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VM: Maybe I'll just follow up on Brian's question but ask it more about the dynamics of, say, Gidra and the movement. My own students have been looking at Gidra for an assignment, and they were really noticing how heavily Japanese American it was, right? The editors and a lot of the writers. There a few people like Dinora Gie who were contributing, but it's very heavily Japanese American. And is this reflective of the demographics at the time of who was in college, or were there some other kinds of dynamics at play here? Why do you think the ratio was the way it was, the proportions?

AU: I think it represents the demographics of the time because back in the mid-'60s to late-'60s, weren't Japanese Americans the biggest Asian American group population-wise? Yeah, so I think it was more a reflection of that, and also the connection between UCLA and Gidra. Because a lot of the Gidra people were Sansei students attending UCLA. But you also see in those very early Asian American Movement years in L.A., there was also a lot of JAs. But again, I think it's demographics.

VM: Thank you. Brian, over to you.

BN: Just to follow up on that, were you involved at all with Gidra? I know they published some of your pieces.

AU: I wasn't involved with Gidra. I knew people like Mike Murase, but I wasn't involved.

BN: Okay.

AU: I kind of wanted to be, but I tend to be kind of shy socially. And I knew that they would hang out at night and have meetings and this that that. I was kind of shy.

VM: Well, you made a big splash right from the very beginning of Gidra with your "Yellow Power Manifesto" which my students still love.

AU: And that's all because of Mike Murase. Mike Murase was a TA for that first class that Yuji taught, so Mike printed it. But then Mike also printed the three poems that I included at the end of my "Yellow Power" essay. But something was driving me poetry-wise. And in those days, if you look at the Gidra, you can see all these people submitting poems. I mean, a lot of the movement people were writing poems. And I think I've asked this to some other people in other ethnic groups. I think this was happening not just in the Asian American community, but also in the Black and Brown and Native American movements. A lot of creativity going on.

VM: Was this when you started writing poems? Were those your first three published poems?

AU: It was the second time I got published. The first time I got published was my junior year at Pasadena High School. They put out a literary journal called ARTES, A-R-T-E-S, and looking back on it, I can see that maybe I've always been kind of a protester. Because that poem was my telling other teenagers not to be such conformists, because you know, teenagers conform. And so the whole poem was against teenage conformity and the title was "Simon Says." Anyway, that was the first official one, and then the second time I was published was the Gidra articles in '69.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.