Grandma Matsuyoshi was a collector. If your grandmother was from a certain generation, you know what I mean: mine never threw away anything. After she died, we found the piles of stuff she had left behind. Though she only crocheted for a few years, we found hatboxes full of scraps and cast-off yarn. In other sadder collections, we found all the amber pill bottles she had saved from five years of chemotherapy - glass in one box, plastic in another - all of them cleaned and capped. In an envelope marked with my name in her dresser, I even found my own dried umbilical cord, brittle and blackened with age and not unlike the charred skin of a hot dog. Junk! I thought at the time, and for a week, I dragged green garbage bags to the curb.
This was what writing for me was like my first few years in creative writing programs. Surrounded by predominately, if not exclusively, white writing students and teachers, I disgorged myself of what I thought was junk: my cultural baggage. My aesthetic was remote and intellectual; very little of my personal history entered into my work. And how could it, when I chose words that never betrayed my ethnicity? I surrounded myself with daring and dizzying American writers and tried to emulate them, spinning yarns from nothing but the language and my own pressing ego.
But no matter how much I wrote, there was one incident that nagged me and escaped fictionalization. About a month before my grandmother died, I drove her from her house to the final trip to the hospital. As I was carrying her up the hospital steps, I was almost halfway up before I realized how light she was. She seemed suspended in my arms, weightless, almost as if she were floating in water. I guess I should have expected it, she having been five feet tall and weakened by chemotherapy, but still I was surprised. I had expected her to be heavier. I had assumed 67 years of living would have settled into the density of her body, and that I would be able to feel the burden of the concern and pain of 67 years of loving. I did not want to think that a body that had survived almost 70 years could be almost incorporeal, and that memory was the only consolation at the end of life. I remember resolving then, that I would gain weight in my old age, so the bulk and heft of my body would comfort me in my declining years. I was imagining myself squeezing into a love seat, struggling with a group of nurses and interns as they tried to turn me over in the hospital bed, when I was jerked awake.
Grandma had somehow reached back and grabbed onto the handrail. I realized then that she had been speaking to me the whole time I had been carrying her up the steps. "Bochan," she said, "Bochan." The term of endearment startled me. It had been a long time since she had called me that and addressed anything to me in Japanese. I stepped away from the handrail and tried to pull her hand away, but her grip was too tight. "Bochan," she continued and I started to laugh, partly because I was losing a wrestling match to a 67 year old woman who weighed less than 100 pounds, but mostly because what I thought was her confusion about who I really was. Later, an admissions orderly came to my rescue and after he had pried Grandma's fingers from the handrail, I followed them into the hospital.
I tried for years, without success, to capture this scene down in fiction. I told it from my point of view, from her point of view, from an omniscient third. In every version, I transformed the cultural and linguistic "peculiarities" by burying its undeniable cultural sources. I did not want to write culture, I told myself, but fiction. I had come to believe the famous radio literary critic who had told me, "There are good minority writers but not great ones. You become a great writer when you learn to write about problems bigger than your own culture." Each term, I labored to discover how I could adapt my stories to fit that desired broader audience.
So the two remained separate inside of me, the writing part appeared at the writing programs and classrooms, and the cultural part appeared whenever I went home to visit. During one of these visits home, after having quit another writing program dissatisfied yet unable to articulate reasons, I was confronted simultaneously by my writing and my culture.
I was helping my father landscape his new house. We had returned to my grandmother's old house, number 13 on a lane that didn't go anywhere but dead-ending seven houses after it broke from the main road. There had never been more than a dozen inhabitants on the lane. Recently, the developers had torn down all of the old buildings, and we had snuck back to reclaim a part of our family history before the foundation of a high-rise condominium was poured. Thirty years ago, my grandmother had rented out her garage to a man who made fake shell leis for a living. He would import from the Philippines bald, white, shells made of paste and string them to sell to the tourists in Waikiki. He was considered a dangerous character, a minor con-man who was rumored to carry a gun, and so all us neighborhood kids loved him. That day, my father and I were digging up the earth of what was once this man's workshop. We were like archaeologists, unearthing shells, cleaning them off, and storing them in boxes. When we had found about 15 gallons worth of shells, we returned home where my father used them to create a dramatic shrub garden that earned him "Yard of the Month" honors.
At some point during the hours of digging and cleaning, I came to see that this was what I should be doing with my writing. I had spent my time in writing programs denying the shells beneath my feet, when I should uncovering them, polishing them, and bringing them out into the open. What I needed to do was reclaim a community that had been buried through its silence.
Cultural anthropologists have a saying: All of writing is writing culture. This has been true for Asian-Americans, who in addition to working within the culture of American Letters, must examine and explain their own ethnic cultures as well. After a reading, a Chinese-American poet was approached by a literary critic and offered this judgement: "I have nothing to say about your poetry, because I don't understand Chinese poetry." After pointing out to him that she wrote and read in English and wasn't Chinese but Chinese-American, this Ph.D. in American literature said, " I have never read any Chinese poetry." A former professor of mine boasted that once he left graduate school, he refused to read anything in translation. "And since I only know English," this tenured professor with an emphasis in 20th century literature said, "I never read anything foreign." These American professors demonstrate the futility of consciously trying to write for an audience "bigger than your own culture." There are many more excuses for not reading the work of an Asian-American writer than there are defenses by that writer.
The only solution is for Asian-America to keep writing. Writers, says Geoffrey Wolff, are great grievers. Write out of this sense of grief, for the communities that have been destroyed, and also to keep the world from its silence. People of color in this country must write, if for no other reason than to keep their own communities alive. The next time someone asks you, "Why do you write/read this ethnic stuff?" Tell them, "Because if I don't tell it, it won't be told, and America won't come looking for it."
A fellow writer, a woman who will undoubtedly have her face swathed onto the back of a paperback someday, once asked me, "If you're not writing for a million people, then who are you writing for?" For the twelve people on Muliwai Lane, I can tell her now, for only twelve. 
Illustration by Ramon Gil.
