‘i. They’d never seen anything like it. They only knew James Michener, basically.

KT: Right, which is like—I read that book [Michener’s Hawaii -KT]. I thought it was terrible. [Laughs.]

SS: Yes. [Laughs.]

KT: Anyway, okay, I’m gonna step ahead because this—we’re talking about your book. Looking back at And the View from the Shore: What do you feel has been the impact of your book, And the View from the Shore, on the nation’s perception and reception of Asian American literature?

SS: Well, I think it was—I’ve heard, anyway, that it was a combination of the annotated bibliography of Asian American literature that Arnold and I put together in 1979, and my 1991 book And the View From the Shore, that established within the field of Asian American studies, that there is an Asian/Pacific American studies, Asian/Pacific American literature and literary studies, now established. The trouble is once that kind of thing happens in academia, in a professional organization like the Association for Asian American Studies, then the other guys who ignored Hawai‘i’s literature in the first place can ignore it again. They say, “Oh, no worry, Sumida took care of that territory, so we don’t have to study this in California. We don’t have to study Hawai‘i’s literature elsewhere.” Except in Seattle there were people like Sam Solberg who was deeply interested, and other people who took it up.

But in the mainstream of Asian American Studies it becomes a controversial thing. How do we include Hawai‘i in Asian American studies? How do we include the Pacific Islands? It’s not only Hawai‘i, but Guam and American Samoa, other places, too. How do we include them? It becomes controversial and then our work in Hawai‘i’s literature and Hawai‘i’s Asian American studies become marginal. It was actually called “marginal” by some California-centric scholars and their publications. They proclaimed, “This is nice fluffy Hawai‘i stuff that’s on the margins of our main concerns in our field.” I said, “Oh, God!” So that, that’s been the influence.

I have to tell you that since the bibliography and my book were published, as far as I can tell, no one can get away with saying the way Michener and others said and wrote, and that generations of Hawai‘i schoolteachers were taught to tell us Hawai‘i people, that we have no literature of our own. Nobody can tell us that anymore, and when I realized that, after Arnold and I finished the bibliography, I just—I became outraged. That was one of the moments that I was outraged. I said, “And we’ve been told this all our lives. All our parents’ lives, you know, for all the time that Hawai‘i has been under United States of America we’ve been told we have no literature of our own and Hawaiian literature was treated as something in a dead language.” I became outraged, and we should never again suffer such lies. They can’t say this ever again, ’cause we had hundreds of works listed in our bibliography; listed and commented on in our bibliography. When I went on to do the dissertation and book, I thought that this work is simply my contribution to a much larger interest. That was already shown at the Talk Story Conference. Hundreds of people got involved, showed their interest, and the media, too, so—I think that our work has been an influence. If I were to have to revise my 1991 book there’s a lot of things that I can say since then, because I’ve been teaching Hawai‘i’s literature all along at different universities, and I learn a lot from the courses.

KT: And there’s been a lot more literature published.

SS: That’s right. That’s right. That’s what Bamboo Ridge is about. I don’t, can’t keep up anymore.

KT: That’s hard.

SS: Sorry.

KT: That’s a good thing I think. So we actually wanted to find a few more people that that have been mentioned about in connection with Hawai‘i’s literature, Rob Wilson? What, what do you see as his contributions?

SS: Well, Rob arrived at Hawai‘i with his fresh PhD in English, from UC Berkeley. That’s real high level, right? He comes to Hawai‘i in the midst of our Talk Story work. It might have been late, maybe just in time, for the Talk Story Conference. But Rob is the kind of guy—he got involved and interested, enthusiastic right away. So he was among us. He was eating it all up. He had to digest a lot. Yeah, there was a steep learning curve, but that’s him. He loved it. He loved that learning curve. He just went and zoomed ahead. He began to make a name for himself in the literary profession as a scholar who could write theoretically about Asian American, about Hawai‘i’s, about Pacific Islander literature. It was a time when post-colonialism was rising as a field of study and he could look at the Pacific Islands in a post-colonial framework and perspective. Rob got very involved in that.

