This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Thank you to Hori Nancy Petron, the head of practice, for inviting me to be with you today. It's a great honor, actually, to take the teaching seat. And of course, it's not one that I do lightly, and I do it with a fair amount of trepidation and anxiety. So I hope my words today will be helpful for you. As Kodo said, I live here in Santa Cruz, and I've lived here now for over 30 years, and we're just coming off a red flag warning. as was much of the Bay Area. I saw that there was record heat in the Bay Area yesterday.

[01:03]

And, you know, down here, a red flag morning means heat, wind, possibly fire, and possibly evacuation as well. I was one of 70,000 people who were evacuated in late August. I think many of us down here, we have a little bit of jangled nerves because of this kind of state of high alert and emergency that we know exists in the world around us. And in some ways, I think that is the state for all of us, whether we're living in California with fires and climate change. For many people, this has been a very intense period. with the pandemic, with politics. There is, I think, a kind of sense of just heightened vigilance about what is it that comes next.

[02:10]

And I've noticed that when we are in this state or when I've been in this state, it's often an index of kind of great historical cataclysmic change in the world. And I'm thinking of things like 9-11 or I'm old enough to have been around when JFK was killed and when Martin Luther King was assassinated. All of these events, they're really this kind of reordering and realignment of how we understand the world, how we be in the world. And I suspect that we are in such a moment right now. And of course, it's really difficult for us to see... or to have come clearly into focus for us, what the parameters are of the change, of what exactly will come next. And I think it's really worthwhile at this moment to open up conversations about what does it mean to be a practicing Buddhist in this period.

[03:15]

And in particular, I'll talk today about the bodhisattva practice of wisdom or prajna. I feel like we could all use some more insight about the nature of the world and our relationship to it right now. I'll talk also a little bit about the ways in which I practice or understand the practice of prajna, of wisdom, which is a practice of seeing clearly. And in that context, I will also talk a little bit about particularly how I work with these issues around my own racial identity. So I know that I'm not a part of the regular rotation of speakers here at City Center, so I'd like to just say a little bit more than what Kodo has offered in the beginning, just to give you kind of a sense of who I am and maybe give you a little bit more background and context for why I speak about the issues in the way that I do.

[04:26]

As Kodo said, I've been here at Santa Cruz. I moved here to be a professor in sociology, and I specialize in the areas of social inequality, class, culture, race. I did a lot of work on racial identity. I happen to be a so-called expert about racial equity and university admissions and kind of the notion of merit and getting ahead, evaluating people on the basis of merit. And I've had a really long and wondrous career doing academic and intellectual work. And as probably most of you know, if you've ever been in school, academic work is really, or being at the university, is a very verbal occupation. And it's not always, it's really not my nature to be so verbal and to be quite so me-centered. So I started practice... at Santa Cruz Zen Center shortly after I received tenure, because honestly, when you're trying to get tenure and stabilize your life as an academic, it's a 60, 70 hour a week job.

[05:39]

So I started practice for all the same reasons I think that many people do, which is that I felt like I wanted more. I was unhappy, even though I was relatively successful. I had the good fortune to work with Catherine Thanners for many, many years, and also the good fortune to be a disciple of Jean Bush as well. You know, I continue to describe myself as a Zen student rather than as a priest or teacher, really just to emphasize that I'm still working at this. And in fact, maybe the most important thing I can say about myself is, you today that I want to share is I think I am mostly like all of you. I just am working alongside others to develop and deepen my practice in the Dharma and constantly adjusting and wanting to be upright in the world.

[06:47]

So I hope that's helpful for you. I'd like to also just say that, you know, I've been part of the online practice period this fall, and I've had my doubts about what that would mean to have a Zoom Zen life. But it's been really wonderful. And one of the things that we're studying as part of the practice period that Abbot David and Abbot Ed are leading are the Bodhisattva archetypes and how to Practice compassion, have wisdom in the world, this world of great uncertain times. I've been thinking a lot about this practice of prajna or wisdom. And so I'm going to talk about that today. And I've been sort of reflecting, kind of tacking back and forth between thinking about wisdom as a practice.

