[p. 3 of 4]

[Yamashita continues]... interests me that can be engaged with as purely an aesthetic experience. You or I can step into a Zen rock garden or stare into field of irises, but the stepping in or staring away is an act of repudiation or leave-taking. The world encumbers me/us. What's a vacation? Even when we were children traveling to Yellowstone, my parents were trying to show us the world we didn't yet know.

LRS: And this was a political act on their part?

Yamashita: That's stretching it perhaps, but yes, my parents were always teachers. They believed that traveling was an opportunity that expanded our vistas.

LRS: Also, doesn't politics sell? What was that agent afraid of?

Yamashita: Probably not politics embedded so boldly in fiction. The reading public separates nonfiction and fiction, strictly separating fact from fabricated. The agent wasn't afraid, just unable to promote or represent my kind of work.

LRS: How has teaching influenced your writing, and vice versa?

Yamashita: Teaching has made me more aware of my process as a writer. It's also placed me inside the academy with scholars and their thinking, writing, and libraries. I have enjoyed learning from my colleagues, reading their work, thinking about their research. In the beginning, I didn't understand why I was invited to teach; I just thought it was a very fortunate opportunity. Over the years since I arrived, I have learned to see why my writing and interests intersect with others'. In teaching Asian American literature I've been forced to really read the work of my fellow writers, to think about their work in the broader vision of Asian American literature and as a project and field of study.

LRS: Was teaching a course on Asian American literature the university's idea or your own? How do your personal and artistic identities as Asian American (if you have these) figure into it all?

Yamashita: The Asian Am lit was their and my idea. For years, I've been the only one teaching it at UCSC, so I guess I feel responsible. This isn't to say I haven't made the courses my own. I teach it like a writer, I guess, and I teach what I'm interested in. I imagine that I was teaching a "diasporic" Asian Am lit class before anyone else, and I did this to try to understand what it was I felt was missing from the curriculum, trying to figure out what I, as a writer, had to do with this area of study. Now, everyone must have a diasporic take on the literature.

I don't have a problem with identifying as an Asian American writer, if that is what you are asking. It's a political designation that remains necessary.

LRS: Necessary for what, do you think? Can you imagine a point in the future in which such an identification would no longer be needed?

Yamashita: I guess my concern as a writer is about history and voice, about leaving a record and finding and giving voice. The designation Asian American for me carries a history of solidarity, struggle, and advocacy. The work that this particular American history does is to teach, remind, and to cause change. For example, it's possible through a history of wars, imperialism and colonialism, to trace immigration patterns into the United States. Furthermore, it's possible to extend that history to that of detention, internment, imprisonment, and incarceration. Currently, we are again at war, and another American and international citizenship finds itself under surveillance, threat of or in actual incarceration.

LRS: I've read that you were planning a novel about the Asian American political movement, and then a "bigger" project involving China. If this is still what you are working on (and you don't mind saying), where will the novel about the Asian American movement be set? Will transnational and global geographies figure into it, or will it be something of a departure from your first three books? And, I'm burning with curiosity: what's leading you to China?

Yamashita: The Asian American movement novel is set in the Bay Area: San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley. And yes, the transnational and global figure in very importantly since that was the nature of the movement, even though it's been sometimes dismissed as participating in a period of factional and segregated movements.

The China thing is really about museums, but that may have to wait. I have another project that involves my father's family archives that that includes extensive correspondence between all the family members

[continues...]