This is the history that we share:

	Emily P. Lawsin, in front of Carlos Bulosan's image. Photo credit: Roger Fojas.

The love of my life brought me to this spot
before I even had a clue that he liked me.
We were classmates and it was my first summer in Los Angeles:
we had just finished a plate lunch
of fried Hawaiian Royale at the old Kenny's Cafe,
a home-style treat, after a year of stale dorm food at UCLA.

He walked me across the street
to a burger stand owned by his old Boy Scout buddy:
Mago's Famous, where I drooled over
avocado teriyaki chicken tacos
then rushed next door to Angel Maid Bakery,
where he bought his favorite, banana burrito.
"Only in L.A," I marveled.
(Seven years later, they made our guava wedding cake.)

We walked past the old Manila salon
where he used to get his hair cut by his old neighbor,
and he took me next door to Filipinas Trading Center
(just to prove that he was cool),
where I loaded up on newspapers and sweet halo-halo mix for shaved ice.
Then he confidently said,
"Now let me take you to the REAL market."
"What?" I said.
We ran back across the street here,
to Aloha, as the locals call it,
the icing on the cake, like heaven,
for someone confined to the mini-marts of Westwood.

And just like earlier when we had eaten at Kenny's,
he saw ANOTHER person at Aloha, who either
a) played CBO basketball with him, or with his best friend,
or with his brothers, or with his sister, or with his niece, or with his nephew; or
b) went to his church and "ooh," hadn't seen him since he was "this high", or
c) played volleyball, poker, or craps with his dad, or
d) all of the above.
And though I didn't meet his whole family until a year later,
something told me: this was home.

After buying a trunk load
of pan de leche, arare, and macadamia nut cookies,
we drove down Centinela Avenue,
past the Venice Japanese Community Center,
where he played basketball since he was five (the site of our wedding reception)
and the Buddhist temple where he still holds
the best record for Sunday School attendance
You wouldn't guess that now, no way,
and neither did I, back then
but it's only befitting for the grandson
of the head minister of the Buddhist church of Seattle, my hometown.
As we drove and munched on senbei,
we found this is the history that we share:

how his father hails from Kona farms,
much like the ones that once bore fruit here;
how my uncles, aunties, manongs, manangs
toiled this land when it was celery and lettuce;
how his paternal grandparents fanned the
cane fires and plantation strikes of Hawai'i,
while my migrant uncles with hundreds of Chicano braceros
walked pickets in Yakima, Watsonville, Delano, Stockton, and here;
how his auntie cleaned houses
and my mother sewed garments,
both for mere cents per hour;
how my father,
my Godfather Urbano, my Uncle Eddie, Uncle Leandro, Uncle Johnny, and Uncle Paul
served in the U.S. Army's Filipino Infantry Regiments
and MacArthur's Philippine Scouts,
fighting for this country's freedom,
in their homeland of Bataan, Corregidor, and Leyte,
while his mother,
his grandmother, his Uncle Sat, Auntie Ets, Uncle Kaz, Uncle Aki, Auntie Hiro, and Uncle
Shinya,
lost their freedom behind barbed wire
in TWO of America's concentration camps: Minidoka
and Crystal City, a camp for possible "high-risk evacuees",
where they joined his grandfather, much, much later.
The elder's "risk" or crime? Being a devout, peaceful minister.

This is our history that we share.
Over 50 years later,
the real crime is that his grandfather never lived
to see an apology or reparations.

We kept on driving. We keep on driving.

When we returned to campus,
we learned more from our talk story
than any stack of textbooks could tell.

This is the history
we continue to share.

Maraming Salamat, Thank You, Aloha, Tony, Jenni, and the over a hundred volunteers,
for painting it for all the world to see.

January 15, 2000

The Aloha Grocery & Mural is located at 4515 Centinela Avenue in the Culver/Marina-Adjacent area of Los Angeles. Aloha Grocery was the site of a mural unveiling to its diverse community, which welcomed everyone with a strong aloha spirit.