[07:57]

thinking about my own life, thinking about race in particular as one of the kind of major fault lines of my own existence in this world. And then back again to wisdom. So, you know, I don't have like complete and thorough prescriptions about what this is or how to think about it. And really today, I just want to offer you some thoughts and prompt maybe a series of questions about what this is. And please know that my deepest intention is to bring the practice and the wisdom of meditation, the practice of being on the cushion to the world of now. And I think this is part of what we're doing all the time is juggling or thinking about these ancient practices that were developed thousands of years ago and thinking about how we apply them and the way in which we apply them today. Kodo, I'm seeing a note that says my internet is unstable.

[08:59]

Am I still being pretty clear here? I'm still hearing you very clearly. Okay, very good. So, let me talk a little bit about Prajna. Probably many of you know that, you know, wisdom is one of these core things ideas that we associate with Buddhism and Buddhist practice. We often say or aspire to attain the wisdom of the Bodhisattvas and the Buddha. And at the same time that, you know, this is a cornerstone concept and practice. And you know this because, you know, all across Zen centers, all over the world, temples, We chant the Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra, sometimes the hymn to Prajnaparamita. And in our studies, there's lots of references to attributes, activities, things that get said that are considered to be wise action, wise beliefs.

[10:15]

So as one of the six paramitas, I think... I'll just say first, one of the most common misconceptions I think that many of us carry is that wisdom is a thing that once you have it, then it belongs to you or you're able to exercise it. And I think the teaching actually, to be historically accurate, is that this is a practice of seeing clearly or sometimes it's translated as insight. from the original Sanskrit. And in my own brain, which arguably is a somewhat reptilian one, I actually have another more pragmatic way that I understand the practice of seeing clearly, which I like to say is to see the world as it is and not as I want it to be. You know, so often when we're... sitting zazen or we're at work or we're with family or kids.

[11:20]

A lot of what we do is the energy of our activity is to change the world or to change the conditions under which we are living, practicing, working, working with our families and so on. So one of the ways I remind myself about this practice of seeing clearly is first I remind myself that it's a practice and that once I think I see something clearly, it's really just for that moment and it's not forever and that it's a repetitive practice that I have to continually look again and look again and look again. And the other sort of prelude comment that I'd like to make about our work with insight or seeing clearly is that I try to remind myself that I need to subtract my own body and mind, in some ways, from seeing clearly what's in my body and mind.

[12:26]

I don't know if that makes sense, but, you know, the practice is to, when one tries to see clearly oneself, which is really the practice of meditation, This is a practice that you do over and over again. It's not like you look once and then you're clear. It's really that you look, you study, you look again, you sense, you breathe. This is kind of wisdom. I think one of the parmites that's most fundamentally, explicitly tied to the practice of Zazen or meditation. So one of the things that I have been considering... and I would submit for your consideration today, is that when we talk about this practice of seeing clearly, when we talk about this practice of insight, in most of the sutras and original teachings and then the secondary readings that we have, for example, we're using a book by Teigen Leighton called Faces of Compassion.

[13:36]

The emphasis is really on... what happens in our individual life world. So what happens with me, Dana, Takagi on the cushion from day to day, hour to hour, and so on. And it's always been implicit that what happens in the individual life world is also part of a universal truth or universal life world. And there's lots of... There's lots of kind of history and text, original text that support this view. But I think our tendency, and please get at me if you think I'm wrong about this, because it would be a wonderful conversation to have. I think most of the tendency that we have in Soto Zen is to focus on the Zazen aspect, to focus on what comes up in our individual life worlds.

[14:38]

And I want to suggest to you today that maybe it's productive also for us to think about what it means to see the universal or to see the world beyond this one and to see that world clearly. Because that is really the world that we're working with inside of us, right? We share lots of universal attributes of being human, being born. being sick, going through old age and death. And then in addition to that, are there particular kinds of important aspects of being in the world, seeing the world clearly that also come up for us? And as I move to talk a little bit about myself and my experience with being Japanese American.

