symptomatic of an enforced identity crisis among
incarcerated Japanese Americans, recalling her
mother asking, “If I sign this / What will I be? / I
am doubly loyal / to my American children / also
to my own people. / How can double mean noth-
ing?” The cycle closes with the widely reprinted
“Cincinnati,” in which the narrator, eager to be
at last “in a real city / where / no one knew me,”
is met on the street by a “hissing voice that said /
dirty jap / warm spittle on my right cheek.” Look-
ing at her soiled reflection in a shop window, the
narrator ruefully observes, “Everyone knew me.”
A second collection of fiction and poetry, Desert
Run, was published in 1988, and Yamada edited or
contributed to several literary collections through-
out the 1980s and 1990s.
Besides being a poet and editor, Yamada is
a lifelong advocate of women’s and ethnic mi-
norities’ rights. She founded the Multi-Cultural
Women Writers of Orange County, and has served
as a board member for Amnesty International
(U.S.A.) and the Pacific American Asian Center.
With NELLIE WONG, she was the subject of the
1981 public television documentary Mitsuye and
Nellie: Asian American Poets and appeared as one
of the primary interviewees in Yunah Hong’s 2001
documentary Between the Lines: Asian American
Women’s Poetry.
Bibliography
Usui, Masami. “A Language of Her Own in Mitsuye
Yamada’s Poetry and Stories.” Studies in Culture
and the Humanities 5, no. 3 (1996): 1–17.
Yamada, Mitsuye. “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disas-
ter: Reflections of an Asian-American Woman.” In
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga, and
Gloria Anzaldúa, 35–40. New York: Kitchen Table
Press, 1981.
———. “A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada,” by
Helen Jaskoski. MELUS 15 (1988): 97–108.
Yamada, Mitsuye, Merle Woo, and Nellie Wong. Three
Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism.
Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2003.
Eric G. WaggonerYamamoto, Hisaye (Hisaye Yamamoto
DeSoto) (1921– )
Hisaye Yamamoto may well be one of the most
widely anthologized authors in the United States,
but she considers “housewife” as the term that
would best describe her occupation (Cheung 5).
Yamamoto was born in Redondo Beach, Califor-
nia, in 1921, a mere three years before the 1924
Asian Exclusion Act was passed, to Japanese im-
migrant parents from Kumamoto. She grew up
speaking Japanese and, like many of her peers,
only began learning English in kindergarten. As a
student at Compton Junior College, she majored
in French, Spanish, German, and Latin. During
World War II, she and her family were interned in
Poston, Arizona, where she wrote a series of works
for the camp newspaper, The Poston Chronicle. Few
of these works were fiction, but she did publish a
serialized mystery titled “Death Rides the Rails to
Poston” as well as a short piece called “Surely I Must
Be Dreaming.” More of her work during this time
was in journalism, a field she would later return to
during a three-year span, between 1945 and 1948,
when she worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles
Tribune. After adopting a son in 1948, she volun-
teered to work at a Catholic Worker rehabilitation
farm in Staten Island from 1953 to 1955. She met
and married Anthony DeSoto in 1955, and the
family returned to Los Angeles, where Yamamoto
and DeSoto had four additional children. She lives
in Southern California.
Yamamoto began publishing in literary jour-
nals in 1948, the same year she adopted her son
Paul, then 5 months old. She turned to full-time
creative writing when she was awarded one of the
initial John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowships
in 1950. She spent that year (1950–51) writing, and
in the following year, “Yoneko’s Earthquake” was
included in Best American Short Stories of 1952.
Martha Foley’s yearly “Distinctive Short Stories”
list also featured a number of Yamamoto’s stories:
“Seventeen Syllables” made the list in 1949; both
“The Brown House” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” in
1951; and “Epithalamium” in 1960.
Her creative works have been widely reprinted
in both anthologies and periodicals. In 1986Yamamoto, Hisaye 327