WAKING UP FROM THE 'NIGHTMARE' OF GUN VIOLENCE

On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance 2022, a day to honor the memory of transgender people who have lost their lives to anti-transgender violence, a man wielding an AR-15 style rifle attacked an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., U.S.A. called Club Q.

Five human beings were murdered, over 25 souls were injured and countless others are now experiencing emotional trauma.

At the time of this writing in late November 2022, this was the 662nd mass shooting incident to take place in 2022 in the United States. This number is only part of the 39,461 people who died that year due to gun violence.

As Childish Gambino put it plainly, “This Is America.”

In July 2022, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity took place in Cannes, France, where among the attendees were Manuel and Patricia Oliver, who along with their late son Joaquin had created the nonprofit Change the Ref organization. Joaquin (affectionately known as Guac), was shot and killed on Valentine’s Day, 2018 “in a hallway outside of his creative writing class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.”

Joaquin was one of 17 people who were murdered and 17 more who were physically injured. Emotionally, the injuries persist indefinitely.

Today, the Oliver family has a message for everyone who will listen: gun violence must end, now.

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO THE UNITED STATES?

Manuel Oliver explains, “Our whole family was living in Venezuela — ourselves and our two kids, Andrea and Joaquin. Things were not looking good in Venezuela 20 years ago, and we were already planning to move to a place where our kids would have a better future. I am a European citizen, from Spain, and Patricia has family in Florida. We ended up choosing Florida. We did our homework and chose a place where our kids could have the best education possible. We were chasing the American dream, and we ended up living the American nightmare.”

Patricia Oliver continues, “People continue to come [to the United States] — even by walking. I tell friends, ‘This is not the country we imagined.’ We were attacked, personally, yet [before the attack] we were never afraid to send our kids anywhere or go to Joaquin’s games or events. We felt completely safe and relaxed. It takes a lot of sacrifices to move to another country, and you have to consider the whole picture.”

Manuel Oliver adds, “There is always a level of risk in any situation, so you have to consider the levels. Because gun violence [in the United States] is becoming worse year after year, day after day, now [the risk] is well known. Organizations like ours have been letting people know what is going on. All immigrants are looking for a safer future for their kids. We were willing to sacrifice our friends, our networks, our comfort zones — everything [for the sake of our kids].”

HOW DID YOU COME TO CREATE CHANGE THE REF?

Manuel Oliver explains, “At the time my son was murdered, I was working as a Creative Director in the music industry. It was a fun job and I was very happy promoting blues music. You have to find ways to sell the vibe, as a product, and convince people that this is the music you should be listening to. When the tragedy happened, I made a call to my boss that night to let him know I quit.

“After that, we flipped what I was doing with blues and [poured it] into Joaquin. We continue to have legit contact with Joaquin [because] he was old enough to leave us posts, comments, thoughts, behaviors, passions — everything. We know him.

“Change the Ref, the nonprofit we created, is an extension of Joaquin. It’s the opportunity for Joaquin to continue saying things. Joaquin was against gun violence — we know that. He loved his family, and we need to let people know that. By doing that we continue to be Joaquin’s parents.

“You can either quit your parenting or reset and reimagine your parenting. This is the way we have become, today, Joaquin’s parents. His intentions were always civil rights, pro-choice and gun violence prevention. Today, we are his messengers.”

Patricia Oliver continues, “Joaquin was a very deep thinker — often expressing himself in Tweets. We have a group of girls who collected all of his Tweets for us to read. Every day we are finding something new — it’s beautiful. I used to clean his room, and I continue to do so. I once found a paper from school that he wrote when he was 12. It started, ‘Dear U.S. Gun Owners. I don’t understand why you have a problem with background checks.'”

Manuel Oliver adds, “Our goal is that people know Joaquin. Like any parent, we want all possibilities and opportunities to go to the legacy of our son. The purpose we move forward every day [through Change The Ref] is for him.”

AS PARENTS OF A CROSS-CULTURAL CHILD, DO YOU HAVE A CALL TO ACTION FOR OUR COMMUNITY TO END GUN VIOLENCE?

Manuel Oliver replies, “Gun violence in America is not only an American problem. It’s creating consequences in other nations. Injustice should get us all involved — it doesn’t matter where it is coming from. In America, gun violence kills more than 45,000 people every year. Let’s work together. Join our movement and save a life. It’s easier than you think.”

Patricia Oliver adds, “Our Shame Cards are very powerful — when you see one from afar, you don’t get it. Once you see it closer, you see the tragedy [and understand].”

Take Action Against Gun Violence

• Visit the Museum of the Incomplete to honor the “incomplete works of artists, educators, researchers, scholars, and athletes who never had the opportunity to realize their true potential.”

• Learn about Change The Ref and all the important initiatives that empower the voices of youth.

• Turn a Post Into A Letter to let your representatives know, in Joaquin’s handwriting, that gun reform matters to you. Or, send them a Shame Card to remind them that gun violence impacts every state, and every person, in the United States and beyond.

• See how pro-gun advocate David Keene gave a graduation speech to The Lost Class.

• Hear from Joaquin himself, who asks you to vote — because his vote is Unfinished.

Scan the QR code for the links mentioned in this story: cultursmag.com/gun-violence-and-waking-up

For Japanese-American journalist and author Gil Asakawa, it’s incredible to see how

Japanese food has become accepted in the United States.

