My great aunt Katherine, a nisei Japanese American from Hawai‘i, and my great uncle Joe, a southern Italian immigrant from Satriano, Calabria, met at the height of World War II in Philadelphia, where they applied for a marriage license on August 22, 1945, shortly after the war ended.
If this story sounds like the American Dream, in certain ways, it was. Their mother tongues were Japanese and Italian—or, more specifically, regional dialects of these languages that their parents spoke—and they fell in love in English, their shared second language, as they acclimated to the local culture of South Philadelphia in the 1940s. At the time of their union, however, interracial marriage was still illegal in more than half of the nation, and they both faced discrimination that was underscored by federal legislation based on ethnic origin, such as the Immigration Act of 1924, which targeted people from East Asia and southern Europe. As newlyweds, they relocated for about a year to the island of O‘ahu to be near my great aunt’s mother and siblings...
