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Remembering the Best
by Phil Tajitsu Nash

If you are a public figure–a movie star, a congressman, even a city councilman–your obituary has likely been largely written already. Stashed in some computer crypt on a reporter’s hard drive, it can be whisked out at a moment’s notice, needing only a few updated paragraphs about the tragic heart attack or terrible bus accident that caused your demise.

While thousands of Asian Americans have achieved prominence noticed even by the mostly white news staffs that generate most of the pre-made obits at metro dailies and TV stations nationwide, too many of us will go unremembered. To be sure, U.S. Sen Dan Inouye of Hawaii and Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon, will receive their due press when the time comes. But what of activist scholars such as Dr. Setsuko Nishi, artists such as Mine Okubo, and pioneering journalists such as Takako Kusunoki? Their obituaries may well take the form of paid ads by funeral homes or family members, or perhaps (if they die on a slow news day) their lives may be written about by a journalist with neither the time, interest or influence within his organization to ensure proper play.

Fortunately, author Michi Wegyn’s memory has been enshrined for future generations through proclamations passed by California lawmakers last week. When she died April 25, I wrote an obituary as an act of friendship. I hoped that others would remember Michi as I did–as a courageous woman who defied great odds to do great things, including publishing a book that decisively refuted the U.S. claim of "military necessity" as an excuse for internment. In my piece, I tried to bring in the personal dimension to her great feat of authorship and political imagination.

I submitted the obit as a Washington Journal and sent it out over the Internet. A number of readers who had also known and loved Michi wrote back, expressing their admiration and gratitude at her life and their loss at her death. But all of these words were spoken in the private realm, and they emerge here only because I write in a public forum.

Some of the mainstream press–that "rough draft of history"–also honored Michi’s memory, including the touching and personal obit written by an Asian American woman at New York Newsday. It included quotes from those who knew her and put her life in the context of the Japanese American experience. Less personal were the obits sent out by the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press. The worst–which I must say smacks of the "tragic mulatto" genre–ran in the New York Times.

Seven column inches were devoted to a sober recitation of her vital information: parents, education and survivors. For those who knew her only through this obituary, her life doubtless seemed full of deprivation, her struggle for redress had failed, and her book was nothing but a grim recitation of the government’s failings. Though the writer sought out the executor of Michi’s will for a quote about her cause of death (cancer), none of her friends were quoted about the impact of her life.

To comment on Michi’s historic book Years of Infamy, the paper of record, included a quote from its own New York Times Book Review. But conspicuously absent were the political impact of Michi’s life and the key points she made in her book.

For those of us who are now shaping our world, we must remember, too, to shape even the memory of our own lives. We must make provisions for how and who will remember us, and who will determine the worth of our days–and to do it before our last breath is exhaled, our bodies grow cold, and our mortal remains are committed to the soil or the air.