There is No Experience

I push the bell on the front door of Bessie’s green, Hood River farmhouse and count to sixty, but am met with no answer. The only audible noise is a faint knocking in the distance, a sound I attribute to the farm workers lining the surrounding country roads. I ring again and wait another minute before deciding to try my luck at the back door. As I walk around, I hear the knocking again, louder this time, and look up to see an old woman with gray waves in her hair and an exasperated frown on her face, holding a cane high above her head and knocking it against the dining room window. She waves towards the back door with her cane, and it takes a couple more charade matches for me to decide that I should, indeed, let myself in. Bessie Assai, a 95-year-old, retired farmer, has every right to tell her guest,  a 22-year-old, able-bodied nomad, to let herself in.

Once inside her house, I watch Bessie slowly maneuver towards the kitchen table with her walker. I immediately feel the uncertainty that I often feel with older people, unsure of how much I should offer to help. From a young age, I was taught to help my elders as much as possible, to treat them like kings and queens because they hold more knowledge than I could ever fathom. Yet, I wonder if a woman who spent her entire life relying on the strength of her body might feel disheartened when others question her physical independence. When Bessie doesn’t reply to my offer to help, I watch her maneuver towards the dining room table, and I take the seat across from her.

From the moment of our window-charades, my short visit with Bessie met absolutely none of my expectations. After spending less than an hour in her home, I can find many adjectives to describe Bessie: hardworking, bright-eyed, charming, and collected. Yet, I can also think of one thing that Bessie certainly is not. Bessie is not interested in discussing the political implications of her intersecting identities: the child of two Japanese immigrant farmers, a woman, a farmer on her father’s farm, a wife of a farmer, and a mother. Instead, Bessie wishes to discuss the habitual: the everyday life of her mother and father while managing an orchard in the Hood River Valley, her childhood spent on that orchard, and her adulthood spent on the orchard owned by her and her husband, also located in the Hood River Valley.

Bessie’s focus on the habitual, rather than the political, is especially surprising to me given the historical oppression of Japanese immigrants in the Hood River Valley. Following the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the heavy immigration of Chinese labor subsided, and the Oregon labor market began to rely on Japanese workers. By 1909, over a quarter of the Oregon Issei  (Japanese immigrants) worked as migrant farm workers. The Issei population in Hood River, Oregon grew rapidly when, in exchange for clearing brush for other farmers, Issei farm workers could receive marginal land to begin their own farms.

At that time, many of these Japanese farm workers in the Hood River Valley took on the title of independent Farmer. Rather than awarding them respect, this new title caused many Issei farmers to face continuous oppression in the form of state and county-wide legislative efforts to take away their land, for fear of the new competition. Never mind that these Issei farmers introduced new ground crops, such as strawberries and asparagus to the region, as their new land lacked the trees necessary to grow the more common orchard fruits and compete with more established farmers.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, this bigotry reached its precipice. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, designating the removal of any people of Japanese ancestry from a large zone of the west coast, including Portland and Hood River. All Issei in the area were forced to report to assembly centers, and eventually, concentration camps. In 1945, the war ended and the camps closed, freeing the Oregon Issei to resettle or move back to their homes. The 69 percent of Oregon Japanese Americans who returned to their homes faced exclusion from their communities, rallies to deny them of their citizenship, and other forms of opression. At this time, the Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) asimilated into the United States culture, likely fueled by the oppression their families faced when tied to their Japanese roots. These Nisei befriended their Caucasian peers, faced less exclusion, and enjoyed diversified options to choose their own life-paths.

Bessie echoes these feelings of Nisei acceptance, as she recollects feeling welcome in her community while growing up on her parents’ orchard. Aside from this reference to acceptance, Bessie focuses on the normalcy of her life on the orchard. When asked about her early days working on her parents’ farm, Bessie responds that no specific memory comes to mind, because everything just came naturally. Her adulthood spend on another orchard evokes similarly non-groundbreaking memories. This later experience was, “just normal,” she explains. Most surprisingly, when asked how her experience as a Nissei affected her experience growing up and farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie responds, “there was no experience, we just farmed.”