When my book came out in 1991, I said, “Hey, Rob, I’m sorry, but you know I didn’t originally write this in high theoretical terms.” This is simply a book, first my dissertation, that I tried to write so that Hawai‘i people could read it and learn something about what our literature has been and is now and may become in a future. What our Hawai‘i’s literature is, that’s all, I mean, just specific authors and titles and how they kind of form patterns and things like that. So I didn’t write—I didn’t even try—I don’t even know how to write in high theoretical terms. He said to me, “Oh, Steve, no, you don’t have to tell me that. I think you’re a theoretical songbird.” I said, “What?” Yeah. He said, “The way you subsume theory in everything you write. In your close readings of all these literary works,” He said, “You’re a songbird. Theory is everywhere in what you said.” But that’s Rob, you see, and that’s the kind of enthusiasm he had. I mean he can see that kind of thing in the work of others, whether it’s creative writing or critical writing, academic writing. And he was producing his own literary scholarship that way, right? I gotta say I never really read much of his work because I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t have the patience or wherewithal to sit down and understand and learn his language of what to me was highly theoretical literary studies. But I say this in admiration and, you know, thanks to him.

KT: Well, I must say I’ve read parts of your book, and it’s very readable, but I can also see the theoretical underpinnings of it. You know the pastoral, the heroic—all those elements you speak of that kind of provide a framework.

SS: I wanna—okay, I think you’re going to come to this, but let me say that, okay, for me the process has been to try to understand the literary works and from there to understand what my theoretical assumptions have to be in order to understand the literary works and their authors. In other words, the authors and their works come first, I am secondary, and this applies to how Darrell and Eric came first. Whereas in some sense I want to say, “Oh, yeah, Bamboo Ridge came out of our work on the Talk Story Conference,” it’s the other way around. Work on the Talk Story Conference became what it was because of Darrell and Eric and how they were already writers and they knew other writers in Hawai‘i. It’s because of these writers that we had something called Talk Story. Yeah.

KT: There’s one other writer that we’re wondering about whether you had any contact with: Ozzie Bushnell?

SS: Yeah, yeah. He was a member of our board. He was one of my main mentors, anyways. Ozzie Bushnell. I’ve always admired him as Hawai‘i’s main writer of historical novels and I am so indebted to him. Really, we spent many, many, many hours together, and even so, when Arnold and I finished our bibliography and we introduced it at the 1979 Big Island Talk Story Conference, and I came home from Hilo inspired as to what my dissertation—what my thesis would be, I came home and I called up Ozzie Bushnell and all excited I said, “Ozzie, I have to show you what Arnold and I put together, this bibliography we’ve been working on.” And he said, “Okay, come over right away, but drive carefully now. Just take your time. Get here safely. Show it to me.” And when I showed it to him, this thick stack of pages, he looked through it. He looked through it. He said, “Who would have thought?! There’s so much!” Now for him to say that he, the critic of Michener, who said publicly at our Talk Story Conference and at other speeches that he gave, that writers like Michener had stolen materials from Hawai‘i. Even Bushnell didn’t know what Michener had stolen from. It was all this stuff, you know, that Michener’s own researcher had shown him, but Michener had dismissed. Writings by Hawai‘i writers he denied, he got ideas. He got details. He got a lot of stuff, but he dismissed it. To him it’s not literature. It’s just—It’s just casual writing.

KT: Okay, I think that we’ve covered about the early years of Bamboo Ridge and how you knew Eric and Darrell, so I’m gonna ask you, do you subscribe to Bamboo Ridge now? Do you keep up with it?

SS: I’ve got to confess I don’t. I can’t remember that I ever really subscribed. I donated to—I don’t know if that was actually taken as my subscription, whatever, but I, but I donated, and not much. I mean in my profession, teaching at universities like that, it’s not that much of a salary.

KT: Oh, I know.

