San Mateo Daily Journal July 11, 2023
Ella asked her husband, an engineer, to help her better track the performance of particular stocks and indices so that she could invest the money she scrimped and saved each month. Thomas Kikuchi obliged. Using 1970s computer tools he gave her she became quite the whiz at predicting and profiting from the stock market. A few days each week she would head over to the local investment office, dressed in business attire, carrying a nifty briefcase, to execute her trades. One evening, when Thomas came home from work, he found her despondent, asking now if he could help her find a way to do her trading without going into that office. A group of white men had mocked her that day, humiliating her for being an Asian woman in a man’s world.
He was no stranger to humiliation. WWII Executive Order 9022 put him and his family in an Idaho concentration camp, with him doing forced labor in strawberry fields. Ella, born in Hawaii, had not suffered that fate, islands so full of Japanese people that it would have been impossible to intern them. Her parents ran a popular restaurant next to an Oahu train station where U.S. troops gathered before being sent across the ocean to fight. I like to imagine that my Marine cousin Artie Popkin might have had his last good meal there before being KIA at the age of 19.
My Jewish father, Herbert, landed in Europe the day the war ended, and was sent to Dachau to guard German officers on trial for war crimes. What he saw and heard there left horrible scars that only became visible in the last years of his life. When he returned from Germany to his home in New York, he met my mother, Muriel. She had endured a terrible first marriage to a psychotic monster, forced for a year to stay in that marriage by parents and a society that didn’t believe in divorce. Herbert, by comparison, was a gentle saint.
Ella, Thomas, Herbert, and Muriel begat Derrick and Craig, my husband and me. Our parents had a lot in common, especially their abilities to tell good stories, real, heartbreaking, funny stories. And, they taught us that evil triumphs when good people stay silent. That’s why Derrick and I are anything but silent. He and I suffered discrimination, hatred, and violence, because of who we are (Jewish, Japanese-American, gay) and today, because of giants who came before us, we’re able to live good, healthy, relatively safe, happy lives. We live those lives today because of those born here and those who migrated to America, with papers and without, fought in WWII, and those who fought for civil rights for women, people of color, indigenous people and LGBTQQIA+ people.
That’s why today our lives are dedicated to standing up for anyone who is marginalized, attacked, discriminated against, and why we work to save this incredible planet for which, my faith tells me, God gave us the responsibility of good stewardship.
As you read this my husband and I are in Hawaii where we are spreading my mother-in-law Ella’s ashes. She was the last of our parents to leave us and her ashes will join those of Artie Popkin, Herbert and Muriel Wiesner, and Thomas Kikuchi in the waters of the Pacific. We’ll then meet up with dear friends, one a daughter of the Armenian genocide, the other a fellow veteran, fiscal conservative Republican who believes, rightly, that the world is much better off today than it was 50, 100, 200, 1,000 years ago. We recognize how much progress our still imperfect union has made, how much more change is needed, and worry about the fate of our democracy which we believe is endangered by those who peddle fear and hate to amass power and wealth.
Forces working to divide us today claim that LGBTQQIA+, BIPOC, AAPI, LatinX people, Jews, and immigrants are taking away their rights. We’re not. It took a world full of all kinds of people to defeat the greatest military threat we had ever faced, an enemy that vowed to erase all diversity, equity and inclusion. The ashes my husband and I are spreading are mingled with your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and on and on. Did the “greatest generation” die so we could hate or fear our neighbors? No. Let fear and hate die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I promise with my heart and soul, if you are truly in danger of being harmed because of who you are, how you look, or what you believe, Artie Popkin, Thomas and Ella Kikuchi, Herbert and Muriel Wiesner and the heroes in your own family will rise up in me, my husband and tens of millions of others to stand up for you.