Everything She Touched: Life of Ruth Asawa

By Marilyn Chase

Everything She Touched recounts the incredible life of the American sculptor Ruth Asawa.

This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices—family, friends, teachers, and critics—to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist.

Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer's daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She survived adolescence in the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and attended the groundbreaking art school at Black Mountain College. Asawa then went on to develop her signature hanging-wire sculptures, create iconic urban installations, revolutionize arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, fight through lupus, and defy convention to nurture a multiracial family.

• A richly visual volume with over 60 reproductions of Asawa's art and archival photos of her life (including portraits shot by her friend, the celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham)
• Documents Asawa's transformative touch—most notably by turning wire – the material of the internment camp fences – into sculptures
• Author Marilyn Chase mined Asawa's letters, diaries, sketches, and photos and conducted interviews with those who knew her to tell this inspiring story.

Ruth Asawa forged an unconventional path in everything she did—whether raising a multiracial family of six children, founding a high school dedicated to the arts, or pursuing her own practice independent of the New York art market.

Her beloved fountains are now San Francisco icons, and her signature hanging-wire sculptures grace the MoMA, de Young, Getty, Whitney, and many more museums and galleries across America.

• Ruth Asawa's remarkable life story offers inspiration to artists, art lovers, feminists, mothers, teachers, Asian Americans, history buffs, and anyone who loves a good underdog story.
• A perfect gift for those interested in Asian American culture and history
• Great for those who enjoyed Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel, Ruth Asawa: Life's Work by Tamara Schenkenberg, and Notes and Methods by Hilma af Klint

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781452174525

Marilyn Chase

Marilyn Chase is a journalist and teacher, and the author of The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco. She lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

Untitled (S. 108), ca. 1970

For my mother and the next generation: Gabriela, Dillon, Ruth, and Sonia Elena.

Text copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Chase.

All artwork copyright © 2020 by the Estate of Ruth Asawa.

Photographs copyright © 2020 by the individual licensors.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Page 218 is a continuation of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-7452-5 (epub, mobi)

ISBN 978-1-4521-7440-2 (hardcover)

Design by Kristen Hewitt.

Jacket photograph: Ruth, peering out from behind a group of looped-wire sculptures, 1951. Photograph by Imogen Cunningham.

Back jacket photograph: Untitled (S. 042), 1954, Aluminum and brass wire, 90 x 36 x 36 in. (2.3 m x 91.4 cm x 91.4 cm). Photograph by Laurence Cuneo.

Endpapers photograph: Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures and their shadows, 1956.

Photograph by Imogen Cunningham.

Title page photograph: Ruth holding one of her early looped-wire sculptures, 1951.

Photograph by Imogen Cunningham.

Chronicle books and gifts are available at special quantity discounts to corporations, professional associations, literacy programs, and other organizations. For details and discount information, please contact our premiums department at [e-mail] or at 1-800-759-0190.

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680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

CONTENTS

Prologue: Auction, 2013 7

Chapter 1: War 8

Chapter 2: The Camp 22

Chapter 3: Getting Up in the World 36

Chapter 4: Climbing Black Mountain 42

Chapter 5: Love Letters 57

Chapter 6: A Loft for a New Life 69

Chapter 7: A Workshop in Noe Valley 89

Chapter 8: Gamble with the Young 106

Chapter 9: The Fountain Lady 117

Chapter 10: The Wolf at the Door 131

Chapter 11: Woman Warrior 141

Chapter 12: Trust Me 149

Chapter 13: The Fighting Years 161

Epilogue: A Compact of Love 170

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 184

A NOTE ON SOURCES, LANGUAGE, AND INTERVIEWS 186

ENDNOTES 188

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 216

IMAGE CREDITS 218

INDEX 219

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 225

PROLOGUE:

AUCTION, 2013

When the auctioneer’s hammer came down, the winning bid topped $1.4 million for an 11-foot-long sculpture of wire mesh so light its shadow and substance seemed to merge. The delicacy was deceptive. Years of weaving such wire into gossamer globes had scarred the artist’s small hands.

