Kimiko Guthrie on Her Career in Dancing and Writing Block Seventeen 

Hapa Mag - DECEMBER 9, 2020

By Lauren Lola

Author Kimiko Guthrie and I share a lot of common ground — literally. Aside from the fact that we’re both Hapas native to the San Francisco Bay Area, we also share California State University, East Bay as an experience. I’m an alumnus of the school, while Kimiko has been a lecturer in the Theatre & Dance Department for the past 20 years.

Never once did we cross paths until now, as she continues to promote her debut novel, Block Seventeen. Set in the early 2010s in the Bay Area, it follows a woman, Akiko “Jane” Thompson, as she navigates a series of disturbances: a mysterious intruder who doesn’t steal a thing, the disappearance of her mother, and her fiancé, Shiro, constantly jeopardizing their security as he threatens to expose the misdeeds of his colleagues at the Oakland International Airport TSA. While Jane tries to sweep it all under the rug, echoes from the past force her to confront them — as well as learn a family secret.

After switching our conversation to phone, following technical difficulties over Zoom, Kimiko and I dived into how her novel came together, along with her career in the dance world and her upbringing in Berkeley.

What makes you Hapa and is that a word that you associate with?

I grew up in Berkeley in the 1970s, so a long time ago, and I never really knew the word Hapa until probably high school. My mom is Japanese American, and my dad is European American, Caucasian. I always actually saw my mom's side of the family more because they're in California. So, I grew up much more around my Japanese side. My dad's side is from Texas, and so we saw them twice or something on a couple trips.

I always very much identified with both sides of my cultures. But in high school, once I was with my mom and her friends, and she told them, "Oh yeah, all of Kimi's friends are Hapa," and I was like, "What? No, they're not." And then I thought about it, and all my best friends were Hapa. I hadn't really even noticed. We were probably the only Hapa kids at our school, and we all gravitated towards each other. So, when she said it, it seemed so obvious.

More recently, I heard more issues with the word, people feeling it's culturally appropriated from Hawaii. That was a little shocking to me because, although it totally makes sense, it was such a part of my proud identity growing up, but I totally get also the issues with that term and it being a Hawaiian term.

I think we natives of the Bay Area can agree it’s probably one of the most diverse places in the country, if not the world. Aside from experiences of having Hapa best friends and people asking, "What are you?", how else would you describe growing up as a mixed-race person, especially at the time you came of age?

Berkeley, the Bay Area is such a diverse place. I think I was really lucky in that way to grow up in the ’70s and ’80s in Berkeley, because there were other kids who identified as Hapa, lots of mixed-race people in general. Although I do feel because of this country’s very racist history my generation was, in a way, the biggest mixed-race generation, because before then, not that long before my parents got together, it was illegal for people to marry somebody of another race.

My dad grew up in a very white, small Texas town, and all of his pop culture was very “white America.” I remember how he would always watch Western movies, cowboys and Indians. He was always on the cowboy side of things. I remember having a realization as a little kid, "Well, I look a lot more like the Indians than I do like the cowboys." I think in America, even though we are super diverse, it has been a very white-focused society. I think anyone who doesn't identify as fully white is going to feel that sense of confusion or otherness, at least in relationship to mainstream culture. That's changing more and more, which is great.

In your author bio, you said you got your love of writing from your father and dancing from your mother. What was it about those art forms that intrigued you to the point of wanting to pursue them both?

I don't know if I would've gravitated towards that without my parents. I've always loved working with words, and my dad would always help me with my English papers. He wrote plays when I was younger, so I got to kind of be a part of the behind the scenes. He had one play produced, and as a kid I got to go to the rehearsals and see it go from the page to the stage. That was really, really exciting for me.

My mom danced some when I was younger, and she took me to dance classes. I think the physicality of dance combined with the kind of introspection and intellectuality of writing are a really good balance for each other. Not that dance isn't intellectual, it is. But it's the more physical act with something a little more internal.

Tell me more about your work in the dance world. Has being Hapa had an influence at all in your work?

I've always loved to dance, but I was really interested in acting for a while in college. Being mixed-race, and I think this is fortunately not so true anymore, I noticed that people who would often get the parts were blonde and blue-eyed, or a lot of the parts that were offered in Shakespeare and other Western plays were for people who very much looked white.

After graduating college, I started up a dance company with Eric Kupers, who's another professor [at CSU East Bay]. A lot of my work was about being mixed-race. In my 20s I did a piece about the Japanese American internment. I was part of Asian American dance performances. They had a company called Unbound Spirit, and that was really, really important for me to be a part of. I think dance really was a wonderful place to kind of explore what it means to be Asian American and be around a bunch of other Asian American choreographers.

Let's talk about Block Seventeen. Where did the idea come from and why did you feel that now was the time to write it?

I guess it's always been a story that I've wanted to tell, growing up hearing little bits about the internment camps — or the incarceration camps that I think a lot of people are rightly calling them now. Maybe partly because I was a kid, and people sometimes don't want to share really hard things with kids, but there was a big focus on moving forward and not looking back. Not dwelling on the negative. Only looking at the positive. And not just from my family, but culturally within the Japanese American community. I would hear a little bit about camp all the time, often almost pleasant memories: "Oh, remember when we would be sitting by the river with Mama," or "Oh, Mama and Papa got a break from working so hard."

