Nikkei Write Now Writers Group
Marnie Mueller
On Writing The Showgirl and the Writer
September 10, 2024
I'd like to share a quote from James Baldwin, which served as a touchstone and a security blanket as I worked on The Showgirl and the Writer. He wrote, "In the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one's interior, uncharted chaos… so have we as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about the darker forces in our history." He was stating the connection between the personal and the political. In a profound way, he gave me permission to look deeply and honestly into myself and into my subject, Mary Mon Toy, in order to understand the human consequences of one of three grave sins against democracy: the genocide of native Americans, slavery, and, of course, the Incarceration of people of Japanese Ancestry.
It has always been difficult to explain my history. How could anyone, Caucasian or Japanese American, ever understand what it meant to be a white person born in a concentration camp in America and how that experience within my family, situated in the context of the subjugation of another race, connected politics and history inextricably with my sense of self?
I never wanted to write a family memoir. I was more comfortable transforming my life into fiction. I had concealed so much of my person as a child and young adult, including hiding that I was Jewish, that the habit was deeply set. It permeated my presentation to the world, making it close to impossible to openly expose myself to readers.
I had no plan to write about Mary Mon Toy, a Nisei performer who had been incarcerated during WWII for the crime of her race and ethnicity. I had no inkling of what it took her to pursue her desire to make it big on stage when the prejudice against Japanese Americans was still high after WWII.
Writing memoir is a daunting and frightening form because the author has to expose herself. In the case of The Showgirl and the Writer, a hybrid memoir/biography, I've had to expose two people, Mary Mon Toy and myself.
In 1994, I met Mary in a focus group for the Japanese American National Museum. I was there because I had written a story that appeared in a national magazine about being born in the Tule Lake High-Security Segregation Camp to Caucasian parents, young progressives, who had gone voluntarily to work there. Mary stood out more than I did in the assembled group of well-dressed Japanese American professionals when she arrived… an elderly woman aided by a cane, wearing a black cape, with a red AIDs ribbon pinned to the collar. She took off the cape to reveal a black sequined top and purple sweatpants.
Mary and I were the only participants at the meeting who had been in the camps. She told how she had been Incarcerated in Minidoka Camp in Idaho and how she had been permitted to leave early because Eleanor Roosevelt had procured her a scholarship to Juilliard. What she did not reveal was that at Juilliard, she was told that she would never get a role in opera, not even Madama Butterfly, because she was Asian. Undeterred, she had scoured New York Newspapers for auditions and found an ad for "oriental girls five six and over" for the new China Doll Club on Times Square. She later told me that she got the job because, in her words, "I was tall for an Oriental girl and had tits and long legs."
At the focus group, she listened intently when I described my father's work in the camp and how my mother, who was six months pregnant, had signed on to teach the imprisoned children.
As we were leaving the meeting, Mary stopped me to ask where I lived. When I told her on West 77th Street, she said, "Good, I live on West 88th; we can take the bus."
And thus, our 15-year friendship began.
From the start, Mary invited me to Actors Fund performances—she had progressed from the Chop Suey circuit, breaking through to white vaudevillian venues, to lead singer in upscale nightclubs, to Lou Walters' Latin Quarter, where she performed with a Black Cotton Club dancer and a white stripper and became friends with Christine Jorgensen the first public transgender, and from there to making her name in two racially groundbreaking Broadway plays, House of Flowers, a ninety-nine percent all-Black musical, and The World of Suzie Wong.
In the spring of 1998, a written invitation arrived from Mary asking if I would accompany her to the gala opening of an exhibit entitled America's Concentration Camps on Ellis Island where there was to be a life-sized replica of a barracks. I was as tremulous as an adopted child about to meet her birth mother, as this offered the possibility of going home in the company of others who had lived the experience and knew about the place and the conditions of where I was born. As we rode on the bow of the ferry across the black waters of the bay to Ellis Island, Mary put her hand over mine on the railing and left it there.
The years passed. I became her Power of Attorney, giving over more and more of my life to her care to the detriment of my own life and profession. The question hovering over all was why I had taken her on as my responsibility. What was the tradeoff for me in the friendship? People said I was a saint to care for her. That was definitely not the case. At the least, I was ambivalent. I was often annoyed. And I even saw her as my burden after a while. But there was unquestionably something I needed from her. And to be honest there were moments when I was flooded with love for her and vicarious joy in her accomplishments. There were other times I suspected because my mother had died a month before I met her, that she had been sent to me to rectify an unfinished filial debt. She, at one point, indicated that she and my mother had attended Broadway High in Seattle in what could have been the same year. Or did I want to merge again through Mary with the Issei couple who had cared for me in camp when my mother went back to teaching? Or was I paying homage to my parents' time in camp? Or, finally, was it my private form of redress for what our country did to Japanese Americans?
