Salem Press

American Ethnic Writers
Garrett Kaoru Hongo

Born: Volcano, Hawaii; May 30, 1951

Japanese American

Hongo writes lyrically and evocatively about personal history, place of origin, and ethnicity.

Principal Works
drama: Nisei Bar and Grill, pr. 1976, revised pr. 1992

poetry: The Buddha Bandits down Highway 99, 1978 (with Alan Chong Lau and Lawson Fusao Inada); Yellow Light, 1982; The River of Heaven, 1988

nonfiction: Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i, 1995 (memoir)

edited texts: The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, 1993; Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir, 1994 (by Wakako Yamauchi); Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America, 1995

Garrett Hongo (GAR-reht HON-goh) was born in the shadow of the Kilauea volcano but reared near Los Angeles. When he comes to terms with his origins during his first sojourn to Hawaii at middle age, he liberates his spirit with a moving insight that solidifies his sense of self. His poetry and prose are reverent, precise, and evocative, celebrating male ancestors, early Japanese poets, family, birthplace, and home.

Estranged from his past, Hongo was sheltered from the bitter truths of the World War II internment by his family. Gardena, California, the town where he grew up, boasted the largest community of Japanese Americans on the mainland United States at the time and was bordered on the north by the predominantly black towns of Watts and Compton and on the southwest by Torrance and Redondo Beach, white towns. Thus, Hongo was sensitized to issues of uneasy race relations and urban street life early in life.

Hongo studied in Japan for a year following graduation from Pomona College, then earned a master's degree in fine arts from the University of California at Irvine. As a poet in residence in Seattle, he founded and directed a local theater group called The Asian Exclusion Act. Hongo identifies largely with the West Coast, a mecca for many Asian American writers, and early became a friend and collaborator with Lawson Fusao Inada, a pioneer Japanese American poet. His marriage to white violinist Cynthia Thiessen and their rearing of two sons, Alexander and Hudson, have given Hongo particular sensitivity to the cultural terrain he calls "the borderlands."

As the only Asian member of the faculty at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Hongo began directing the creative writing program there in 1989 and received several extended leaves that allowed time in Hawaii to work on his prose memoirs, published in 1995 as Volcano. Among his most important influences is Wakako Yamauchi, a widely anthologized Japanese American short-story writer and playwright, whose works Hongo collected and edited under the title Songs My Mother Taught Me, which was published in 1994.

Volcano
Type of Work: Memoir
First Published: 1995
Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i evocatively describes flora, fauna, and geographical features of an exuberantly lush and exotic landscape. The book contains biographical portraits of a handful of Hongo's flamboyant, melancholy, or mercenary ancestors, intriguing in themselves. In the artful way in which it combines place with personal history, and in which it seeks to reconcile Hongo's Japanese heritage with his American circumstances, the book explores a larger truth: To achieve true peace of mind, it is necessary to seek, acknowledge, and celebrate one's own ethnic, geographical, and biological origins.

Hongo's last name means "homeland," and he conducts a pilgrimage, crossing the Pacific Ocean to immerse himself in the birthplace he left when he was only a few weeks old, Volcano. Growing up near Los Angeles and living as an adult in Missouri and Oregon, Hongo first returns to Volcano when he is thirty years old, his Caucasian violinist wife and their infant son, Alexander, in tow. Having felt a profound sense of estrangement from his past, knowing little about his father or grandfather, Hongo soon makes acquaintances in Volcano with locals and distant relatives, who reveal painful truths about the ravages of the Japanese American internment on his family. His cabin in the rainforest is in the shadow of the Kilauea volcano, which takes on symbolism as his narrative continues. He shops in the general store that his grandfather once owned. He witnesses a volcano erupting in the early morning and hikes around lava flows. He eats food such as poi and miso soup, which for him become a wayside of culture and memory.

The first visit makes Hongo eager to return, having given him particulars of ancestral memory and having shown him a way to belong in and to make sense of his world. In the poignancy and drama of coming face-to-face with ugly racial and personal secrets and also with the beauties of place that lift him above the pain, Hongo becomes inspired to compose the poetry that had been locked deep inside. The book ends with the wish that the reader achieve similar healing self-knowledge.

Suggested Readings
Chock, Eric, and Darrell H. Y. Lum, eds. The Best of Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writer's Quarterly. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1986.

Evans, Alice. "A Vicious Kind of Tenderness: An Interview with Garrett Hongo." Poets & Writers Magazine 20, no. 5 (September/October, 1992): 37-46.

Filipelli, Laurie. Garrett Hongo. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1997.

Jarman, Mark. "The Volcano Inside." The Southern Review 32, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 337-343.

Slowik, Mary. "Beyond Lot's Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilynn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura." MELUS 25, no. 3 (2000): 221-242.

Jill B. Gidmark