Archive for February 24th, 2008
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
