Mariko Rooks, Trumbull '21

Black Yonsei: A Superheroine Origin Story

By Mei Chen

I imagine that Mariko Rooks inspires fear in lesser humans.

Over the course of an hour and a half that slips away much faster than expected, it becomes abundantly clear that this is a woman who adapts, overcomes, but never gives up. Mariko cares—about individuals, about populations, about the present and the past and the future—with such fervency that within the short span of our conversation, I begin to believe in the possibility of changing the world.

As the History of Medicine major tells me about her time poring over archives, I joke that she reminds me of Indiana Jones, without the whip. We both laugh a bit (a tiny bit—it wasn’t a particularly good joke), before she pauses and says, “Well—yes, but also no—he’s all sorts of problematic.” At which point I admit that I’ve never seen Indiana Jones, and we both laugh for real.

Obviously, after the interview, I had to look up what’s wrong with Indiana Jones, and, well—a lot. Not only does he not, in fact, spend very much time doing research at all, he’s also honestly just quite terrible. The lovable Harrison Ford makes us forgive the sins of his character: a womanizer who, to put it politely, robs graves and steals culturally significant artifacts. Meanwhile, Mariko, who is in the midst of completing a dual Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Public Health, has devoted her undergraduate career to tracing the intertwining of medicine and the transatlantic slave trade and wrestling with the relationship between health outcomes and race in modern America. It’s an unfair comparison, really—if I had to choose a role model between the two, I would, without hesitation, give my (admittedly insincere) apologies to Dr. Jones.

I first approached Mariko about this interview after hearing of her work as a research assistant for Dr. Carolyn Roberts, who taught the incredible HSHM 241: Sickness and Health in African American History. Rated an astonishing 4.91 out of 5, this is a course where every lecture ended in applause, and the last one in a standing ovation from every student packed into SSS 114; already in awe at the incomparable Professor Roberts, I wanted to know everything about the kind of student involved in her process. This conversation with Mariko ended up being one of those things in which every expectation is met, and subsequently exceeded—no surprises, in the best of ways.

Mariko is Black and Japanese, a melding of cultures that has shaped her passion for her work. Living in California meant a strong sense of her identity as a fourth-generation Japanese American, or Yonsei—like many Japanese Americans in California, Mariko is the descendant of immigrants who moved to the United States for agricultural labor after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, whereupon racial housing segregation formed a tight-knit community of those occupying a shared space far from home. Mariko describes the prevalence in her community today of institutions that are only Japanese American: churches, summer camps, pre-professional programs. As a teenager, Mariko participated for five years in the Kizuna Leadership Program, which is the largest Japanese American leadership program in Southern California and teaches the history of Japanese American activism and identity. Mariko notes, however, that the building up of her Asian self came almost at the expense of her full identity as a biracial woman. Her high school was incredibly diverse, but with academic success obviously stratified by race; Mariko describes it as a “weirdly insidious” experience, being so heavily involved in the Japanese American community yet also being the only Black girl in her Advanced Placement classes.

“College was the first time I was really able to explore what it means to be Black, and my position in that community,” she says, pointing to her involvement with Cultural Connections—Yale’s pre-orientation program designed to emphasize the experiences of underrepresented students—and the Afro-American Cultural Center, as well as the newly rebranded Asian-ish (formerly Yale Hapa), an organization of multi-racial students of Asian descent. “Having time away from home meant being able to unpack my own intergenerational trauma with a really supportive community at Yale … marginalized communities at Yale are really good at being able to talk about the effects of oppression.”

Mariko has extended this more recently developed understanding of Black trauma and oppression to her research; her work with Dr. Roberts encompasses the history of medicine as related to the slave trade, as well as the overall history of Blackness in America. She describes it as a lot of searching through archival documents and looking for primary sources.

“The issue is that we have two fields of study,” she tells me. “There’s the slave trade and the history of science, and despite the fact that slavery and, specifically, the migration of people and medical knowledge has transformed the way that medicine has developed—the fact that medicine has developed as a result of the slave trade—those connections haven’t been explored that deeply. It’s an emerging field. How did systems of thought and resources and ideologies of African health influence the development of health and healthcare in Western medicine?”

