Brenda Wong Aoki
| Brenda Wong Aoki | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
July 29, 1953 Salt Lake City, Utah |
| Residence | San Francisco, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Artistic director, First Voice |
| Organization | First Voice |
| Notable work |
|
| Style | Noh, kyōgen, and contemporary storytelling |
| Spouse(s) | Mark Izu |
| Children | Kai Kane Aoki Izu |
Brenda Wong Aoki is an American playwright, actor and storyteller. She creates monodramas rooted in traditional storytelling, dance movement, and music. Aoki’s work combines Eastern and Western narratives and theatrical traditions such as noh, kyogen, commedia dell’arte, modern dance, Japanese drumming, and American jazz. Most of her performances express themes of history, mixed race, home, gender, and mythology. Aoki is a founding faculty member of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Aoki and her husband Mark Izu, an Emmy-winning jazz music composer, are the founders of First Voice, a San Francisco-based nonprofit arts organization.
Brenda Wong Aoki was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and grew up in Long Beach, California. Aoki is of Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Scottish descent, and she is the eldest of six children. Aoki's paternal grandfather was a founder of San Francisco's Japantown in the 1890s.
Aoki graduated in 1976 from University of California at Santa Cruz, with a bachelor's degree in Community Studies. She later received a K-12 credential from San Francisco State University. She spent years as a community organizer working with at-risk-youth at Centro De La Raza and then as a public school teacher with the Long Beach Unified School District and San Francisco Unified School District, while continuing her activities as a poet, dancer, musician, singer and activist. [10] She taught one of the first Asian American Women’s Studies Class in the country at San Francisco State University.
Aoki sought to trace her family history by consulting with relatives and finding information from archived newspapers at the San Francisco Public Library. In Japan, the Aoki family had been “Hidden Christians” and kept the faith during the 200-year period of Japan’s persecution of Christians and isolation from the West. As a result, Aoki's paternal grandfather, Chojiro Peter Aoki, was sent from Japan in 1897 to become the leader of Seiko Ko Kai, the Japanese Episcopal mission, a founding institution of Japantown, San Francisco. Father Aoki was one of the first fully ordained Japanese Christian ministers In 1909, her great uncle Gunjiro Aoki, a Japanese immigrant, became engaged to Helen Gladys Emery, the Caucasian daughter of Grace Cathedral's archdeacon. The engagement incited public outcry and resulted in Californian legislation adding Japanese immigrants to the list of races banned from marrying white citizens; a law that remained in effect until 1948. Father Aoki was asked to resign because of his support for his younger brother’s marriage to a white woman. Banished by Grace Cathedral, he was sent to Utah where he and his wife died shortly after, leaving 11 children orphaned. Aoki developed a play based on her family’s history that she began performing in 1998 called “Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend.”
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