Densho Digital Repository
Seattle JACL Oral History Collection
Title: Ryan Chin Interview
Narrator: Ryan Chin
Interviewers: Camila Nakashima, Bill Tashima
Date: December 1, 2020
Densho ID: ddr-sjacl-2-25-1

<Begin Segment 1>

CN: Yeah, hi, thank you, Bill. Hi, Ryan, nice to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to have us talk to you. So yeah, my name is Camila. I'm a junior at the University of Washington. And I'm studying Environmental Studies and geography. I'm originally from Oakland, California, and I got involved in this project through one of my professors from last year. And I'm interested in it because it relates to my own family history. Two of my grandparents were from the Seattle area and then moved down to the Bay Area later on. So yeah, I'm passionate about these topics, and I love learning more about it. And I'm also interested in talking with you because I'm also Chinese and Japanese, so I think it's interesting to hear your experiences. So if you're ready, I'd like to start off just by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're from and your experience growing up.

RC: Yeah, so thanks for that intro, Camila. I am from Seattle, born and raised. I'm, like you said, half Chinese half Japanese. My maternal side is Japanese, my paternal side is Chinese. On my Japanese side, I'm fourth generation Yonsei, and then on my Chinese side, I'm third generation. So, let's see... on my Japanese side, both my grandparents were also even born in this area. My grandfather was, kind of grew up in the Mukilteo area and my grandmother grew up south of Seattle. So yeah, I was born and raised here. I went to the University of Washington like yourself. I majored in business and let's see... on both of my sides, my father was very... he volunteered a lot in the community. And he actually, since you're from the Bay Area, he grew up here, but he went to San Francisco State and he was there when kind of the parts of the Asian American Studies movement started at San Francisco State. And so that's... it was a very, a crazy time there. And so he came back, and then he volunteered, started to volunteer here. And so people also like my aunts and my uncle on my maternal side are also kind of very involved in the community and like to volunteer with different things, both in terms of civil rights, and as well as a lot of stuff that we're related more towards, like APA kind of related groups. Let's see. Yeah, so I guess that's a that's a good starting point.

CN: How would you say that, like your father and the rest of your family being involved in like, APA issues in organizations, how did that influence you as you were growing up?

RC: So I didn't say that... I actually grew up in a single parent household, my parents were divorced when I was only three, and I was actually raised by my dad. So he volunteered a lot, he also worked for the government his whole life. So he worked for the city, for the Department of Community Development, and kind of his area when he was working for the city was the International District. So how to do, like, what things would be best in terms of trying to help out the International District from a city perspective, and what are kind of the issues there. Then he went to work for the state and did other stuff that was not related to that kind of work. But being a part of a single parent household, especially when I was young, it just meant that a lot of times, since there was no one at home, he would just end up bringing me to the meetings, just to sit there because there was no sitter. And so for me, it just kind of became, I guess, a way of life, it was just part of my social fabric. And it became kind of intertwined with me, which was... played out to be very interesting over time, because as I grew up and as I started to volunteer, then I would start to interact with some of those people that were in those meetings. Which was kind of interesting, because you would go from like observing them just as an observer, as a child, to interacting with them closer to a peer-to-peer level, but it just really became kind of intertwined with me.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2020 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.