INTAKE: one history professor’s promise to George Takei
Once upon a time in 1950s America, three children of immigrants sat together in student government class at Los Angeles High School. Each of them lived with an identity of being Other in a way they could not shake; each carried the secret fear of striving to fit in. These three were Tommy, born in Czechoslovakia on the eve of Nazi occupation, who escaped the Holocaust at age two; Myra, a first-generation Jewish American daughter of immigrants, growing up in the shadow of her volatile Yiddish-speaking granny; and George, who had just emerged from spending his youth in a remote internment camp for Japanese Americans. Day by day as children, they had learned to manage the anxiety of what might come next for Jews and Asians. By their teen years, the three friends had won so much recognition for their civics and good citizenship that at L.A. High they occupied the highest levels of student government. Tommy had become Student Body President, Myra was Girls’ Senior Board President, and George was Boys’ Senior Board President.
If you’ve guessed that this story’s teenage George was George Takei, you’re right. And Myra Schiller? She is my hip Jewish mother; and Tom Wolver, now a highly regarded sculptor whose astonishing works address the Holocaust and the shadow side of the human unconscious. I learned the story of their groundbreaking adolescent friendships while researching my first book: an oral history of gender and ethnic identities at L.A. High in the bygone 1950s.
Yet as a young girl growing up in L.A. myself, I never learned about the internment of Japanese-Americans from any class at school, from any book or film. It would not be until 1978, about to finish high school, when I stumbled across a movie showing camp internees locked behind barbed wire. Shocked, I asked another friend’s mother if she’d known about those camps, having lived through World War II. I’ll never forget the way she fixed me with a steely stare and told me, “We were scared.”
Through four years of college and six years of graduate school, I made it my business to learn more than I ever wanted to know about the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese Americans, the re-opening of one of the U.S. camps to hold “hippie” protestors in the 1960s, and a proposal by several homophobic politicians during the 1980s to reopen the camps for gay men with AIDS. I was able to meet George, I befriended Tom, and I watched with pride as my mother, under Tom’s tutelage during her late sixties and early seventies, became a peace and justice artist herself—winning a local prize for her sculpture of an Afghan refugee woman and child.
In every history class I teach, I teach the lessons of how just a few leaders feeling scared led to George spending his kindergarten years uprooted and imprisoned, and yet how he, Tom and Myra turned their outsiderness into leadership—and art. All three have made their mark. And remain friends. And as I watch the men selected for our next administration increase the scared that actual immigrants feel (and Jews, and Muslims, and gays like George and me), or casually reference registering Muslims because of past surveillance done to Japanese Americans, I feel that sharp intake of breath; that gasp that all I’ve done could not prevent this ignorance and hurt.
The intake that I’ve worked for is not a breath of panicked sorrow. The intake that my elders learned in civics class at L.A. High and modeled in their model Student Government was a nation taking in the immigrant. The next three outsiders our “leaders” seem afraid of could be Tommy, Myra, George, or other artists in their infancy, who, given space to grow up and to thrive could add new light a thousandfold to fortunate inheritors like me.