Aly Morita is a writer, Asian American activist and daughter of the late Pat Morita. She is currently at work on her first novel at Sassafras Liberty, an artists collective in Tennessee.
In 1984, I was in the throes of becoming a nightmare teenager, having discovered boys, Aqua Net for my spiked hair and the telephone. My younger sister was an awkward nine-year old, looking more like a boy than a girl with her short hair and cherubic face. My mother was in the midst of putting the finishing touches on the house she had rebuilt tooth and nail, the one we had just moved back into—the home destroyed by a mudslide four years prior. My father had only recently rejoined my family after spending a few years in Hawai’i, nursing the wounds he had suffered after the cancellation of his series, Mr. T & Tina, the first network sitcom starring an Asian American. The home we moved back into, my parents’ marriage and my family were barely intact, but the summer of 1984 seemed full of promise.
My father had spent the last year involved with this new movie, called The Karate Kid. He endured endless jokes from my sister and I—the title was so uncool. I was a little embarrassed, knowing my father was going to star in a film about karate—my unformed identity politics just cognizant enough to discern a problem, but our taunting was quieted by the tremendous amount of satisfaction and happiness my father experienced throughout the making of the movie. He was nothing, in his eyes, if he wasn’t working.
