Allegiance: A Review Dear Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione, Very rarely do I go to the theatre and feel the emotions brought about by seeing Allegiance. The experience itself felt like an adventure, an uncommon glimpse into a world heavily draped in shadow. It is billed as a story about the Japanese family living in [Continue Reading...]
Dear Tak Toyoshima, Until I met our mutual friend SAM, I had only hung out with guys like Jason Fox, Calvin & Hobbes, and Charlie Brown–rad lads, to be sure, but on the whole a little difficult to relate to. Good ol’ Chuck could never understand what it was like to grow up under Confucian-inspired [Continue Reading...]
Dear Carlos Bulosan, Sometime during my elementary school years, someone told me I was a good creative writer. I even wrote a play that my classmates and I acted out in my fourth grade. That was my last year in the Philippines. The following school year, my brother and I joined Mama and Papa in [Continue Reading...]
To Lois Ann Yamanaka | Alanna Aiko Moore Dear Lois Ann Yamanaka, Every year for Christmas, for as long as I can remember, my father would buy me books as a gift. After I moved to the mainland, he would always choose books written by Hawai’i authors, to remind me of home. My favorites? All [Continue Reading...]
To John Okada | Nelson Nagai February 16, 1971 Dear Mr. Okada, My name is Nelson Nagai and I am the Chairman of the Stanford Asian American Student Alliance (AASA). I am writing you because AASA has made a proposal to the Stanford University Housing Office for the creation of an Asian American themed dormitory [Continue Reading...]
To Bao Ninh | Tina V. Cabrera Dear Bao, I write you because like you I am a writer. When I read your novel, The Sorrow of War in 2007, I was just beginning my writing career as an MFA graduate student, and in the process of writing my own creative nonfiction novel. I admit [Continue Reading...]
To Carlos Bulosan | Alicia Upano Dear Carlos, I am writing to you because I keep moving and I keep finding you there. Even now, I write to you from San Jose, Calif., where I’ve recently re-settled, and where you, some decades before me, arrived to organize Filipino and Mexican workers in the lettuce fields. [Continue Reading...]
To Agha Shahid Ali | Dilruba Ahmed Dear Shahid, In response to the territorial dispute in your Kashmiri homeland, you declared to a friend during your dying days, “I wish all this had not happened…This dividing of the country, the divisions between people, Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu, you can’t imagine how much I hate it. [Continue Reading...]