The Nisei Daughter Three and Four

In the beginning of chapter three, An Unpredictable Japanese Woman, Monica Sone tells us that she wants to be a dancer. But she doesn’t want to be a Japanese dancer, she wants to be an American dancer. I found it interesting that her father said no because he thought that she would become a geisha like over in Japan. But he still doesn’t want Sone to become a dancer in America because they dance “trashy”. “I lumbered out to the main auditorium to help serve tea, reeling like a grounded butterfly” (pg 46). I found this sentence interesting because it described how she felt like she was living in America but yet she still has to practice Japanese culture. All she wants to do is be free but she is just a “grounded butterfly”living as a Japanese American.

The part where Monica, her mother, and Mrs. Kato are trying to get on the streetcar I thought that it was funny how she was really embarrassed when her mother and Mrs. Kato were speaking Japanese and everyone was looking at them. I think that this shows that Sone doesn’t want to be seen as a Japanese girl but rather an American girl. I also liked how she added that her mother tries very hard to learn English and she talks about for a little while in the book. But her father on the other hand doesn’t feel he should need to learn English and she only only talks about him for a paragraph or two.

In the second section, The Japanese Touch, I noticed that Sone loves American Holidays but when it comes time to celebrate Tenchosetsu  she doesn’t want to go and has no way of escaping it because she is Japanese. Also when the ceremony is done the last sentence she writes is “We scattered in all directions, as we raced home to recapture our holiday plans” (pg. 70). It sounds to me like that ceremony was just like school and that it wasn’t considered a real holiday to Sone. But then it seems that she only likes the holidays where she can have fun and be “free” like the Japanese picnic one. I liked this chapter, too, because it talked about all the holidays they celebrate, Japanese and American ones, and I enjoyed reading the similarities and differences.

Add a comment February 24, 2008

“A Shocking Fact of Life” and “The Stubborn Twig”

Finally a book that I can understand the first time through and I don’t have to flip three pages back to know what Kingston was actually talking about. But anyway, during class we were talking about the very first paragraph of The Nisei Daughter which was “The first five years of my life I lived in amoebic  bliss, not knowing  whether I was a plant of an animal, at the old Carrollton Hotel on the waterfront of Seattle. One day when I was a happy six-year-old, I made a shocking discovery that I had Japanese blood. I was a Japanese” (pg 3). I thought that it was interesting that she described herself as this blob that was running around in life being very happy but in the next line she is not very happy to find out that she is Japanese. Then on page nineteen she says “I didn’t see how I could be a Yankee and Japanese at the same time. It was like being born with two heads.” She is American Japanese but doesn’t understand how she can be both; she thinks that she can only be both. Here is the beginning of change for her in America.

In the Woman Warrior the father was rarely there for his kids but in the Nisei Daughter Monica Sone’s father is upfront and center in his children’s lives. Another point in the Woman Warrior is that Maxine Hong Kingston told stories that her mother told her and she had these ghosts that I couldn’t figure out and it didn’t feel like a real memoir. Yet The Nisei Daughter feels like a real memoir because Monica Sone tells her reader’s her story of her childhood and how she grew up. Her characters in her book actually have names unlike in Kingston’s “memoir”. I also liked the fact that Sone’s father employed white American’s to work for him and when he got arrested his workers stood up for him. It’s the whole idea of interracial relationships between the Japanese and white Americans.

Bottom line I think I will actually enjoy this memoir.

1 comment February 24, 2008

Japanese Immigrants

After reading the two chapters in Strangers from a Different Land I had no idea that the Japanese were forbidden to immigrate anywhere. I thought it was interesting that, like the Chinese, Japanese laborers immigrated to Hawaii or California in order to make enough money to buy back there land and basically be rich in their native land, Japan. I also found it interesting that on page 45 Takaki wrote “Japanese migrants had a higher literacy rate than their European counterparts: according to the U.S Census for 1910, only 9.2 percent of Japanese immigrants ten years of age and older were illiterate, compared to 12.7 percent of foreign born whites in the same age group.” I also found it curious how the Japanese took more pride in who they sent over to America and the Hawaiian Islands than the Chinese did. They had a strong central government who screened the Japanese immigrants who applied to immigrate across the seas. They made sure that these people were strong, healthy and literate. The Japanese government wanted to “maintain Japan’s national honor” (pg 46) while some of their people were in America and in Hawaii. Also the Japanese encouraged women to migrate to Hawaii and California in order to avoid problems with prostitution, gambling, and drunkenness. Women were also allowed to work in services such as inns unlike the Chinese women who only worked on farms. I liked how Japanese women were educated side by side with men in Japan which made most women who immigrated more literate than Chinese women. But, like the Chinese women, hundreds of Japanese women were forced into prostitution.

