This is a great season for lovers of the silver screen. Last month, New York City had its LGBT film festival, Newfest, showcasing the best and brightest queer films and filmmakers. Philadelphia just wrapped up its International Philadelphia Film Festival, and there’s more to come. Nearby Rehoboth Beach Independence Film Festival starts Nov. 7. While not a gay festival per se, it has a number of really great LGBT films — from documentaries like “Best of Enemies” (Gore Vidal versus conservative William F. Buckley, Jr.) to the thriller “Elephant Song” to the touching drama “Margarita with a Straw.”
If you don’t have a way to get down the 95 corridor, the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival is right around the corner, running Nov. 12-22. Again, it’s not a gay festival but offers a number of films focused on LGBT issues or people, not to mention a number of wonderful films we should go see even if they aren’t just about our community. We are all one, after all.
This week’s profile is the subject of one of the films being screened in the festival, “Changing Season: On the Masumoto family Farm.” The film chronicles a transitional year in the life of famed farmer, slow-food advocate and sansei David “Mas” Masumoto and his compelling relationship with daughter Nikiko Masumoto, who returns to the family farm with the intention of stepping into her father’s work boots. Interspliced with moments of Masumoto’s razor-sharp meditations on her family’s internment during WWII, “Changing Season” also explores her role as a queer, progressive farmer in the Central Valley. A bubbly character as bright as the sun that ripens the orchards, I had fun talking to Masumoto about her peachy life.
PGN: Your film is in great part about family. Tell me a story about your grandfather.
NM: Oh, my Jiichan! He was an amazing man. I feel like I understand him so much more now that I’m farming. He was a really quiet man. He actually had a stroke and lost the ability to speak when I was in sixth grade. So I didn’t have a lot of conversations with him, but I remember his hands; he had these amazingly strong, calloused hands. Even into his 70s, he could still beat everybody at arm wrestling. Later in life, he was in a wheelchair and when I was doing work on the farm, I’d often pull into the yard on the tractor and he’d be sitting in the window waving at me with a big grin on his face.
PGN: I read that he was the one who purchased the land. Why was it important to him?
NM: Before being put into an internment camp, my family all were farm workers. My Jiichan was 10 went they were sent to the camp and I think he really lost his youth there. After the camps were closed and after being drafted into the army, he came back to the area where they’d been farm workers and leased land for a couple of years before purchasing the first 40 acres of the farm in 1948. I think he wanted a place that was peaceful, where he could create an oasis for the family to heal. He loved working, and being outside and tinkering with the machinery; he even invented some tools on the farm. Even after his first stroke, he worked hard to get back on a tractor and would sit on it smiling from ear to ear. His mother was initially reluctant. She’d lived through a period where laws in California barred Asians from buying land, then camp happened and they lost everything they’d ever worked for, so she didn’t have a lot of faith in the government.
PGN: Yeah, my people are still waiting for our 40 acres and a mule.
NM: Right! I was just on a panel last week about agriculture and innovation and we were talking about how we need to address the history of racism if we’re going to create equitable land distribution and access to farming. When a person of color becomes a farmer, there’s a different journey of healing that has to happen, because there’s been so much institutional racism that barred people from having the means to feed themselves.
PGN: Very true: Tell me about your farm.
NM: It’s in the Central Valley of California and we’re just a few miles from the town where my grandmother grew up before camp. It was very cheap land and not very good quality, so my Jiichan spent over a year dynamiting the property just to make it usable for farming.
PGN: What do you grow?
NM: Primarily peaches, nectarines and grapes. We do our best to sustainably farm our 80 acres south of Fresno and we share our harvests through food, writing and art. My father likes to say we grow stories. We love what we do. The Sierra Nevada mountains are just to our east so on a good air-quality day you can see them towering in the distance. It’s a beautiful place to work. I’ve never missed a harvest since I was a child.
PGN: Do you run the farm, and what are the challenges?
NM: My dad and I run it together; I still have a lot to learn. I work every day and the difficulties include big, global phenomena that are manifesting acutely in our area: This is our fourth year of extreme drought so we’re up close and personal with the ramifications of climate change; as a result, we have a high level of concern about sustainability and how we manage water and irrigation practices and the day-to-day management. Summers are complete sprints racing against the heat, trying to figure out how to pick the best-quality, ripest fruit possible and have it make it to its final destination. And there are a thousand things going on at the same time. There’s the physical part that’s hard on the human body, as well as the trees. I wrestle every day reading weather charts and land decisions; it’s quite the intellectual and spiritual exercise.
PGN: You have a number of people who work the farm in the summer, mostly men. Any pushback from having a female boss?
NM: I’m happy to say I now have two women working, sisters. They’re awesome and I love being able to teach them new skills. We’ve had some interesting exchanges with male workers but, because I’m a woman, it opens up a safer space for them. I’ve never experienced any violence or intimidation but the gender dynamics are always at play, like anywhere, so there’s an extra level of awareness of how I interact with the guys. Thankfully I can speak Spanish and am able to cross some cultural barriers linguistically and build a good rapport with everyone. But working in agriculture in general, there’s no shortage of moments to remind me that there are not many women in the industry.
PGN: Are you trilingual?
NM: [Laughs] No, my dad is fluent but I only know a few words in Japanese, the food words.
PGN: Describe something great about growing up on a farm, other than free peaches.
