Layhannara Tep
Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita
Karen Tei Yamashita has been a trailblazer throughout her illustrious decades-long career in American literature as a writer and an educator. Her early work, which compared Japanese immigration to Brazil with Japanese immigration to the U.S., provides an innovative transnational lens that has transformed the way we examine community. According to the National Book Foundation, Yamashita’s writing has broadened the scope of Asian American literature outside of a U.S.–based context and challenged ethnic studies to embrace its diasporic possibilities.
As a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was tasked to develop a curriculum that would speak to the multi-faceted experiences of Asian America at a time when that identity was in constant flux. Ultimately, her observations about the trends in Asian American literature helped inspire the creation of the ten distinct voices that narrate her celebrated, genre-fluid novel, I Hotel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2010 and the winner of the American Book Award in 2011, among other accolades. I Hotel, which examines the Asian American movement of the 1960s, has become a staple in ethnic studies curricula across the country, reminding us of the power of fiction in revealing the hidden textures of history.
Yamashita has published eight books, ranging from novels and short story collections to nonfiction accounts. Her relentless pursuit of truth through story has spanned into a multi-decade career that earned her the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2021. In our interview, Yamashita discusses how her mother’s resistance to her writing about their family challenged her to write outside of herself. Refreshingly candid and generous with her words and time, Yamashita offers a rare glimpse into her writing process, what compels her to research-driven projects, and how she considers the form and voice that best convey the story that needs to be told.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: Ethnic studies and creative writing play major roles in your career. How do you approach the intersection between ethnic studies and creativity in your work?
KAREN TEI YAMASHITA: It goes back. I went to Brazil to study Japanese immigration to Brazil, to make a comparison of the communities in Brazil and here. I discovered that Hiroshi Saito, a Japanese sociologist who studied Japanese immigration in Brazil, had written a sociological study in Portuguese. So, to answer your question, I’ve been doing this awhile, but at a distance.
When I arrived to teach at UC Santa Cruz, no one was teaching a course in Asian American literature, and we had no formal ethnic studies or Asian American studies program. I was hired to teach creative writing, and they asked if I would teach one literature course. So, every other year, I taught Asian American literature. It wasn’t my focus, but I developed different ways of reading it, [especially] from a transnational point of view, since I’d studied Japanese immigration to Brazil. When I began to look at the literature, it was really dif- ficult because Asian American literature is not just one culture, it’s many. Every week in the syllabus, we were somewhere else––in China, in Southeast Asia, in South Asia. It’s a challenge. I had to learn about all sorts of Asian immigration to this country. Not just that, but the politics of every country and immigration policy and their legal ramifications. I needed to know the history, the dates of exclusion acts. When you teach, you have to be ready to provide that history, at least an overview, because students can’t otherwise understand the context of the literature. To be responsible to teach the literature, I was forced to be responsible to it.
WSR: You’ve been credited for taking Asian American Studies and ethnic studies outside of just a U.S.-based context. Why do you think it’s important for the discipline to look beyond a U.S.-centric idea of itself?
KTY: I went to South America and saw a Japanese community formed in a different national space with a different cultural, psychological, and historical make-up. Their next generations also have a different way of seeing the world, and that was, to me, fascinating.
At the time, Asian Americans in the United States were trying to pull together ethnic studies and trying to define what it might be. In defining that, they were also excluding folks, and, to me, it didn’t make sense. Asian American ethnic studies was, at its inception, East Asian, and of course that changed because of the Vietnam War and the refugees and exiles coming from Southeast Asia. Many more Asian folks began to be participants in Asian American studies.
In the beginning, it was assumed that the literature was an American language literature by immigrant/ethnic folks. But everyone comes from somewhere. You have a whole generation, the second generation, straddling two languages, speaking with their parents. The stories are coming from their parents. It made no sense to cut us from a diasporic or transnational vision. Those stories are rich and powerful, about how people come to this country and make their way.
WSR: How did your work with the Japanese community in Brazil broaden the way you look at your own Japanese identity?
KTY: Prior to Brazil, I spent about a year and a half in Japan while in college. While there, I researched my family history. I met my relatives, and it was fun to see who looked like my dad, my aunts and uncles, to hear their stories, to find those connections.
