Brenda Wong Aoki doesn’t just tell a tale. She lives it. Onstage. Out loud.
Just watch her narrate the traditional Japanese story “Mermaid Meat,” for example. At first she is the fisherman, heaving and groaning as he drags his heavy net ashore. And then she is a young mermaid, wondering if she’ll ever be as beautiful as her mother. Aoki shifts from character to character, scene to scene, with an artful flick of her fan.
Local audiences will be treated to just such a performance when Aoki takes center stage at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, which runs Sept. 7-9 at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi. Widely honored as a pioneering storyteller and writer, Aoki shapes and shares traditional Japanese legends, family stories and her life experience as an Asian-American woman.
Although this is the first time Aoki, who lives in San Francisco, has been slated to appear at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, she views her trip to Utah as a homecoming. “If you know an Aoki in Utah,” she jokes, “I’m related to them.”
Brenda Jean Aoki was born at St. Mark’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. “My pediatrician was Dr. Toyota, a sweet chain-smoking, 4-foot-tall female Japanese-American doctor who brought most Japanese Americans in Salt Lake into the world,” Aoki says. Her father, Dave Yukio Aoki, was a star quarterback for the West High Panthers in the 1940s. He and all 10 of his brothers and sisters were raised in Salt Lake City by their big sister Sets, who worked sorting candy at Associated Foods, and Sets’ husband, Dave.
“My Aunt Sets told me that she wished she’d never left Salt Lake to get married,” Aoki recalls. “She got married in Oakland, Calif., on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. She spent her honeymoon in a horse stall in the Tanforan Race Tracks while waiting to be processed, then she and Uncle Dave were shipped to Topaz Camp in Delta, Utah.” When Sets’ siblings visited her they would say, “Gee Nee-san [Big Sister], if you’d stayed in Salt Lake, you’d be on this side of the fence!”
The kind of racism that led to the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II essentially shaped Aoki’s career: “One of the reasons I became a storyteller is to tell my own stories, because when I began 40 years ago, there were very few nonwhite stories being told.” And although she was trained as an actor, roles were limited, even when casting calls went out for someone of Asian descent. “I am mixed race. I’m Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Scots-Irish. I didn’t always fit the stereotype and wouldn’t get the part.”
This lack of opportunity drove Aoki and her husband, the musician Mark Izu, to create opportunities for themselves and other artists. In addition to her work as a storyteller, Aoki is a curriculum developer and educator, as well as a founding faculty member of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, while Izu is a driving force behind a new genre of music known as Asian jazz.
As recent events in Charlottesville and elsewhere have demonstrated, racial tension is still alive and well in America. How do thoughtful citizens deal with this ongoing and complicated reality? Aoki encourages people to tell their personal stories. “Talk in the first person. ‘I did this, this happened to me, I felt so helpless because. …’ I learned this from older African-American activists in New Orleans who built coalitions with white people during the civil-rights era. They taught me that personal story goes beyond skin color, gender or sexual orientation and it is irrefutable and uniquely individual. But each individual impacts the whole, so everyone’s story is important.”
Personal stories. Stories shared. Stories lived out loud. Aoki has great faith in their ability to educate, to heal and to bring people together. “Storytelling is a gathering, people coming together with their loved ones. This always creates a special synergy. People need each other. We need to gather more today than ever before, because deep truths can be shared in an arena of good will and trust. When the truth is revealed and common values and vision uncovered, we can begin the real work.”
Aoki remembers an experience she had after telling a story about a Japanese-American girl in a prison camp at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn. An older white woman approached her and said, “That’s how it was! That’s exactly how it was.” Aoki then learned that the woman had grown up in a camp. Her Quaker parents, a doctor and a nurse, were appalled that their government would imprison American citizens because of skin color, so they moved their family into a camp, where they provided medical care for the detainees. The conditions, the woman remembered, were horrible.
Personal stories like this can lead to unexpected connections between people from different backgrounds. They also have the power to teach. “The United States is a very, very young country — just a couple hundred years old. We’re like a toddler going through the terrible twos. But most everyone on the planet has a representative living here. We can take the best practices and thought from cultures older and wiser than us from our own citizens and come up with an American culture that truly represents all the people who live right here in the U.S. of A. Who knows? We could probably save the whole planet!”
In the meantime, Aoki says with a laugh, she plans to take the stage at Thanksgiving Point “unmuzzled” and with “an open throttle full of heart!”
Timpanogos Storytelling Festival
- To learn more about this year’s featured storytellers, including Aoki, visit <a href="http://timpfest.org">www.timpfest.org</a>.
- Featured storyteller <a href="www.shonaleigh.uk">Shonaleigh</a>, a third-generationstoryteller in the Jewish “drut’syla” tradition, will give a special free performance on Tuesday, Sept. 12, at 7 p.m. at the Orem Library (58 N. State St., Orem). For more information, contact Ruth Covington at rcovington@orem.
- To learn more about Brenda Wong Aoki, visit her website at <a href="http://www.firstvoice.org/brendawongaoki/">www.brendawongaoki.com</a>.