Christie’s May 2013 show, Ruth Asawa: Objects and Apparitions, was the sculptor’s first solo exhibition in New York City in over fifty years. The evening auction at Rockefeller Plaza fetched four to five times the sculpture’s estimated value of $250,000 to $350,000. Some people in the San Francisco gallery world had worried about putting Ruth’s piece on the block, where it could disappear into private hands, out of public view. She belonged in galleries and museums that would display and not disperse her work, they said. But on the New York art market, it was a triumph. The record auction price for an Asawa vaulted the artist into the stratosphere. Christie’s Senior Specialist of Postwar and Contemporary Art, Jonathan Laib, was elated and convinced that Ruth’s resurgence was under way.

Ruth’s children, raised to put creativity over commerce, were stunned. This was Mom’s work, one of many pieces she wove in her home studio where her children also saw her cooking dinners and mopping floors. For as long as they could remember, her sculptures had hung from the rafters, sheltering their lives, casting moving shadows. Watching the act of making sculpture had expanded their world beyond the brown-shingled house where they grew up in San Francisco into limitless realms of art.

Far from the frenzied bidding at Rockefeller Center, the artist kept a lookout over her garden, a profusion of green she tended for most of her eighty-seven years. She watched the windows for the emerald flash of hummingbirds that sipped nectar and wove nests in her honeysuckle. She had survived the Great Depression and World War II, slighted for her gender and interned for her race. She had toiled in the fields, the studio, and the classroom, elevating work to a form of Zen practice, her hands never still. Now arthritis had stiffened her once-agile fingers. Fragile from strokes, she had spoken little in the six years since losing her life partner, the architect Albert Lanier. Together they had lived without a blueprint and loved across color lines. They raised six children and fought for the education of thousands more. They mastered the art of shaping space—Ruth in sculpture and Albert in architecture. As their health failed, the couple had lived in hospital beds in the sunny room that had once been her studio. Her children knew best how to deliver the big news from the auction—and how to read her response.

Innocent of the previous night’s bidding, Ruth looked bemused as her daughters Aiko and Addie drew close. When Addie whispered the sales figure in her mother’s ear, Aiko watched her mother’s eyes and mouth widen in wonder as if to say, Really?

Mama, Addie said, you’re playing with the big boys now!

But it had not always been so.

CHAPTER 1:

WAR

On December 7, 1941, faraway bombs broke the peace of a working Sunday.

The Asawa family was working in the fields of their Norwalk, California, truck farm. The family would soon fill sacks with farm vegetables as a holiday gift for the school bus driver. The simple offering embarrassed their middle child, fifteen-year-old Ruth. As she worked, she reflected on the coming Christmas break which would bring not parties and presents, but the season for planting green onions, passing seedlings hand to hand, pushing them into the earth, and pressing the furrows closed in endless rows.

Around noon, the rhythms of that life exploded in chaos. Shouts reached their ears in the field: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. The Asawas dropped everything and ran back to the farmhouse. Gathering around the radio, they listened to reports about the unfamiliar place now in flames, learning for the first time that it was a military base in Hawaii. As the chaos cleared and the attack came into sharper focus, Ruth’s confusion turned to dread.

Terror struck all of us. We wondered how our classmates would react. On Monday the 8th our high school principal Mr. Ralph Burnright called an emergency assembly to make the announcement that the United States and Japan were at war, but assured the student body the Japanese students at Excelsior Union High School were not responsible for it.

On the school bus, Ruth met hard stares. Withdrawing into a shell, she sought comfort from fellow Nisei—second-generation Japanese Americans who, like her, were born in the United States. A girl in choir class was bereft because her boyfriend wanted to enlist. But after Pearl Harbor, the army rejected Nisei volunteers.