But what happened in Japan was also traumatic because I was trying so hard to learn the language and to be Japanese. There’re so many conforming forces in Japan. I thought that if I could only learn the language, I’d become Japanese because I looked like them. While I was there, I let my hair grow, got contact lenses, and only wore Japanese clothes bought there. But it was a weird experience because of how I understood females to behave in Japan. It was a very subservient space, and I was always hiding.
Then I arrived in South America and met Japanese Brazilians who are mostly second-generation. Their immigration is displaced by a generation because of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. [Ed. note: an informal arrangement between Japan and the U.S., halting legal Japanese immigration into the U.S., among other things.] By the 1920s, immigration in the United States from Japan was cut off and got diverted to Brazil. So, I met Japanese Brazilians my age who are second generation (I’m sansei, third), and many of them are bilingual. They were, to me, like my parents in that sense.
What I also came to realize is that they were Brazilian, and, well, not uptight. To be frank, Japanese Americans are rather uptight people. I mean, when we’re together, we don’t think that. But then Japanese society is pretty uptight, what women can do or not do is restrictive. Not that Brazilians are feminist, but much of the sense of restrictions went away. Brazilians openly hug; they’re verbal, funny, laugh, tell jokes, drink, and dance freely. Sounds like a stereotype, but I felt that they feel more comfortable in their bodies. It’s one thing I rarely felt in the United States or in Japan. I never felt completely comfortable in my body. The racialization of folks in the U.S. is intense. If you look like us, every day you walk out––it doesn’t matter where you are, you could be at a post office, doing something normal––there are few interactions where you’re not aware of race. In Brazil, everybody thought I was Brazilian, it didn’t matter. It was a different space for me physically and socially. It was very freeing.
With time, I got to meet Asians from other South American countries. From Mexico, Panama, Peru, Cuba, and they’re hilarious together. I think that changed everything for me, because I came home and thought, screw that. I don’t carry that kind of tension with me anymore.
WSR: Did it inspire the way you approached your work after?
KTY: Yeah, of course. It gave me permission. But for a while, I would not write about certain things. I mean, people have asked me, ‘In the I Hotel, you’re writing about different ethnicities, how could you do that?’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, how can I do this?’ But if I want to tell the story, I’m going to have to go there. It has its hazards, too, because I really felt that I couldn’t do it unless I really, really did my homework. I studied 200 or 300 times more stuff than I needed to know because I felt that it wouldn’t be respectful to write about the Chinese, for example, unless I knew much more than anybody who was talking to me about the subject. I never went into a situation unless I really studied it. I don’t think people knew that. It was out of respect.
WSR: I Hotel is told from multiple points of view, each from a different Asian American community, which is such a feat. You mentioned that you did intensive research on each community. Why was it important for you to have a diversity of experiences represented in this book?
KTY: Well, because we’re calling it Asian American writing, so what is that, really? That was the larger question. This movement, starting at the end of the sixties, was generated by intense activity, revolutionary thinking, and the tremendous changes that were going on in the United States at the time. People asked, ‘What does it mean to be educated? Is it relevant?’ Our education seemed irrelevant to those people dying out there, or to those young people drafted, or to violence happening on the streets. You might have been the first in your family to get into a university or college as affirmative action had been activated in those days. What was our responsibility to those expectations? Certainly, to our families and to what should happen next. We were defining what and who Asians are and figuring out how to bring people together in solidarity to organize politically. That was powerful.
WSR: I Hotel defies genre. Why did you feel like it was important to put the Asian American movement in this unique novel form?
KTY: When I was teaching Asian American literature, every week I was in a different culture, a different history and geography, a different time period. But I discovered I was also in a different genre, a different narrative form, or narrative point of view, and I began to notice this.
Say we started out with the oldest literature through Chinese Americans. What I noticed in this vernacular were the aphorisms. Aphorisms are metaphors for moving the narrative, for storytelling, and are very prevalent. Then with Japanese American narratives, there’s an unwillingness to proclaim “I” or a point of view that’s particular. There seemed to be a desire to have a collective voice, to have agreement. These are kinds of stereotypes of ourselves, but I was also noticing that we as writers were promoting these stereotypes. As I began to realize this, I thought about how to talk about it.
