by David Suzuki
and I assumed he was a shoo-in. I couldn't believe it when he lost, and I learned only later that Central just didn't elect Jews to student office.
My loneliness during high school was intense. I ached to have a best buddy to pal around with but was far too self-conscious to assert myself and make a friend. My main solace was a large swamp a ten-minute bike ride from our house. Any marsh or wetland is a magical place, filled with mystery and an incredible variety of plant and animal life. I was an animal guy, and insects were my fascination. Anyone who spotted me in that swamp would have had confirmation of my absolute nerdiness as I waded in fully clothed, my eyes at water level, peering beneath the surface, a net and jar in my hands behind my back. But I couldn't spend all my time in that swamp. I spent most of my waking hours daydreaming, creating a fantasy world in which I was endowed with superhuman athletic and intellectual powers that would enable me to bring peace to the world and win mobs of gorgeous women begging to be my girl.
I hung out with a few other marginal guys who were good students but not on any sporting team. In his fascinating 1976 book Is There Life After High School? Ralph Keyes makes the point that high school is the most intense formative period of our lives. Dividing high school students into two groups—Innies (football players, cheerleaders, basketball players) and Outies (everybody else, wishing they were Innies)—he suggests that our high school status remains with us psychically through adulthood. He's right in my case.
In my last year of high school, one of my fellow nerds suggested I run for school president. It was completely unexpected, and I said no. When I told my father, he was disappointed and asked why. “Because I'd lose” was my explanation. Dad was outraged. “How do you know if you don't even try? Besides, what's wrong with losing? Whatever you do, there will always be people better than you, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. There's no shame in not coming in first.” I don't know how he acquired his wisdom, but his response stayed with me for life.
So I went back to my friend and said I'd give it a try. We campaigned as Outies and rallied all of those who weren't with the in crowd and wanted a say in student government. My sisters and our friends mounted the campaign with signs and posters saying You'll Rave About Dave. Dad let me take the Model A to school, and we tied a sign on the roof. My public-speaking experience at Leamington High served me well during the campaign at Central, and to my amazement, I won with more votes than all the other candidates combined. It was a powerful lesson—there are a lot more Outies than Innies, and together that means power.
All during high school and college, I worked for Suzuki Brothers Construction as a framer. I worked on houses, framing the footings, shoveling and pouring concrete, and then framing the house all the
Dad's Model A decked out for my campaign to be student president in 1953 (note the box on the back where we carried leaves to use for compost) way to the roof. It was hard physical work, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to watch a house emerge from a hole in the ground. The structure we framers put up was later covered with shingles, siding, plaster, trim, and paint, until there was no outward sign of the work we had put into it.
In many ways, that house was like our childhood experiences. Over time, we acquire a veneer of personality that enables us to move among and interact with others, but beneath it remain all the unremembered experiences with family and the fears, hurt, and insecurities of childhood, which others cannot see. For me, the alienation that began with our evacuation from the coast of British Columbia and continued through high school has remained a fundamental part of who I am, all my life, despite the acquired veneer of adult maturity.
chapter TWO
COLLEGE AND A BURGEONING CAREER
I ATTENDED COLLEGE IN the United States as a result of a chance encounter with John Thompson, a former classmate in London. His father headed the business school at the University of Western Ontario, in London, and John, an American citizen, left London after completing grade 12 to enroll at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. I met him on the street while he was home visiting, and he raved about Amherst and suggested I apply. He had application forms sent to me, so I filled them out and sent them off. I hadn't taken the SATS or AP courses that many Canadian students now do, and I didn't have the extracurricular or athletic experiences that applicants to top universities usually have. All I had was my academic record. I learned later that John had made a strong pitch for me to the dean of admissions, Eugene Wilson, and I was accepted with a scholarship of $1,500, which at that time was more than my father earned in a year.
In the 1950s, the same grade 13 exams were written by all students in Ontario and acted as an academic filter. Most students left high school at the end of grade 12, and grade 13 was for those intending to go to university. But many of those who flunked grade 13 ended up going to American universities, so it was our common perception that U.S. universities had much lower academic standards than Canadian institutions. Not only that, Americans went only to grade 12 before entering university, and I had had an extra year of schooling. I thought Amherst would be a piece of cake.
Boy, did I learn in a hurry that there is a vast range among post-secondary institutions in the U.S. Yes, there are some universities and private colleges where academic standards can be pretty low, and state colleges and universities vary tremendously in academic stature and standards. Private schools also range in quality, but there are many top-rated liberal arts colleges throughout the U.S., including Amherst, Swarthmore, Reed, and Smith. The best and/or well-off students in the U.S. often attend private preparatory high schools, where the goal of the program is to gain admission into a leading academic institution. Over a quarter of my class at Amherst had been valedictorians in their high schools. Students with poor records wouldn't even bother applying, and of the students who did apply, fewer than one in ten was accepted. So these were pretty impressive students. As a scholarship recipient, I had to remain in the top 20 percent of my class to retain the support. No problem, I thought, since I'd had that extra year of a Canadian high school, which we knew was superior to begin with.