SS: And we have to make contributions in our way and I donated, but the Bamboo Ridge people have been very generous, so what they did was for a good number of years, they would keep sending me the journal. At some point, that kind of faded away, dropped off. I would have to ask at the Asian American Studies conferences, for instance, at the book displays. I would have to buy specific titles and whatnot, but that was all good for me, because I wasn’t able to read all of it anymore. No. So my reading in Bamboo Ridge became pretty selective. I could see at the conferences and book displays in bookstores, which titles were of special interest to me and I certainly did find some. I have always, however, ordered Bamboo Ridge titles for courses I taught. I began teaching Hawai‘i’s literature as my own course at Washington State University in 1982, when I finished my dissertation. Might have even been 1981 when my wife, Gail, and I started teaching at Washington State University. My Hawai‘i course continued through the ’90s at the University of Michigan. Bamboo Ridge publications have always been included until 2016, when we retired from teaching at University of Washington. It’s an unbroken record year by year, of teaching Hawai‘i’s literature, and soon the enrollment of each of those classes was at the maximum of fifty, with a waiting list and always going beyond the maximum set for the course. There was usually an overload in the course. So fifty-plus students using Bamboo Ridge publications from 1982 to 2016 add up to a lot of BR books.

KT: Gee! Do you have any favorite local authors or poets?

SS: Well, yeah, I’ll just say, but this is like already ages old. I mean old as me. Okay but these authors have continued writing. So their works today are not as old as back then. Oh, Juliet, Kono is one of them. First her Hilo Rains [Issue #37/38 -Ed.], and seven years later her Tsunami Years [Issue #65/66 -Ed.], and later Anshū [Issue #97 -Ed.]. So that became anyway—my students knew Juliet Kono.

KT: Yeah, I think that book should get a Pulitzer.

SS: Very important work to me. And Darrell Lum was a regular in the syllabus. You could say it’s because of the Pidgin angle, but he’s really good at writing dialogue and creating stories. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, you know, she had her time in my course. Wing Tek Lum and Eric Chock too. Wing Tek is an unusual writer. By the time I retired I wasn’t able to include his Rape of Nanking poems [Issue #102: The Nanjing Massacre: Poems -Ed.]. I mean his “documentary poetry” that just blows my mind. I’ve tried to talk to him about it. Those are some of the authors who have been featured in my course. Sylvia Watanabe, back in a day, was one of the writers in my courses, when she was one of our grad students at University of Michigan. Her work was very localized there, too, in a sense that people knew her when she appeared in a syllabus. Also, every year since publication by Bamboo Ridge [2003 -Ed.], the contemporary Hawaiian dramas in He Leo Hou, edited by John Wat, [Issue #83 -Ed.] not only were required but also were performed by students in my course.

KT: What, what criticisms do you have of Bamboo Ridge?

SS: Along the way I came to understand how my being away from Hawai‘i, the heat of Hawai‘i politics was no longer blowing down my own neck as if looking over my shoulder. I began to understand how Native Hawaiian literature, that is to say, “indigenous literature,” most places in the world is in conflict with multi-ethnic literature, because multi-ethnic literature comes out of a history of colonization, of Hawai‘i, or any place in the world. Under colonialism the place becomes diversely ethnic and racialized because the people who set up the colonies bring in laborers from elsewhere in the world, so it becomes multi-cultural. So in Talk Story and in Bamboo Ridge we have this model for Hawai‘i’s culture and society and politics for that matter: that it is about diversity, that it is multi-cultural. It’s not centered on any particular—well, and that’s the claim, anyway. It’s not centered on any particular ethnicity, but from a Hawaiian sovereignty point of view, which I guess I always felt interested in, even attached to in some ways—when Hawai‘i was a kingdom, a sovereign nation, the sovereign, central culture of Hawai‘i was Hawaiian. ‘Iolani Palace was Hawaiian. It’s in the style of who knows what kind of baroque, you know, but it’s Hawaiian, because Hawaiians created it and anything that was created in Hawai‘i is Hawaiian, in that sovereign culture.