If you look at the I Hotel, the ten novellas are ten narrative points of view. The first chapter is a mixture of all of them. When I wrote the first chapter, I was experimenting with literary voices. Once I knew what those voices were, I knew what the rest of the book would be. It was my way of organizing space. As long as I could organize space with narrative voice, I could control the vision going forward.
WSR: You mentioned different narrative trends from each community. How did the trends shape the narrative voice you employed in each novella? How did it allow you to represent each community’s point of view?
KTY: The Chinese section, for example, is told in aphorisms. I got a copy of Confucius’s Analects. I used the numbering system that’s there. I also had to make a decision about the overall voice of the novella, and I felt very tentative. I wanted to make sure that I could get a voice that could critique what was going on, but also step back and be unreliable. The voice I chose was a Chinese dowager. She gets to be blistering about what’s going on and critiquing and making fun of events. Like, ‘These kids don’t really know anything, but let them have their fun because the expanse of the sun and sky is much greater, and they don’t know they’re going to die.’ It was a nasty voice to play with, to be able to be critical but to also give space.
WSR: Including I Hotel, research seems to be a big part of your work. What draws you to projects that require you to do comprehensive research?
KTY: Writing is the way I learn. When you write, you stake out a project, you learn things that you didn’t know. Fiction is funny that way. If you have to retell the story from another point of view, you learn something about what happened that can’t be known by just reading the history, or by delving into the mechanics of a legal position, or by studying the sociology or the psychology of it. Fiction for me is special that way; it teaches you something that you can’t know otherwise. It makes the connections that you wouldn’t necessarily make. That’s why I love it. It shows you possibilities.
The things people are unwilling to say, that’s curious to me. What people are unwilling to say or cannot say because they can’t back it up. Fiction writers can speak, and somehow, in that way, we can connect dots. Maybe it’s speculation, but I think it’s valuable because perhaps events might have been different. Painful events, tragedies might have been different.
WSR: Earlier, you mentioned that even after you were able to give yourself permission following your time in Brazil, there were still some stories that took you a while to address. What topics did you have to take time to come around to? Are there still topics you want to address that you haven’t yet explored?
KTY: Certainly not my family. That’s why they are the last books I have written, I had to wait for them to die. And still, I haven’t written about my mother’s family. I was not permitted to for many years. I also didn’t think it was that interesting. They became interesting later.
I had written something that was memoirish while I was in Brazil. It was a good thing I sent a copy to my mom. Later, my dad said she was so angry she made him drive her to the newspaper business where it was to be published, and she took the manuscript away. After that, I never again wrote about my family. I remember my friend said that he was going to tell my mom that she did me a great disservice by forcing me not to write about the family. And I replied, ‘No, because my mom forced me to write about other things.’ I was forced to go outside of myself to write about the Brazilian Japanese community, about other people, to study. I studied everything else but us.
WSR: Would you say two of your other books, Letters to Memory and to some extent Sansei and Sensibility, are for and about your family?
KTY: My father’s family, by the time I wrote Letters to Memory, were all dead. But it was also because they were all dead that my cousins and I were like, ‘What do we do with their stuff?’ My aunts in particular saved everything. When we brought it all together, we found all their letters. My nieces took the letters and collated them. Then, we could read the letters chronologically, and that became fascinating. The war period was the most interesting, and I used that material for the book. It also became the family archive. My niece Lucy went through all of it, created a website, and we put all the materials in Special Collections in the UC Santa Cruz library.
WSR: How did it feel to delve into that subject after your mom literally did not give you the permission to write about your family?
KTY: Literally. I haven’t really done her family yet. I wrote a lot about her in that book, Letters to Memory. Maybe it’s written to her. Sansei and Sensibility was for my sister. She didn’t like it either. I would finish a story and send it to her, and she would never say anything. It was just silence.
After the collection was published, I guess people started reading it, and they said nice things about it to my sister. Then she became president of the Southwest region of the Jane Austen Society (JASNA), so she says, ‘Katy, you’re going to have to zoom with Southwest JASNA.’ I had to create a talk, keynote, slideshow, everything. I knew she had to vet it. What was interesting was that she wanted me to expand it, and made me tell JASNA about the incarceration of our family, and I had to make it clear that this was a bad thing. I thought ‘Why am I doing this? I thought I was writing about you.’
