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.