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of The Huntington’s Pacific Rim collection, the photo album moves out of the private sphere and into its new life as a historical document, capturing one Chinese family’s journey of immigration in the mid-twentieth century.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 and the Chinese Exclusion Act, and both modeled for decades of descendants how to capture their family stories in image and word. 

It was with a great sense of adventure that, in April 1940, two young Japanese American women embarked from Los Angeles aboard the ship Kamakura Maru on an epic year-long journey to Japan. Sumi Lillian Sakai and Sunao Sally Imoto were both born in California. Sumi’s widowed mother, Yuki Sakai, had founded Tokio Florist in Los Angeles in 1929. In Japan, Sumi and Sunao planned to visit extended family, study traditional Japanese arts, and pay their respects to ancestors. Their travels are captured in two remarkable annotated photo albums.

These photo albums document women traveling abroad alone. On the long journey across the Pacific, they occupied themselves with numerous rounds of ping pong (or, as Sunao puts it in her photo album: “ping pong – ping pong – and ping pong”). Once in Japan, Sumi and Sunao settled in with a community of fellow Japanese American female travelers. They took lessons in calligraphy and the okoto, a Japanese stringed instrument, and “after suffering untold agony … learned to kneel on the straw matting to study” (Sunao). They also visited family gravesites.

Sunao’s album also offers commentary on their experiences in Japan as Japanese American women. “We were insufferably superior to everyone,” she writes, “typical Americans in a backward country (what we thought).” Describing her experience with Ann, another Japanese American visitor and a rowing companion with a “wild laugh and unruly locks,” she exclaims: “People stared—we loved it!” Relatives living in rural southern Japan and Manchukuo (Japanese-controlled Manchuria) led very different lives. Sunao includes a photo of her aunt doing laundry in a canal. She explains: “Aunt told me she was looking forward to having her eighth (?) child in February. ‘Seventeen years is a long time to wash diapers,’ she said.”

The two carefree young women beaming from album pages would see their lives drastically changed following their return home in the spring of 1941 and the outbreak of war with Japan in December. A year later, the U.S. government forcibly removed and incarcerated both women in two of its ten incarceration camps built to house 120,000 Japanese Americans: Sumi and her family at Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, and Sunao at Poston Internment Camp in Arizona.

Sunao qualified for release in 1943 after being sponsored by the poet Carl Sandburg and his wife, Lilian, to work for the family in Michigan as a secretary. The Sakai family remained incarcerated until 1945, and both of Sumi’s grandparents—Asakichi and Ura Kawakami—died at Manzanar. 

Following their return to Los Angeles, the Sakais revived Tokio Florist, which Sumi kept running until 2006, along with her husband, Frank Kozawa. Its former location on Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake neighborhood was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) in 2019. 

The Sakai family continued to expand and preserve its collection of photo albums, snapshots, studio portraits, correspondence, and business records, until it was acquired as Sakai-Kozawa Families Papers by The Huntington in 2020—one year before the Tsute and Lucy Yang papers joined the Pacific Rim collections.

Like Sumi Sakai, Tsute Yang was born in 1916. While the images in Sumi’s photo album betray little of the hardship her family endured after they immigrated from Japan, Tsute’s letters reveal his arduous effort to reunite his young family across an ocean. In 1945, then a twenty-nine-year-old electronics engineer, Tsute accepted a Chinese government–sponsored fellowship to study at Harvard University, leaving behind his wife, Lucy, and young son, Bunli. Tsute frequently corresponded with his wife, detailing his experiences in the United States. Lucy wrote back about her own difficult situation in China, as the nation grappled with the end of World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

Written in vernacular Chinese, in clear and legible characters, Tsute’s letters detail his experience as an international student in the United States. He reports on the difficulty of learning English, what he ate for meals, people he met, and how much he misses Lucy and Bunli. Tsute supported his family by sending vitamin supplements and medicines in the letters, enabling them to cope with supply shortages and inflation in war-torn China. 

With the support of University of Toledo, his employer at the time, Tsute arranged for Lucy and Bunli to board a steamship in Shanghai. They arrived in San Francisco on January 30, 1947. After a long train ride to Toledo, Ohio, the family was finally reunited. Among the few possessions that Lucy was able to bring with her were Tsute’s handwritten letters.

The relief brought by the Yang family’s reunification, and the joy brought by the birth of their son Larry, was only temporary, however. The family still had to confront the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other immigration policies. Correspondence between Tsute and Lucy and immigration authorities documents scores of applications, questions, rejections, and successful petitions. 

Perhaps influenced by his parents, Larry began writing letters at a young age. These letters provide an intimate look at the intergenerational dialogue between immigrant parents and their offspring. In one letter, dated April 2, 1992, Larry writes: “If I may say this, telling you and talking about being gay to you, my parents, is as hard on me as it is on you. It is very scary to me to feel so vulnerable. I am now disclosing very precious feelings and emotions that I do not usually say to anyone.” Larry was working as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his coming out was a shock to his traditional Chinese American parents. The exchange of letters, written during the height of the AIDS epidemic, records anxieties, confusion, and hurt, but these raw emotions also fostered understanding that eventually led to reconciliation and acceptance. Larry’s letters, along with other LGBTQ resources and support groups, helped change Tsute and Lucy’s initial views, leading them to embrace their son’s sexual orientation.

In the late 2010s, Lucy, then a widow, began suffering memory loss, so Bunli and Larry placed her in a senior living community. While the sons tried to visit her as much as possible, extended absences exacerbated her memory impairment. As a result, Larry returned to the letter-writing practice that had always sustained his family: he started an almost-daily ritual of sending her a photograph postcard. Lucy passed away in 2021, at the age of 103.

Sumi and Sunao were intrepid California friends who braved a long overseas journey and survived years of Japanese incarceration. Tsute and Lucy escaped a dangerous life in China to raise their children amid vacillating fortunes in the United States. The photo albums and letters that they left behind—and that the next generations continued to compile in their wake—narrate distinct yet interconnected immigrant and intergenerational experiences among Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans. These families’ handmade histories are both universal testament and a unique set of material objects. Each collection gives researchers the opportunity to explore the complex and profound interactions of a twentieth-century family, expanding and reshaping our interpretations of American history in the process.

Li Wei Yang is the curator of Pacific Rim collections at The Huntington. 

Melissa Haley is the Shapiro Center Archivist at The Huntington.