This post is mostly about The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Oksuka, which my Book Club is reading this month. But I’ll also mention two other novels I’ve enjoyed that also deal in part with the Asian-American experience—Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See, and Love and Other Consolation Prizes, by Jamie Ford.
The Buddha in the Attic tells the story of Japanese women in the early 20th Century, from their arrival in the United States as mail-order brides, through their early marriages to men they didn’t know or knew only through pictures and correspondence, to their work in the fields or as servants in white families, to their roles as mothers, to their internment in the camps during World War II. All in about 140 pages.
When I say the novel “tells the story” I use the term “story” loosely, because the book has no plot. The novel is written in the first person plural, and the book is essentially a list of what happened to a variety of Japanese people, no one of whom gets more than a line or two. Here is the first paragraph, to give a flavor of how the entire book is written:
“On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years—faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiance, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.”
The writing is lyrical and moving. I wasn’t sure I would like the repetitive use of “we” and “some of us,” and at times it was monotonous. But it was also mesmerizing.
Most authors who take on the saga of a people write about representative characters. Otsuka did not do that. She let the repetitive construct of her language highlight both the similarities and the differences in this group of Japanese American women. Many of them experienced the same things in their families and work, but others had unique twists. Otsuka was able to show both the commonalities and the breadth of this population in her sparse but poetic prose.
This is the story of a group of women who came to this country, made a difference, then vanished overnight from their homes with seeming ease. Were they missed? Perhaps for a moment, but according to Otsuka, it wasn’t long before the waters stilled over the ripples they left behind.
Even without a plot, the story is effective . . . And even haunting. I wanted to know more about these women, to have each one come alive, rather than to see them all as the part of a collective.
The other two novels I’ll mention are by authors whose books I’ve enjoyed in the past—Lisa See and Jamie Ford.
Lisa See’s Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane tells the story of a family of tea growers in China in the mid-20th Century, though the village where they live is very primitive. We see the main character Li-Yan as she grows from a young girl into a successful businesswoman (after many struggles and much pain, of course). Meanwhile, her daughter, born out of wedlock, is adopted into an American family and knows nothing of her roots, other than that she was brought to a Chinese orphanage with a teacake wrapped in her blanket.
I enjoyed learning about the tea culture in China and about ethnic differences of Asian tribes near Myanmar/Thailand. It was interesting to see how much this region developed—from pre-electricity to cell phones, from no roads to air travel—in one generation. The novel also portrayed the impact of U.S. adoption on Chinese girls. I thought the ending of the book was a little abrupt (though I won’t reveal what happens at the end). Still, this was one of my favorite of See’s novels.
I put Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane in the “haunting” category because of the harsh yet romantic world of tea-growing. It was a place I did not know, yet found poignant and beautiful.
Jamie Ford also has written about the Asian-American experience. In Love and Other Consolation Prizes, Ford writes about a half-Chinese boy growing up in Seattle. Ernest Young (born Yung Kun-ai) is raffled off to a woman who owns a brothel during the Alaskan-Yukon-Pacific World’s Fair in Seattle in 1909. Ernest falls in love with two girls at the brothel, one the madam’s daughter and the other a serving girl who has ambitions to become a prostitute. The timeline goes back and forth between 1909 and 1962 (when Seattle hosted another world’s fair), and we learn what happened to Ernest and the two women he loved.
I’m a sucker for books set in the Pacific Northwest, and this book set in Seattle taught me history I hadn’t known. I remember the 1962 World’s Fair, though my parents thought I was too young to attend with them. I had not known about the AYP World’s Fair in 1909, and I relished seeing Seattle fifty years before I was ever there. I’ll call the novel haunting, because it depicted a world that was dark and tragic, yet also vaguely familiar to me because of its location.
I loved the writing in Love and Other Consolation Prizes, just as I have enjoyed Ford’s other novels. Still, much as I liked this novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet remains my favorite of Ford’s books.
Here, then, are three novels that haunt me—novels that brought to life other times and cultures and that therefore have broadened my outlook on the world.
What books about other cultures have you enjoyed?
