Writing the book of Ruth

In the summer of 2014, while exploring ideas for a new book project, I stumbled across a news article that changed my life and set my course for the next five years.

The article reported that the family of San Francisco sculptor Ruth Asawa, who’d died the previous summer at age 87, gave her archives to Stanford University’s Special Collections. That meant they would be available for study by students, scholars and writers.

I was intrigued. Original artifacts that document a life are a treasure trove. Burrowing into an archive gives researchers an experience like the “rapture of the deep” felt by scuba divers descending into their watery world. There’s a time-machine thrill in holding photos, sketches, letters, journal entries, telegrams, contracts, phonebooks, datebooks, recipes and report cards. Over time, the tones and rhythms of a voice emerge, and they start to speak to you. It happened with my first book about the public health doctor Rupert Blue who saved San Francisco from plague in the early 1900s.  Could I be that lucky again?

Luckily for me, Ruth Asawa had such a distinctive voice: earthy, humble and persistent, with flashes of impish humor.  Also fortunately for me, she was an inveterate saver.  Her collected papers filled an incredible 275 boxes of pale gray, acid-free cardboard. 

Once the collection was organized and numbered, it opened for viewing in March 2015. The Special Collections room with its high ceilings, soaring windows, long wooden tables and grandfather clock – overlooked by bronze busts of Dante, Steinbeck and Hemingway – was my  workspace for the year and a half it took to read my way through Ruth’s papers.

It was there that I first got to meet Ruth as a Southern California farm girl, raised as one of seven children during the Depression by hardworking Japanese immigrant parents, growing strawberries and melons, green beans, tomatoes and onions. The children were in the fields every waking hour that they weren’t in school or doing homework. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, the U.S. government viewed members of their race as potential spies. Her father was seized by the F.B.I. and taken to an alien enemy camp. She and her family were ordered without due process into what the government called relocation or internment camps – in reality, barbed-wire ringed prisons, studded with gun towers and raked by searchlights.

Her first stop was an assembly center at Santa Anita Racetrack, where she occupied a horse stall for six months. Then came a train trip to tar-paper barracks in rural Arkansas. Raw apartments with gaping boards let in dust and wind. Mess halls served subsistence fare budgeted at 37 cents a day per person. Mass toilets obliterated privacy. Her one ray of light was art: meeting Disney artists in Santa Anita and teachers in Arkansas who nurtured Ruth’s gift. Because cameras were forbidden contraband, she sketched her graduating class.  Admission to Milwaukee State Teachers College got her out of camp after a year and a half. But after three years of college course study, lingering racism barred her from student teaching, so she had to leave Milwaukee empty-handed, without a degree or credential.

From that hard landing into adulthood, Ruth transcended racial and gender bias to make her way to the experimental art school at Black Mountain College, NC. It was a magnet for geniuses and creators like Bauhaus émigré Josef Albers, and futurist Buckminster Fuller. They became her devoted, lifelong mentors. She also met the love of her life, Georgia architect Albert Lanier, and defied parental objections to marry him in California, which luckily had just overturned its law against racially-mixed marriages. 

One thing I loved about Asawa was her analysis and, ultimately, her defiance of the assumption that a woman had to choose between her dedication to art, and pursuit of personal fulfillment in love.   

In febrile and sensual love letters, Ruth and Albert worked it out. Could they be artists and live together?  In the end, they decided they could. She opened her arms and claimed it all:  a life of abundance that included a productive home art studio, a passionate partnership with Lanier, and a family of six rambunctious and wildly creative children.

Her mother’s advice that guided her life was: “Be lucky.” In truth, she made her own luck.

She learned a technique of basket weaving on a teaching trip to Mexico. She adapted it into a method of looping steel, copper and brass wire into sculptures that were surrealistic but suggestive of nature: transparent dragonfly wings, garlands of seaweed, flaring trumpet vines. She fashioned fountains featuring voluptuous mermaids, origami sunbursts and lotuses. And she crafted bronze bas-reliefs of whimsical cityscapes and wartime devastation.

Pursuing Asawa’s family and friends, I wore people out with my questions. No wonder biographer James Atlas, called his book on the genre: “The Shadow in the Garden.”   We are always there, watching and listening.

While probing and mining memories to understand Ruth, I worried: Would my writing do justice to her essence?  Ruth is a study in contrasts: deceptively simple and intellectual, instinctive yet analytical in her art, frugal and generous, elegant and unpretentious as a pair of jeans caked with baker’s clay or garden soil. Born under the astrological sign of the earth ox – to which she ascribed her capacity to “chop wood, carry water” – she pursued her art with humility and a Zen work ethic. 

