Nick Pugliese

“I come as one, but I stand for 10,000.”  

I heard Oprah repeat this Maya Angelou quote when I was a teenager—surely too young to understand what she meant by this, and probably too young still.

Inheritance

“You have to understand, it’s because they lost everything.” That’s how my mom would explain it to me years later.

When I was eight, my mother’s aunt passed away. Her name was Yoneko. She enjoyed white rabbit milk candy and was an avid collector of things. As a toddler, I would call her My-neko because I thought she was mine. In the weeks after her passing, frequent trips were made to her home to clear out what was hers. The work was divided amongst my parents, aunts and uncles, and their cousins and I was never allowed to join. It took weeks because of all of the items Yoneko had accrued across her lifetime.

During the second world war, while still in elementary school, Yoneko was sent to a Japanese internment camp along with all of her family members. They were split into two different camps. Separated between Topaz Internment Camp in Utah and Rohwer in Arkansas, they were stripped of not only their belongings, but also each other.

Once they were released from the camps and allowed to reunite, Yoneko and the rest of my family quickly learned that in order to survive, they were going to need to shed some of the most fundamental parts of themselves. They would practice their Buddhism quietly. They wouldn’t teach their descendants the Japanese language. Only English would be spoken under their roof.  If someone mistook them for Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean, they were to go along with it.

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started asking more questions.  

Why don’t we speak Japanese?

Why wasn’t I raised Buddhist?

Why did Yoneko have so many things?

Preservation

“Why are you here? It’s just supposed to be for Asians.”

This was the question posed to me by a fellow classmate while away at an AAPI weekend for incoming freshmen at the college I ended up attending. It’s embarrassing to admit that I took this as a compliment. I had grown to feel a sense of accomplishment if another person didn’t see the Japanese ancestry behind my eyes. My family learned to disown the most Japanese parts of them. And although I was never taught to do the same, somehow, I still did.

I used to feel like I wasn’t enough of anything. Filling out any kind of form, I would become filled with anxiety when asked to check a box for my ethnicity.  

Do I check the box that says Caucasian? Or the one that says Asian?

Do I count as being biracial if I don’t look it?  

I was the shortest person in the room with my dad’s side of the family, but the tallest when  surrounded by my mom’s. I could only speak English—same as my mom and her siblings. There was a road of identity and I straggled the center in every way. What box was I meant to fit into?

Throughout all of high school, I checked Caucasian.

By the time I was graduating from college, I had come to understand that I was not half of  anything, but rather, more than one thing. I embraced and identified with the Japanese side of myself. I understood that it didn’t matter how I looked or what language I could or couldn’t speak. There was a lineage that preceded me filled with rich culture, traditions, and stories that cemented my being as Japanese.  

Whereas once, I blamed the Japanese side for my strong calves, my oily skin, and my bushy eyebrows, in my early adulthood, these have become some of my favorite physical attributes. I see my uncle’s calves in my legs, my aunt’s skin on my face, my mother’s brows above my eyes.

I am a mosaic of all who came before me.

Influences

In this moment, as I sip on my coffee looking out onto the streets of New York, I feel those 10,000 that Maya Angelou spoke about. When I walk into a room that I might feel I don’t  belong in, when I fall down, when I persevere, I remind myself that I did not end up here by accident. I was born out of the hardships these generations faced as well as the laughs they shared and the smiles they cracked.  

There’s video footage of my mom’s other aunt, Takeyo, dancing with her cousins while interned.  Joy is revolutionary.

We don’t always have the choice of what we inherit, but we do get to choose what we preserve. Our legacy begins before we do, but we get to decide which parts we take with us.  

What will the generations that come after me inherit? What will they decide to preserve? Leave behind? I know now that the 10,000 include these generations as well.  

History often repeats itself, both in our surroundings and within us. It doesn’t always look the same. It will choose different targets. It will choose different tactics. But when history does inevitably repeat, I will revolt with the love and joy that I’ve inherited.