The principal’s speech briefly soothed Ruth’s nerves. But her father, Umakichi, was uneasy. Born in Japan sixty years earlier, he feared being seen as an enemy despite devoting four decades to tilling American soil. After the bombing, his family took down the emperor’s picture. Once as common in prewar Japanese American households as pictures of the king or queen in British homes, now it had to go. Any memento of his old country might seem suspicious. He resolved to purge his home of souvenirs like the kendo equipment Ruth and her older sister Lois used to practice Japanese fencing: a bamboo sword, body shield, gloves, and hakama, or culottes.

Ruth watched him build a bonfire and feed pieces of his past life to the flames:

To rid the house of any Japanese artifacts, he dug a big hole to bury the kendo gear and burned the hakama, beautiful Japanese books on flower arrangement—tea ceremony, Japanese dolls, Japanese badminton paddles. I still see Lois weeping and pleading with him not to burn them. He was afraid of being implicated.

Days after Pearl Harbor, Los Angeles began blackouts. Reports of unidentified planes over the city drew antiaircraft fire that awakened Norwalk residents from midnight to two in the morning as spotlights blanched the night sky. Enemy aircraft were never confirmed, but fear of an attack stirred anxiety from California to the East Coast.

War inflicted differing levels of sacrifice on the home front. Families said goodbye to their sons. People adjusted to shortages and ration coupons for sugar and gasoline. The wartime hit parade spun platters like Rosie the Riveter and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me). Japanese Americans faced a different reality: slurs and menacing gangs that beat up anyone who, to their eyes, looked anything like the enemy. Some Asian Americans wore buttons to distinguish their origins: I am Chinese. Guides appeared on how to spot a Jap, promoting vicious racial stereotypes of yellow skin, buckteeth, squinty eyes, and shifty demeanor.

More than 2,600 miles away, in Washington, D.C., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration feared that spies in the Japanese American community were aiding Japan in an imminent invasion of the West. Hysteria drowned out any opposition—even from the nation’s top cop, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who insisted there was no evidence of sabotage. Few listened.

Politicians on the home front employed a chilling new term. Even before Pearl Harbor, in October 1940, Navy Secretary Frank Knox had handed Roosevelt a fifteen-point program to get ready for a possible war with Japan. The twelfth point: Prepare plans for concentration camps. President Roosevelt himself used the term. The world hadn’t yet come to equate concentration camps with the death camps of Nazi Germany that exterminated millions of Jews. But a clear-eyed view of history must recognize that what Washington originally planned to hold Japanese Americans—aliens and citizens—weren’t evacuation centers for their safety, but concentration camps.

Newspaper editorials calling for a roundup of Japanese Americans grew venomous. Speaking as an American . . . I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior, declared Henry McLemore in a column published in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them . . . Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it.

Cartoonists stoked hatred with caricatures of slant-eyed spies. In Waiting for the Signal from Home . . . , artist Theodore S. Geisel pictured hordes of smiling saboteurs lining up for cakes of TNT to blow up the whole West Coast. The cartoon bore the pen name Mr. Geisel would later use on scores of his popular children’s books: Dr. Seuss.

Congress chimed in. All Japanese, whether citizens or not, must be placed in inland concentration camps, opined U.S. Representative Leland Ford, a Republican from California. Ford urged loyal Nisei, who were American citizens from birth, to join in and enter the camps voluntarily to safeguard the military security of their home country, the United States of America.

Supporters of the roundup and incarceration of Japanese Americans included California Governor Culbert Olson and California Attorney General Earl Warren. Warren—the future governor, Supreme Court Chief Justice, and progressive hero of the 1950s who helped strike down school segregation—called for putting people into camps by showing a map illustrating Japs in vicinity of strategic sites like airports, railroads, and dams. Conspiracy theorists held that Japanese American farmers could lay out crop rows like signposts, pointing the way for invading bombers to hit key targets. (While a vigorous supporter of the Japanese exclusion during the war, a retired U.S. Chief Justice Warren would later voice remorse in his memoirs for the imprisonment of children.)

