‘That is part of me’: Sacramento Congresswoman uses personal history to inspire change

By Edie Lambert

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    SACRAMENTO, California (KCRA) — During Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month there’s been a spotlight on the importance of education, especially with the recent increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

A Sacramento Congresswoman has been doing that work for decades, including fighting to preserve former World War II Japanese American internment camps. She has a deeply personal reason for this work.

“I was born in an internment camp,” explained Congresswoman Doris Matsui. “Poston, Arizona is on my birth certificate.”

The Poston internment camps are in Southwestern Arizona, and at one time housed more than 17,000 people. Although Matsui’s family was released when she was just three months old, she says being raised by parents and grandparents who went through that experience has shaped who she is, and how she leads.

“I realized it is who I am, and what I do is reflective of the lessons that I’ve learned as I’ve been growing up with my parents,” said Matsui. “That is really part of me, that whatever I do, whether it’s healthcare, flood protection, technology, climate, I always incorporate that into what I do.”

Her family told her about the hardships of the camps, and also the strength to rise above those challenges.

They told her about how the people in the camps teamed up to patch the shacks and barracks to make them more liveable, created their own clinics and schools, and grew their own fruits and vegetables.

They were determined that their years spent in an internment camp would not be ‘lost years’. The message she heard was that anything could be bearable or even transformed with a spirit of collaboration.

“I think through all of this, they understood how important it is to work together, be a part of a community,” Matsui said.

Matsui was part of the team that fought for $90 million in federal funding to preserve Japanese American internment camps, a bill signed by President Joe Biden in 2023. Matsui says there is no better way to understand history than to actually see what happened.

“In the fog of war, American citizens were forcibly removed to these desolate areas because they felt they were a danger to the country, disloyal. This happened, and we can’t ever let this happen again,” said Matsui.

She was reminded how easily history can repeat itself after the September 11th terrorist attacks, when Donald Trump suggested barring Muslims from entering the country and creating a government registry for Muslim Americans. This was during his first campaign for president in 2015. Trump and others in the Trump campaign used the internment of Japanese Americans to argue for the legal precedent for those actions.

“I said, wait a minute, do you realize what you’re saying?” remembered Matsui. “I believe that those of us who are Asian Americans realize we have to stand up for everyone else.

And then COVID-19 hit.

As some political leaders called it the “Chinese Virus or “Kung Flu”, anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 339% in the period from 2020 to 2021.

“I feel a sense of alarm, because it’s the targeting of people who aren’t quite like yourself or you don’t know them, you don’t understand their culture,” Matsui said. “And that’s really why we have to keep talking about how important it is to understand each other.”

Despite the challenges, she’s maintained a vision and hope planted in the most barren of places.

“What the Asian Americans understand, is there’s strength in our diversity. This country also, can be diverse, but our strength is our unity. And that’s a lesson for the whole country, I believe,” Matsui said.

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