[15:42]

I'm going to talk specifically about Asian Americans here. I'd like to just first say that it's always really tricky to take a little bit of liberty with the original text and particularly with Dogen. And I just wanted to share with you before I move to talking a little bit about what I think it would mean to see the world as it is beyond this one, what that means practice-wise. I'd like to just share with you something that appears in the Vendawa, discerning the way, on the endeavor of the way. And here's something kind of quadruple. a series of four statements that Dogen makes that I think comes at the heart of the way in which what we do on the cushion is an expression of working with what's out in the world and vice versa.

[16:49]

So Dogen says, an ancient Buddha said, the entire universe is the true human body. The entire universe is the gate of liberation. The entire universe is... the eye of Virochana. And the entire universe is the Dharma, body of the self. You know, it's always tricky to quote Dogen without lingering on him for five or six hours. Because, of course, there are different translations. And Dogen himself is a literary wizard in that sometimes you can't take him literally. He works through illusion, negation, and other kind of discursive modalities so that sometimes you're just utterly confused about what he means. But I offer this passage, the entire universe is the true human body, to just say that, you know, while we focus in the Soto Zen tradition principally on this individual, this one, as an expression of the universal,

[18:05]

It's important to know that the universal is out there and that the world outside or beyond this one is out there. Just kind of pausing here to think if I've said enough about Prajna. I think perhaps, you know, if you're listening to the lectures, at San Francisco's Zen Center, you'll hear Abbot Ed and Abbot David lecture a bit more about Prajna as one of the Paramitas and how we associate this practice of seeing clearly with particular archetypes. So I think I'll just leave that there and move forward here. So, You know, although the emphasis in this school of practice has been on the individual life world as opposed to the individual in the world per se, you know, the core practice is that when one sits on the cushion, the act or the practice of seeing clearly is to see the emptiness of all things.

[19:32]

That is to see that, not that the self does not exist exactly, like literally does not exist, but that there is not a stable self and that we are constantly changing and in motion. So whenever you say something like, I'm the kind of person who believes that, or I am this kind of Zen student, I am this, of this view about this, it is really just for that moment. And this... the solidity that we attach to our understanding of ourself, our identity, our relationship to the world, is itself always in flux and flowing and changing. So, but we're especially seeing, given the nature of the world and the nature of changes, particularly in the past four or five years, but I'll say really 20 years, a huge effort on the part of many teachers and practitioners to think about how we see the world clearly.

[20:38]

That is how we see the world beyond this one. Clearly. And, you know, this is very exciting work, I think. Probably many of you are already familiar with this. For example, Zenju Earthland Manuel wrote One of my Dharma sisters, way back from when we were in a retreat together with Ryumon at Tassahara, she writes in her book, The Way of Tenderness, a society that doesn't examine itself is an unenlightened one. Similarly, Larry Gang, who's a founding teacher at East Bay Meditation Center, and I think also rotates in and out of spirit rock, You can tell that he's signaling a kind of collective understanding of the way in which we are together in the world by the title of his book, Awakening Together.

[21:40]

And Angel Chiodo Williams, of course, the author of her first book is called Being Black, and her second book, Radical Dharma, has been lately speaking of what she calls the collective unconscious. And my dear Dharma sister, Lian Chet, is also teaching about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path in terms of kind of a much more complex notion of identity, including race. Forgive me, there are probably many others that are working on this and thinking about this. But I do want to, before I leave this point, just say that the original person who really has been talking about this for a very long time is Joanna Macy. She's writing back in the 1980s and 1990s about the relationship of self to society and the way in which Buddhist practice is as much about the self as it is about the self in the world and having a clear understanding of what's going on in the world.