Roosevelt’s cabinet backed the roundup with little dissent. Attorney General Francis Biddle opposed the action but, as a newcomer, he carried little weight. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a civil rights champion, appealed to her husband. The president listened coldly and told her never to bring it up again.

On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of people of Japanese blood from a broad swath of the western United States that was seen as a sensitive military zone. The area included coastal California, Washington, and Oregon, plus southern Arizona. The program would uproot between 110,000 and 120,000 people, order them into assembly centers, and transport them to the camps. For many, their homes and property would be hastily sold at a fraction of their value, stored and later looted, or simply abandoned and lost. The American Civil Liberties Union would call the action the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.

Ruth’s father, Umakichi Asawa, as a young man in the early twentieth century

Umakichi Asawa had come to the United States in 1902 at age nineteen to avoid being drafted in an earlier conflict, the Russo-Japanese war. His life on American soil began with a desire to avoid fighting. He belonged to a farmer’s association, sent his children to Japanese-language school on Saturday, and took his family to a Quaker church on Sunday. He found bloodshed so distasteful that he tasked his wife, Haru, with butchering the family’s weekly chicken. Neighbors couldn’t believe that this lean, weathered farmer with the large, hardworking family could be a secret saboteur in their midst.

The first wave of arrests began quickly and quietly, just after Pearl Harbor. The Asawa family noticed community leaders disappearing. The children’s Japanese teacher, their sensei, was among the first to go. A new wave hit in February 1942 with the arrests of religious and business leaders—including local farmers.

Two lawmen descended on the Asawa farm one day that February, flashing their badges as Umakichi knelt over his strawberries. The scene was seared in Ruth’s memory:

Without warning . . . two FBI agents appeared looking for Father. They went out to the field to get him. It was around 11:30 in the morning. They allowed him to eat lunch. My sister Chiyo had baked a meringue pie. We ironed him a white shirt, pressed his black suit, and away they went.

Ruth wouldn’t see him again until after the war.

Umakichi was raised in a very poor family in Fukushima province. As a young boy, he peddled natto, or fermented soybeans, from a cart in the street before sunrise, crying Natto! Natto! But beneath his humble roots lay a powerful origin myth for the Asawa family, a name that is all but unheard-of in Japan. The story goes that Umakichi’s family was descended from the samurai class, and Asawa was originally Asano. Lord Asano was a famous eighteenth-century retainer to the Shogun whose ritual suicide in a bloody court feud left his forty-seven samurai followers (or ronin) leaderless. The samurai from whom Umakichi descended sought revenge, which meant he also had to commit ritual suicide. But before taking his life, he sent his family into the mountains, told them to become farmers, and changed their name from Asano to Asawa. Ruth regarded this as a tale, savored in the oral tradition, passed down with a dash of skepticism.

Umakichi fled Japan with his brother in 1902 to avoid being drafted into the coming Russo-Japanese war. After crossing the Pacific, they toiled in Hawaii’s sugar cane fields and then crossed into the mainland via Mexico, eventually working in Utah’s sugar beet industry, saving their money. In Southern California, they leased fields just off of Rosecrans Boulevard and built their own farmsteads.

Like many a lonely immigrant bachelor, Umakichi wanted a wife. Families arranged long-distance engagements through the exchange of formal portraits with young women from home, known as picture brides. These betrothal pictures, the century-old predecessor of selfies on dating sites, were carefully composed to show prospective mates at their most elegant and eligible. A fiancée, looking sober and demure, might be flanked by her mother and sister, garbed in a fine kimono, her hair piled up in a glossy pompadour. This was Umakichi’s first view of Haru Yasuda, the youngest daughter of a family that raised silkworms and wove silk for kimonos. (She was actually the second candidate, an older sister first having backed out of his proposal.) In 1919, Haru crossed the Pacific Ocean and landed in San Francisco. She met her fiancé, a seasoned laborer who was more than a decade older than her, and together they boarded a southbound train to share a life of companionship bound up in toil. Seasons were marked by onions, broccoli, and cauliflower in winter, strawberries in spring, and tomatoes and melons in summer. Haru was following in the footsteps of many a picture bride, and more would come. Her older sister would soon arrive to wed Umakichi’s brother Zenzaburo.

