Kindle Notes & Highlights
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February 5 - February 19, 2025
Her family came as immigrants, picked peaches and grapes in the fields of California, found poverty and racism and yet stayed while struggling to build something.
My maternal grandparents came from the rural countryside, leaving villages in Hiroshima, carrying hope to foreign places called Fresno, Selma, Fowler, and Del Rey.
All with the dream of planting themselves in the American soil they serve.
Isolated, invisible, and expendable—immigrant families are easily overlooked.
They will forever live with these ghosts of hate and incarceration.
Do I disrespect my family’s ancestors and keep secrets secret? They had worked hard, so hard, to establish themselves and scratch out a new reality in a world that had imprisoned them.
The abruptness sheds light on that passage because my grandfather at that time was working on a farm in Sanger (outside of Fresno, California), a thousand miles from Seattle. There’s no reference to which Wednesday, and it ignores the fact that immigrants were forced to endure days and weeks in quarantine. The resulting confusion tells me more about legacy than any date and place. I now can see Shizuko as treasured inheritance.
Who will look after my parents and me as I age? On a family farm, it’s traditional that someone stays behind to tend for the family and the land. A son may inherit the farm and unfairly a daughter is often burdened to care for aging parents. Unfair for all because such obligations are not rewarded in our current systems.
With each Obon season, I think of the countless contributions of farmworkers who have also labored on our farm, including those who have pruned the one-hundred-year-old grapevines in front of our farmhouse.
Their hands too shaped these vines.
Every summer in the 1960s, migrant
Often these workers spent winters in Texas. I can recall old cars with Texas license plates driving into our backyard in spring. Families were seeking work and for months they joined our operation.
These sounds crossed borders and connected our little town of Del Rey with the South Texas towns of San Antonio and El Paso. This
I farm with these spirits eternally.
Each left behind something more than success: they bestowed us with significance.
I begin to understand the sense of accomplishment of my grandparents, pare...
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Each harvest proved they were accepted he...
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We remain inspired by their resilience.
To finally belong. Shikata ga nai. It can’t be helped.