I sure had my comeuppance with the first midterm exams. I was not going to coast through Amherst as I had through high school. Suddenly I had to develop efficient study habits, learn to use the library, and write thoughtful essays. Amherst honed my academic skills, and I am grateful that I was able to attend a top-notch undergraduate school and receive an elite education that had no counterpart in Canada. I admire and support the enlightened policy that funded a foreign student like me in the belief that we added to the education of all at Amherst. I can't help contrasting that with Canadian universities that now accept foreign students merely to exploit them by charging exorbitant tuition fees.
I was the first person in my family to graduate from a university. Although my grandparents had not intended to remain in Canada, their Canadian-born children—my parents—had no interest in moving to Japan, because Canada was their country. They pounded home the importance of education as a means for us to escape the extreme poverty we found ourselves in after the war. The biggest fear I had during my youth was that my father might yank me out of school and put me to work.
Most of the students at Amherst came from families whose members had attended university for generations. They were well traveled, many having spent summers abroad. They went to concerts and listened to classical music. They read books for pleasure and attended the theater. These students were cultured, experienced, self-confident, and very bright, and I have never felt more of a yokel than when I first arrived on campus.
At Amherst I also found that most Americans knew almost nothing about Canada. If, on rare occasions, they thought about the country, they regarded it as an annex to the U.S. Nevertheless, I was classed as a foreign student and in my freshman year took advantage of the foreign-student program to stay with an American family for the Thanksgiving holiday. I was shocked when, during the traditional turkey dinner, the conversation became
very serious and political and the mother began a loud and animated argument with her husband. In my family, women did not get into discussions in which there might be disagreements. My mother would leave the serious talking in public to my father (although I learned after her death that she was quite outspoken and influential with Dad when they were alone). And she would most certainly never confront him or disagree with him when there were others around. That Thanksgiving was my first intimation of what equality of the sexes might mean.
In London, puberty in a time of straitlaced attitudes toward sex, fear of pregnancy, and “shotgun marriages” was difficult enough, but as a Japanese Canadian scarred by the war and internment, I had a small potential field of girls to consider. Restricted by my father's edict that I must find a mate who was Japanese, I protested there were too few teenage Japanese girls in all of London, so Dad allowed me to consider dating a Chinese Canadian. “Dad,” I pleaded, “there are only three Chinese families here and I don't know any of them.” “Okay, okay,” he relented, “a Native girl is all right.” When I pointed out that there might be First Nations reserves on the outskirts of town, but I certainly did not know any Native girls, he added a black girl to the list of acceptables. The only black girl I knew was Annabel Johnson, and she certainly was not interested in me. “All right, I'll allow a Jewish girl,” he said, grudgingly, having run out of visible minorities. Dad's descending order of potential mates was based on ethnicity and the extent to which he felt the women themselves would have experienced prejudice, but he failed to recognize that he implicitly accepted the stereotypes and limitations of the bigots.
In grade 12, I had asked the prettiest Japanese girl in London, Joane Sunahara, to go to a New Year's Eve dance. She turned out to be a terrific dancer and an even better kisser, and soon I had my first steady girlfriend. When I became student president at Central Collegiate, she became a vice president of students at Tech, and we were a couple at all the social events at the two schools. But once we had graduated, she went on to Ryerson in Toronto, and we understood that we would stay in touch but also date others.
Amherst College had been an all-male school since its inception in 1821. After a long, often rancorous debate, in 1974 the board of trustees voted to integrate the sexes, with female transfer students being admitted that fall and the first fully integrated freshman class admitted in 1976. Today, women and men are almost equal in number. When I was at Amherst, we dated women from the all-female schools Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges, seven and ten miles away, respectively. Each fall when I returned to Amherst, I would anxiously scan the freshman books from Smith and Mount Holyoke, looking for the three or four Asian students I would consider asking for a date. At social events, I was acutely conscious of being Japanese.
In my freshman year there was another Asian student, a Japanese American from Hawaii, on the same dorm floor, but he only exacerbated my sense of insecurity. Gordon was of very big physique for an Asian, and he had an outgoing personality. His father was a wealthy Honolulu dentist and businessman. Gordon was very conscious of clothes, and I learned from him that dirty white bucks were de rigueur and that wool challis ties, charcoal-gray suits, and pink button-down shirts were what the well-dressed person of that time wore. I couldn't afford them. But it didn't matter, because I had never been interested in clothing styles and was content to let my parents buy clothes for me. I hung around Gordon simply because he was another Asian who I felt shared with me a common background.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Gordon had been reared in privilege. Japanese Americans in Hawaii had not been incarcerated during World War II, and he had gone to Punahou, a private school in Honolulu. He was self-confident, and our shared Asianness was inconsequential to him. I think he tolerated me the way one tolerates a mutt, with a mixture of amusement and pity.