WSR: Sansei and Sensibility is a collection of short stories. Why did you feel like the short story was the ideal form for these narratives?
KTY: Jane Austen wrote six novels and what are called her juvenilia, so that was the project. I listened to her novels, one after the other. I’d get an audio-book, cook and clean and listen. I thought, ‘This novel could be a short story. This is the basic plot; these are the characters; this is what happens. What can I do in 15 pages?’ Coalescing characters and plot, I scrunched it.
Then I thought, ‘What if I replace these characters with Japanese Americans from the sixties and seventies, what would it look like?’ Listening, I thought about what my sister reflected on, how it reminded me of growing up in Gardena, although we never had that kind of privilege. But all of the social conventions within a Japanese American community in the postwar [era], there were all the things said and not said, the assumptions. People were always watching. Don’t step out of line because, you know, ‘So and so had a baby, but she married out of wedlock, and they sent her away.’ There was all the gossip about things that happened in a small community. Then we grew up as a “model minority.” We were supposed to go to college, supposed to get good grades, supposed to be model citizens, supposed to toe the line. Everybody knew what everybody was doing. That kind of confined society is similar to what Austen was talking about: people gossiping with their assumptions. There were class hierarchies as well: Where you lived in the city, what neighborhood, defined who you were class-wise. The parallels were subtle but still there.
WSR: Are you able to share your current project?
KTY: I never hide what I’m doing. People say you’re not supposed to tell people because it’s going to spoil it. Why would it spoil it? No one wants to do what I’m doing; they would just go screaming out of the room if they had to do it.
I started a project called Questions 27 & 28. Those are two questions in the so-called “loyalty questionnaire” administered to Japanese Americans in concentration camps. It defined whether they were loyal or not to the United States, and whether they could leave camp or whether they were sent to Tule Lake and asked to renounce their citizenship. These were two of the most unnecessary questions and should never have been asked. The government asked because the military and Justice Department had made the mistake of incarcerating all the Japanese on the West Coast, 120,000 people. But our government never wanted to say, ‘We made a mistake.’
They realized they didn’t want to keep the Japanese in camps and had to let them go, because it was bad press and unconstitutional. Plus, they wanted the youth to go to war and fight for America, wanted them to go into military intelligence and spy, wanted the women, children, and old folks out, the families to leave, and to normalize the situation. Japanese Americans had been denied the right of habeas corpus and were imprisoned illegally. The loyalty questionnaire was conceived as a leave clearance questionnaire, required to be answered to facilitate leaving camp, getting jobs outside.
My mother and father answered the questionnaire right away and left early. But then, there were people who said, ‘Are you kidding, you’re asking us these questions?’ And they said, ‘Heck no, I don’t want to go to war for you; heck no, I’m not going to denounce citizenship to Japan, even though I was never a citizen in Japan.’ In this way, the U.S. government was able to prove that there were people who were not “loyal” to the United States and that was a “good reason” for keeping them in camps. As a result, many people suffered unjustly.
I became interested in the questions themselves, while looking at a project called the Japanese Evacuation and Relocation Study (JERS), facilitated by the University of California. It was a sociological study of the camps on site and in the day. The study received money from Ford and other foundations to send researchers into the camps. There were white scholars obviously there for the study, but many of the researchers were Japanese American Nisei studying sociology or anthropology. These nisei had to do their work surreptitiously. No one could know what they were doing because the Japanese in the camps became suspicious of spies among themselves and beat them up. Gradually, nisei researchers were forced to leave camp. But what they did was record what people were doing, how they were adjusting, reorganizing their lives. They recorded and made statistics about language study, family structures, conflicts, organizing, all the things that sociologists believe are interesting about a culture or group. Whatever you want to say about JERS, it’s a significant record of what happened.
Of course, the University of California would not admit this, but the study was also employed for the purpose of war. We can only speculate about this. The War Department wanted to know things about the Japanese, and applied this knowledge later in the occupation of Japan. I’m not the first person to consider this old research, but I thought, ‘Why not employ fiction to write about it?’
WSR: You mentioned that the researchers who conducted the sociological study from the UC were mostly white, but that there were also Japanese American researchers associated with the study?
