The East San Gabriel Valley Japanese Community Center (ESGVJCC) sits in the middle of a West Covina suburb. Its brown brick facade and abundant Japanese black pines look somewhat out of place among the sweeping driveways and cookie-cutter houses that surround it. I sat at a picnic table surrounded by elementary school kids after our tour of the facility. While we munched on homemade popsicles, I asked them about their lives: What’s your favorite food? What’s your favorite movie? What’s your favorite activity at the community center?
Spam musubi! Cheetos! Udon! Fried rice! Kiki’s Delivery Service! Godzilla! Painting! Taiko drums! Through the excited, rapid-fire answers I felt my heart swell. I had missed this in my childhood. Though I had learned my shapes from Round is a Mooncake by Roseanne Thong and had grown up on both traditional and nontraditional Chinese cooking, I had very few Asian American peers as I navigated elementary school. The cultural mash of food, entertainment, and traditional values that is Asian Americaness was something I was not privileged with in my youth. No one else was eating congee for breakfast or doing tea ceremonies with family or making kimbap with their mothers.
Looking around the facility, it was evident that the community center seemed out of place only in looks. The vibrant hub is home to countless services and programming for both youth and elders to socialize and to connect with Japanese history and culture. Pearl Omiya is the Executive Director of ESGVCC and is responsible for the existence of many of these programs. As she showed us around the various classrooms and buildings, she explained the reasoning behind her own involvement. As a mom of three kids, she was in need of child care that was not only trustworthy, but also culturally enriching. West Covina simply did not offer what Pearl was looking for, and thus she created it.
Pearl demonstrates so many qualities that I hope to have in the future. Seeing a mother of color using pre-existing infrastructure not only to her communities’ advantage, but to her own advantage was fascinating. To me, her involvement in ESGVJCC is not just AAPI activism.
Among racial-ethnic groups in the U.S., Asians are perceived as most likely to achieve academic success, most likely to be perceived as nerds, most likely to be left out, and lastly, least likely to be befriended alongside Hispanic/LatinX individuals (Zhang 20). This community center is in direct opposition to so many cultural conceptualizations of what Asian Americaness is and as I continued to watch the kids talk, I thought about what the center would have meant to me in my youth.
Internalized racism is perhaps unavoidable for those of color in America and I am no exception. Centers and resources like ESGVJCC present an alternative to institutionalized education for communities to garner cultural understanding between different minority groups. Pearl’s work is vitally important and abysmally undervalued, but there is no doubt that it is activism.