By the time she died, she had named me Executor of her estate. Over the years, she had repeated a story of having been born in Hawaii to a Japanese mother, which was why she had been sent to a camp and a Chinese doctor who had worked in Father Damien's Leper Colony. He had died, she said, when she was two, and her mother had remarried an Issei man and moved to Seattle, where Mary grew up. At her memorial service, when I met with Lori, Wendy, and May (Mary's nieces and sister-in-law), I was mortified to learn from them that she had made up the elaborate story and I had fallen for it. Mary's parents were both Issei immigrants. Mary had been born in Seattle and lived there until her family was forcibly evacuated.
I was depleted from the last years of caring for her and wanted to go back to my normal life, but now I needed to know why she had concocted such a story.
Packing up her belongings, I went through her extensive collection of theater memorabilia. I discovered in her press clippings that she was always referred to as Chinese American or a mix of Chinese and another ethnic Asian identity, but never Japanese.
On all of her official documents, the name Okada was appended. I devised a theory that her married name had been Toyokada, and she had dropped the Okada to create a catchier showgirl moniker. Eventually, I learned her name was Mary Teruko Watanabe Okada. But where had Teruko disappeared, and why?
The more I delved, the more I realized that this was a bigger story than a theatrical choice; rather, it was a wiping out of her ethnicity, a denial of her birthright, much as I had done from childhood and as a young adult hiding my Jewish heritage. Hers exemplified the emotional impact on people who endured the Incarceration, and the resulting effect it had on the rest of their lives. I felt I had a responsibility to write about it.
I researched her past in the intimate and invasive case files of herself and her family in our government's National Archives, War Relocation Authority (NARA-WRA), the same place I had previously found my family's own story of our time in Tule Lake camp for a novel loosely based on our experience. My discoveries about my parents had filled me with pride, beginning with what was said about my father in a Japanese American journal, that he was the one Caucasian in the administration who could be trusted.
But It was of a different emotional order to experience what my friend Mary, her new husband Shig of six months, and her family had suffered during their forced removal from their homes, to be incarcerated for years, destined to live behind barbed wire in a destitute area of the country where the temperatures ranged from 20 below in winter to 110 degrees in summer, housed in one room for each family unit, in crudely built raw wood structures, protected from the elements by one layer of tarpaper on the outside walls, having to trod out in all kinds of weather to use communal bath-houses, latrines, mess halls, guarded by armed soldiers in towers from which searchlights focused on the prison population through the night. Mary's marriage floundered and dissolved in camp, and she medically lost both of her ovaries while there. It was devasting for me to learn what she had gone through. I regretted that I hadn't been there for her as she grew old with this untold history. When I interviewed the famous tap dancer Dorothy Toy, who had passed as Chinese to escape camp, I told her Mary was also Japanese American. "I had no idea," she said, looking bereft, "we didn't talk of those things then." She asked if I had spoken with Mary about her experience, and I had to tell her that we rarely mentioned the camps. "Oh, that's too bad," Dorothy said. "I'm sure she would have liked to talk with you about it."
The deeper I went, the more I understood. She had taken on the moniker of Mary Mon Toy to disguise not only that she was Japanese American but also that she had been in a prison camp and was a divorcee who could not conceive a child. It was a heavy burden to maintain alone.
Colleagues increasingly said that I must put my story and that of my parents into the book I had begun to write. I resisted for the longest time, feeling it would be presumptuous and self-indulgent to do so. Only by a stroke of chance had I been born in Tule Lake while others had been incarcerated by force. What right did I have to speak of their suffering? But gradually, I saw that my singular perspective of being a white person born in an American concentration camp whose parents had done honorable work established my standing in telling Mary's story. Also, my own history of hiding my identity as a Jew would allow me to sympathetically talk about her elaborate masking.
It took me ten years to figure out how to make what I had found into a book. The first drafts were an unholy mess. I couldn't decide how much of myself and my family I should put in. It was a constant balancing act to try to hold to a through line, or the red line, as it is referred to in biographers' parlance.
Each book one writes requires a different form. It has to be as unique as the writer and the book's content is. My mistake when I set out was that I believed that being a memoirist/biographer required a different skill set than fiction, with specific rules. If only I could access those rules, I could accomplish my goal. I wasted a lot of time in the guise of what a nonfiction writer should do. I wrote masses of stilted prose bogged down by verifiable facts until I understood that the opposite was the case. Mine was a unique story about a unique character in Mary. And it needed my voice and my own thoughts and insights gleaned from my unusual life experiences.
My connection to the camps required heavy documentation. Memory is fugitive, which can be excused to some extent in memoir, but vast amounts of corroborating evidence existed about my own family's life and work, in the archives of universities, in NARA, and in oral histories of others who knew us in Tule Lake. My office overflowed with books about the history of the camps, file upon file of my family's and Mary's family's War Relocation Authority case records and day-to-day journals written by Nisei sociologists for the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), Mary's theatrical photos, scrapbooks, her press coverage and librettos, and the history of the discrimination against people of color in theater.
How was I ever going to assemble the multiple threads of the story into a driving narrative without applying the leaps of fictional imagination to keep it exciting?
