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Saiki, Patsy Sumie (1915–2005)
Writer and educator Patsy Sumie Saiki was born
on March 15, 1915, on the island of Hawaii to
Japanese immigrant parents from Hiroshima,
Japan. Her parents were part of the first wave of
contract laborers recruited to work Hawaii’s sug-
arcane plantations. The contract labor system be-
tween the Kingdom of Hawaii, which was then a
protectorate of the United States, and Asia, which
had begun opening its borders to Western trade,
began in 1885 and gradually came to an end by the
1910s. After concluding their three-year contract
with their plantation, Saiki’s parents bought a
homestead with their savings on Ahualoa, Hawaii,
where they raised their seven children.
In 1931 Saiki left the island of Hawaii to attend
McKinley High School on the island of Oahu. Her
mother died from cancer, however, before Saiki
graduated. This was a formative and important
event for Saiki, as memories of her mother, as well
as the difficulties her parents faced as new immi-
grants to Hawaii, continued to influence Saiki’s
writing and teaching throughout her life.
In 1950, after getting married and having
four children, Saiki enrolled in the University of
Hawai’i at Manoa to study education. In 1952,
as a junior, Saiki won the Charles Eugene Banks
award for short story writing. Upon receiving a
bachelor’s degree in 1954 and a master’s degree in
education in 1959, Saiki continued to study at the

University of Wisconsin on a Wall Street Journal

Fellowship. In 1967, after a few years of work in

education back in Oahu, she moved again to the

mainland, this time to obtain a doctorate in edu-

cation, with a specialization in multiethnic cur-

riculum design, at Teachers’ College of Columbia

University. After teaching at the University of Ha-

waii, Saiki worked for the Hawaii State Depart-

ment of Education.

Saiki wrote prolifically throughout her adult

life. Her first book, Sachie: A Daughter of Hawaii

(1978), explores the violence of plantation life

for the Himeno family. By having a 13-year-old

Sachie narrate the novel, Saiki is able to univer-

salize the young girl’s experience and highlight

the pervasiveness of racism and plantation logic

in structuring the everyday ethos for both immi-

grants and white plantation owners in the early

20th-century United States. Sachie’s voice, as an

American-born child of Japanese immigrants, is a

particularly powerful tool for criticizing American

racism; throughout the novel, Sachie experiences

and elaborates the negative effects of the disparity

in privilege between her and her white peers. In

a different way, Sachie’s sense of alienation from

American culture is heightened by her parents’

fear of reprisal from whites and plantation own-

ers, which limits both their criticism of plantation

life and their engagement with the broader Ha-

waiian society.