Our Ivy Farmers have enjoyed another night of soulful talk and sinful sushi. Lucky for us, our host will often serve refreshments that are aligned with our book; and so the theme of this week’s meeting was Japan. Our book, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, was a rhapsodic tale of Japanese “picture brides,” young women who were purchased by proxy and sent overseas to husbands in California with only a picture in their hand, and no idea of the life of servitude and solitude to come.
Otsuka traces these women through the early part of the 20th Century to their eventual round-up into internment camps during WWII. She writes in the first person plural, “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house…” a literary device that only sharpens their stark separation from American society. Like many first generation immigrants, their children eventually reject them as well; forgetting their language and becoming rebellious teenagers. The women have lost their family and homeland, and finally their own children even as they accompany them west to the camps.
I came to understand how a community that ignores or marginalizes those who are different, ‘the other,’ can be silent and indifferent as they are taken away. I couldn’t help but smile as I listened to Mitt and Newt dissect their immigration policy.
MountainMornings 