Fred Nakamura was a California nisei who did time in a detention center during World War II as a teenager, and from there signed on to fight in Europe as soon as he was old enough.
Many years later, he earmarked a pot of money to sponsor an annual ESL essay contest at my college. Every spring I have worked there, we have held the contest; we decide on a topic, generally something to do with the immigrant experience or education or the American way of life in general, and give out beginning, intermediate and advanced prizes. The winning essays are often moving and original. We have a beautiful awards ceremony in the college theatre, the college newspaper takes pictures, and I often tear up.
This year, there was talk of not holding the contest. Everybody is stressed out, over-extended and exhausted, Fred Nakamura is no longer living, and nobody can think of an uplifting topic.
I volunteered to coordinate it, without the elaborate ceremony that really is what takes most of the work. I do think that if Fred could slog through Manzinar and World War II, we should be able to slog through funding cuts and a recession.
But we're still having trouble with a topic. Probably about the economic mess, since nobody around here can think about anything else. (They just laid off most of the support staff in disabled students' services, for example, which I actually think must be against the law.) But how to continue the tradition of positive thinking that attaches to the event?