[22:44]

So I feel very inspired by both lines of study. On the one hand, the more classical Sato Shu and Soto Zen that emphasizes kind of the way we individually apprehend what's going on in the world. And then also this newer line of work. They both, I think both allow us to look at big issues like climate change or systemic racism or general inequality, changes in faith and so on. But I've noticed that most of these conversations about society tend, when we do talk about race, in particular, and racism, we tend to go dual. And we tend to talk about black and white. And that's probably not entirely true. I have heard many Zen teachers say, let's talk about the issues of racism that affect people of color, indigenous people.

[23:52]

And So today I would like to sort of pick that apart a little bit. And I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the things that I've felt experienced in my life as an Asian American and particularly as a Japanese American. And I want to do this for a couple of reasons. One is that, you know, we don't talk about Asians very much. And it's a little bit ironic since, you know, Soto Zen in the West really comes out of Japanese-American communities. I was having an exchange with this priest who perhaps many of you know him or his book, Duncan Williams. He's the author of a really fine book called American Sutra. And it's a study of... Buddhist practice in the internment camps during World War II.

[24:52]

And the exchange that we had was, I happened to do a little bit of work in this area. And actually, I don't really do that work in the area. I have a lot of files on this from when I was doing work in that area. And I wrote him because I came across a list of all the different kinds of Buddhist practice that were... in the Japanese American community at the time that they were interned during the Second World War. And it's actually kind of phenomenal to see this, in part because, you know, whatever one might think about racism toward the Japanese during World War II, the... War Relocation Authority, which was in charge of relocating the Japanese into internment camps, or some people call them concentration camps, or prison camps, they were remarkably knowledgeable about the practice of Buddhism. So for those of you who have practiced in Japan, there were a lot of temples.

[25:59]

I mean, there must be a list of maybe 30 temples or so, including Eheji and Sojiji, the two kind of main temples of Soto Zen. So we were just kind of marveling at the exchange of information about Buddhism and the knowledge about Buddhism that existed prior to the Second World War. So one reason I want to talk about Asians is that we don't often talk about Asians. And the second reason is that I think often when we include Asians in discussions of race, we try to, or we think that they might be like a black experience or a white experience, or that they fit neatly into the dualism of black and white. And I want to suggest to you today that, first, it's not my experience, but historically, that's not very accurate. And that Asians have their own, I want to say, kind of fault line in the history of

[27:09]

in the history of race in America. I recently heard an interview with a young writer, Vietnamese writer by the name of Ocean Bong. And Mr. Bong wrote this brilliant book. He's a poet. And he wrote a book that was published, I think last year called On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous. And when that book was published, Mr. Bong won both a Pulitzer and one of these MacArthur Genius Grants. So, of course, he's been on the talk circuit, you know, all these news stations and literary magazines want to feature him and think about who he is, and they're asking him about his process. And he issues this warning, and what he says is that, you know, Asians are really... They're incomprehensible.

[28:12]

They're incomprehensible. They're unfathomable, he says. Because the experiences are, on the one hand, different from other racial groups, and on the other hand, overlooked. And so part of what he does is he kind of really highlights the cultural context of Asian American politics, Asian American politics, particularly in his case, growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. He says this one funny thing. He says, you know, I didn't even realize there were white people because I didn't grow up around white people in Connecticut. And the other writer that I want to just mention here is someone who's completely really probably inaccessible for most of us. She's an academic and... She writes about the Asian-American experience in race, along with a number of other people, as being one of mourning or melancholia.

[29:14]

And the source of that mourning and melancholia, the source of this sadness and grief, is to always be invisible or to be just disappeared. And also to, you know, in this kind of not being legible as part of racial politics, One feels like they don't have a place to go. And she's sort of interested in the psychodynamic, what happens to the psyche in the body, and is this recuperable or not? So let me return now to talk just a little bit about what the Asian American experience has been and what my experience in particular has been. I want to talk a little bit about internment. And I do so with the worry that some of you will think that internment is the defining thing that we talk about when we talk about Japanese Americans.

