substack.com · 3 hours ago

Doing Her Part - by Sue Granzella

Shizue Seigel's earliest memory is of stooping in a California strawberry field beside Japanese Americans who had lost everything to wartime incarceration - people who responded to that loss by quietly building irrigation systems together, plank by plank, working in the collective spirit she would spend a lifetime honoring. Displaced across segregated Baltimore, occupied Japan, and the margins of every room she entered as a child, she learned something that would quietly shape everything that followed: "I always had one or two friends, and that's what saved my life - that ability to connect somehow and learn about the kindness of strangers." As an adult, she turned that hard-won understanding outward, walking toward whoever stood at the edge of a gathering, recognizing in them the loneliness she once carried herself. Now in her late seventies, she directs Write Now! SF Bay, coaxing stories from over 500 writers and artists of color who were often raised, as she puts it, "to keep their heads down, and their mouths shut." What Shizue understands - and what her life demonstrates - is that sustainable change doesn't announce itself from a podium; it moves quietly through people doing their part, one shared story at a time.