Questions regarding Bessie’s gender identity produce a similar response. When asked how her identity as a woman affected her experience farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie replies that it affected her “in no way.” Yet, I can’t help but realize how the affects of Bessie’s gender on her farm work emerge at other moments in our conversation. When discussing her mothers’ life on the farm, and how it differed from her fathers’ life, Bessie tells me that her mother did not, in fact, work on her parents’ farm. Instead, she got pregnant soon after coming over to the United States, and had to take care of the children, rather than farm.

Bessie experienced a similar phenomenon, and while she grew up working on her parents’ farm, her farm tasks did not carry over to the farm where her and her husband lived. Bessie’s reiterance of the fact that “all things were natural, nothing different” between farming in childhood and adulthood, more applies to her husband, also the child of Japanese immigrants, who completed the farm work on their orchard. Maybe Bessie’s life on her new orchard can be called “natural, nothing different”, but if so, it was only a “natural, nothing different” carry-over from her mothers’ life, rather than her own childhood spent farming with her father. Similar to her mother, Bessie had children soon after marrying and moving to the new farm, and taking care of the children became her primary job.

After speaking with Bessie, I wonder why she does not consider the different, expected tasks of her and her husband as indicative of a connection between her gender identity and her experience as a farmer. Most woman farmers I know are quick to describe the implications  of their gender, and how it affects their work and treatment as farmers. They cite memories of colleagues suggesting that they ask their husbands before making a business decision, or inadequate respect from other farmers in the region. Yet, most of these women are less than 50 years old, and while I would not guess it from her bright eyes and playful smile, Bessie is 95.

I cannot help but wonder if Bessie’s dissimilar response to the gender question holds generational, and possibly cultural, roots. Maybe, Bessie’s answers implies a sort of generational acceptance. Perhaps Bessie, her mother, and other women of their generations and culture, believed that there was no alternate option but to cease farm work and other income-generating activities once the children were born, as they had become accustomed to this practice. With little precedence for questioning this expectation, Bessie simply accepted it. Of course, I will not delegitimize the decision to play the role of full-time parent, one of the most draining jobs in the world. Plus, Bessie could have easily grown accustomed to women with dual farmer-mother roles from neighbors, friends, etc., and decided that she wanted to focus on the later half. * Yet, I wonder how Bessie’s answer would have changed, and whether she would have found a connection between her gender and work, were she born twenty years later.

As for Bessie’s answer to the questions regarding her Japanese identity, I am not sure why she strayed from the political. Was the Nisei assimilation into United States culture so strong that it overshadows any memories of her parents’ oppression? Or, did the memories of this oppression leave Bessie with such a sour taste in her mouth that she no longer wants to talk about them? Or maybe, Bessie simply remembers the habitual more strongly than she remembers the political. Maybe, she remembers the day-to-day planting of strawberries, the harvesting of asparagus that grew from her parents’ trees, and the bundles of juicy pears her husband would collect from their orchard.

Regardless of the reasons for Bessie’s apolitical focus, I hope that she can look back on her life as a farmer, a mother, and the work she has completed with her own two hands, and smile. I hope she can think about the legacy she passed on to her son and grandson, who continue to farm, and gloat. I hope she can reflect on the ability she has awarded all of her children to receive a college education and choose their own paths, and sense nothing but pride. Yet, if I were to ask Bessie whether she feels proud, she would likely tell me that her experience isn’t one of pride or shame. She would tell me that her experience just is.

*During another interview, soon after my conversation with Bessie, I learned that many women in the Hood River Valley, even women from Bessie’s mother’s generation, played the dual mother-farmer role, as well as the role of housekeeper, organizer, etc., etc. Likely, Bessie was accustomed to women who took on the mother-farmer role, but this dual-role was not common in her family, and thus, was not habitual to her. Of course, this introduces an entire other conversation, still relevant today, about “super-women” and the expectation that women do literally all the things, and how only mothers are made to feel guilty when they don’t parent full-time and work full-time and cook healthy meals and run marathons and organize the PTA and do all the things, but that is a whole 5,000 other blog posts!