[30:18]

And it is very important and it is very figurative. And I hope from my comments you'll get a sense of that. But I hope also that you'll know that the conditions of possibility for Japanese American life and our... are constructed and kind of the parameters are drawn by internment. But the community is so much more than that. So I should say just one other thing, and I realize now I want to move a little bit more quickly so we can get to some discussion here. You know, I recently read a book. I'm a big advocate of studying history as a way of understanding race. And I recently read a book that I know some others have been reading called The Warmth of Other Suns by a writer. She's actually used to be a journalist named Isabel Wilkerson. You might know her because she recently published a book called Cast, which is getting a lot of buzz in outlets like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, blah, blah, blah.

[31:24]

So one of the things... I've read both her books, and the first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, is the story of the great migration of blacks out of the South from about, you know, the Jim Crow era, 1870, up to World War II and beyond. And what she chronicles is really an experience and a history of race. But what's kind of amazing about her book, which is really long, it's like 600 pages, is never once does she mention the word racism. She considers that word to be not the right word for starters to describe the experience of blacks or the history of the black experience in the United States. But also, I think what she does is rather than use that word, which is a little bit overdetermined, she puts in place describing the experience instead. Okay.

[32:24]

So, One of the reasons I wanted to talk about internment, you know, this is a personal issue for me. I come from a small family. It's just me and my sister, my parents, both of whom have passed. That is, both of my parents have passed away. My parents and their parents and their siblings were all interned in different internment camps during the Second World War. And internment is a really important experience because where it's a really important moment in history because this is one of only two times that the government has later issued a national apology to a racial group. So Japanese Americans were issued a racial apology for the internment between 1942 and 1945. That apology was issued and signed by...

[33:25]

It's actually a public law that was a joint Senate and Congress law. I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of the law in case you wanted to look it up. But it was signed by President Ronald Reagan. And that law, the civil liberties law, provided for not just a national apology to all Japanese Americans, but it also allocated reparations for survivors of the internment camps. And everyone who could document that they had been in a camp received $20,000, which of course is kind of a small amount relative to the amount of loss, but it's not nothing. And it also says something about the power of apology, which is not to say that things are fine around internment and Japanese Americans. There's a lot of people who still have a lot of feeling and a lot of emotion about this.

[34:25]

And the only other time the government has issued an apology to a group based on kind of ethnic or racial identification has been to the indigenous people of Hawaii. Native Hawaiians would call themselves the Kanaka Mali. And the Kanaka Mali were given an apology to in, let's see, when was it? I think it was 1993, and certainly it was modeled on the apology to Japanese Americans. And the apology to Native Hawaiians was, in effect, sorry, we overthrew the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893. And I mention these two because I think it's interesting that... given a lot of the talk that we saw and maybe were part of this spring about the Black experience, about reparations, about national apologies, there hasn't really been a serious apology signed by both houses of Congress and the Senate and signed by the president ever to Black Americans.

[35:38]

So it says something about the racial politics of this. Okay, I'm I could see I'm really running out of time here, so let me try to get on point. As I said, both my parents were interned and their families were interned. And the first thing I want to say is that the way I was brought up, internment was like a whisper in my family house. Really up until about maybe 1970. My parents didn't talk about this. And, you know, you could put a lot of kind of interpretation and projection on why they did or didn't talk. But this was, as I look back on it, I think this was how, this was the truth that they saw about the world. This was them seeing clearly what it was. One of the first talks I had with my family was my mom.

[36:44]

And I asked her, why did they go? And she said to me, you don't understand. We didn't really have a choice. And me, from the position of being a Japanese American, going to school, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, I was like, yeah, but you have rights. She came back at me and she said, you really don't understand. And I really didn't, you know. And she didn't have the language to explain it to me, and I didn't have the capacity to understand the history at that time. So I was brought up, you know, the way that Japanese Americans talked about internment when I was young, really up until the time I was about 16 or so, was that people didn't get together and, you know, have a meal and have beer and say, dang, that was really messed up during the Second World War.