“[I]t’s amazing to see the cultural evolution — nay, revolution — that now has Japanese restaurants in every city and sushi in supermarkets across the U.S.,” Asakawa writes in his book “Tabemasho! Let’s Eat!: A Tasty History of Japanese Food in America.”

Asakawa was born in Japan of Japanese-American parents who had moved back to Japan right before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II.

In an interview with Culturs Magazine’s Doni Aldine for the “Destinations with Doni” podcast, Asakawa talks about growing up in Tokyo and going to school on U.S. military bases.

“I had this very bicultural upbringing of hanging with U.S. Military B.R.A.T.s during the day and then going home to the Japanese neighborhood, playing with my Japanese friends after school,” he says.

When the family moved to the U.S. in 1966, Asakawa was 8 years old, in third grade, “and my mom still cooked this mixture of Japanese food at home and American food and my dad would grill the steaks on the hibachi grill on the back porch.”

‘BICULTURAL FOODIE UPBRINGING’

Asakawa talks about having a “bicultural foodie upbringing” where his mother would make spaghetti with meat sauce for the rest of the family and salmon with rice for herself.

Between him and his older and younger brother — he was the middle child — Asakawa says he connected more than the other two with his mother about how she cooked things.

“I paid attention to my mom,” he says. “I paid attention to the cutting board she used and the sound that her knife — it’s called a hocho, a Japanese kitchen knife — the sound that it made when she was cutting carrots or cucumbers or ... cabbage or anything, chicken, shrimp.”

Asakawa maintains a blog — nikkeiview.com — that concentrates on Japanese and Asian identity, racism and history as well as news. It was that blog that caused a publisher, Stone Bridge Press, to approach him over a decade ago to invite him to write a book, “Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa ... and Their Friends” about the history of

Japanese-Americans. The book was published in 2004 and a second edition came out in 2014 due to an increase in U.S. interest in Japanese pop culture.

“And then at some point I realized, you know what? I’m really into food and I’m going to ask Stone Bridge Press, my publisher, if they’d be interested in a book about Japanese food, not just the history of Japanese food, because there’s a couple of really good, well-researched books about that, but how Japanese food changed and evolved as it became popular in the U.S.,” he says.

When Asakawa first moved to the U.S. in the mid-1960s, his third-grade classmates would tease him about eating “raw fish.” Fast-forward to the 21st century and those same classmates’ grandkids are the ones going to their local supermarket and buying sushi “because it’s not weird or gross or exotic to them.”

Even sushi, which has such a huge popularity at restaurants in the U.S. nowadays, wasn’t something he or his family ate much of when they were living in Japan.

“My mom would make certain kinds of sushi for New Year’s and invite friends over, or we would go out for special occasions to restaurants that were known for their sushi,” he says. “And it’s kind of the same with JapaneseAmericans in the U.S. ... Yeah, we all eat sushi, but we didn’t necessarily grow up eating sushi.”

EATING ‘LAME’ SUSHI

That said, nowadays Asakawa knows very well when he’s eating “lame” sushi, particularly if the chef cooks the rice in a certain way.

“The slight sweetness that goes into sushi rice is so important,” he says. “The way that sushi chefs have to fan the rice while they’re cutting it, they’ll never smash the rice, the individual pieces of rice, they kind of sprinkle the vinegar and then they kind of mix it and they fan it at the same time to cool it.

“You can tell when that’s not done right,” he continues. “I can tell when sushi rice has no flavoring in it and it’s just rice and I go, ‘Man, this is phony. This is just totally fake.’ If the rice isn’t cooked well, that’s really a bad sign.”

Asakawa is also not a big fan of the California roll, which has the rice on the outside without the seaweed wrapping.

“It was invented by Japanese sushi chefs in the U.S. but it was made to appease diners who were grossed out at seeing seaweed on the outside of a sushi roll,” he says.

NOT SO ‘TRADITIONAL’ JAPANESE FOOD

One of the main things

Asakawa learned while writing his book is that a lot of the food people just accept as being “traditional” Japanese dishes were appropriated from other cultures.

“After World War II, I write about how the three really familiar foods in America — Japanese foods — were sukiyaki, teriyaki and tempura,” he says, adding that tempura was actually something that came from the Portuguese in the 1700s.

“They would batter-fry vegetables for one of their Catholic holidays and it was called ‘tempora’ something or other. And ‘tempora’ — time — turned into tempura, which makes perfect sense from a Japanese perspective. And they started making that,” Asakawa says.

Ramen is another food that isn’t originally Japanese, according to Asakawa.

People think of ramen right away as a Japanese noodle, but it was originally a Chinese noodle dish, he says.

“The Chinese laborers on the docks of Yokohama Bay in the late 1800s, early 1900s would make it and sell it as street food from carts for Chinese laborers, dock workers. And then it became popular with Japanese laborers and then a restaurant started serving it. And then a restaurant in Tokyo opened that started serving it. But each time [the] Japanese took, and this is very typical of the history of a lot of foods in Japan that are not Japanese in origin, they would adapt the flavors and adapt the textures to suit the Japanese palate,” Asakawa says.

This whole discussion of ramen starting out as Chinese and now being Japanese, to Asakawa, “that’s a real reflection of the way food is a gateway to culture and that it evolves and it changes as it hits new cultures.”

Scan the link below to listen to Asakawa’s full interview on the “Destinations with Doni” podcast. cultursmag.com/gil-asakawa-on-the-history

By Myra Dumapias