Keynote Speakers
Brenda Nakamoto
Brenda Nakamoto’s Peach Farmer’s Daughter is sheer poetry in prose, a collection of short essays that centers on growing up on a peach farm in Gridley. From this focal point, she expands her view to touch on many subjects, including the Japanese-American community, life on a farm whose crop is subject to the whims of temperature and rain, musings on writing, and reflections on being a caregiver to her aging parents.
“This is how my mind has worked—okazu, goulash, fish, sushi—all so different and yet in some ways much the same.”
“This is how my mind has worked—okazu, goulash, fish, sushi—all so different and yet in some ways much the same.”
A long-time staff member at UC Davis, Brenda has continually nurtured her talent as a writer by participating in writing workshops given by the Davis Art Center, Sacramento City College, University Extension at UC Davis, and privately from Rae Gouriand, poet. From her work, we, as ESL teachers, can better understand the backgrounds of our students as she brings to life her grandparents’ and her parents’ lives as first and second generation immigrants, and listening to her work can rekindle in us all that common desire we have to write our own memoirs.
Casey Chin
In From California to Kaiping: Retracing Roots in China, his documentary shown on KVIE, Casey Chin, a native of Sacra-mento, chronicles his “personal odyssey to rediscover his ancestral roots,” the journey he took from Sacramento to rediscover the village in Guangzhou Province in China that his grand-parents immigrated from to settle in California over 70 years ago. Right from the start, we are captivated by a life of contrasts as he super-imposes a Chinese tune over American music while playing his guitar and when he shows his father working on his Harley-Davidson in the living room while watching cowboy movies.
“But when does cultural identity become lost in the melting pot,
and when do individual notes become lost in the chorus?”
Interspersing the past, the recent past, and the present, Chin leads us to understand the path first and second generation immigrants took in the Central Valley of California and the impact that past still has on the third generation.