Ruth’s mother, Haru Asawa (center), with her sister Ura (left) and her mother in Japan

Home was a simple farmhouse in the small rural town of Norwalk, later incorporated into sprawling Los Angeles County. Umakichi built the board-and-batten house with its paper ceiling and tin roof. He built the barn and the garage. The spare shelter was graced with an encyclopedia and a player piano. There was little money for luxuries.

Norwalk saw biplanes buzz its cornfields in the early twentieth century. With a population of four thousand, its economy comprised farms, a blacksmith shop, a tire factory, and the Dr. Ross Dog and Cat Food factory, which turned old horses into pet food and Silver Tone soap. A three-bedroom house rented for $12.50 a month. A merchant’s lunch cost forty cents. As city fathers wooed commerce, Hollywood discovered the town’s railroad station as a set for a movie starring Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice. But it wasn’t Hollywood glamour that sustained Norwalk through the Depression. It was the sweat of farmers like Umakichi Asawa that kept the town going. Despite alien land laws that barred them from owning the fields they tilled, Japanese farmers produced bumper crops: 40 percent of California’s fruits and vegetables coaxed from 1 percent of its farmland.

Umakichi and Haru were prolific partners in the fields and in the nursery. Their family grew to include Lois, George, Chiyo, Ruth, Bill, Kimiko, and Janet. Public displays of affection were rare, but their devotion was palpable. Haru gave birth at home and nursed each baby for two years—or until the next child came along. She carried her youngest on her back in the fields as she worked. Umakichi fashioned toy tractors from empty spools and rubber bands. The children were expected to be silent at meals—youngsters asking questions were considered nosy and rude—but they were allowed to crawl into bed to hear their parents’ stories.

A jet-haired newborn, Ruth wailed her way into the world on the winter afternoon of January 24, 1926, protesting expulsion from her mother’s warmth into the chill. That’s how she would remember it in wartime, as the world got even colder:

I, being a winter baby, had an excuse to squirm and yell when I first made my debut. As an infant, I had my way or else!! I rarely had my way.

Making her way was an act of will. As the middle child of seven on a small truck farm, she stuck up for herself, but pitched in with the rest to help grow, pick, and transport produce to the Los Angeles farmers market. Ruth worked in the field and the packing shed after school—planting, harvesting, sorting, and crating vegetables from four until eight, when she turned to her homework until midnight under the watchful eye of her older sister Lois.

Perched on the back of her father’s horse-drawn wagon was when she let her daydreams out to play. Dangling her bare feet in the dirt, toeing in and out, she traced hourglass designs in the soil. No one watching the girl could guess that in those furrows, Ruth Aiko Asawa was planting the seeds of her future in art.

The life of the Asawa family was forged in a frugality that put calluses on Ruth’s hands but never coarsened her dream of art. True to her astrological sign—an earth ox—she followed the Zen path of chop wood, carry water. Her American name, Ruth, recalled the biblical figure of family loyalty. Her Japanese name, Aiko, means love child. Her black bob framed a moon face that often was pensive, but her apple cheeks popped out when she smiled. She drew constantly.

For her parents, tilling 80 acres and rearing seven children took grit. Haru rose at three each morning to start the day’s rice cooking in an outdoor pot. Umakichi was up at four to check his gopher traps and returned for breakfast at six. Then it was back into the fields for workdays so relentless that visitors wanting a word with him had to catch up with him in the fields. For the children, walking a half mile to the bus and attending school was a respite from chores.

