Page 106 and I was already shaking tears off. Otsuka’s unrelenting prose wears down every emotional defense you’ve set up until you’re going through the raw emotions of a young boy, his aging single mother and his iconoclastic teenage sister paying the price for the crime of their birth place and time – they were of Japanese descent, born on the very American soil of 1942 California.
We often forget how systemic the oppression was – that the postmen made snide or overt insults at Americans writing to their Japanese neighbors, that school children were frowned at for waving a hello to their once-equal classmates, that jobs were scarce after Pearl Harbor or of the Japanese-American’s sheer identity crisis when they barely spoke Japanese and lived in a society where Pearl Harbor was deeply entrenched in memory.
And it’s a straight line from subtle WW2 American-racism to today. It’s a straight line to our violin teacher refusing to teach a non-brahmin child, the school that undeniably rejected applications on the basis of caste, the schoolyard gangs formed and the hellos that were never heard on the basis of systemic racism, casteism, sexism or xenophobism.
1942 to 2021, the system lives on. Julie’s effortless prose makes it easier to see.
Perplexed Potatoes 