PART ONE: THREE QUESTIONS FOR KAREN TEI YAMASHITA
Angie Sijun Lou: Tell me about how this project started for you. Why the noir genre?
Karen Tei Yamashita: Several years ago. I was invited to write a noir story about Santa Cruz. That, I thought, is pretty fertile territory, considering the stories of serial murders in the seventies. Amidst the surf and sunshine and the congregation of flower children, there has always been this dark undercurrent, captured by Hitchcock’s Psycho and combined with our post-sixties form of degeneration. It was my mom who noticed the plaque in the medical offices on Water Street that honored the memory of murdered Japanese American family. She stared at the plaque nestled in a Japanese garden atrium and remarked to me, that her sister had known the issei mother of the family, that after the death of her son and grandchildren, she eventually committed suicide. This story was, to me, terrifying, and I put it aside for many years, but then took courage to finally research it and to write the dark fiction that spoke beyond its cruel reportage. That story was the beginning. Whether it’s noir or not, I don’t know.
ASL: How did you know where to look to uncover these hidden histories?
KTY: I admit the impetus to write about a Japanese American family was personal to me, then wondered about other folks in Santa Cruz whose stories hadn’t been explored.
That reminded me that Judy Yung, American history professor and oral historian, and George Ow, local entrepreneur and philanthropist, had taken groups of students to visit the area around Mobo Sushi and Trader Joe’s where the old Santa Cruz Chinatown had once existed. I also knew about the death of Fermin Tobera during the Filipino riots, and then I discovered London Nelson, a formerly enslaved man who bequeathed his land and property to fund the public school. And the Water Street bridge lynching of Francisco Arias and José Chamales. Local historians, like Geoffrey Dunn and Sandy Lydon, had been researching and writing about this history for years. I didn’t have to look far. They’d done all the work.
My work was to look into the gaps and speculate what couldn’t be accounted for in the record, to flush out a possible truth and people with more complexity than their final demise.
ASL: Each of your stories includes a walking tour of the place. Why was this important?
KTY: The idea of a walking tour was inspired by Judy Yung who in the years she taught at UC Santa Cruz used to take groups of students to San Francisco Chinatown, explore the streets and alleys to point out the vibrant community hidden to tourists. She walked us into housing projects, Tong Associations, in and out of small businesses like a fortune cookie factory or a medicinal shop filled with a fascinating array of dried herbs and animals. The best part of the tour was to end at a local restaurant and eat.
Well, in Santa Cruz, our Chinatown was long gone, but it is still possible to walk around and over the site. And the Santa Cruz Museum of History and Art has an archive of old maps that tell another story, the change over time of commerce and ownership, from Mexican mission to an outpost on the rush to gold.
Walking around the town made me aware of the train tracks, the tunnel and stairs, the view from the mission, the relationship of pier, harbor and bay to the town, its forest and farmlands. I admit I’m not much of a walker or hiker, but trekking the land on foot is really the only way to feel and see the particulars, the geography and archeology, layers of time and history over the same soil.
PART TWO: THREE QUESTIONS FOR ANGIE SIJUN LOU
KTY: How did you select this curation of writers?
ASL: I was interested in selecting writers who worked across genres until their borders faded into indistinction, especially troubling the assumptions of the nonfiction essay. An essay is a mode of inquiry constrained by its truth content. I read essays expecting a certain level of factuality from the writer. What happens when the truth evades us, when the archive has no record of us History is taught to us as a static and everlasting—things happened that cannot be changed. Dark Soil believes that our living narratives of dead events wield symbolic power over our present. I saw the work of these writers as carrying forth the tradition of the poet-critic, those who listened when the angel of history spoke to them in a distorted voice.
KTY: You titled the collection Dark Soil: Fictions and Mythographies. How would you define a mythography?
ASL: The word ‘mythography’ is an intentional perversion of Audre Lorde’s word ‘biomythography,’ an interweaving of myth, history, and biography she practices in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. I wanted to make a similar portmanteau with geography instead of biography.
Many cultures engage in oral traditions where truth is transmitted through gossip and fable, changing from mouth to mouth to make a collective collusion. My only guideline was that I wanted the writers to write a prose piece that uncovered the hidden history of a place. Maggie Nelson said that assignments are great for creating the desire to disobey the assignment, and I was open to the disobedience that followed. Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint did not want to name her place, fading it into oblivion as a political act, because to name something is to give it a kind of semiotic power. Juliana Spahr wrote a poem about a riverbank on the Ohio River, only locatable with its geographic coordinates. I used the myth of Persephone’s abduction to write about the site where the experimental artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was killed.
The word mythography captured the ethos of the project: a mythic geography that overlays the real.
KTY: What was your experience editing this collection?
ASL: I struggled to make this collection feel cohesive while attending to the pieces in their variousness and specificity. I believe deeply in constraint-based writer because it gives the writer a form to talk about their existing obsessions.
As soon as I gave them the green light, every writer went running toward their private hauntings. Instead of reigning them in, I let the essays unfold into playgrounds brimming with spectral resonances.