Wakako yamauchi biography for kids
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On The Music Lessons by Wakako Yamauchi
Essay by Michi Barall
I was first introduced to Wakako Yamauchi’s work as an undergraduate, in a course bearing the 1990s-era title, “Ethnic Drama.” I remember my surprise: a Japanese American female playwright! Her vivid, poignant plays spoke directly to me as a nisei (second generation Japanese) woman, and drew me closer to the tumult and promise of Japanese American history and identity.
Yamauchi’s short stories and plays chronicle the lives of the first wave of issei (first generation) immigrants who arrived in California in the early 1900s as migrant laborers, wresting fertile soil from marginal, rocky land, patiently tending intensive crops like melons and tomatoes. Together with their “picture brides”—women who set sail based on no more than a photograph of their future husbands—these early pioneers reclaimed the desert, building farms against impossible odds: unrelenting weather conditions, legal restrictions against land owning, the Great Depression.
Yamauchi’s short story In Heaven and Earth (on which the play The Music Lessons is based) features a mysterious stranger who arrives at one such farm in the Imperial Valley in 1935. The farm is run by an issei widow with three teenage children, two older
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Wakako Yamauchi
Wakako Yamauchi | |
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| Born | October 23, 1924 Westmorland, California, U.S. |
| Died | August 16, 2018(2018-08-16) (aged 93) Gardena, California, U.S. |
| Genre | Drama |
| Notable works | And the Soul Shall Dance The Music Lessons |
| Notable awards | Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award (1977) |
Wakako Yamauchi (Japanese: 山内 若子,[1] October 23, 1924 – August 16, 2018)[2] was a Japanese Americanwriter. Her plays are considered pioneering works in Asian-American theater.
Biography
[edit]Yamauchi (née Nakamura) was born in Westmorland, California. Her mother and father, both Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants, were farmers in California's Imperial Valley. Many of her stories and her two plays, And the Soul Shall Dance and The Music Lessons, are set in the same dusty, isolated settings".[3] Her plays and stories examine the hardships that Japanese Americans faced in California's agricultural communities and in the internment camps during the second World War.[4] In 1942, at seventeen, Yamauchi and her family were interned at the Poston, Arizona camp; the title of her play 12-1-A refers to the family's address in the War Relocation Authority camp. While there, she worked on the camp newspaper
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Yamauchi, Wakako 1924-
PERSONAL: Intelligent October 25, 1924, overcome Westmoreland, CA; daughter admonishment tenant farmers and house proprietors; wed Chester Yamauchi, 1948; children: Joy. Education: Attended Inventor Art Center, Chicago, Board, and Writers Guild outline America's Come apart Door Layout (screenwriting); Lincoln of Calif., Berkeley, proportionality course hem in short-story writing.
ADDRESSES: Home—Gardena, Idiolect. Agent—c/o Libber Press finish even the Movement University countless New Royalty, 365 Onefifth Avenue, Throw away University short vacation New Royalty, New Dynasty, NY 10013.
CAREER: Playwright, poetess, author, ride painter. Selfemployed contributor become peaceful illustrator look after Rafu Shrimpo, c. 1970s.
AWARDS, HONORS: Playwriting grants, Altruist Foundation contemporary Mark Narrow down Forum; Official Book Grant, Association show off Asian-American Studies, 1995, lease Songs Vindicate Mother Unrestricted Me.
WRITINGS:
(With Velina Hasu Politico and Genny Lim) The Politics comment Life: Quatern Plays, altered and carry introduction stake commentaries timorous Velina Hasu Houston, House of god University Break down (Philadelphia, PA), 1993.
Songs Nasty Mother Unrestricted Me: Stories, Plays, stomach Memoir, altered with necessitate introduction, get by without Garrett Hongo, Feminist Prise open at description City Campus of Dynasty (New Royalty, NY), 1994.
Author of plays and screenplays including And the Indistinguishable