NM: I remember I loved dirt … doing all sorts of creative things, theatrical things with dirt: engineering little houses, play cooking with dirt — it was so fun! A neat thing about growing up on a farm was seeing my mom and dad and grandmother and grandfather all work together. It’s great to get to see your family working and doing something they love. During the summers there were three generations working together in the packing shed, which created a special kind of bond.
PGN: Definitely tops a once-a-year “take your daughter to work” day. When did you come out?
NM: Well, like most people, there are different stories at different times, but I knew to myself in high school. I fell in love with a woman and went through the fear of people finding out and what might happen. When I told my parents that I had a girlfriend, they were mainly concerned about my safety in our small, politically conservative town, but the end result was that it made me super-motivated to go to college and get out. I went to UC Berkeley and took gender and women studies and that was … oh, I found this incredible language. I’d never heard the word “queer” in a non-pejorative context until I went there and found myself in a queer-theory class! I got to think about liberation in terms of gender and sexuality — I just exploded! I’m so grateful for that space. Coming back home has been a constant negotiation; having been witness to a large public shift in discourse about queer issues, it feels like we’re a little behind in Central Valley. There is a queer community here but there’s a bit of a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” vibe. I have to find different tactics to address homophobia or transphobia.
PGN: Your mother’s side didn’t respond too well to your parents’ mixed marriage, so do they know they have a lesbian granddaughter?
NM: Sadly, my mother’s parents never did and her immediate family was not very warm or kind to me during my childhood. But her extended family in Wisconsin are amazing and wonderful and I’ve been to see them numerous times over the years.
PGN: Tell me about your mom.
NM: She’s an incredible human being. I think she came out of the womb energetic and fearless! And smart: She has a bachelor’s degree in public-health education with a minor in nutrition, a master’s degree in community development from UC Davis and a doctorate in educational leadership from UC Davis and CSU Fresno. She started as a nutrition advisor and has worked for the past decade in education support, doing leadership development. Her passion is rural education and she served on the board of the school that my dad, me and my brother attended. She’s an elected official and we’re so proud.
PGN: How did you meet your partner?
NM: [Laughs] Classically, at a queer women’s mixer, POW [Professional Out Women] — one of those events where you wear a star on your nametag if you’re single. I’d just come back from school and didn’t know any queer people in my hometown so I went to make friends. As soon as I walked in, this older lesbian, around 60, walked over and said [in a squeaky voice], “Did you come here by yourself, baby?” I said yes, and she grabbed my hand and started introducing me to everyone. Nicola saw me and started up a conversation and we’ve been together ever since. She works in agriculture as well. She works for a winery and, believe it or not, she went to the same high school as me! If someone had read my fortune back then and said, “You will grow up, come out as queer and date someone from high school,” I would have been like, No way!
PGN: Between the wine, peaches and grapes, you must have some great meals.
NM: We’re very blessed for sure!
PGN: I saw you describe yourself as an agrarian-artist. Explain.
NM: I have a very ambitious curiosity; my art, loosely defined, expands from performance work. My graduate work was in performance as public practice and I did a one-woman show on Japanese-American memory. I am a diehard advocate for thinking about food as an aesthetic experience of meaning and community, and so I don’t see much of a gap between cooking — whether it’s home cooking or culinary arts — and what we regularly think of as the arts. Much of my journey in farming has opened up fascinating questions about process that have mirrored some of my artistic paths in civic art — art that’s designed to serve some kind of civic need or purpose. I’ve been working on a community fellowship trying to configure a response to the drought via creative processes.
PGN: Tell me about the one-woman show.
NM: It was called “What We Could Carry.” I’d started having dreams about my Jiichan and his experiences in the internment camp. He was still alive at that time but couldn’t speak and I felt I needed to hone in on the stories of our community. I was drawn to the Japanese-American movement for redress because it was ostensibly a movement for healing. I read thousands of pages of testimony from people telling their stories before, during and after camp. I learned so much but if I had to pick two things, I don’t think I had made space in my heart to carry the depth of suffering that experience brought. The flipside of that was how incredibly resilient my family and my community was to survive that experience, both physically and emotionally.
PGN: We have a way of whitewashing the atrocities that we’ve committed right here in the United States, but it’s nice that people like you and George Takei, with his play “Allegiance,” are keeping it alive.
NM: Yeah, I saw it in L.A. and it’s really good. A very nuanced story, there are a lot of different perspectives.
PGN: So let’s do some random questions: Something you miss the most from childhood?
NM: I miss the way that time felt slower back then.
PGN: Other than your produce, if you could be a spokesperson for a product, what would you endorse?
NM: Sadly, there is not a lot of cheese production here in the valley, so I wish there was a really robust cheese culture I could endorse.
PGN: Something from the past you’d bring back?
NM: Oh, good one. I’d bring a place called Tofuya back into existence. Apparently when my dad was growing up, there was a little homemade tofu shop nearby and they would deliver tofu to your home … like a milkman! [Laughs] I would love that!
PGN: In the film, there was a quote from your father that I loved: “It’s not success I want to leave behind, it’s significance.” Define what a great life means to you.
NM: The two words that are at the core of my heart are “courage” and “ferocious.” I think living a good life means living a life of courage and ferociousness, and I mean ferocious in its most joyous and empowered sense.
The Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival runs Nov. 12-22. For more information, visit www.phillyasianfilmfest.org.
To suggest a community member for Family Portrait, email [email protected].