Before today's class, I started drafting a post on historiography. We've read a considerable amount of fiction set in the periods we're studying but written much later. Of course historical memory is as relevant as the events that transpired. It's impossible anyway to understand history without something of a presentist lens; why not go straight to what Yamashita thinks of WWII, what Divakaruni thinks of the early 1900s, what Lau thinks of the 1860s? But it made me wonder if there's a problem of voicelessness. By using modern sources we're in danger of making the assumption that the "picture brides", for example, cannot speak for themselves -- that there are no interviews, letters, pictures from these women that we could be reading. In a context where the idea of an intermediary is so fraught -- cf Nomura -- is this adding another?

Well, that'd be true if this was a history class, which: it isn't! We're studying Asian-American women's experiences, which means Divakaruni and Yamamoto's, too. So much of what we've talked about so far has put stress on the necessity of generational continuity. The Filipina-American journalling project is primarily figured as valuable so that it can foster communication and tradition transmission between first- and second-generation Filipina-Americans. And then there's the movie, which -- combined with class reactions -- is a treatise on the necessity of continuity, of cultural connection, and of personal experiences as reinterpreted through the viewer's eyes. Enough people have posted stories of their own Wilshire bus that it's pretty obvious straight-up history is only half the story, and the less important half.