For all their labors, the first-generation Issei (Japanese immigrants) couldn’t yet become citizens or purchase property. (Their children, known as Nisei, who were the first generation born in the United States, were classified as American citizens from birth.) Amid California’s history of white protectionism and anti-Asian bias, the state had passed the Alien Land Law of 1913, which barred Umakichi from owning the very land he tilled. Norwalk landlords who observed Umakichi’s productivity agreed to lease land to him. And he made good by endlessly working, skimping, and strategizing. He enhanced his yields by saving his very best tomato, not to eat but to pluck out superior seeds to grow next season’s crop better than the last. Saving the best for next season became a habit.

The Asawa sons and daughters joined their parents working in the fields every day but Saturday—which was devoted to Japanese-language school. Ruth’s other chief chore was to chop wood and stoke the fire under the family’s traditional wooden bathtub, or ofuro, where they would line up their geta (platform sandals) to soak their weary bodies after the workday. After everyone had bathed in the ofuro, Haru used the warm broth of field dust washed off their bodies to sprout bags of seeds before planting. Along with working the crops and heating the ofuro bath, Ruth repaired the thin wooden crates used to hold vegetables. She planted beans and trained the vines up trellises. All were solitary tasks that her parents assigned to their headstrong middle child to avoid sibling spats. The habit of incessant toil stuck with her for life.

Nothing was wasted on the Asawa farm. Umakichi saved old nails and straightened them out for reuse. The family lived on vegetables and fruits they grew, one quart of milk a day for cereal, plus their one chicken a week. If a ripe melon cracked, the family ate it. On hot days, when Ruth sought shade under a water tower with Mexican farmhands, she got to share their tortillas, warmed over a wood fire.

Umakichi was a truck farmer, who drove his harvests weekly to the Los Angeles farmers market. In the Depression, truck farmers scraped by, getting a nickel for a box of tomatoes, fifty cents for six dozen radishes, thirty-five cents for a crate of cabbage, and ten cents for a box of two dozen melons. Sometimes shippers would trick suppliers, contracting for all of the farm’s celery and tomatoes, and then packing it up and declaring bankruptcy. Growers rarely got ahead. Umakichi exhausted his savings in paying medical bills when his brother fell mortally ill, so the family’s hand-to-mouth existence later included his brother’s widow and children. For working the whole summer, Ruth, like all her siblings, got ten dollars to buy school wear—maybe a pair of shoes for $1.95, underwear, and a couple of dresses.

Umakichi was proud and independent. Ruth remembered sitting around the table, hearing her father read an article about a farmer who couldn’t afford to provide for his five children. He took a shotgun to each of them rather than accept charity. Umakichi told his wife he would do the same thing before he took a handout. The Asawa children, raised not to talk at meals, eyed each other in shocked silence. But for all their father’s fierce pride, his children were never spanked.

The Asawas attended the local Zen Buddhist temple for funerals and memorials. On Sunday, the family went to the Quaker church because it was one of the few Christian houses of worship that welcomed Japanese Americans. Ruth liked it until, one day, the churchyard pond looked too inviting. Leaning over the water, she lost her balance and fell in with a splash, drenching her clothes. Offered a change of clothes from the minister’s son, she spent the service chafing in boy’s garb and then avoided church until she was fifteen.

Later, when war broke out, the Quakers would remain among the few groups to stand by the Japanese Americans. They were fearless people, Ruth would say.

As the girl in the middle, Ruth fought for her place. With three siblings above her and three below, she stood her ground, saying: I was bossed, and I was boss.

Ruth’s earliest memory was of fever. At three years old, she crossed paths with someone who sneezed or coughed. But it was no ordinary germ. Her throat grew sore and coated with a tough gray membrane that made it hard to swallow or breathe. It was diphtheria, a contagious bacterial disease known as the strangler. Before routine vaccination, it was a major killer, especially of young children.

Sounds of discord reached her bed: her parents in rare heated argument. Her father was fighting to take Ruth to the hospital while her mother pleaded to keep her at home.

"If you don’t let her go, she will die," she heard her father say.