The second part of the assigned reading was about how the Japanese who took more pride in who they sent over were discriminated against. I think that they went through more awful things than the Chinese because during World War One Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps because Americans thought that they were spies. On page 209 “In his testimony to Congress shortly before its passage, V.S McClatchy of California declared: ‘Of all the races ineligible to citizenship, the Japanese are the least assimilable and the most dangerous to this country ….With great pride of race, they have no idea of assimilating in the sense of amalgamation.’” This is sad to think that my country treated the Japanese, Chinese, and most likely many other ethnicities like garbage and it’s not fair to people of a different race that want to immigrate to America. They went from being better than the Chinese to worse than “all the races”.

1 comment February 17, 2008

Practice…

Well even though I already took the test I’m still going to write out a practice exam question.

Strangers from a Different Shore by Ronald Takaki is a book that has the history of Asian’s immigrating to America and all the different problems they run into especially between men and women. Takaki writes about the Chinese immigrating to both Hawaii and California where they were wanted and accepted at first but then later, in California, were hated because all these different stereotypes were floating around the United States. In Hawaii men were welcomed and encouraged to bring their wives and children, mainly because their sugar plantations needed more workers, but in California the Chinese were treated like dirt. California only wanted men to immigrate to America and told women they were not welcomed here when they passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act.” But many Chinese women were left in China because they needed to tend to their family or because they bound their feet couldn’t travel to America. Other Chinese women were sold into becoming prostitutes. Takaki tells his readers this sad story on page 41: “One of these prostitutes, Lilac Chen was only six years old when she was brought to San Francisco. Years later, at the age of eighty-four, she remembered the day her father said he was taking her to her grandmother’s house: ‘And that worthless father, my own father, imagine…sold me on the ferry boat. Locked me in a cabin while he was negotiating my sale.’” Women were seen as sex objects or a housewife but never someone who was worth anything to anyone because people thought Chinese women couldn’t work, but men, on the other hand, were seen as good workers who would work for less than American men.

Add a comment February 17, 2008

“Strangers From A Different Shore”

While I was reading these two sections of the book I was disappointed with the way white people in America were treating the Chinese and other foreign people. Who are we to tell them that we don’t want them here or to ban them from our country when America wasn’t ours to begin with? We took this land from the Native Americans a long time ago so how can we stand there and tell the Chinese to go home?

In the first section, Tan Heung Shan and Gam Saan, we were told that Asians came from all over China and migrated to either California or Hawaii. In the beginning the Chinese men were welcomed to the “New World” and were allowed to dig for gold. After a while though the Chinese were banned from California due to the new Chinese Exclusion Act. But yet in Hawaii Chinese men were encouraged to bring their wives and children so they can all work together. In California white people didn’t want to be bothered with women and children of the Chinese race. Another reason women couldn’t make it to Hawaii or California was that they bound their feet which would unable them to walk or cross the ocean. But sometimes when some women did cross the ocean they were sold into prostitution. Either way it was hard for Chinese women and children to cross the ocean.

In the second section, Gam Saan Haak, we learned of how the Chinese were first accepted in California and then becoming unwanted in America. They, then, were treated equally with equal pay and equal labor of the white men but later on they were treated as less than equal. Chinese men had to work twice as hard for less pay than they American man. While reading this piece I was very sad to learn of how people wrote horrible things about the Chinese and how they treated them at their work place. I never knew these things actually happened but then again look at the way we treated the Native Americans.

Add a comment February 10, 2008

Oh Frank Chin!

