2007 UC Davis Fall Convocation

Convocation remarks

Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef's introduction

Next, we’ll hear from Isao Fujimoto, senior lecturer emeritus, who helped start Asian American studies here and our Department of Human and Community Development. Isao’s insights about community are informed and very personal, gleaned initially from his experiences growing up on an Indian reservation in Washington State and then in a number of internment camps during World War II. He believes and demonstrates that the most inspired learning and community building take place when people connect and truly care. Isao?

By Isao Fujimoto

More than 40 years ago I was in the Philippines researching village development. One remote village was in the mountains of Northern Luzon, home to numerous indigenous tribes like the Bontocs, Ifugao, Ibaloi and the Kalingas.

It was near Christmas time 1965 when my wife and I were invited to join a celebration in a Kalinga village. As we were sitting in their makeshift village church, a small boy appeared and presented my wife with a gift—one egg.

As inspirations, emeritus faculty member Isao Fujimoto credits his father, who gave him a stamp album during a difficult time, and a very poor boy in the Philippines who gave him an egg. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)

We were immediately struck by what that gift represented. In that very poor village, one egg was a very precious commodity. That special act of generosity left a deep impression on us.

I can trace my being in the Philippines to another generous gift given to me many years before.

I grew up on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Eastern Washington where over a hundred immigrant families from Japan were farming on land leased from the Indians.

When World War II began, everyone of Japanese descent on the West Coast was rounded up by the U.S. government and evacuated to the interior. Our family was imprisoned first in the Heart Mountain, Wyo., concentration camp and later at Tule Lake, in Modoc County, which was my introduction to California.

These camps confined everyone behind barbed wire with armed guard towers spaced every l00 yards.

It was in the Tule Lake camp that my father gave me a gift that helped me transcend being imprisoned, leading to what I am doing now.

I had started collecting stamps, and, seeing that I had little equipment, my father looked through a Sears Roebuck catalogue and ordered a stamp album. It was the biggest Scott’s album available and it cost $5.

As a cook in the prison camp, my father was paid $16 a month — he had diverted nearly a third of his month’s pay to get me that album!

The impact of that gift was liberating. As I studied the images of stamps from everywhere, my imagination flew me over the barbed wires to places all over the world, firing up my curiosity to know all the amazing people on this planet.

My father’s gift of the stamp album got me started on a journey leading to my work as a rural sociologist doing community development with people from all over the world.

Today is a day for remembering that all of us, like the little Kalinga boy and my father, are bearers of life-inspiring gifts.

Some, like all of you here, bear gifts of intellectual talent; others add or bring gifts of creativity, courage or compassion. It is not our purpose as a university to search for who is the most gifted, or to define gifts in narrow terms. Rather, our purpose is to encourage each of us to discover our gifts, whatever they might be, and to deepen and strengthen them, for the common good.

The follow-up question,” What shall we do with our gifts?” can be answered by the choices we make.

Some years ago I saw a billboard at California’s northern end of Highway 99 stating: “If you are a doctor, our community welcomes you. We don’t have any one like you. Please call this number.”

For those of you considering medicine, would you also consider responding to such an ad?

Say you graduate as an English major — will you write copy for a public relations firm to get people to buy more things they do not need? Or will you be an investigative reporter or teach youth in an inner-city school to write expressively about their families and their dreams?

If you become a lawyer, you can devise ways for Fortune 500 companies to avoid paying taxes or you can do pro bono work for the victims of Katrina denied payment on their insurance claims.

If your interests are in agricultural business, you can become a junior executive with Con Agra, Cargill or Dole, or you can help manage a farmer’s market like the local one in Davis that enables 50 local producers to make a decent living while adding social and environmental vitality to our region.

No matter what our age or major, no matter what our resources or life circumstances, the world stands ready to receive our gifts.

The most important question we’ll face won’t be on an exam or during a performance review, it will be the question we answer in our everyday lives here at the university, with our families and in our communities.

Everyone here has the potential to make a difference and inspire others. How much and in what ways will depend on how we answer the question: “Today and every day, how will we share our gifts?”

Isao Fujimoto is a senior lecturer emeritus in Asian American studies.

Last updated Oct. 1, 2007

Questions or comments? Contact Susanne Rockwell, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-2542