It’s an emerging field, and Mariko is a pioneer at the forefront. Each of Dr. Roberts’ research assistants has their own personal focus, and Mariko’s focus is the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in response to needs for mass medicine that arose as a result of the slave trade. For the past several months, her task has been to identify the suppliers of medicines on slave ships, which would likely implicate those individuals and corporations in the slave trade itself. Mariko informs me that in most instances, profits made from supplying drugs to slave ships were subsequently invested in the trade of people; her time is spent detangling these webs of nebulous relationships. With COVID-19 looming in the background, Mariko’s work is still full steam ahead, thanks to the wonders of high-speed Internet—this summer, she will be examining primary and secondary sources of enslaved holdings in Africa, in communication with private and public archives. She considers it an adventure, like Alice jumping down the rabbit hole, but one with poignant consequences.

“We’re telling the stories of people whose voices cannot be heard, whose stories we cannot fully know,” she says. “These are opportunities to try to do them justice in whatever way we can.”

In addition, Mariko will also be working on her senior thesis this summer; both a deviation from her work with Professor Roberts and a return to her Japanese heritage, her thesis will look at the development of intergenerational Japanese American health practitioners in the late twentieth century. She plans to continue writing this historical narrative of Japanese American healthcare as she completes her Masters of Public Health in 2022, flipping the angle in her fifth year at Yale to examine the patient side of the relationship. Together, her analyses of Black and Japanese American health over the course of American history form the foundation of Mariko’s ultimate goal—a career spent working to inform and rewrite public health policy in the United States in order to improve health outcomes for impoverished and minority populations.

Mariko says she’s wanted to pursue a career in public health since high school—in an attempt to reconcile a love of biology with a refusal to be a doctor, one intensive Internet search led to the discovery of public health as a viable future. Subsequently, she was accepted into the Osborne Head and Neck Institute (OHNI) Medical Scholars Program, a clinical internship for high school students that she describes as the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life.

“I really struggled intellectually with it, but I think that was really, really good for me—I got a really fundamental, hands-on sense of why healthcare and medicine is so important,” she explains. She goes on to recount the profound impact of learning from predominantly surgeons of color, giving acknowledgment to Dr. Reena Gupta, whom she describes as a personal mentor. She also, quite vehemently, continues to balk at the idea of pursuing medicine herself—as it turns out, the OHNI Medical Scholars Program inadvertently cemented that reluctance. “I passed out during surgery,” she admits. “They said, ‘If you feel faint, leave immediately,’ and then it started and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the ground and everyone said, ‘We literally just told you!’”

A few years down the line, it’s obvious Mariko has made the right decision for herself. She has no regrets about the academic path she’s chosen, and is positively thrilled at the idea of staying at Yale for another year to complete her MPH. She points to the smaller class sizes and incredible faculty at the Yale School of Public Health, being able to spend a year in New Haven without the academic stress of the undergraduate college experience, and, of course, being able to spend more time with Dr. Carolyn Roberts. It’s difficult to convey the extent of Dr. Roberts’ impact on Mariko—as an academic, as an activist, as an individual—but, as expected, Mariko herself puts it best.

“She’s able to inspire a kind of ethical and thoughtful and compassionate learning within an academically competitive institution like Yale,” says Mariko. She pauses briefly, then continues after some reflection: “If she’s somehow mythical, I would not be surprised.”

And in the end, after we say goodbye and hang up the Zoom call, what sticks with me the most isn’t exactly how Mariko’s identities have forged her path, or how that path manages to both honor the past and dream of a better future. What resonates is how that path and the person who walks it have both flourished under the guidance of a mentor who truly, genuinely cares, who has taught her pupil to do the same. Harry had Dumbledore, Batman had Alfred, Mariko has Dr. Roberts. For the record, my personal research tells me that none of Indiana Jones’ adventures feature this sort of relationship—maybe that’s where he went wrong.