Ronald Takaki 1939-2009

Rest in Peace, Professor Takaki.

This is already a deeply sad year, despite all of great, joyous stuff that happens every day. This is the year that my major monuments continue to pass away. My undergraduate advisor has just emailed to inform us Ethnic Studies alumni that Professor Ronald Takaki has just passed away yesterday. I first met him in the Spring 1990 semester as a freshman at UC Berkeley in the very huge Asian American Studies 20A course, Asian American History. For those of you not in the know, Professor Takaki wrote the book, Strangers from a Different Shore, THE book on Asian American movement and migration to the USA.

He was my very first ever Asian American teacher.

Perhaps today we think of his book as old hat, but in 1990 it wasn’t. It was revelatory. It was the first time I have ever read or heard any American scholar, much less an Asian American scholar place us in a serious American History context. What it felt like to me is that he placed us on the map. He made us visible. On a segment on some national morning talk show, Professor Takaki was interviewed by Jane Pauley, and he told her that Angel Island was our Ellis Island. Again, today this is kind of old hat, but then, it opened up something in me; I needed to know that my being here, our being here, was historically significant, as historically significant as white folks.

I remember Professor Takaki explaining “epistemology” to us undergrads in the lecture room, 10 Evans Hall. Standing on the stage with his enormous yellow chalk, its dust all over his hands. He’d run his chalk dusty hands through his gray hair, and the yellow would stay there. He was vivacious, hands, face, and voice animated: “The study of HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW? This is epistemology.” At the time, it was flying over my head, but of course, this is one of the most important things I have ever learned: to question what I have been taught as the truth. To consider and question the source, to demand to see the evidence myself.

The second course I took with him was Ethnic Studies 130, which was something like the comparative study of immigration of many different ethnic and political groups to North America. Again, this was an exercise in epistemology, examining historical assumptions of why we are all here, and how we have become divided as we are, in spite of many multiethnic, political alliances throughout American History. The core text for this course was A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, which I highly recommend everyone read.

I should also say that Ethnic Studies being multidisciplinary, it was in his classes that I first read Carlos Bulosan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua; all very formative literature for my critical political education and for my education as a poet.

I am not quite sure how to end this post except to say thank you, Professor Takaki. I am so deeply grateful that you were my teacher.

Addendum: A few posts and news bits online:

• Emil Guillermo @ Amok
• UC Berkeley News
• AsianWeek
• Asian American Journalists Association