I began to see that I could use fictional techniques, all the while honoring the documentary facts by merging Mary's and my stories with my own apprising voice. The revelation of Mary's passing as Chinese-American had come inconveniently halfway into the book. In fiction, that is called a Reversal, whereby a plot goes along one direction until a discovery crops up, causing the plot to veer off on another path toward a resolution. With that, I realized I could go back and spot suspicions I had had about her stories but had brushed aside. I could use certain episodes to foreshadow the moment of reversal. She was an unreliable narrator, a great destabilizing source to use in the merging. Following the example of George Elliot's Zionist novel Daniel Deronda, I began to alternate chapters about Mary's life, my life, my parents' tenure in the camp, much as Elliot had with setting up Gwendolyn's and Daniel's seemingly disparate material. Applying Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, I worked with subtext to disable intentionality as I grappled with why I was so obsessed with caring for Mary.
What did I gain by embedding myself in the narrative?
I went from caretaker to detective to guide for the reader, most often white readers, by means of two real women, to tell the tragedy of the camps and their impact on those who lost years of their lives and property, as well as opening up the role of contemporaneous allies, like my parents.
Through our stories, I was exposing those darker forces in our history as a country, those veins of racism, ethnocentrism, gender discrimination, classism, and religious intolerance, living barely below the surface just waiting for some trigger, a malevolent leader or a political incident, to cause them to rise up, making a nation susceptible to acts as unthinkable as forced Incarceration people based on race and ethnicity or religion.
In giving myself over to her truth and mine, I learned an important lesson about my own blind spots regarding racism, which were emblematic of other white people's blindness. I learned that a biographer needs identification with and sympathy and empathy for the subject when dealing across racial lines, but at some point, this is not enough and becomes disingenuous when aiming for a more truthful truth. Instead, one must separate from the person whose story you are telling and identify where you and she are different. As James Baldwin hints at, only by coming clean with the lies we tell ourselves can we be freed to see the other and accept them in all their different versions of self. In my case, it was the matter of the genesis of our need to hide who we were and, concomitantly, the anger behind our need. I discovered that my own anger was an infantile one, emerging from the disruptions and dislocations throughout my childhood as we moved from one conservative place to another when I hid my Jewish identity from other children behind my father's Christian name. I became a spy in the world of antisemitism, witness to terrible slurs, but I had to hide my hiding from my Jewish mother, cutting off a place to go for protection and fortification for absorbing identity courage. Mary, on the other hand, had a close, loving mother who prepared her for anti-Asian cruelty in America who provided her with pride of race and ethnicity. Mary's anger emerged in her adulthood from the betrayal of her government and the enraging impact of the racism, as manifest in Yellow Face Casting, that held her back in her career. She had the courage to be outspoken in her demonstrations against Yellow Face Casting as early as 1968 and her adamant support of Affirmative Action in the performing arts in the 1980s, though sadly, she did so as a Chinese American actor. Politics is complex when it comes to race.
Even coming from a progressive family where racism was openly discussed, I had missed this difference between the two of us. I had been too invested in seeing her as an exemplary case of someone who had let go of her anger in order to go forward. A white deficit of understanding. The section of my book where I bared down on my own failure to understand made a number of my activist friends uncomfortable, as I believe it did many white editorial gatekeepers. Reading between the lines of the editors' rejections, of "it's not exactly what we're looking for now," a common remark, which I think went deeper than that and to Mary herself and how I had chosen to depict her, as who she was in all her complexity. The idea that she wasn't a suffering, perfect, sentimental example, serving to prove how horrible the incarceration was, unnerved some people. As a self-described "tits and ass" showgirl, who had committed the sin of denying her ethnicity, she was not a heroic figure to them. Though she is doubly heroic to me, given that she had to fight ageism, racism, and sexism as she kept her eyes steadily on the prize. Coming up, it was almost impossible for female Asian actors to get jobs other than eroticized roles, such as prostitutes. In her first role on Broadway in House of Flowers, based on a short story by Truman Capote, that is exactly what she played. When she appeared in The World of Suzie Wong, Truman Capote sent her an opening night telegram, Congratulations Mary, too bad it's a House again."
As I was finishing the book, Asian Americans, mostly women, were being physically attacked in the subways and on the street in my liberal city. And in Atlanta, Georgia, eight Asian American women were killed in a massage parlor and then deemed complicit in their own deaths for working in quasi-sexual jobs. It gave me pause to be writing in such a way that could be used to further eroticize Asian women.
I once asked Glory van Scott, one of Mary's closest Black colleagues, "Who was it tougher for, Mary or you as a Black, in forging a career." She immediately answered, "Mary had it harder, she was alone. We had each other."
I learned from her courage. I would never have written so directly about myself if I hadn't met Mary. She brought me to acceptance of the locus within me where my creativity, identity, and politics reside.
As a result of my research and Lori and Wendy's support, Mary now has her own Wikipedia page posted by the Smithsonian and a virtual archive which, to date, includes over 366 objects of her performance career developed in cooperation with Densho.org, the preeminent website on the Incarceration. You can go to Densho.org, Mary Mon Toy Theatrical Collection, at https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-367/ to see her in her full glory as a recognized Japanese American performer. Her physical archive will later be housed in the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle.
©2024 Marnie Mueller