Momotaro/Peach Boy: A Portfolio

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Following is an excerpt:
Momotaro/Peach Boy is a portfolio of nine prints based on the popular Japanese folk tale about a baby boy who emerges from a giant peach and grows up to become a hero. The prints in this series form the pages of a fictional narrative, inspired by family memories of the forced internment of Japanese Americans and the experiences of Japanese American GIs in World War II. Each of the prints incorporate photographs of my father, grandfather and son, as well as cartoon characters, material from the National Archives, traditional Japanese motifs and illustrations appropriated from magazines and children’s books.

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My Winter Travels on the Sea

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Boat—a tool for my journey on the sea and also my second oceanic ancestor. I never imagined that I would ever travel alone on the sea. In the beginning I just wanted to rebel against my parents because they stopped me from studying in Taiwan. Further, it had always been my childhood dream, inspired by my youngest great-uncle, to travel alone on the waters. Rebellion was not something easy on our island within the tribe I belonged, despite my being the only son of my father. However . . . .

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“Had He Lived Always among the Chinese or with Savages”: A Musing on a “Chinese” Descartes of Modernity in the Discourse on MethodKy

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Thinking “With the Same Mind”
Wait, what, Chinese? What’s happening? What was “China” or “Chinese” for René Descartes, “the father of modern philosophy”? Why is he stitching those “Chinese or savages” into his semi-autobiography, Discourse on Method? There, you might say, he is just making some ‘multi-culty’ comparative point on how come ‘we are the world,’ how we are just all of “the same mind (son même esprit),” “charactological” differences or divergences notwithstanding. Sure, simple enough. Then what kind of or which cliché is being recruited in this “characterization” of those Chinese or savages or French or German — and to what end? Where and when did that caricatured passage click into a position on this map of thinking drawn, hypothetically, together with all others at work or play? Where does the “or” of “the Chinese or savage” come from? When and where, at what point, does such exclusionary or optional thinking begin to matter at all? Indeed, you might still ask, what’s the matter?

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Nurturing an Ethos and Mind-set: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China

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As a child educated in the U.S. through the late 1950s and early 1970s, I learned little about China that was not negative. I knew it to be the “Sick Man of Asia,” and to have fought and lost the Opium Wars to the superior Western powers. It was a country that could not feed, clothe or shelter its own people; I grew up hearing of the “starving children in China.”

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My Journey to Spirituality

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During the past three years, I have met His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama three times: twice as his host at Hunter College in New York and once as his guest in Dharamsala, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, the site of Tibetan government-in-exile. People have asked me what is a leftist scholar engaged with civil rights and labor issues doing with a religious leader like the Dalai Lama. My answer is — it came naturally.

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Three Poems

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Contemplating a Statue of
Douglas MacArthur on Corregidor Island

Evening star, still star, brilliant gleam in
The sky how I wish Douglas never returned

Had taken that slow boat to China instead
By way of Okinawa, by way of Japan.

Doggone Dugout Doug, what was in
That pipe you smoked, thinking you
Were our jut-jawed liberator when you

Were the oppressor, when the dreams
You handed the little brown brothers
Were as fleeting as corn-cob smoke

When all there is to show for it in the
Monsoon air of Corregidor, this lair
Of Chinese corsairs, Spanish jailers
And Yankee officers, is this bald-headed

Expatriate Minnesotan in the boots of
His occupier father determined to keep
These islands slices of American pie?

He is in love with the guns now silent
And his twisted odes on freedom
Lie as flotsam on the dark waters of
History, in love with the ruins of a life
That never was.