Not Yo' Butterfly by Nobuko Miyamoto (University of California Press)

Misao was a picture bride who arrived in the U.S. in 1912 to marry a man she’d never met. By 1914, she had two daughters, both born in Oakland, whom she sent to live with her parents in Japan for ten years. Soon after the girls returned to her, Misao died, leaving them to run the family household in a country they’d been separated from during their formative years.

Hatsue, the oldest, had been molded into a traditional Japanese girl but her younger sister Mitsue called herself Mitzi, studied fashion design, and insisted on marrying for love. The man she loved was half Japanese and half Caucasian, the son of a Mormon farm girl from Idaho who had fallen in love with a Japanese laborer and married him in spite of anti-miscegenation laws. Mitzi was as determined as her future husband’s mother had ever been. She defied her father, married the man of her choice, and gave birth their first child two years before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

“I was born where I didn’t belong. At two, I became the enemy.” Although Noboku’s first memories were of the internment camp that had been hastily cobbled together at the Santa Anita racetrack in which the confined prisoners were housed in horse stalls, Mitzi knew a way out. Telling the authorities that her father-in-law had a farm in Idaho that her family could go to, she discovered that not only was the man she spoke to from Idaho, he had gone to the controversial wedding of her husband’s parents. Once again two rebellious women changed the life of Noboku Joanne, known as Jojo. The little girl was given the freedom of farm life and the attention of everyone around her. She soon showed a love of music that seemed to pour into her and came out in the motions of dance.

When the war was over and the Miyamoto family returned to California, Mitzi turned her own artistic ambitions toward her daughter. Jojo had tap lessons, ballet training, and began going to professional auditions by the time she was fourteen. At fifteen she was dancing in the filmed version of The King and I and a year after high school graduation, she was on her way to New York alone as a cast member of the Broadway musical, Flower Drum Song. Jojo became JoAnne Miya and the stage became her natural habitat—until she met an Italian filmmaker with an ambition to make a documentary about the Black Panthers.

This is how a rebel became a revolutionary. JoAnne Miya met and immediately gravitated to Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese American activist who held Malcolm X on the night he was killed. Through this friendship she met the Black community leader who would become the father of her child and the one who insisted she return to her Japanese name, Nobuku. The glamorous performer became a protest singer who wrote songs that came from her own history and that of her parents, songs of rebellion that galvanized young Asian Americans and drew the attention of Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

This autobiography is a stunning social history, showing how America’s crucible of racism can bring rebellion into full flame in three generations, from a picture bride to a performer who uses her art to buttress her principles. It casts a bright light upon Asian, Black, and Latine activists, working together to bring change and transform their country.~Janet Brown