Umakichi prevailed. Ruth was admitted. The family was placed under quarantine.

As a toddler on a hospital ward, the lonely, frightened three-year-old wept for her father’s visits. He promised to bring her home when her fever broke, but the recovery was slow. After two weeks—and a cloying hospital diet of stewed prunes—Ruth was finally strong enough to leave. The ordeal impressed upon her that life is short and time too precious to waste, she would say. In a school essay, she later crafted a happy ending to the terrifying episode:

Fortunately, Father drove me home from the hospital in our very best Model T in time for Christmas. All I could remember was a beautiful doll and a tree that touched the ceiling.

For most of her life, Ruth remained sturdy and robust, and the shadow of life-threatening disease passed over her, not to return for more than half a century.

In March of 1933, when Ruth was seven years old, Los Angeles was jolted by a violent earthquake that rocked the farmhouse, making its timbers lurch and groan. Ruth clung to the wooden beams for a long half minute until the shaking subsided. Haru regaled the family with stories of epic earthquakes in Japan, when yawning crevices opened and swallowed people whole.

Farm life held all manner of dangers for all children in the pre-war years—not just illness or natural disaster, but also poverty, farm equipment, and open fires. Ruth once saw her older sister Lois scalded by boiling water. After drifting in and out of consciousness, Lois told her little sister that she dreamed a friendly man with a long white beard in a horse-drawn chariot came for her, but she refused to go because she heard her mother calling. Lois recovered from her burns, but that vision lived in Ruth’s memory. When Lois died later in old age, Ruth wrote to her sister’s son, saying Lois’s sense of adventure gave her strength and dispelled her fear of death. Maybe, she wrote, the bearded charioteer had returned for Lois at last.

Home canning by thrifty farm families also held hazards. From a bumper crop of tomatoes, the Asawas once cooked up jars of homemade ketchup that went bad, swelling under pressure. The jars exploded, shattering glass and a shower of red sauce. But the family didn’t quit canning. They learned from the misadventure, sweeping up the shards and splatter, and cooking up another batch.

Crying doesn’t help, Ruth would tell her friends.

Ruth worked to live and lived to draw. When she wasn’t in the fields or bent over her homework, she delighted in sketching the cartoon characters Blondie, Flash Gordon, Little Orphan Annie, and the Katzenjammer Kids. She discovered Norman Rockwell and drew 1930s child stars like the blond Shirley Temple and brunette Deanna Durbin. Encouraged by her art teachers, Gwendolyn Cowan and Edith Loewe, she drew polar bears lit by the aurora borealis. In the eighth grade, Ruth won a prize for her design of a patriotic poster of the Statue of Liberty against a red background. Her reception of the award was the only occasion Ruth remembered that her shy and hardworking parents visited the school.

Teachers were free with discipline and parsimonious with praise. Miss Cowan rapped unruly boys with a ruler so hard that it broke—provoking howls of laughter from the class that reduced the teacher to tears of frustration. Ruth was impressed that Miss Cowan cared so much about her craft. Miss Loewe tartly remarked that Ruth’s bold originality in abstract studies was marred by a certain lack of neatness. This theme would later be picked up by the most revered teacher of her life. But Ruth was undaunted. By age ten, she was sure: She wanted to be an artist.

Ruth kept an indelible memory of those farm wagon rides, dragging her feet and carving traceries in the dirt with her toes, weaving a trail of curved lines in the wake of dust between wheel tracks. Those shapes would resurface in the undulating forms of her wire sculptures.

Crafting beauty from cast-off materials—a byproduct of scarcity—was another lifelong habit. As a little girl, Ruth would unwind the fine wires used to bundle vegetables and refashion them into bracelets and rings, studding them with a red bead she imagined as a ruby. She reveled in found objects, scrounging supplies and recycling trash into treasures.

