Strawberry Social
2022, A collaboration with Amisa Chiu, Jaclyn Nakashima and Janine ShinodaHood Strawberry season is a very short and miraculous time during the early summer. When I was younger, my mother would sometimes take my brother and I strawberry picking. I don’t remember it being leisurely. We would compare how full our buckets were to measure speed, Brian being too slow since he would eat so many.
According to the Japanese American National Museum, at one time pre-WWII JAs farmed 90% of strawberries in Oregon. As children, my parents would board a bus during the summers to pick strawberries for local farms. It’s a shared experience for many locals of their generation, especially for Japanese and Chinese Americans.
My mother’s pies are my very favorite dessert. She makes two kinds a year- apple pie in the winter and strawberry pie in the summer. The strawberry pie is mostly berry with a thin layer of cream cheese separating the berry juice from the pie crust, only Hood berries.
Strawberry Social was a June celebration of strawberry season and activation of strawberry memory. Taking place at Ikoi No Kai Senior Lunch Program, participants exchanged stories about their relationship with strawberries while sharing strawberry desserts and screen printing tenugui (summer multipurpose towels).
Supported by Ikoi No Kai & Metro and Living Arts.