All I have to say is Oh My God! Frank Chin’s essay was so boring and repetitive and argumentative. This was a hard essay to get through and not feel personal about some of the things he was talking about in his essay. Now I wouldn’t be the first to say go out and read Maxine Hong Kingston memoir because I personally didn’t like it very much but for Chin to sit there and bash her memoir and call it fake isn’t fair. Yes, I thought there were some places in her novel that were fake but after reading quotes that she said in Chin’s essay I understand that her memoir is her “vision”. In order for her to get her story across to many people she felt that she needed to elaborate some of the details of her life. Her Fa Mu Lan story is twisted to contrast her life not necessarily the “real” version of the story. I was disappointed that he would bash someone of his own ethnicity and race because he doesn’t agree with her memoir. But like people were saying in class maybe he is mad that her story is well-known and his isn’t. What about stories and myths that have been passed down generation to generation by non-Asians, how do we know that they aren’t embellished? But unlike Frank Chin we don’t sit here and write a really long essay expressing our concern about how such and such story is fake therefore this person is fake over and over again.

We all know that he doesn’t feel that Asian women are suppressed like in Kingston memoir but rather Asian men are because they aren’t sex symbols. When we were discussing Asian men and women in pop culture and we were naming men such as Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, we saw them as crime fighting hero, not a sexy man. However Bruce Lee did have a nice body, only boys bought his posters because they wanted to be like him. Jackie Chan on the other hand are in movies with some fine looking men like Owen Wilson and Wilson is always getting the girl in the end but not Jackie Chan. Yet, there is Lucy Liu who is in Charlie’s Angels as a hot ass kicking woman. So in our society we see Asian men in martial arts but Asian woman as sex symbols who can kick some butt.

Add a comment February 7, 2008

“At the Western Palace” and “A Song for a Barabrian Reed Pipe”

When I first read “At Western Palace” I noticed right away that Moon Orchid, Brave Orchid’s sister, is the exact opposite of Kingston mother. Brave Orchid had created a wonderful life back in China when she lived there and when she came to America she had to start over raising her children while taking on odd jobs here and there. But Moon Orchid needed her sister to buy her pane ticket and also she doesn’t know how to wash dishes or fold laundry. When Moon Orchid learns her husband re married and never wanted to bring her to America, which is refrerred to as the Gold Mountain, Brave Orchid wants her to confront him but Moon Orchid is too shy and afraid to do that. I found Moon Orchid quite annoying because she was too afraid to do anything and she couldn’t even do simple house work. When they finally go to the hospital to see Moon Orchid’s husband he was very cold to all of them and tells Moon Orchid that he wants nothing to do with her. I’m not a big fan of the husband because he seemed to hold a certain power over Moon Orchid. When i read the end of the chapter and learned that Moon Orchid dies in the insane asylum I almost knew that it was going to happen because Moon Orchid was very weak unlike her sister. I was upset that she didn’t become stronger and try to confront her husband and eventually overcome the “ghosts” that she saw in L.A. and Stockton.

In ” A Song for a Barabrian Reed Pipe” Kingston is young and in grade school. One day she teases this other girl that is exactly like her, shy and timid and follows this one girl around in school. Kingston calls this girl mean names, pinches her cheeks, and pulls her hair. I feel like she was tormenting her because Kingston didn’t like herself and because this girl reminded her of herself she felt the need to torment her for what seemed liek hours. Maybe by tormenting her Kingston felt satisfied or even more upset because she realized she can’t change who she is. Then when her mother tried to marry her off to a “fresh off the boat” Chinese man  she makes herself act strange deliberatly. She smashes dishes and spills soup and she even pretends to have a limp when all of these visitors come to visit her. I think that she acts weird because she doesn’t want to follow the Chinese tradition or end up like any of ehr ancestors. I think that she wants to be her own person and wants to live like American’s do. The when she goes crazy on her mother one day accusing her of trying to make her a mother and slave and of lying to her when she told her stories. I think that she was sick of her mother always cutting her down and telling her what to do that it was all bottle up inside and she couldn’t hold it in any longer that it all came out. I was really confused when her mother called her “Ho Chi Kuei” which means a “Good Foundation Ghost”. I’m not sure why her mother called her a ghost and I’m very confused about why she did. I think towards the end of the chapter Kingston finally accepts her past and her Chinese culture and that this chapter combines all of the chapters of strong women versus weak and vunerable women.

1 comment February 3, 2008