{"id":2567,"date":"2009-05-31T09:48:22","date_gmt":"2009-05-31T14:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/?p=2567"},"modified":"2009-05-31T10:24:16","modified_gmt":"2009-05-31T15:24:16","slug":"ronald-takaki-pioneer-in-ethnic-studies-dies-at-70","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/31\/ronald-takaki-pioneer-in-ethnic-studies-dies-at-70\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronald Takaki, Pioneer in Ethnic Studies, Dies at 70"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As you might be aware, Ronald Takaki &#8212; a UCBerkeley professor, scholar and pioneer in ethnic studies &#8212; died last week.  He committed suicide, his son said. Takaki has suffered from multiple sclerosis for 20 years.<\/p>\n<p>The Los Angeles Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/obituaries\/la-me-ronald-takaki29-2009may29,0,6360569.story\">has a detailed obituary by Elaine Woo<\/a>. NPR has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=104699815\">a remembrance by a colleague<\/a>, Larry Hajime Shinagawa, a professor at the University of Maryland. The New York Times also has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/31\/education\/31takaki.html\">a piece this morning by Williams Grimes<\/a> (former food critic!).<\/p>\n<p>His death is particularly important to me, because his history about Asian Americans, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hachettebookgroup.com\/books_9780316831307.htm\">Strangers from a Different Shore<\/a>, came out when I was in 7th grade (maybe 8th). And it was profoundly influential at my young age. I think I found it in the Jamaica library in Queens (best library for borrowing books when I was growing up), and read through it within two days. It showed me a parallel history of a group that was (largely) left out of our chunky American history textbooks in junior high. And it showed me there was even a world of ethnic studies. <\/p>\n<p>It really was the first time I ever noted a scholar&#8217;s name because his work was so distinctive. Before that, books were just books. I didn&#8217;t even really pay attention to  authors. This was the first time I realized that people could push boundaries of scholarship by assembling information in a new way.<\/p>\n<p>So in a way, that work influenced The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.<\/p>\n<p>I also love the fact he was the first professor at Afro-Am studies at UCLA. As his students put it in a good humored way: only a white university would get a yellow man to teach black history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As you might be aware, Ronald Takaki &#8212; a UCBerkeley professor, scholar and pioneer in ethnic studies &#8212; died last week. He committed suicide, his son said. Takaki has suffered from multiple sclerosis for 20 years. The Los Angeles Times has a detailed obituary by Elaine Woo. NPR has a remembrance by a colleague, Larry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[125,124],"class_list":["post-2567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese-food","tag-ethnic-studies","tag-ronald-takaki"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2pydS-Fp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2569,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions\/2569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}