David Mas Masumoto - Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm

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Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm

Copyright 2023 by David Mas Masumoto & Patricia Wakida

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book Layout by Mark E. Cull

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Masumoto, David Mas, author.

Title: Secret harvests: a hidden story of separation and the resilience of a family farm / David Mas Masumoto.

Other titles: Hidden story of separation and the resilience of a family farm

Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2023]

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016771 (print) | LCCN 2022016772 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280776 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781636281032 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781636280783 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Masumoto, David MasFamily. | Japanese American farmersCaliforniaFresnoBiography. | Japanese AmericansCaliforniaFresnoBiography. | Japanese AmericansCaliforniaFresnoSocial conditions20th century. | Sugimoto, Shizuko, 1919-2013. | Disabled womenCaliforniaFresnoBiography. | MeningitisPatientsBiography. | FarmersCaliforniaFresnoBiography. | Fresno (Calif.)Biography.

Classification: LCC F869.F8 M37 2023 (print) | LCC F869.F8 (ebook) | DDC 979.4004/9560922dc23/eng/20220427

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016771

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016772

Publication of this book has been made possible in part through the generous financial support of Ann Beman.

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

For my Aunt Shizuko, the Sugimoto Family, and the Masumoto Familyfor their resilience.

David Mas Masumoto

To my Bachan Miyeko Okamura Kebo and my Grandma Rose Wada Wakida

Patricia Wakida

Contents

A family separated by racism against Japanese Americans and the discrimination of people with developmental disabilitiesreunited seventy years later, returning to their roots on a farm and bound by family secrets.

Every Family Has Secrets

PREFACE

I Farm with Ghosts

I farm with ghosts. They live in our fields. Each peach tree has pruning scars from the generations who worked these orchards. Every vine has been shaped by the hands of workers who returned each year to add their touch to the sculpture. People and their families have etched their marks on my farm, and I, too, hope to leave behind a simple signature on this seemingly ordinary landscape.

Ghosts inhabit our family history; their collective voices contribute to a perspective that shaped my upbringing. They pass on lessons I struggle to understand, sometimes rejecting, other times surrendering to their value, but never ignoring them because they haunt my memories: a worn shovel, a bent peach limb, the twisted trunk of an old grapevine, a family photo, a Buddhist altarall trigger a rush of stories that can overwhelm.

Memory and reflections fill this book as I learn more about my familys past. We were immigrants from rural Japan, Kumamoto on my fathers side and Hiroshima on my mothers side. We were destined to become farmers like generations before us, scratching out a living while carving a niche in the earth. We were Buddhist in a Christian land, settling in the isolated countryside outside of Fresno, California. We were farmworkers, then later farmers of organic peaches, nectarines, apricots, and grapes for raisins. Because of our legacy as immigrants and the incarceration my family endured during World War II, we lacked collections of artifacts. I inherited only a few haunting sketches. Often reserved, we were not a family of storytellers. A silence hovered over family gatherings as I learned to accept and explore the unspoken.

Memories can and should change. Our own stories are fluid, reimagined with new information, corrected with facts, yet anchored in a past as we try to honestly recall and yearn to remember. Documenting these stories forces me to ask: What is the truth and why does it matter? And most importantly, how deeply does one explore dark family issues yet respect distances with a historical tenderness?

One of the ghosts who inhabit our farm is Shizuko, an aunt with an intellectual disability whom we only recently reconnected with. Like a grapevines wandering canes and tendrils that twist and curl, searching for attachment and support yet reaching for sunlight to strengthen and extend their growth, her story unfolds as an evolving tale buried in the history of immigrants, the saga of racism and discrimination, the deplorable treatment of people with disabilities, and the shroud of family hidden stories, all the while working the earth and trying to plant and extend our roots in American soil.

I am not speaking for Shizuko. I do not speak on behalf of disabled people. Too often many have assumed they know what the disabled community knows and thinks. I remain inadequate to write that story; Shizuko has her own voice and her own way of communicating that I am only beginning to grasp. I try to capture the mosaic of her life as told through family stories combined with research, visits, and interviews.

I cannot fully complete her portrait because of the gaps in her life story. Instead, I can only attempt to grasp the significance of the lost years and decades of her survival and thriving resilience. I am haunted by gaps in family memories, nebulous responses and twisted behavior that must be examined within the context of historynot to uncover excuses but rather reveal family baggage we all must carry and learn to live with. Much of her story continues to be found in a world of secrets to be explored.

I carry the weight of troubled memories. Some are stirred by wondering; others are involuntary, stimulated by the feel of the dirt and sweat on our farm or the aroma of a ripening peach. I attempt to organize them into a narrative but accept the impossibility of the task. No one has a monopoly on the truth, the ghosts of one-hundred-year-old grapevines remind me.