BETTY NOBUE KANO

My mother was born in Richmond, CA, she was a Nisei/Kibei. She went back to Japan, married my father, who was from Amami Oshima, a teacher at Tohoku University in Sendai, where I was born. I was five when they came to the US and I started school, attending 6 different schools for the next 6 years as we moved from Richmond to Cambridge and back again... The 60's were turbulent at UC Berkeley and I careened from physics to fine arts, joined the Free Speech Movement and dropped out. I completed studio art studies at SFState, and returned to UC Berkeley Graduate School in art in 1968, where I helped form Asian American Political Alliance and participated in Third World Liberation Front, TWLF, organizing, striking and teaching a first class for Ethnic Studies. I was inspired by Asian American history to go to Japan and to leave the academic battleground I was losing. It was a pilgrimage that lasted 3 years and I came back chastised and an American.