[37:45]

No, instead, they went to the kind of relational discussion in which they would say, when you would meet someone new, you would say, oh, Sakamoto's, you know, where were you during the Second War? Where were you during the war? Or they'd just say, where were you? And the coding of that was always, I was at this camp. Oh, well, how long were you there? And, hey, I know these following six people who were there. By any chance, did you meet them? And so that was the talk. It was really about where were you? Do you know so-and-so? And it was a really interesting kind of discussion. My parents... came to, like many other people, in fact, my mother was pretty figurative in the move for reparations for Japanese Americans. They came to talk about it differently, but it's interesting, it's always been interesting to me, kind of the lack of affect about it.

[38:53]

It became an injustice and a wrong. But to have the long view about how it affected their lives, how it limited their lives, and how it didn't, and how it affected their relationship with their parents, as well as their relationships with their children, people like me and my sister, was really not a part of the conversation. And this is part of being, I think, culturally Japanese-American. It's not really just a story about my parents and their parents' interactions with the War Department, the Justice Department, and so on during the Second World War. I still don't feel like I have a very clear view or that I see clearly this kind of historic event for Japanese Americans. I will say that I took a trip with my nephew at the urging of my sister maybe about 10 years ago.

[39:54]

My sister and her family live in New York, and she sent her son out, who was 21, and she... said, Auntie Dana will take you to Manzanar. And I was like, oh boy. So, you know, traveling with a 21-year-old is really something. We jumped in the car with the dog. My nephew got the snacks at the 7-Eleven. And I kept saying through all of this, I'm a Zen student. I can do this. I can eat beef jerky and drink Arizona iced tea and have donuts. I'm good. I'm a Zen student. I can do this. So we get all the way down to Manzanar, and my nephew really wanted to see the baseball diamond down at Manzanar because he had been read to, as a child, a little children's book called Baseball Saved Us, which was about the very active baseball teams that were at Manzanar. And so we went into the visitor center the next day, and if you ever get a chance to go to Manzanar, it's really quite...

[40:59]

I would say it's a good visitor center. It's accurate. It's very comprehensive in how they talk about the legal issues, the social issues, the community issues, and so on. And up on this great big wall inside the visitor center, they have the names. I think it's about 11,000 or maybe 10,500 people who were interned there. And At the time, first it took me five minutes to find my dad and his parents. I'm named for my grandmother, who I never met, and I also never met my grandfather. They died of kind of the wasting diseases of poverty and despair before I was born. I saw my Aunt Ruth. My dad had, there were three people and three kids in his family. My Aunt Ruth, who... We actually didn't spend that much time in camp, but she took care of her younger sister, who was also enlisted there because her younger sister, my Aunt Hannah, was ill at an early age and became a deaf mute.

[42:14]

So they were allowed to leave camp to go to the California School for the Deaf. My Aunt Hannah, at the time that I saw her name on the wall, had died. She died of breast cancer that went untreated because she was so afraid of doctors, right? This is the world of Japanese Americans. You know, people grew up in very segregated places. And my aunt, with the kind of added issue of being a deaf mute, she had had nothing but bad experiences with doctors. I'll just say something about my Aunt Ruth, and then I'll... a few more comments and move to a close here. My father's oldest sister, Ruth, I have two big memories of my aunt. We didn't see them very often, but one was she really ran a tight gender discipline ship, and when she would see me, she would say things like,

[43:20]

don't you have anything nicer to wear, like something pink? And I would say, no, I don't. And one conversation has always stayed with me. She was talking about Richard Nixon. And I must have been about 16 or 17 at the time. And I said, really, you're a Republican? And she said, yes, I am. For the rest of my life, I will be a Republican. And I said, why is that? And she goes, it's really simple. The Democrats put us in camp. So that was her construction of reality as it is, right? The world as it is. And even though it was limited and partial, I could see that it really structured her politics, you know, for the rest of her life. Besides the whispers that I grew up with about internment from my parents, I wanted to also contextualize that a little bit and say that although I didn't realize it really until last week when I started to prep this talk, I grew up in a pretty segregated life.

