1100 words...

31 March 2022: Wrote just over 1100 words of the Watanna entry today. A bit slow at times--sometimes 30 or 45 minutes between sentences when I had to walk away for a bit, do something else, but they got written. Also checked off a bunch of other "to do" items. 

Bit by bit...

Not much to show for it...

29 March 2022: Today has felt like a very long day. The best part was probably my walk this morning, but it seems so long ago right now. 

I worked all day (more or less), but don't feel like I have a ton to show for it. I had one student conference, but the student was resistant to most of my advice and too much in his own head, psyching himself out. So that was frustrating, even after forty-five minutes of talking. Hammered out a loose outline for my entry on Onoto Watanna, but a thesis is sort of eluding me and I think I've got way too much material. Worked a bit on a bunch of other projects, too. 

Big tasks, little tasks, etc. Usually I feel more accomplished, but not today. I think that's okay, so long as I can feel some real progress tomorrow. 

"The Japanese in America"

16 March 2022: “Sometimes I dream of the day when all of us will be world citizens—not citizens merely of petty portions of the earth, showing our teeth at each other, snarling, sneering, biting, and with the ambition of the murderer at our heart’s core—every man with the savage instinct of the wild beast to get the better of his brother—to prove his greater strength—his mightier mind—the superiority of his color." --Onoto Watanna, "The Japanese in America," p. 177

I've been working on my book's entry on Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton) and boy, is she interesting. The lines above--from the closing of an essay first published in 1907--are striking for a number of reasons. For instance, they make me think of works by her contemporaries like Zitkala Sa or W.E.B. DuBois who also speak of dreams of racial equality. 

But they also stand out to me because--spatially--she spends so much more time on the nastiness (from "showing our teeth" onward) than the dream. She was a Canadian/American with British and Chinese roots who presented herself as Japanese writer, a fraught choice that gave her access and some degree of agency. She knew how to speak to white writers with essentialist notions, exploiting them to sell books and pay her bills. She was, in fact, quite good at it. But those very choices that led to her success must have left her feeling quite cynical at times, which we can see, I think, in those lines above.  

Work Cited

Watanna, Onoto. “A Half-Caste” and Other Writings, edited by Linda Trinh Moser, U of Illinois P, 2003.