<Begin Segment 9>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

JG: Well, let me ask you . . . It's so rich, this conversation. 'Cause one of the things, you know, if you look at the arc of your life as you describe it up to this point, one of the things that's really kind of evident is the emergence of this kind of consciousness. And I'm trying to get a sense of how that unfolded over time. I mean, because here you are, I guess people would call you a provocateur, an intellectual provocateur. I mean, let's face it, it takes a little bit of nerve to teach Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, and Orwell's dystopian novels, in an Orange County school in the early '60s. You've just graduated from UC Santa Barbara, you've had this kind of turning point in your intellectual development, you've begun this real serious interest in looking at the history, the lives of people of color, and I'm just trying to get a sense of where that comes from. I mean, is it rooted in your family's experiences? You talk about World War II, your being a child seeing Japanese faces on the movie screen, these individuals were demonized, and if you could kind of map out a bit, where does Art Hansen become, like, politically activated?

AH: Well, it starts with the family. Of course, as you know, Norwegian Americans are fairly well represented in Japanese American studies -- people like Douglas Nelson, Gwenn Jensen, Andy Russell, and even Lane Hirabayashi, who is of Norwegian descent on his maternal side -- and Norwegian Americans have also been very much involved in the socialist movement in this country, especially the agrarian socialist movement, because they were largely farmers, and they were protest-oriented. I didn't know much about that at the time I was coming of age, so that wasn't such a profound influence on me, but it might have been on my dad. But it was really my father more than anything else. My dad was very much against authoritarianism. For example, he did not want my brother Roy and I to call him "Dad" or "Father" or "Pop" or anything like that. He thought that was an unearned increment of authority and power. He wanted to be loved and respected on the basis of who he was rather than on what title he was wearing. So he had us call him Haakon, or we just called him "Haak." So my dad was always "Haak." And my brother, who loved my dad terribly, named one of his two sons Haakon. So that name persists right now in the family. But our father not only had us call him Haak, but he had us do another thing. Now, keep in mind, this is a guy that wasn't afraid of taking a shot at us or kicking us in the ass or whatever else he thought was necessary. It wasn't like he was a milquetoast, but he did have a fierce sort of philosophical bent towards this anti-authoritarian idea. He had us play a game with him that he called the "light touch." And this was to disabuse us of thinking of him being an authority figure. What we had to do was take our hand and hit him across the top of the head, like this, just so we would do a light touch like that. And he said, "Now, go ahead and do it," and both my brother and I were scared to do it, afraid we were going to miss and then hit him really hard. You remember, Jim, the famous Beat story of the shooting of the apple off the head, right?

JG: Yes, William Burroughs.

AH: Right, where William Burroughs attempts to shoot the apple off the head of his wife, but instead hits her in the head and kills her. Okay, but my brother and I were having the feeling like this was Burroughs's wife, okay? But my dad never did get mad at us about that. But those kinds of things were what he wanted us to do. Now then, my dad was probably an atheist, even though he marketed himself as an agnostic. But he had my brother and I go to church because he didn't want to make up our minds as to how we felt about religion. And so he forced us to go to church. I mean, we had to go to church, and here's a guy who never went to church. He's home and we're going to church. Or, when we'd have a town parade in Goleta, California, he would paint signs for the church float and do all these things, because he wanted to give us the best shot at religion. His parents were religious, but he wasn't. But he wanted us to figure this out for ourselves. So it's those kinds of things. My dad had one suit. He hardly ever dressed up. Most of the time at nights he would just be working on things. He worked 'til three or four in the morning on different things. He always had different problems he was solving, trying to square a circle, a veritable mathematical impossibility. He would work on these kinds of things. When he was young, he used to write novels, and they were gloomy, and he kept getting rejections. But my dad was a person . . . I studied him a lot, just watched him. But he's somebody that I not only loved, but I really admired, not because of his achievements financially, not because he commanded all of these paternal titles, but just because of the worth of him as a human being. Now, my mother was not an intellectual. My mother was dyslexic, and she frequently mispronounced words.

JG: What's her name, Art?

AH: Anna.

JG: Anna.

AH: It was Anna, and her maiden name was Stover. She was brought up, not by her parents, but by her grandparents, my great-grandparents. I never met my grandparents on my mother's side. My maternal grandmother was an alcoholic; she died at age thirty-nine, and she had crippling arthritis as a young woman, and apparently was in tremendous pain most of the time. But when my mother was in high school, her mother would come to the high school to bring my mother her lunch or something, and she was staggering through the halls, and my mother was absolutely embarrassed. She would hide anywhere she could so that she wouldn't have to be seen with her mom. Her mom tried to kill her once. When my mother was born, her mother put her in a foundling home, up in the Troy, New York area, the city of Watervliet, and so she was effectively an orphan. Her father was just the guy that happened to be in bed with her mother at that particular time. I have a photograph of him, he was a World War I veteran, and I have a postcard he sent to his wife and he wrote, "You won't have this old puss to haunt you any longer," or words to that effect. That's all it says on it. And that's it. My mother once visited him, and he was living up in Vermont, outside of Rutland, on a farm. She went up there, and her grandmother dressed her up in these frills, and she went to her father's house and all his kids were barefoot and they were all like hillbillies, and she was so mortified to have to be there. But that's the only time she ever saw her dad. So she was brought up by a generation that goes way, way back into the 19th century. And her grandmother's attitude towards medicine was that you should never want to go to the hospital. Her family on her side was Irish, and they said, "If you go to the hospital, they'll slip you the black bottle," which meant, "They're going to put you to death." Or, her grandfather would pull tricks on her and say, "Now, I want you to go pick up our clothes from the Chinese laundry, but you watch it because they'll take kids and they'll put 'em into this cauldron full of boiling stew and they'll start mixing you around in it. Or my mother would be a little late going to school and her grandfather would pay a black kid to chase after her and say, "I want to kiss you." I mean, it's the kind of thing she was dealing with then.

So my mother was an educated -- high school graduate -- but not an enlightened person, and my father was largely self-taught but was very enlightened. But both of them were extremely kind and generous people. If people came over to our house, if they expressed a liking for something, my parents just said, "Take it," just like that. It's the way that they were. And so people who have had a bad experience with their parents, it's hard for me to comprehend. My experience at the most elemental level with my parents was just unqualified love and support, but not fawning over us. I mean, my mother would scream at us and my dad would get fire in his eyes when he got angry at us. It's not that we didn't face that kind of thing, because we did, and especially when we worked for my dad. He made an object lesson out of us, which was unbelievable. My brother once was working for him in construction and he just stormed off of the job. He basically said, "F you," and got out of there. He said, "I'm not going to work for somebody who's such a lunatic." My brother loved him. So we have histrionics and everything else, but underneath all this stuff was really, really, love. So anyway, that's basically kind of where my values came from. And the bottom line for me was to pursue a course that was ethical, to pursue a course that I think challenged authority, and was, you know, to be just a people-oriented person. So I think I got that from my dad, and my brother's the same way. And I think my dad was a strong example in that particular sense.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.