"Some Nikkei are biding their time; one or two more years and they can get a Japanese passport. That might be a ticket to somewhere: Canada, Australia, America. Or just going home, wherever that is. Japan might not be the final resting place.
Nikkei on the move. I might meet you on a train in Bangladesh, a marketplace in Algiers, a sauna in Stockholm, atop a mesa in Hopi country, online at CafeCreole. I'll say Wagahai wa Nikkei de aru. Are you?"
From "Circle K Cycles" by Karen Tei Yamashita. I never actually read the entire book (it's non-linear, with parts in Portuguese and Japanese) and now it's sitting in a box at my mom's house, but I don't think any other single book has done more for my understanding of myself as Nikkei. Go figure all the books about little middle-class Japanese American girls I was raised on never struck a chord with me and suddenly I found myself relating to this book about Japanese Brazilian migrant workers in Japan, years before I even began to dream of coming here. Now here I am in Niigata. The Nikkei journey isn't linear, it's circular.
My New Year's resolution for 2011 is to read 50 books in English and one book in Japanese. Maryann is doing the same thing until July (and blogging it!) and I think my buddy Matt is going to go for it too. I did it once before, in 2007... I've lost the list, but that was the year I read most of Isabel Allende's books, as well as most of my feminist reading (I read "The Feminine Mystique" over winter vacation 2006 and that set me off).
This time the goal is to prepare myself for an eventual job search in the literary world. My three categories of focus are classics, genre/popular fiction, and books by San Francisco publishers. Really I feel like I need to read far more than 50 books to be well-read, but I'm trying to learn a language too and there are only so many hours in the day.
A friend sent me this great New York Times article about San Francisco's literary scene, of which my favorite part is the guy reading his way through a breakup by devouring "Tropic of Cancer" in one sitting in a cafe in North Beach. I don't want to admit it but this might also be what I'm trying to accomplish here. ("Tropic of Cancer," by the way, is an excellent book to read yourself through a breakup, but that's in a box at my mom's house too. Womp womp.)
I'm not starting the count until January 1, but I've read about a book a week for the past month. Right now I'm reading "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" by Yukio Mishima. (This is probably not a good book to read yourself through a breakup.) I'm hoping it will be easy to keep the momentum.
Isn't this great? I'm going to print it out and hang it on my wall.
Showing posts with label Japanese American issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japanese American issues. Show all posts
12.20.2010
7.12.2010
New layout! (sort of)
If you're reading this on my blog's main page, you might notice a few differences. Hella Angeleno is now Hella 日本 (that's "Nihon" or "Japan" for the majority of you reading my blog), and the layout has changed! I'm not 100% sure about all this floral nonsense, but all the solid colors I tried made my blog look like the website for the historical society, so for now it stays. I suppose that is a risk of using this particular photo in the header... it's not exactly, you know, edgy. But too bad, I'm keeping it!
Speaking of the photo--it was taken sometime in the 1950s in Niigata, Japan. The lady on the right is my great-grandmother, Shige Sakuma. You can't tell from the cropped version, but in the original photo it's clear that she's the American visitor, with a nice bag and shoes. I have no idea who the other people in the photo are.
I don't know if any of you have read the book Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (or seen the movie with Elijah Wood, which is probably more likely), but I suddenly find myself in the same position as the "hero" of that book. He's full of romantic visions of his family history; he steps off a plane in the country of his ancestors, with only a black-and-white photograph to guide him--and is immediately greeted by a flatulent dog and a guide whose English he can barely understand. No one is interested in his family; they just want to know if everyone in America is rich and has a giant penis, and require multiple explanations when he asks for a vegetarian dish in a restaurant (he ends up with potatoes). As crazy as it sounds, this is what I want--to bring my connection with Japan into the present, no matter how mundane or absurd the results. I'm not interested in lying to people about my "samurai ancestors"; I want to see rice fields.
(And rice fields I shall see. Hooray inaka!)
Speaking of the photo--it was taken sometime in the 1950s in Niigata, Japan. The lady on the right is my great-grandmother, Shige Sakuma. You can't tell from the cropped version, but in the original photo it's clear that she's the American visitor, with a nice bag and shoes. I have no idea who the other people in the photo are.
I don't know if any of you have read the book Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (or seen the movie with Elijah Wood, which is probably more likely), but I suddenly find myself in the same position as the "hero" of that book. He's full of romantic visions of his family history; he steps off a plane in the country of his ancestors, with only a black-and-white photograph to guide him--and is immediately greeted by a flatulent dog and a guide whose English he can barely understand. No one is interested in his family; they just want to know if everyone in America is rich and has a giant penis, and require multiple explanations when he asks for a vegetarian dish in a restaurant (he ends up with potatoes). As crazy as it sounds, this is what I want--to bring my connection with Japan into the present, no matter how mundane or absurd the results. I'm not interested in lying to people about my "samurai ancestors"; I want to see rice fields.
(And rice fields I shall see. Hooray inaka!)
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