As soon as America takes over, it becomes a very small part of American culture in history, you see, and that’s how sovereignty is taken away, and that’s the injustice of the whole thing. And I said, “That is at odds with our Bamboo Ridge, Talk Story, paradigm.” But because I was already in Michigan, and Seattle, and was teaching in Japan, sometimes, just talking about these things, I wasn’t directly involved in the politics of trying to say such a thing about internal conflict that we have in Hawai‘i. No, I would have been forced to be a partisan in that controversy if I were in Hawai‘i. So in this way I benefited from and I tried to do something with—for other people—with, you know, being able to talk about this conflict between indigenous sovereignty and colonialist diversity, from outside Hawai‘i.

As I speak, read, and write, here again, about this conflict, I’m thinking always of Haunani-Kay Trask and her declaration, “We Are Not American!” That’s how at odds the Hawaiian sovereignty and the Asian American studies declaration of being “American” are, opposing each other. What “American” means in the term, “Asian American,” though, is still overripe with questions.

And this goes back to a question we had back in the ’70s. How can some of these writers of Hawai‘i, like Milton Murayama and now me as a student of Hawai‘i—how come these guys are doing their work outside of Hawai‘i? And that’s part of the answer, that we avoided the stifling political heat that’s in Hawai‘i itself, and I think Bamboo Ridge itself generally is evidence of this, because Bamboo Ridge doesn’t—is rarely, explicitly political in the emphases of the stories, of the poetry, of the drama or whatever. Very rarely and when it is, it’s kind of ironical, like in the poem that Eric wrote, the speaker claiming, “I’m just a local guy. What do I know about, you know, Imperialism here and there? I just love to eat strawberries. What do I know about the oppressive conditions of growing strawberries and raising them and harvesting them? You know, in California. I just want to eat strawberries. Just leave me alone. I’m just a local guy, I’m not political, you know.” But Eric is saying that as a political statement, satirizing our own selves who claim not to be politically involved. Bamboo Ridge kind of has that air about staying safe away from political heat, as if no, no, no, we don’t speak in that kind of political jargon. But we express our politics in a different way. We imply it in a different way, and that goes back to the conflict between the California guys, the kotonks, and the local guys.

KT: Yeah. Well, I have to confess that I’m a kotonk. So looking back in 2017 you wrote a letter to the Asian American Association of Scholars faulting them for failing to invite writers from Hawai‘i to the first Asian American literature festival sponsored in Washington, D.C. by the Smithsonian. What stimulated you to write that letter?

SS: You know I’ve seen your question before and I can’t remember exactly and I didn’t bother to look up old email exchanges that I had about that. I try to recall. I heard back then in 2017 or so, that there was gonna be—hurray!—this first convening of Asian American writers in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian, and to me none of it made sense. None of it was true. It’s not the first convening. So what, that it was in Washington, D.C.—in the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American department that Hawai‘i’s Franklin Odo, our dear senior colleague now passed away, founded. And even he wasn’t telling these guys who were advertising, publicizing their “first” convening of Asian-American writers. He wasn’t saying: “No, no, no, no, there’s a history behind this.” So I wrote to whoever was named as one of the leaders of that project. I asked why the announced lineup of writers for that convention didn’t include any Hawai‘i writers. I said, “Hey, come on, are we so irrelevant that you don’t remember? You don’t even know? You never learned in the first place, that we have a literature of Hawai‘i, and we include Asian American writers? If you want to limit the category of Hawai‘i’s literature just to Asian American writers, there are lots of them, and very, very good writers and published and well published, and more published in a more longstanding journal than anything you guys have on a mainland.” And yeah, I was very indignant. Oh! So you don’t know my book!?? I didn’t say so, but you know that’s what I meant, and Franklin Odo himself had to jump in. He said, “Oh, I should have said something.” So yeah, you should have said something, you know. Franklin and I were very close colleagues to each other at that time until his death in 2022.

KT: Okay.

SS: Yeah, but they—these are younger people in the field. Right? They said, “Oops, we made the old guy pissed off. Oh, we better—who? What Hawai‘i writers? Who you are talking about?” they asked me. I said, “Juliet Kono, Wing Tek Lum,” like this and, of course, I cited Bamboo Ridge Press. So they got in touch with the Bamboo Ridge people right away, and Bamboo Ridge got in touch with me to ask what the flap was about. Wing Tek told me like this: “So, you still able to speak up for us?” Yeah, of course I never gave up on us.

