him the story of his great-grandfather, who, com-
ing from Africa as a slave, had been forced to give
up his African name and, with it, his cultural heri-
tage and identity.
Char Siu Bao Boy tells the story of Charlie, a
Chinese-American boy who enjoys eating char siu
bao (Chinese barbecued pork buns) and brings
them to school every day for lunch. His friends
find the looks of the buns disgusting, and they per-
suade Charlie to eat ordinary food such as sand-
wiches and hotdogs. He tries for a while, just to
be accommodating, but one day he goes to school
with a char siu bao for each of his friends and asks
them to taste the soft buns. Every child seems to
like char siu baos and from that moment onward
Charlie is requested to bring them every day and to
share the Chinese delicacy with his classmates.
Sandra Yamate taught Asian-American lit-
erature at DePaul University in Chicago and is
currently the director of the American Bar As-
sociation’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic
Diversity.
Elisabetta MarinoYamauchi, Wakako (1924– )
Yamauchi’s parents, Yasaku Nakamura (father)
and Hamako Machida Nakamura (mother), im-
migrated to the Imperial Valley before World War
II. Born in Westmoreland, California, Yamauchi
was the third of the Nakamuras’ four children. Her
parents worked as tenant farmers because of the
Alien Land Law, which did not allow Japanese to
own land. Her parents spoke only Japanese, and
Yamauchi learned English at school. Her family
subscribed to a Japanese paper, in which Japanese-
American short story writer HISAYE YAMAMOTO
published English columns using her pen name,
Napoleon. Yamamoto’s works were Yamauchi’s
favorite. After the Great Depression and the 1940
earthquake when her parents’ lettuce farm failed,
her parents gave up farming, moved to Oceanside,
California, and started a boardinghouse for Japa-
nese immigrants and migrant workers. At a cooper-
ative of Japanese farmers called Kumamoto Mura,
Yamauchi met Yamamoto on several occasions.
At the outbreak of World War II, just as the
Nakamuras paid off their debt from their board-
inghouse, Yamauchi, her three siblings, and her
parents were interned in Poston, Arizona, and her
father died in the internment camp. It was at the
camp that she met Yamamoto again. Yamauchi
started contributing her art works to the Poston
Chronicle, a camp newspaper to which Yamamoto
contributed stories. After spending 18 months in
the camp, Yamauchi moved to Chicago to work at
a candy factory and started to go to theaters. She
spent a short period of time at the Writers Guild
of America’s Open Door Project and later took
two correspondence courses in short story writ-
ing with the University of California at Berkeley.
She married Chester Yamauchi in 1948 and had a
daughter, Joy, in 1955.
Yamauchi started writing short stories in her
mid-30s. After her mother’s death, Yamauchi found
her mother’s diary, written in Japanese, which she
could not read. She realized that, because she had
not known about her mother’s life, she wanted to
leave something of herself to her daughter Joy. After
her short story, “AND THE SOUL SHALL DANCE,” was
rejected by various publishers, she started taking
writing courses and learned that she was not writ-
ing for a white audience. In the 1970s Yamamoto
encouraged her to contribute “And the Soul Shall
Dance” to an anthology, Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of
Asian American Writers (1974). Her story caught
the attention of Mako, the artistic director of the
East West Players in Los Angeles. He encouraged
her to transform the story into a play and gave her
the Rockefeller Foundation grant for playwright-
in-residence. And the Soul Shall Dance was per-
formed as a play in Washington, D.C., New York,
Hawaii, and Seattle. It also won the Los Angeles
Critics’ Circle Award for best new play in 1977 and
was broadcast on PBS in 1978.
Kyoko AmanoYankee Dawg You Die
Philip Kan Gotanda (1988)
The best known of Gotanda’s theatrical works,
Yankee Dawg You Die premiered in 1988 at theYankee Dawg You Die 331