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My Turn by Dmae Roberts

From The Asian Reporter, V20, #4 (January 26, 2010), page 6 & 7.

I’ve been fortunate to do what I love for most of my life — telling my own personal stories and those of other multicultural Americans. As a 1.5 generation, immigrant, mixed race Asian American, I often see several sides to a story. I’m always left with more questions than answers. Those questions I’ve shaped into radio stories, stage plays, and personal essays. It’s been a blessing to have my work recognized with awards and honors I never thought possible when I was growing up in rural Oregon. I’ll be sharing a bit of my history and continuing to ask questions that have few answers as part of "My Turn" in the coming months.

I often call myself Secret Asian Woman because I’m not visibly Asian to many Americans (except in Hawaii, Alaska, or San Francisco). The most common question people ask when I reveal my race is, "How did your parents meet?"

Both my parents were survivors: My mom grew up in the ravaged countryside of Taiwan during World War II and my dad was a child of Depression-era parents in Dust Bowl Oklahoma. They both experienced poverty, but on two different sides of the world and in dramatically different ways. My dad lived the idyllic farm life on 40 acres with parents who adored him. My mother was sold to work as a bonded servant and suffered physical abuse and starvation.

My parents met when my father was stationed in Taiwan a few years after the Korean War. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan and we lived in Japan until my dad quit the military when I was eight years old. When we arrived in America, we travelled around a lot while he jumped from job to job.

We finally settled in Junction City, Oregon, a small rural town (and home to the Scandinavian Festival) where my mom found work at a nearby plywood mill. In our new hometown, my brother fell victim to bullying and name-calling because he looked more Asian than I. He was picked on and tormented until he graduated from high school. To this day, he is withdrawn and distrusts others. His experience with racism, in addition to my mother’s experiences working at the plywood mill (where she was treated as a simple China doll by some of her male co-workers), influenced me and really forged my commitment to fight racism through my art.

I only wanted to be an actor and writer when I was growing up, but when I went to the University of Oregon, I majored in journalism so I could make a living doing something other than manual labor at the cannery or plywood mill where I worked during the summer. It was in Eugene that I happened upon KLCC, a community radio station. I fell in love with producing creative art pieces for public radio. Before I graduated, I started selling my pieces to NPR.

Soon after, I began applying for grants, which eventually led to the production of the radio documentary Mei Mei, A Daughter’s Song — my most personal and artistic piece about my relationship with my mother. For the piece, we went to Taiwan together. We had a tempestuous relationship, and when we were in Taiwan — a place she hadn’t been to for 25 years — it became more volatile. I captured it all in my recordings, and the piece received a Peabody Award.

Twenty years ago, I moved to Portland, continued in radio to support my theatre work, and adapted Mei Mei into a stage play at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. Later I wrote Breaking Glass, a piece about my family’s experiences in Junction City produced by Portland Repertory Theatre. Picasso in the Back Seat, a play about the value of art, was produced by Artists Repertory Theatre in 1996 and garnered an Oregon Book Award and a Drammy.

After taking over a nonprofit called MediaRites, which promoted projects about women and minorities, I turned it into a multicultural media and theatre production organization. From 2003 to 2006, MediaRites took on the production of the first Asian-American history series on public radio. The Crossing East project, which spanned three years, involved raising nearly $400,000 and producing eight hours of documentaries featuring 50 scholars, producers, and artists. It aired on 230 public radio stations and resulted in my second Peabody Award.

Because of the success of Crossing East, the Asian American Journalists Association honored my work with the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice. I also received a $50,000 fellowship from United States Artists (USA) that has allowed me time to take a sabbatical.

While on sabbatical, I realized I needed to write my memoir to expand the personal stories that began with Mei Mei and to bring my mom’s stories full circle after her death in 2002. Much of my time now is spent working on the project. It’s a painful journey to experience all the emotions again, especially those during the caretaking of my mother in her three-year fight against breast cancer, but I believe it’s a story that resonates with others taking care of their aging parents.

I’m also continuing to produce and host Stage and Studio, a weekly live arts show that has aired on Portland’s KBOO community radio for 13 years. I love interacting with and serving the local community. And because arts coverage in print and broadcast media is reduced daily, I’ve been proud to cover theater, dance, literary, and media arts in Portland as well as nationally.

I’m happily married to a great supportive husband, and we have twin tabby kitties. My hubby and I love to travel, but otherwise we tend to be homebodies. I generally have a stack of books and movies nearby for fun. And because I’m involved in the arts here in Portland, we frequently go to films, the theatre, music performances, and dance productions.

In the next few months, my focus is to complete the book, and I’ll be working with a radio colleague to produce his six-hour Radio Shakespeare project. I’m excited to be part of the "My Turn" team and hope to focus on the arts, new media, multicultural issues, my personal history, and those questions with few answers as we start this new decade!