KT: Yeah, I cited that letter for grants I’ve written. So the press is set to celebrate its 45th anniversary next year. Well, actually, this year, looking back, how do you assess the impact the Press has had?

SS: Well, the process of BR becoming established has gone the way of the world, and that is from being an upstart press and publication, as a quarterly journal at the beginning, anyway. From being the upstart, it’s succeeded in becoming something like an established literary institution in Hawai‘i, and as I said, you can’t take it back from Hawai‘i’s history anymore. It’s there. So all of our works are there, as on the historical record, whatever happens hereafter in Hawai‘i, and that’s a big change. Along the way Bamboo Ridge has had to figure out for itself what is meant by Hawai‘i’s literature. What is meant by Hawai‘i’s local literature? Who gets to be published in Bamboo Ridge? From the start that was a very thorny issue. This is controversy. Does it include Native Hawaiian literature? They said, “Well, yeah, of course.” But you see: how? In what way will you publish an entire issue of Bamboo Ridge on a work by John Dominis Holt, and recognize that this is a central work in what, in the point of view of Hawaiian sovereignty, is the central culture in Hawai‘i? They’ve had to figure this out.

The controversy that was almost not spoken of in the time that 1978 came along and we’re doing the Talk Story conference and starting up Bamboo Ridge was: Is a writer of Hawai‘i, a local writer of Hawai‘i, as we’re thinking of, is that person necessarily born and raised in Hawai‘i? Is that a qualification, a necessary qualification? There were some who said, “Well, yeah and that’s the point, because we who have been born and raised in Hawai‘i—we the guys who’ve been left out of Hawai‘i’s literature, you know, denied recognition all this time? Yeah, you gotta be born and raised.” You gotta talk Pidgin. You gotta write in Pidgin. Well, yeah, that’s the hallmark, you know. But right away you can imagine that’s not true. [Eric Chock wasn’t writing his poems in Pidgin. -SS.] It cannot hold true right? So the other point of view was: whoever is in Hawai‘i and cares enough to write a story or a poem or a drama, or whatever, about Hawai‘i, okay? that is, set in Hawai‘i; cares enough about Hawai‘i to devote that work of writing that story to set it in Hawai‘i, that’s a writer of Hawai‘i. Think about it that way, because that person from elsewhere, as well as every locally born and raised person, is adding to changing what the body of Hawai‘i’s literature is by whatever contribution that person makes. Let’s look at it that way because that’s the way we were trying to say America should be seen. Asian Americans are part of America, by virtue of us being here and being part of society and interacting with all other peoples in Hawai‘i, in America. That’s what America is and that’s who we are in America. We’ve got to say the same thing about Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i’s people, Hawai‘i’s writers. But this took working out within Bamboo Ridge, and then very soon came an issue of Bamboo Ridge where they included William Stafford, the poet laureate, so to speak, of Oregon, and in a way representing America people before Lawson Inada became the poet laureate of Oregon. He wrote wonderful poetry, right? So he gets published in Bamboo Ridge. You see, we have William Stafford too because he’s a highly regarded friend of Hawai‘i’s writers.

KT: Yeah.

SS: He cares. He cares well enough to be included in this setting and make a contribution. Yeah.

KT: Alright! Well, my last question. I think we can infer your answer. But I’m gonna ask, anyway. What do you think about now, compared to when you first became involved with Bamboo Ridge, when Bamboo Ridge first started? How do you think things have changed and what still remains the same?