Asawa is a hero for our time, especially now when scapegoating of minorities has yet again confined families behind barbed wire, and given a racial label to a pandemic without borders.  She left us a legacy of life lessons: how to transcend hardship, transform the refuse of life into art, and rise from government abuse to a life of service to her community and its children.  Her refrain was “Art saved us.” And indeed, she is living proof that creativity heals, informs and ennobles life.  

Ruth’s daughter Aiko told me that her mother always kept a lookout for hummingbirds.  Today, when she works in her garden, the sight of a hummingbird is like a visit from her mother’s spirit. Sometimes when I’m outdoors, I feel the air vibrate as tiny wings buzz past with a flash of emerald wings, and I know my hero is present. 

Heroes and Survivors: “Be lucky”

We’re one week away from the release of my book, Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa. The first biography of an unsung artist and hero, it was five years in the making.

Now the official publication date of April 7, 2020, is upon us.  But the normal butterflies of bringing out a book (will the book get good reviews?) are eclipsed by a global pandemic.

So, like most of you reading this, l’m sheltering in place to avoid being one more link in the chain of infection and transmission of the new coronavirus and the disease COVID-19.

This means no literary festivals, readings, bookstore events or publication parties.  Reading a good book may be a solitary pleasure.  Launching a book is traditionally a social pursuit, with the sharing of food and wine, hugs and handshakes, signing copies and shared conversations.

But, for good reason, not this year. Still, books remain good companions, sustaining us in isolation, expanding horizons in quarantine.  As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest: “My library was dukedom large enough.” I hope people take comfort in books shared with friends.

Now, after resisting what my friend Donna urged me to do years ago, I’ve decided to write a blog.  Since I won’t be hitting the bookstore circuit for a while, giving talks, or inviting a lively Q and A, I’ll try to do it online through social my website, www.marilynchase.com/blog. 

To honor Asawa, I’d like to call my blog: Survivors and Heroes, this first installment honoring her mother’s motto: “Be Lucky.” 

My idea grew out of a realization that, all along, I was drawn to Ruth Asawa’s life story, not just for her light and sensuous sculpture. It’s also because Ruth’s example of courage and creativity through hardship gives me hope – especially now. She is a model of how one woman transcended the worst that history – a government abuse of power -- threw at her. She literally re-sculpted her life, explaining, “Art saved us.”   Whatever it is that we are meant to do – teach, create, or care for family and community – can save us from despair. She has a lot to teach us.

Now is a time we all need pioneers and pilgrim spirits that inspire us to get through a dark time. 

Ruth’s life journey was scarred less by deadly disease, although she had her share of that too:  diphtheria at age three, and lupus that struck in her artistic prime. More than that, her life was marked by social, economic and political stressors of a Depression-era childhood, poverty and farm work through grade school, and wartime incarceration for the accident of being born Japanese American. She faced down racial slurs and sexual bias that led some art reviewers to dismiss her sculpture  as “feminine,”  “decorative” and “oriental.”  Today we might call these microaggressions, little darts lobbed by critics who were blind to her transformation of what had been a man’s medium.

Asawa’s WWII journey saw her father arrested by the FBI as he knelt to tend his strawberries  -- a suspected saboteur for the simple act of giving his children kendo fencing lessons. Whisked to an undisclosed enemy alien camp, he lost the farm he built through decades of sweat labor. Ruth, her mother and five siblings were sent to Santa Anita Racetrack, housed in a fetid horse stall for six months, and then shipped to a barbed wire-ringed barracks settlement in Arkansas. They were among 120,000 of their fellow Japanese Americans incarcerated in harsh and remote prison camps without due process during wartime.  Not a single one was ever proven a spy.

All this might have crushed a lesser spirit.  But it didn’t embitter her or extinguish her powerful drive to make art, find love, cherish family and give boundless energy to build art school programs, as she said, “for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.”  It made her work harder – often around-the-clock –  because suffering had taught her never to waste time.

Ruth Asawa followed the advice of her mother Haru, who counseled her in life and love to “Be lucky.” Clearly, that didn’t mean waiting for good fortune to fall into her lap like a shower of gold.  Asawa made her own luck, and crafted her own destiny.  She brings to mind the saying of Louis Pasteur that “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Luck favors those who work for it, and Asawa made her luck out of a creative vision, Herculean work ethic and deep well of generosity to others  -- especially school children who were hungry for a chance to make art.

 After the psychic wounds inflicted by years of incarceration, Asawa said the only wounds she would bear were the cuts she sustained by shaping wire – once an instrument of oppression – into sculpture. Learning how she transformed adversity into art is my antidote to despair.