I almost thought of it as like the summer camp that we had been allowed to go to. Then when I got older, I was like, "Whoa, what? This is what it was?" It was like a prison based on racism. It was kind of hard to reconcile those two versions of camp that I knew. I interviewed my family members and others. I got to go to this senior home in San Francisco in the ’90s, and interviewed some Issei women who are first-generation immigrants. They were in their 90s at the time. I always was doing research, even though I didn't write the novel until I started it in 2012, but as I mentioned, I did a couple of dance pieces about that. But it's always something I've been wanting to write a bit more about.

Then in 2012, I had my second child. Being a mom was taking up all my time so I didn't really have the resources to go to rehearsals anymore. I thought, well, maybe now's a good time to write a novel because I can do it on my own late at night. My parents would watch my baby, and I could go grab a few hours.

Your novel doesn't shy away from the topics of mental health and ancestral trauma. How did you approach tackling those particular subject matters?

Well, I think my mom is kind of the opposite of the mother in the book, which was actually unusual for her time. She was very into calling it what it was, which was traumatic. Her family, at first, tried to downplay it like, "Oh, you know, it wasn't that bad," but she was very clear that it had traumatized her. She moved up to the Bay Area and did a lot of spiritual healing work on herself. Then she became a trauma therapist, and now she helps other people overcome their traumatic past.

I think seeing her go through that inspired me. Even though I don't necessarily feel like I was severely traumatized by my mom's experience in the camp, it definitely affects you in the subtle, little ways, even if it's not really talked about or acknowledged. I was interested in looking at the unconscious ways that we're all affected by the generations before us.

Much like you, Jane is also Japanese and white. Why was it important to make her Hapa?

She is like me, even though she's not, I want people to know that I'm not Jane, but I wanted to write from a perspective that I really get. I think it was important for me to have her have that mixed heritage, to have the white father and the Japanese American mother. I think a big part of what's going on for her is — which is kind of a microcosm in her own identity — the white mainstream world, and how it can “otherize.” How at the time of the internment camps, wartime racism and fear resulted in the wrongful incarceration of so many people. Looking at that conflict, that kind of cultural misunderstanding and oppression, both of those forces are within both Jane and myself. I felt like that was an appropriate way for me to look at this story through the lens of somebody who has both of those forces inside of them.

I noticed that the story was set in the early 2010s, and you said that you started writing the book in 2012. Is that why it was set during that particular era?

It's interesting because when I started writing it, I honestly felt like when I would bring up the incarceration, people's eyes would almost glaze over like, "Oh yeah, we know about that. We know about that." I almost felt like there wasn't a lot of interest in it, but I was kind of like, "Oh, well, it's important to me. I'm going to write about it anyway." Then 2016 came, and Trump and his administration literally referenced the Japanese American incarceration as a way to justify their potential Muslim ban, new immigration policies, and the separation of families. More and more, I felt like the Japanese American incarceration was relevant again and needed to be looked at because we're repeating history.

I really didn't anticipate it to be so relevant. Of course, I was horrified the more and more relevant it got, but I didn't want to change the setting because I feel like it was important. Even during the Obama administration, there were a lot of disturbing things, and I was pretty horrified by a lot of the surveillance that was happening. I saw parallels between the treatment of immigrants then and now, and I thought it would be interesting to keep it set then, and have it lead up to the Trump administration.

Because of how layered the story is, it's fair to say that readers might take away different messages from it. For you, what do you want to express through Block Seventeen?

I'm often surprised when I hear what people get from it. People are going to take away from it what they see, and I love that.

One of the main inspirations for me was a protest against the denial that I saw — even just calling it internment camps instead of a prison or incarceration camps. It's so important to call things what they are and for people to acknowledge what happened.

I thought it'd be interesting to have a main character who was very, very much into denial. Jane’s MO is to not look at the negative and not look at the past. Her partner, Shiro, is much more about calling things out and bringing attention to things, even if it's not pretty. I wanted to show how destructive that denial can be.

Is there anything you're working on currently that you can talk about?

No, not so much. Ever since the quarantine started, I feel like I've just been on survival mode because I'm with my two kids and my family 24/7, trying to teach, trying to help them with their distanced learning. Even just to have this call, I had to come into my room and close the door. I don't have any alone time at all.

I do have some ideas for a new writing project. I'm not sure if it's going to be short stories or a novel again. One of my very dearest friends died a couple of years ago, and ever since she died, I've been thinking a lot about my friendships with other women. I thought that might be something that I'm interested in focusing on, but I haven't had enough time to really develop anything yet.

I hope that you get to working on your new project soon.

I hope so. I know that'll be great. I hope we all get to. I hope there's an end in sight to all this.

*THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND CONDENSED FOR CLARITY

Lauren Lola is a San Francisco Bay Area-based author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth. She has written plays that have been produced at Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco, and in 2020, she made her screenwriting debut with the short film, Breath of Writing, from Asiatic Productions. Aside from Hapa Mag, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.