When the history book became personal

Not everything that shaped my understanding of yoyu happened in Japan. But being here, far from where I grew up and far from certain defining moments, gave me the distance I needed to begin making sense of them. That was especially true when it came to money.

Excerpt from Finding Yoyu

“Today we’re going to talk about labor unions. Could someone read this section on the Air Traffic Controller’s Strike?”

My breath caught in my chest. I sat in the row closest to the windows, and the sun was pouring through onto our desks, but that wasn’t why I suddenly felt hot. I stared in disbelief at the paragraph about the strike. How could the strike already be in the history books? It wasn’t history. My family was still dealing with the aftermath.

“You’d have been too young to remember the first strike,” my teacher continued, “but who here remembers the one in 1981? You all would’ve been in fourth grade going into fifth, I believe.”

How could he be speaking about it so casually? I wanted to hide. Out of my peripheral vision, I noticed a few students raise their hands. I raised mine too—a little. My hands were shaking, and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. I didn’t want Mr. Johnson to call on me. He probably knew who I was. He was looking at me. Did he expect me to talk about how my father was the regional representative of the union? What would the other students think? Would they blame me, as I was sure their parents blamed my father? Before I could muster the courage to say anything, Mr. Johnson moved on to the next page in our history books. The strike was history, after all.

We recently donated my father’s old files and memorabilia to the labor museum in Michigan. The strike and how it influenced our family could be a whole book. It pains me to limit this story to only a few paragraphs. As a high school senior, I discovered a short paragraph about the strike in my history book and was shocked by how little the event seemed to mean to the rest of the world. Not even a decade had passed, and already the strike was in the book as if all was said and done. For me, it was still very real.

We can all remember key moments in our past when everything changed in our families. Those moments—such as deaths, divorces, accidents, and natural disasters—that we forever afterward think about as “Before” and “After.” In my family, the big before/after event that changed our futures happened in 1981. I was ten years old, and my father was fired—by a US president, no less!—for doing something he deeply believed was the right course of action. He was one of the regional representatives of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union that went on a strike to bring attention to problems with their working conditions and contract. As federal employees, the controllers were banned from striking, but they believed in their cause and did it anyway. And thus, when they didn’t go back to work, as ordered by President Reagan, they were fired.

Some of the problems they tried to call attention to still exist and are being discussed today, 40 years later. In the early ’80s, however, the narrative in the media focused primarily on how the controllers were asking for a raise. Journalists who attempted to share a different narrative of why the controllers felt compelled enough to organize and follow through with an illegal strike against their government were silenced. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but even as a 10-year-old, I could see it happening. A reporter would interview my father, promising to share his honest answers, but what we saw in the newspaper the next day was different. Some reporters apologized. Some could not.

Within a few months, our family went from upper-middle class to barely subsisting. Eventually, my mom got a job so that we could survive. My dad struggled. He felt responsible for carrying the torch for the cause. The fellow strikers had to retrain in new fields and find new jobs—some, like my dad, were blocked for years from certain industries, especially government work.

Years later, after many attempts in unsavory jobs, my dad found steady work again as a correctional officer in a county prison. But he was never the same. He died at 55 from a malignant brain tumor.

So what does the strike have to do with yoyu? Though their cause was about more than money, the strike deeply influenced my beliefs about money, especially earning money.

—from Finding Yoyu

If you’re new here and wondering what yoyu means, you can read a simple explanation here.