clipped from www.asianreporter.com| From The Asian Reporter, V19, #4 (January 27, 2009), page 16. |
Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in
the Life of a Japanese American Family
Oregon State University Press, 2008
Paperback, 308 pages, $18.95
Oregon will celebrate 150 years of statehood in 2009, and to commemorate this event, almost every library in the state will encourage reading and discussion of Lauren Kessler's monumental pageturner, Stubborn Twig, the story of three generations of the Yasui family and their century in Oregon.
As Lauren Kessler writes in her preface, "We want to be proud to be Americans — not with aggressive jingoism but with sincerity, with respect for land, people, and principle. But it is sometimes difficult, for our past is clotted with ugly episodes: invasions, land-grabbing, forced marches, slavery, lynchings, mass internment." Lauren Kessler asks the reader to confront this difficulty and consider who we are, as Americans and as Oregonians.
Stubborn Twig is divided into three sections: issei, nisei, and sansei.
Issei
"Issei: The First Generation" begins in the Hood River Valley, where 21-year-old Masuo Yasui has just arrived by train in 1908. He left Japan five years earlier, "riding the crest of the country's greatest wave of emigration." He had worked on the railroads of the Pacific Northwest, "a minor hero for his skill at throwing a monkey wrench from the moving handcar, striking unwitting jackrabbits that — much to the joy of the meat-starved crew — made it into the next day's soup." Thirty-eight years later, at age 61, he "lost his house, his business, and all but one of his farms," and "missed the birth of his first two grandchildren and the wedding ceremonies of a daughter and a son."
Nisei
"Growing up nisei anywhere was difficult. Growing up nisei in Hood River, epicenter of anti-Japanese agitation, was even more trying. But growing up a Yasui nisei in Hood River, the offspring of the city's only Japanese businessman and the valley's undisputed nikkei leader, was the toughest of all." Tough enough that tragedy strikes one of Masuo Yasui's eight children in the second section of Stubborn Twig. There is triumph as well, particularly in the story of one son's escape to Denver, and freedom, in 1942. Lauren Kessler calls it "a scene that could not have been better scripted by Hollywood." But by the time "Nisei: The Second Generation" draws to a close with the signing into law of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, another member of the Yasui family has been lost.
Sansei
Two Yasui grandchildren still live and work in the Hood River Valley, growing pears, cherries, and apples on land Masuo Yasui bought in 1932, but the Yasui sansei are in many ways "as diverse as the baby-boomer generation of which they are a small part." One has written a play about her father's struggle for justice; another has made a documentary "of her own journey of discovery as she learned about her family's past." It is also in "Sansei: The Third Generation" that tragedy strikes the Yasui family once more.
Stubborn Twig is not only the story of one family, but also a look at the family's neighbors, one of whom "sicced her dog on [a] terrified eighth-grade girl." There was also a gas-station operator who "reasoned aloud that there was no difference between a 'nisei Japanese and a nisei German' — and he was a nisei German," and took down his racist sign. Lauren Kessler never asks the reader: Would you give a pregnant internee craving fruit juice the only thing you could find — syrup from a can of peaches; or would you use a child's drawings of the Panama Canal as evidence of his father's espionage; or would you, like "the vast majority" of citizens of Hood River, keep silent? She doesn't have to; these are questions we readers are bound to ask ourselves as we consider our history and ponder the question of who we are.
* * *
Oregon Reads 2009
Lauren Kessler's Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family has been selected as the Oregon Reads book for 2009. Many events are scheduled throughout Oregon. To learn more, visit <www.oregonreads2009.org>
clipped from blog.oregonlive.com
clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org Growing up in a small town,
we didn't notice
the background figures of our lives,
gray men, gnarled women,
dropping from us silently
like straightpins to a dressmaker's floor.
The old did not die
but simply vanished
like discs of snow on our tongues.
We knew nothing then of nothingness
or pain or loss—
our days filled with open fields,
football,
clipped from www.npr.orgIn Paris, scientists polished and weighed it carefully, until they determined that it was exactly one kilogram, around 2.2 pounds. Then, by international treaty, they declared it to be the international standard.