SS: By far the most obvious change is the proliferation of writers, and what has not changed in that regard is that a recent issue that I did pull up—let’s see, it’s this one here. Just at random, what’s in my bookcase. And this is issue number 108 [showing No Choice but to Follow -KT.] from the year 2016, the year I retired from teaching. It’s a kind of retrospective. In it there are some poems by, shall we say, older writers of Bamboo Ridge. I went back to the 1986 Best of Bamboo Ridge. Back then there were reprintings of older works. I mean from ten years before that or eight years before, but still that kind of thing. So some of the actual works and writers have been perpetuated by being reprinted. That’s one way things stay the same. But the proliferation of writers, some of whom will maybe never appear in print again, but this is just remarkable and I think that is the main change. Something else that has not exactly changed is, say, is the political climate that Bamboo Ridge, in very subtle and complex ways. A climate that it exudes, of appearing to be a-political, that Bamboo Ridge both presents and represents. I think that is continuing on too. Yeah. But I may very well be wrong about that. There may be a lot of explicitly, politically worded stuff that has been published in the past twenty years by Bamboo Ridge, but my suspicion is that again, like Eric Chock’s poem, it’s presented in kind of an ironical way. I still see that my Hawai‘i way of writing about these politics is not a California way.

KT: Yeah, okay, is there any—are there any other professional accomplishments that you’d like to discuss?

SS: I do wanna say that like that letter that I wrote that you asked about in 2017? I mean the national context of Bamboo Ridge still remains very important, but it was built up over the years. My work went on after I left Hawai‘i in 1980 and became involved, beginning in 1985, in the American Studies Association at a Conference, a national conference of the American Studies Association. There were five Asian American participants, only five: Ron Takaki, Gail Nomura [my wife] and I originally from Hawai‘i, Amritjit Singh from Rhode Island College, and Amy Ling who was from New York. But that was it.

And from there it was incumbent on us to introduce Asian American literature, including Hawai‘i’s literature, to the field of American Studies, and that just developed very quickly. At that time I was also heavily involved in the Modern Language Association and the Commission, later the Committee on the Literatures—plural—and Languages—plural—of America [CLLA], that is, a multicultural paradigm for the study and research of America’s literature. I served as Chair of the Committee, known as the CLLA. We developed comparative studies of Native American, African American, Asian/Pacific American, Latino American, and Puerto Rican literatures. Five different groups for the first time in America’s literary history, actually getting together for regular meetings at the Modern Language Association, at the New York City headquarters, to iron out what it is when we see ourselves in interaction with one another. When I could look back at it, I could say, “Hey, that was the beginning of what we think of as American literature today,” and, you know, almost nobody else was doing that except for MELUS, the society for the study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. But we presented our comparative American literatures at conferences, whether it was the American Studies Association or Modern Language Association, which, as you know, is the biggest professional organization in literatures and languages, internationally. We brought in Native Hawaiian scholars and writers. We brought in Bamboo Ridge writers. We put on programs. We put on so many programs in our constituent five different American ethnic groups, and the groups combined together comparatively, that at the Modern Language Association in 1989—I think it was that year—every session put on by any group within the MLA, any group who had slots in the convention of the MLA every session was labeled, you know, session A, session B, session C. We had so many sessions under the literature and languages of America that they had to start all over again with sessions section AA, BB, and CC. We had more than twenty-six, more than twenty-nine sessions in that MLA conference. It was really something, and Hawai‘i’s literature was strongly represented. That was a very deliberate effort that a lot of people contributed to. I’m talking about literary scholars and writers of these other groups as well. We really had solidarity in what we’re doing. Yeah, so it—that too is part of Bamboo Ridge history. After forty-five years maybe it’s not all that well known in Bamboo Ridge, but it was happening, and Bamboo Ridge was part of it.

KT: Okay, we’ve passed the two-hour mark and so I want to thank you for your time and answering all these questions. I am going to edit this and send you a clean transcription of this conversation that will probably be about thirty pages long. You will be free to edit in any way you choose. That includes actually adding elements you think were inadvertently left out, or need to be discussed further and if you think necessary, we could also schedule a second interview. I probably won’t get around to finish it until March. I’m busier retired than when I was working, but it’s been a very—it’s been sincerely, using that word deliberately, a great pleasure to talk to you. It’s been fascinating.

SS: Yeah, well, yeah, oh, I’m glad you and Donald [Carreira Ching] are asking people about this. Especially others of us besides Eric and Darrell, and Wing Tek, who were there from the beginning. They can fill in and tell you a lot more about others they brought into the beginnings of Bamboo Ridge.

KT: Yeah. Okay, well, have a good rest of your day, rest of your week.

SS: Thank you.