Despite the austerity of their lives in America, the Asawas preserved the culture they had left behind. The family spoke Japanese at home. Umakichi learned enough English to conduct his business, but Haru never did. Ruth Aiko learned English when she entered grammar school, where teachers insisted she assimilate and be called simply Ruth. On Saturday the Asawas sent their children to study at the gakuen, or Japanese school. The Saturday ritual began with Lois honking the horn of the family’s old gray Plymouth sedan, calling all the children to pile in for the drive to lessons. Language was taught by a stern sensei. If Ruth drifted off, he brought down a stick on the table with a sharp smack. The children were caught between linguistic tradition and pressure to speak English in school. The part of Saturday school Ruth loved best was calligraphy, learning to create Japanese characters and designs. It took exquisite arm control to sweep the brush from one stroke to the next, balancing the lines and—equally important—the spaces in between the lines.

Ruth, age 13, 1939

The Asawa children also got a chance to spend time in Japan studying with relatives. But when Ruth’s turn came, her host uncle fell ill, so her journey was postponed. By the next opportunity, she had outgrown the kimonos sewn especially to wear on her trip. It was then 1939, and she was looking forward to high school. So her younger sister Kimiko went to Japan in her place, accompanied by older sister Lois. From such trips, the children brought back art and dolls, ikebana flower-arranging books, and treasures that preserved a touch of tradition in their farmhouse.

They didn’t yet know that keeping up their culture carried a cost; that respecting their heritage would mark them as alien enemies; or that children educated abroad, known as kibei, would face special scrutiny. They didn’t know that rising tensions in autumn 1941 would find Lois boarding the last boat home before Pearl Harbor. They didn’t know that Kimiko’s widowed aunt would keep her in Japan, helping fulfill civilian duties like smoothing the runways for a nearby kamikaze base. There was no question of what she wanted. Her longing for home was simply lost in the fog of war. As

Reviews for Everything She Touched

[Susan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just a perfect, (true) , story of an art heroine.

[spinsterrevival · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fantastic biography, and I loved learning about Ruth Asawa who was so remarkable. The author weaves a portrait that makes me wish I could have known this artist, but getting a feel for her through these words will have to do. It’s fascinating the regional prejudice that exists in the art world so much that Asawa was crafting gorgeous sculptures in California and remained fairly unknown from the New York scene. Ruth Asawa truly never stopped: from Japanese American internment camp as a teenager to Black Mountain College then marriage and six children and amazing work for San Francisco and children in arts; she was amazing.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase is a phenomenal work of biography and history (art and United States).

I came to this book because I admire Asawa's art and wanted to learn more about her. I expected to gain some appreciation for who she was but did not expect to be moved to the extent I was. I almost don't know where to begin discussing this book.

Ruth Asawa had a life that tested her at every turn. That is probably true, to some extent, of every life, it is the moments in our lives and how we respond to them that test us and make us who we are. Asawa, however, endured things that could easily have broken her, or made her bitter and hateful, or simply made her shut down. Yet through everything she tended to find a positive way to deal with and move through each ordeal.

I found the entire life story compelling but, because of my interests and old friends, I was particularly moved by her experience of the World War II concentration camps the US government set up to jail (contain) many of its own citizens. The ability to both be present in the moment (school, letter writing on behalf of her father, art instruction) and move into the future (going to teacher's college, a trip to Mexico) shows an amazing degree of strength. To also come out of the experience without a long and abiding hatred of all things American is more than I think I would have been able to do. To then work toward making the world a better place for future generations is the stuff of movies.

Chase writes about this life with both a keen eye and a compassionate heart. The details and research is astounding yet the narrative of Asawa's life never gets bogged down in detail. Rather, it is enhanced by being able to connect more of the dots. I can't speak highly enough about how well written and organized this biography is.

I highly recommend this book to readers of biography, this is a wonderful example of the genre. Also any readers of art or art history books will find a lot of interesting information here. Finally, those interested in US history will appreciate this as a work of historical importance because of the efforts Asawa made to reunite her family during WWII and the response (or lack thereof) of government officials.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.