Since 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, that cylinder has been the standard against which every other kilogram on the planet has been judged. But that's creating problems. According to scientists, the cylinder's mass appears to be changing.
The solution is a new kilogram, one that is based on a constant number instead of a physical object. To get that number, scientists have had to build a special kind of scale, one that measures the kilogram without balancing it against another mass. It has been a long, slow process, but today they are close to redefining the kilogram once and for all.
Please Don't Sneeze On The Kilogram
As it stands, the entire world's system of measurement hinges on the cylinder. If it is dropped, scratched or otherwise defaced, it would cause a global problem. "If somebody sneezed on that kilogram standard, all the weights in the world would be instantly wrong," says Richard Steiner, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md.
For that reason, the official kilogram is kept locked inside a secured vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. Scientists are so paranoid that they've only taken it out on three occasions: in 1889, 1946 and 1989. Each time, they've compared it to a set of copies. In 1889, the copies and the kilogram weighed the same, but by 1989, they had drifted apart. Based on the data, the kilogram appears to weigh slightly less than the copies.
The real crux of this problem is that it's impossible to tell what has changed over the past 120 years. The copies may have grown heavier over time by absorbing air molecules. But it's equally possible that the kilogram is getting lighter. Periodic washings, for example, may have removed microscopic quantities of metal from its surface.
Or it could be that both the copies and the kilogram are changing, but at different rates. There is no way to tell what's happening because mass is always calibrated against another mass, says Peter Mohr, a theoretical physicist at NIST who is working on the kilogram problem.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the change is extremely small, around 50 micrograms (billionths of a kilogram). "The actual ramifications for somebody going to the store will be negligible," Mohr says. But "for scientific work, it makes a difference."
In Search Of A Constant
For that reason, scientists have embarked on a quixotic quest to redefine the kilogram in terms of a fundamental constant. Constants are used by physicists to describe the natural world. They are both precise and unchanging — the perfect instruments for setting standards.
Scientists have already used constants to redefine other units of measurement, like the meter. Originally the meter was equal to the length of a piece of metal kept alongside the kilogram, but in 1983 it was redefined as the distance light travels in a vacuum over 299,792,458ths of a second. Because the speed of light is constant, this new definition means that the meter will never change.
Fixing the kilogram is more complicated. Scientists would like to express it in terms of a fundamental constant called Planck's constant. Planck's constant is a vanishingly small number used in atomic-scale quantum mechanical calculations.
Relating a number that small to something you can hold in your hand, like a kilogram, "is not easy," says Ian Robinson, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom.
Watt's The Difference
Some researchers believe the best hope for redefinition comes from a new kind of scale called a watt balance. "It's basically just a very highly calibrated bathroom scale," says Steiner, who is in charge of the watt balance at NIST.
Rather than using another mass, watt balances measure the mass of a kilogram in terms of electrical and magnetic forces. Those forces can be translated into a number that is related to Planck's constant.
The scale is so sensitive that it can detect changes as small as ten-billionths of a kilogram. "If you pulled a hair out of a person's head and then weighed them, we could tell the difference," Steiner says.
Unfortunately, scales that sensitive are sensitive to a lot of other things, too. Lawnmowers, the tides, and even earthquakes on the other side of the world are able to upset the balance. There are many other sources of noise as well.
Robinson admits that when he started working on watt balances in the 1970s, he thought it would take just five or six years to redefine the kilogram. Today, after decades of work, scientists believe they are still five or six years away from setting a new standard.
Yet most expect that the change will happen. When it does, the metal cylinder in Paris will be replaced by an eight-digit number. Anyone with a watt balance, and a lot of spare time, will be able to measure it for themselves.
Mohr says the new kilogram will be worth all the trouble. "People have worried about mass standards for thousands of years," he says. The new, unchanging number would be a significant improvement over the past: "I think it's just the right thing to do."
clipped from www.npr.org