KTY: For example, Tamie Tsuchiyama was a graduate student in anthropology at Cal. She was a local from Hawaii and could have returned home, but she went to camp to do this research. There was Richard Nishimoto and Charles Kikuchi, and many others. They did detailed analyses on the organization of the camps, the election of block managers, establishment of leadership (official and covert), staffing of hospitals, schools, fire and policing, food service, gambling, generational differences, reported on complaints, conflicts, and riots, and then sent reports to Dorothy Swaine Thomas, professor at the University of California.
WSR: What compelled you to start writing stories? What draws you to continue writing?
KTY: I don’t think I can do anything else. I dabbled with theater; that’s a lot of work. By the time I was writing for the I Hotel, I realized that theatrical writing can be literary. I’m not interested in seeing I Hotel produced in screens or dramatic plays. It’s just a form we can read. If I get involved in a project, I want to see it through to the end. I’m also interested in larger projects.
Continuing to write is not a question. Yuka Igarashi, my editor, and I are calling 27/28 a novel. It’s not really a novel; I don’t know what it is anymore. It’s a series of short stories, but in genre, they’re all different. You’re going to enter different narrative spaces every chapter because I had to adjust the narrative for each story. It’s taking me longer than usual to do this because I have to stop to research each chapter. I know what the subject is, but I don’t know what the story is until I do the research.
The last thing I’ve just written is the encounter of two archivists: actual people, one still alive. One, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, was the archivist for the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Aiko spent all her retirement days in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., turning over dusty old pieces of paper, reading through everything, and cataloging it, so that others could go back and find it in order to do the research. She, with her husband, Jack, did this meticulously; collecting everything in boxes and boxes in their apartment. Her work became the basis for writing the [Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians] report, a huge book about the internment—all the lies, the history of it, and why Japanese Americans deserved redress and reparations for those events. That’s my work at the moment, just one chapter, one story at a time.
WSR: Regarding 27/28, how do you decide what form would best fit the story you want to tell?
KTY: Maybe it’s being flexible. Sometimes I have to learn a form. For instance, [Aiko’s part of the story] is told through the point of view of Peter, who is a law professor. He met Aiko at the archive, so I have their encounter. Now that looks like a regular story. But then I thought, ‘How am I going to tell the other part–– what they discover?’ What they discover are the lies and memos that prove the lies, that force the hand of the government and force the executive order that imprisons Japanese Americans. I know the history, but how to tell a story?
[Ed. note: In the following paragraphs, KTY explains the various factors and questions she had to consider before arriving at the ideal form for the story.] I read somewhere that the decision for the executive order was finalized in the living room of the attorney general, Francis Biddle, in Washington, D.C. So, was it before dinner or after dinner? Or did they have dinner? I figure after dinner because they [the War Department and the Justice Department] get in a fight. So, Jonathan van Harmelen, history doctoral student, with whom I’m do- ing research, found out where Biddle lived. It’s a fourteen-room house in Washington, D.C., a beautiful old Civil War-era house. That’s where the decision to put my folks in prison was made. Then, we try to figure out what they’re eating. Do they have servants? A fourteen-room house? They’ve got servants. Do they have a cook? Oh yeah, they have a cook. And how’s the table set? And these people are from Philadelphia; they’re upper-class Philadelphians. I staged it.
And by then, I knew the War Department and the Justice Department were fighting over this question. The War Department wants to incarcerate Japanese as a wartime necessity, and the Justice Department objects, saying, these people are citizens. The Justice Department relents by agreeing that if they can get an executive order from the president, it can be done. In my fiction, Aiko and Peter can be ghosts or flies on the wall during and after the dinner, explaining what’s going on. The chapter became a play. I didn’t make anything up. The verbiage by the actors is all recorded in memos and transcripts.
WSR: When the two archivists were researching, did they find something about this dinner taking place?
KTY: Peter Irons and Roger Daniels, historians, found in memos and diaries evidence that this dinner existed. There were also two Justice Department men involved and later interviewed, who revealed this event, but it’s really only one sentence in a history book where Peter Irons says, ‘Ironically, everything was decided in Biddle’s living room’ on the night before FDR signed Executive Order 9066. I thought, ‘The future of my parents and 120,000 people decided like that.’ Sucks.
WSR: What leads you to latch onto a project? How do you know it’s a project you want to follow through on?
