10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ruth Asawa inspired S.F. with her art, but can she help me understand myself?
Earlier this month, I stood in front of the redwood doors of Ruth Asawa 's house and realized I loved her — as much as I could love someone I'd never met. The doors led nowhere, standing off their hinges in a white-walled gallery at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new retrospective of the late Bay Area artist's work. But examining the circular hollows she'd carved by hand into the doors, I realized I'd been looking for her my whole life so that I could ask her a question.
Like the underground creeks that run through my Oakland neighborhood, Ruth has been my constant, unseen companion.
Her art backdropped my most tender memories. Drinking tea with my grandmother at our favorite garden in Golden Gate Park while Ruth was there as a bronze plaque molded to a stone. Sketching taxidermied predators at a natural history exhibit in Oakland as Ruth took the form of a wire sculpture on the wall. Waiting for my high school best friend on the Embarcadero on the weekends with Ruth standing by as an origami-esque circle of folded steel.
I told all of this to Ruth's youngest daughter, Addie Lanier, in the back corner of a San Francisco cafe, that Ruth had been like a shadow attached at my ankle since childhood.
'That's appropriate that she was a shadow in your life,' said Addie, 66. 'She said, 'The shadow reveals the form' of her work because the shadow shows you there's all these layers inside.'
But it wasn't until last winter, when I saw a photo at the Oakland Museum, that I realized who cast that shadow. The image haunted me for months: A butt-naked baby sat in the foreground, two woven sculptures hanging above him like gourds, while three other children busied themselves with their own tasks. In the background, face and body partly obscured by the sculptures, was a woman. She leaned forward, elbows propped on her knees and a spool of wire by her sneakers. 'Ruth Asawa and Children,' read the description.
It was the most beautiful photograph I'd ever seen. And it also made me feel a bit nauseous, which happens when I've forgotten something important like my passport or to call my dad on his birthday. Only the something I'd forgotten was Ruth — her name embedded deep in my conscience alongside memories of wandering around the library after school and listening to the local radio station from my car seat with acorns in my pockets.
On the internet, I finally saw Ruth's face. In black and white, her dark hair and broad cheekbones reminded me of the photos of my great-grandparents after they, and other Japanese and Japanese American citizens, were shipped out of California and incarcerated in Arkansas during World War II.
Her face reformed in my mind as I boarded a plane to our shared ancestral homeland of Japan. While reading her biography, 'Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa,' during the 12-hour flight, I learned that we both shared a love for matzo ball soup, the children's book 'Make Way for Ducklings' and Zen Buddhism. We each cut our college classmates' hair and studied watercolor. Ruth was also incarcerated at a WWII prison camp in Arkansas and later moved to San Francisco in 1949.
I sat in my favorite cafe in Kyoto with an egg yolk over a bowl of rice while the Ruth in the book made rhubarb cake for her Bay Area community, carved her own doors from redwood trunks, organized funding for public arts programming and voiced her solidarity with Muslims after 9/11. Critics exotified her as 'oriental' and domesticated her as a 'housewife and mother.' The public speculated on the deeper meaning of her work. But Ruth seemed to pay no attention to any of it, never offering an explanation. She kept weaving, and mothering.
'Ruth was no fan of any labels — female, Asian, modern — preferring to stand on her own, as an individual 'minority of one,' her biographer wrote.
She was fiercely unbothered, titling most of her sculptural works 'Untitled.' I, meanwhile, on the verge of turning 26 while reading about her, was having an identity crisis. What kind of writer am I? An Asian American writer? A writer who sometimes writes about Asian America? Should I also be an artist? Should I be a parent? Should I move to Japan?
I quietly panicked on the train to Osaka, where Ruth has a sculpture mounted to a wall at the National Museum of Art. The bundle of wires that fanned out at its edges like a cross-section of a dandelion was immediately familiar. There's one just like it at the entrance of the Oakland Museum that, as a kid, I'd imagined as the symbol of my home city for all its tree-like bifurcations. But this time I saw its shadow, too, which blurred its frayed edges beyond definition.
Back at SFMOMA, I sat in a recreation of Ruth's Noe Valley living room that faced a photo of her real living room like a mirror. Woven sculptures hung from the museum ceiling in the same orientation she'd once arranged them in.
A week later I told Addie about my identity crisis, that I didn't know who I should be.
'My mom didn't really talk about identity,' she said. 'To her, identity was what you do, how you live.'
I imagined Ruth sitting there on the floor, surrounded by spools of wire but also her friends and family. I saw myself, too, writing on my green rug, surrounded by the people I love.
When Ruth was granted permission to leave the Arkansas prison camp and attend college, Ruth's mother bowed to her, Addie said, and told Ruth who she should be.
'Be lucky,' she said.
I didn't fully understand what she meant and neither did Addie, who shrugged. But I felt myself taking this to heart, like a cell accepting a much needed nutrient.
I asked, and Ruth answered.
