Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall--writer and teacher

There Are Girls Like You in Japan

You stuff your bag into the overhead compartment. You sit down across the aisle from your mom who has planned this trip to Japan, her homeland, in a last-ditch effort to gather and pull the thin string that holds your small family of mom, dad, sister, and you together.

“There are girls like you in Japan,” she once said. You had come out to her maybe a year or two earlier shortly after graduating from college. “Just wait ‘til I tell my brother.” She shook her head in a “Damn, I got a defective one” way. You marked this as progress from her earlier responses, which ranged from sobbing to donning a gold cross necklace. “You’re not Christian,” you remember stating. “I pray every day you will be change,” she said. You said nothing about Buddhism’s underpinnings in the idea of change.

Parenting In Low Light

I couldn’t see the babies’ faces, their expressions, and couldn’t even necessarily tell which end was the head and which the toes without awkwardly reaching out toward a baby–sometimes hitting flannel sheet, sometimes nicking a cheek, sometimes finding the adorable roundness of baby rump. It might sound sweet, this blind reaching, but to me it felt that I was being smacked in the face with my disability: I was blind. I am blind.

Dear Nina: A Re-memory

I want to share your story. The one of you, Nina, a mixed-race teenaged lesbian locked in a Japanese-American internment camp in the 1940s. But I cannot find you. Not among my stacks of history books, memoirs, ledgers, fictional accounts. I look closely at photographs searching for a longing glance between women. A girl holding hands with another girl. I see none. But I know you were there. And that I would have been too, among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned. Would you have found me, another mixed-race queer kid? Don’t worry, I’ll find you. This is me finding you.