KTY: Some things are small essays, and the commitment is different. And sometimes you start something, and it leads to another and another thing. The next book [I have] coming out is set in Santa Cruz––that is, my half of it. During the pandemic, I started to write stories about people of color in Santa Cruz. I always thought Santa Cruz was this white hippie place; I’ve been teaching here for over twenty years and didn’t know any of these stories. Well, I knew some of them. I knew that there were four Chinatowns in Santa Cruz, and I knew that the last Chinatown was over near where Trader Joe’s is now.
One day, I went over to see the Chinese gravesite in the Evergreen Cemetery; the tombstone of London Nelson is nearby. I learned that London Nelson was an enslaved man who came to California during the Gold Rush with his master, won his freedom, and then bought land in Santa Cruz. He was here before the Civil War, and he owned land here. He didn’t live very long, died within about five years, but he left his land to the Santa Cruz public schools. As he was dying, he noticed that the public school was closed with no money to pay the teacher. He left his money and land to build and fund the school. London Nelson is the godfather of the Santa Cruz public school system, but we know very little about his life. Fiction might imagine more.
I also wrote a story about the mission here and another about the lynching of two Californios—Mexican-Spanish-Indian-Californian people. Two Californios were lynched at the end of the nineteenth century on the site of the Water Street Bridge. There’s a famous photograph. Horrible that such a photograph exists, similar to lynchings in the South, made and sold as postcards. I also wrote about the Filipino community in the thirties, about Fermin Tobera, a migrant laborer shot in the riots in Watsonville.
WSR: You seem to take an interest in highlighting hidden histories. Your next project, Dark Soil: Fictions & Mythographies, focuses on these kinds of stories. What do you think is the value of telling these stories through a fictional lens and giving these very real people and these very real histories a new life in that way?
KTY: I guess I could be a historian. But what I know is that historians have to document everything they write. In that sense, I feel they can’t tell the “truth.” That’s a funny thing to say because I’m not telling the “truth.”
WSR: What do you mean by the “truth”?
KTY: I think there’s a different way of looking at history. Well, historians think this, too, but they have to do another kind of work, where they satisfy the accountability of what they’re saying, but they are also theorizing something.
With the Tobera piece, for example, I’m taking from historians who say that the riots here in Watsonville/Santa Cruz and Tobera’s death had consequences for the independence of the Philippines. Now, several points: California as a racist space for immigrants with a need for agricultural labor; Filipino men as having a reputation for being attractive and dancing with white women; the Philippines as a U.S. protectorate making Filipinos, in these years, legal migrants; and the movement for an independent Philippine nation. When the riots happen and Fermin Tobera is killed, his death becomes a political football. People speak righteously about his death while also speaking about racism, immigration, and the status of the Philippines vis-à-vis the United States.
WSR: Why do you think it’s impactful that Tobera’s story is told through a fictional lens?
KTY: On one side of the page, I put all the articles that are in the newspapers. They’re all verbatim. And on the other, I write another story that I imagine.
I saw that Tobera’s mother was interviewed, but I could find little she said. It’s suggested that she was illiterate, words put in her mouth. I guess I wanted to hear from her. In my story, she speaks and tells her son’s story from her point of view. When his body returns to the Philippines, they put his casket in state like he’s a returning war hero. Speeches are made. What can’t be said is what she intimates in fiction: They say he was a hero, but I wish he had come home alive.
WSR: When is the book coming out?
KTY: This book, Dark Soil: Fictions & Mythographies, edited by Angie Sijun Lou, with seven other amazing authors, is coming out from Coffee House Press in May 2024.
WSR: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
KTY: I used to say to my students, because I would see that they were kind of stuck, ‘Maybe you should leave.’ You should leave your home or where it’s comfortable and see it from another perspective. For me, leaving the country and seeing my home through the eyes of other people was so revealing. Having to learn another language changed the way I could see.
But I don’t think that’s true for everyone. There are folks who are writing about their home; they have so many stories to tell about where they live and what’s in their heads. It’s vibrant and full; they don’t have to go anyplace. But me, I didn’t know that Gardena was worth writing about. I would have never written if I’d never left. I think it’s different for everyone.
Maybe it’s trusting that if you take on a project, you’ll go there. Sometimes we think, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this.’ And sometimes, all you have to do is take a nap.