Company. She became interested in jazz, eventu-
ally cofounding the jazz performance ensemble
SoundSeen with composer/musician Mark Izu.
Aoki studied physical comedy with the Dell’Arte
Players and, in 1978, began an apprenticeship in
Noh and Kyo g e n (classical Japanese theater) in
both Japan and the United States.
Since the late 1980s, Aoki has worked primar-
ily as a playwright and solo performer, creating
dramatic performance works that reflect her mul-
tiethnic heritage. In Obake! Tales of Spirits Past and
Present (1988) and Mermaid Meat (1997), Aoki
draws inspiration from Chinese and Japanese
folklore, giving the material a new significance
through her creative retellings. In The QUEEN’S
GARDEN (1992) and Random Acts of Kindness, she
explores aspects of her experience as a person of
mixed ethnicity and as a community organizer in
works that deal with contemporary issues of urban
violence and crime. Other works investigate mo-
ments in Asian-American history. The multimedia
piece Last Dance (1998) celebrates the resilience of
Japanese Americans interned during World War II.
In Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend (1998), Aoki reflects
on her Japanese grand-uncle’s love affair with, and
eventual marriage to, a white woman in Seattle in
1909, an event that triggered angry protests and
anti-miscegenation laws. In one of her most re-
cent collaborative works, Kuan Yin: Our Lady of
Compassion (2002), Aoki reaffirms the sustaining
power of legend with the story of a young boy
whose fears of contemporary ills, such as home-
lessness and terrorism, are eased when he learns of
the legendary Chinese goddess of compassion.
Aoki has performed at venues throughout the
United States, Canada, and Japan and has received
significant recognition for her work. She received
a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Theater
Fellowship in 1991 and again in 1994. She is also
the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation Multi-
Arts production grants in 1992 and 1993. In 1996
Aoki received a lifetime achievement award from
the United States Pan Asian Chamber of Congress
for being the foremost Asian Storyteller in Amer-
ica. In 1997 she received a Civil Liberties Public
Education Fund Award from the United States
Congress. Recorded versions of two of her per-
formance works, Dreams and Illusions: Tales of the
Pacific Rim and The Queen’s Garden, have garnered
best spoken-word album awards by the National
Association of Independent Record Distributors
in 1990 and 1999 respectively. In 1996 The Queen’s
Garden was included in the anthology Contempo-
rary Plays by Women of Color, and in 2000 excerpts
from Random Acts and Mermaid Meat appeared
in Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Perfor-
mance Texts from the Twentieth Century.
A founding faculty member of the Institute for
Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, Aoki
continues to teach and perform internationally.
She and her husband, composer Mark Izu, are ar-
tistic directors of First Voice, a not-for-profit or-
ganization based in San Francisco, where they live
with their son, Kai Kane.Bibliography
Aoki, Brenda Wong. “Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend: The
True Story of the First Hapa Baby.” Nikkei Heri-
tage 4 (Fall 1998): 8–9.
Hurwitt, Robert. “Brenda Wong Aoki.” Extreme Ex-
posure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts
from the Twentieth Century, edited by Jo Bonney,
265–266. New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 2000.
———. “One Woman’s Tales Paint a Portrait of a Na-
tion.” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 August 1998, p.
D7.
Rachel IharaArabian Jazz: A Novel Diana Abu-Jaber
(1993)
This novel won the Oregon Book Award and was
a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. DIANA
ABU-JABER’s most successful novel to date, Arabian
Jazz concerns the problematic nature of Arab-
American identity. The protagonist Matussem Ra-
moud, a Jordanian immigrant transplanted into
Upstate New York, spends quite a lot of time try-
ing to navigate the complex net of family relations
that encircle him: his adult daughters Jemorah
and Melvina, his sister Fatima, and his brother-
in-law Zaeed. Feeling somewhat estranged fromArabian Jazz: A Novel 19