When his father visited in our freshman year, they invited me to go out to dinner with them. I was working on the breakfast shift in the Amherst dining hall, starting at 6:00 every morning and earning $1.50 an hour for spending money. They took me to a fancy restaurant, where I was floored by the cost of the offerings on the menu. When the bill arrived, I offered to pay my share with great trepidation. To my relief, Gordon's father picked up the tab, but I vowed never to go to dinner with them again. And I didn't. There was an enormous barrier created by our different experiences of the war. In Hawaii, the population of Japanese Americans was too great to consider their wholesale incarceration, even though the Japanese attack had been on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. Japanese Americans flourished in Hawaii, whereas my sense of self and personality had been sculpted by poverty, ignorance, and a sense of shame.
In the fall of 1957, my senior year at Amherst, an epidemic of Asian flu swept the world. Despite our rural setting, Amherst did not provide a sanctuary from it, and like many others, I finally succumbed to the virus. I staggered to the infirmary, only to find it filled with sick guys who booed me. There were only a handful of Asians on campus at that time, so it was easy to jokingly blame us for the Asian flu, but I was too sick to care anyway.
I collapsed into bed, feeling terrible, with only the radio as a diversion. I was jolted out of my illness when an announcer interrupted the programming to inform us that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite called Sputnik into space. It was only the size of a basketball, but it was an electrifying achievement, the first man-made object to escape the atmosphere and orbit Earth. I had no inkling that there was even a space program, and the feat captured my imagination. But in the months that followed, I and the rest of America agonized as the United States initially failed in spectacular fashion to get a satellite into orbit while the USSR announced one first after another—Laika, the first animal (a dog) in space; Yuri Gagarin, the first man; the first team of cosmonauts; Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman.
In belatedly recognizing that the Soviets were very advanced in science, engineering, math, and medicine, the U.S. became determined to catch up by pouring money into students, universities, and government labs. In the post-Sputnik frenzy, every effort was made to attract students into science, and even though I was Canadian, I later received funding to carry on with my graduate studies at the University of Chicago.
There was an excitement that came from the infusion of money and government priority for science. We were taught in graduate school that science is the most powerful way of learning about the world. Through science we probed the deepest secrets of nature—the structure of matter itself, the edges of the universe, the genetic code. Implicit in our education was the notion that science rejected emotion and subjectivity and sought only truth.
The queen of all sciences was physics, especially theoretical physics. Biology was a fuzzy science; life is messy and does not readily lend itself to the kind of exquisite experiments done in physics. And within biology, there was a definite pecking order, with taxonomy and systematics (which geneticists contemptuously referred to as stamp collecting), ecology, and organismic biology on the bottom and molecular biology and genetics at the very apex (at least, that's the way geneticists saw it).
I had always wanted to be a biologist. In my early years, I dreamed of being an ichthyologist, someone who studies fish. As a child, I fantasized about being able to fly-fish for my experimental animals and then eat them when the experiment was finished. What could be more heavenly than that? Later, when I became an avid collector of insects, I considered entomology as a possible profession. But it was in my third year of college that, as a biology honors student, I was required to take a course in genetics and fell madly in love with the elegance and mathematical precision of the discipline. I loved reading arcane and difficult papers on exquisite experiments and discovered I had a knack for setting up complex experiments to solve very specific questions.
I had been assured of a place in medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London, but I decided to abandon medicine for genetics. My mother was disconsolate for weeks after
I told her I was not going to become a doctor, and that I would study fruit flies instead.
By the time I had made this decision, it was too late to apply for scholarships or teaching assistantships. I had hoped to work with the famous geneticist Curt Stern at the University of California at Berkeley; although I had been accepted there, I was too late to receive any financial support. Joane and I were still an item and planned to get married, so I couldn't afford to go without such help. Bill Hexter, my thesis adviser at Amherst, called a friend, Bill Baker, a fruit fly geneticist at the University of Chicago, who offered me a position as his research assistant supported by his grant.
My professor Bill Baker, fellow PhD student Anita Hessler,
and me in the fly lab at the University of Chicago
When I graduated from Amherst in 1958 with an honors degree (cum laude) in biology, I knew I could at least be a good teacher, but upon entering graduate school at the University of Chicago I found I had a burning desire to do experimental science. I enrolled as a student in the Zoology Department, and Joane, whom I had married in August 1958, worked as a technician preparing specimens for the electron microscope, a highly demanding task at which she excelled. I had taken a course on marriage and sex in my last year of college, so I figured I knew all I needed to plan ahead. Unfortunately, passion and sloppiness intruded, and all of our plans for the future went out the window when Joane became pregnant. So much for the significance of an A grade in the course I had taken. Tamiko was born in January 1960, a wonderful surprise who took over my life.
Joane and Tamiko
Tamiko's arrival put a lot of pressure on me to complete my degree. Joane would work in the day while I took care of Tamiko, most often taking her to the lab, where she could sleep in the buggy while I counted fruit flies. I would take her home for dinner and then leave to spend long nights continuing the experiments. The work paid off, as I completed my doctorate in zoology in less than three years after graduating from Amherst.