[44:46]

Our lives were... Japanese-Americans. My parents, their friend group were almost exclusively Japanese-Americans. I remember one white couple, but he spoke fluent Japanese and my parents knew him from their days. Berkeley, and this was a guy who was an Asian studies specialist. The dentist was Japanese, the lawyer, the accountant. My parents were unable to buy property in Berkeley because of FHA practices of not loaning to Japanese Americans, to restrictive covenants.

[45:48]

I grew up in Berkeley and Oakland, and one of the reasons my family moved to Oakland is that my parents really, as my sister and I were getting older, wanted to move to a larger house. And they were unable to buy a house in Berkeley in 1966. And they thought about... buying a piece of land and building, and they explored that, and they couldn't get anyone to build for them either. So this is kind of the way that I grew up. We didn't talk about it. I didn't notice it. And as I said, you know, this kind of segregation, even now, like 50 years later, 60 years later from my childhood, I was like, oh yeah, that was segregation. I never thought of that. So maybe for me, this is a lesson or a kind of teaching that it takes a long time to see the world beyond this one in an accurate way.

[46:53]

It takes a really long time. In the same way that it takes a long time when you're doing regular zazen and meditation practice to work at the practice of seeing clearly this one. I need to keep listening to this because it's so good. So I'm kind of like pivoting and thinking about how to close here. There's more I want to say, but maybe some of this can come up when we do Q&A. I wanted to tell you just one last thing, or mention one last thing as a way of a close. And that is that, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, I felt really Asian. And I was very aware that something could happen, you know.

[47:54]

And one of my fellow priests and teachers, I think they're online today. And if they want to see who they are later, that's fine. They wrote me and said, hey, have you experienced any anti-Asian stuff since the beginning of the pandemic? And I went through and I thought about it. And I thought particularly about this one woman in the bank who, this is before, you know, people were wearing masks and stuff. And, you know, I had a little asthma, so I coughed. I was like about 10 feet behind her and she looked at me and then moved another five feet. away from me and that you know that was straight fear and that was also kind of doing the visual that that person is Asian and could be a carrier of the virus anyway I thought about that I thought about various incidents in which you know I thought people looked at me a little too long while I was driving and so on but I had to be honest and I said you know no not really and my friend wrote back and said could you ask your sister

[49:01]

because they live in New York City, and we already knew that people were getting beat up in the subway simply for being Asian, regardless of whether they were Korean or Vietnamese or Japanese or Thai. And so I did that. I asked my sister, and she said no. She didn't have a direct personal experience with it, but we had a conversation about my nephew, the one that, you know, the donuts and the beef jerky and Arizona iced tea. the one that I went to Manzanar with. At the time, my nephew was living in New York, and his fiancée now was living in L.A., and they were commuting back and forth across the country, and they really wanted to be together, and in no small part because her relatives, three of them, had died of COVID in New York. Yeah. She felt very helpless. And she's alone with their dog in Los Angeles.

[50:03]

So my sister and I, we had this conversation about what would be the best way for my nephew to get out to California. Would he fly? How dangerous is that? And we discussed that maybe it would be a good idea if he drove. And my sister just said, yeah, I thought about that too. I think that would be... physically save her. But, you know, driving as a single Asian male in a truck across the country could be really risky to him. And I had to agree, right? And I thought, this is a ridiculous conversation that I'm having to have with my sister. So I wrote back my friend and I said, no, my sister doesn't really have anything specific either. But isn't it enough that we think about it? isn't it enough that the threat, maybe not exactly of violence, but of some kind of incident around being Asian, is something that we think about.

[51:10]

And I think what I wrote this person is I think about it every time I leave the house. And that's not exactly true. I don't, every time I go out of the house think, okay, I'm Asian, what am I going to do? What I really think is it's always in the back of my mind, right? It's part of my consciousness about what could happen and what might happen. And isn't that really the after history or the kind of extended experience of both being Asian, of internment, and so on. So finally, I just want to close and say, this is not just my story. This is now all of your story as well. This is all of your history. And this is the part where we exist in the same world. We have perhaps different ways and kind of places that figure our experience in terms of our identities, but together we share in this after history.

[52:12]

Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[52:39]

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