Brad's audio essay on his great grandmother, Hisao, a picture-bride who couldn't speak English, but who became an American, a Californian, and an Angelino through the Lakers; the woman who began four generations of his family's love of basketball. In the wake of Kobe Bryant's death, it's a reflection on the joy and sorrow of migration, love, and 'Ohana.
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Welcome to a very kind of different episode of Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi and this is not a normal episode of our show.
I wanted to share a kind of an audio essay that I've kind of formulated just in the wake of the death of Kobe Bryant.
I know that many of you listen to this show obviously for religion and politics and you may be thinking of no interest in sports or basketball or Kobe and that's totally fine and if you turn this off right now I'll totally understand.
The story I'm going to tell is really about family and about immigration and about, you know, what it means to be an American.
And I know that may sound strange for now, but hopefully it'll make sense in a second.
So I'm just going to kind of get into it.
And if this is in any way meaningful to you, then that's that's amazing.
Her name was Hisawo.
She came to this country as a picture bride.
That means that she was picked out of a book by a much older man and put on a boat and then shipped here to this country.
After making a long journey across the ocean, she showed up after a shoreside mass wedding, started a new life in a new country where she knew no one and didn't speak the language, didn't know the culture.
Well Hisao and her husband eventually struck out in California and San Francisco after a very brief time and then had to make their way to Maui where her husband's brother was a successful business person.
I'm not sure why or how but Hisao and her husband couldn't have kids and so in a way that was not totally abnormal for the time her brother's, I'm sorry, her husband's brother gave their younger son to them to raise.
Well that boy became my Biological grandfather, Michael.
When Michael grew up, he was understood to be an heir to the family business, somebody who would take over a certain sector of it.
But he died young and left the world very, very soon and very suddenly.
And so his two kids were left with a single mom, with the business failing and other family drama and events happening.
My dad, Michael's only son, was put under the care of Hisao, a woman he wasn't biologically related to, a woman who didn't speak English and was only a few years from arriving from Japan.
Hisao became my dad's primary caretaker.
They lived in a small shack of a house on Maui.
And after he graduated high school, they made their way to Los Angeles, where they reunited with his mom, my grandmother Toshiko, and his sister.
They lived in a small apartment in downtown L.A., two bedrooms, and in the house was my dad and his mom, Hisao, my aunt and uncle, and their two kids.
Four generations, two bedrooms, all trying to make life work.
My dad went to Cal State L.A.
while living in the same bedroom as his mom and grandma.
Hisao didn't speak English, and though there were many Japanese folks in LA, it was different than Maui.
One way to become an Angeleno, and a Californian, and an American was through the Lakers.
Hisao became a rabid Lakers fan.
I've told this story many times, but she couldn't speak English.
Yet even in her 80s and 90s, she knew the starting five for the Lakers, how many points a game they averaged, and who they were playing on a given night.
By the time I came around she was old.
She was in her 80s and still didn't speak English.
She lived in a nursing home in Gardena near LA.
But most weekends she would come to our house.
She would make Japanese food all weekend and cook burnt chocolate chip cookies for myself and my two brothers.
One thing you need to know is that I'm a biracial person, and when I was young, I was a blonde, blue-eyed boy, someone who looked more like he was from Sweden than from Japan.
People definitely did double takes when I was out in public with my dad and Hisao.
I have clear memories of her.
I have clear memories of her watching the Lakers in a chair in our living room, and me watching with her.
From the time I was five or six years old, I loved the Lakers just as much as she did.
It's one of those strange phenomena in life to have such intimate memories of someone who you knew only when you were young and who never spoke your language.
We really couldn't communicate in the traditional sense and yet, when I think of those times, I know that we shared something that was important.
It was a way that we connected.
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