Handmade History

A formal studio portrait, with the mother at the center. Her adolescent sons pose directly over her right shoulder. Her husband stands to her left, looking confident and direct. The image comes from the Yang family photo album. It is a record of family togetherness and an artifact of happy times. Now part of The Huntington’s Pacific Rim collection, the photo album moves out of the private sphere and into its new life as a historical document, capturing one Chinese family’s journey of immigration in the mid-twentieth century. Though less canonical, personal archives, like photo albums and letters, reflect the deeply personal efforts of individuals to move through the world. As we discover from considering the personal effects of Chinese American and Japanese American families that fill the collection, an object like the Yangs’ family portrait is also the culmination of generational aspirations and the collective imperative to navigate migration, familial separation, economic survival, and cultural adaptation. 

Two new collections known as the Sakai and Kozawa Families Papers (1890–2017) and the Tsute and Lucy Yang Papers (1930s–2020) present poignant glimpses into the private lives of Japanese and Chinese individuals across a century of history. These archives allow us to trace the paths of two pairs of young people between the United States and Asia during the tumultuous 1940s: Japanese American friends Sumiko (Sumi) Lillian Sakai and Sunao Sally Imoto, and Chinese husband and wife Tsute and Lucy Yang. Both groups traversed cultures on either side of the Pacific Ocean, both were subjected to the brutal racial policies that motivated the American legal persecution of the Asian population in the form of Japanese American incarceration