No-No Boy is a multimedia project of Brown University doctoral students Julian Saporiti & Erin Aoyama. The project uses music to teach historical lessons of the Asian American experience. Both Saporiti and Aoyama have personal connections to the subject. Saporiti family were refugees during the Vietnam War, while Aoyama had family that were incarnated at US internment camps during the second World War.
No-No Boy takes it name from the No-No Boys who were Japanese Americans who refused to pledge allegiance to the US government or be drafted during World War II as a protest to family and friends being detained in concentration camps. These experiences provided the basis of John Okada’s classic 1957 novel No-No Boy.
“Two Candles In The Dark” is set in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, one of the ten Japanese prison camps set up by the US government. It was at this camp that Aoyama’s grandmother was imprisoned.
Looking back at the history of the US treatment of Asian refugees and immigrants also helps to understand the current issues faced with immigration. Many of the arguments used to justify the separation of children from parents by US border officials are the same arguments used to justify past atrocities. Also efforts to ban specific ethnic and religious groups and the mistreatment of refugees is triggered by the same xenophobia which adversely affected past marginalized groups. Sadly there continues to be a failure to learn from history.