“Balancing Cultures,” for submission to LensCulture Critics’ Choice 2022

In “Balancing Cultures” I am working with layers of meaning, memory, family—and particularly—Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of 120,000 American citizens and legal residents of Japanese ancestry. Startled by a recent discovery of old photographs taken of my family in the Jerome concentration camp, I felt compelled to speak out in contrast to my parents’ silence on being incarcerated. At the risk of betraying family secrets, I wanted to express the emotions they concealed from my brother and me. I pieced together the historical puzzle of this story utilizing these historic family photographs, artifacts, documents, and memories to create a personal expression of one family’s journey from immigration to incarceration and re-assimilation—a journey that was typical of all Japanese families that were removed from their homes, branded as the enemy, and imprisoned in concentration camps without due process. “Balancing Cultures,” originally a personal narrative, unintentionally developed concurrently with a renewed surge of white supremacy and racism in America.