By: Izzy Cheung, Staff Writer
Content Warning: Discussions of Japanese internment camps and racism.
As a student who’s taken their fair share of Communication and English courses, I’m no stranger to digging around large bodies of literature in search of deeper meanings. To me, looking for literary metaphors is like looking into a stagnant lake and trying to find fish; most of the time, I only end up seeing myself reflected on the surface. I was writing a brief summary about Joy Kogawa’s Obasan when I had an interesting thought about what this kind of novel means for Asian Heritage Month in Canada.
It’s important to note I am writing from a Chinese Canadian perspective, and can empathize with similar cultural experiences. However, I understand my experiences will be different from those experienced by Japanese Canadians, as differences in Asian diasporas will impact the ways we encounter life.
Kogawa is a Japanese Canadian poet and author who was born in 1935 in Vancouver, BC. At the age of six, Kogawa and her family were placed in a Japanese internment camp, and the experiences there informed the narratives she writes about in her novel. The book centres around the struggles of Japanese Canadians during and after their time in the internment camps. Despite being written in 1981, this book still serves as a reminder of the chilling chapters of history Canada has tried to keep hidden — some that should never be forgotten.
Obasan follows Naomi Nakane, a grade-school teacher whose family was separated by the displacement created by internment camps. After her uncle passes away, Naomi is tasked with taking care of her aunt (obasan in Japanese). Living with obasan opens Naomi’s eyes to the pain caused by internment camps — not just to her obasan, but others in the family, including herself.
A major plot point in Kogawa’s novel is obasan’s reluctance to discuss her experiences in the internment camp. Her resistance towards topics close to the camps made me consider how many other Japanese Canadians may be living the same way. As I read, Kogawa’s novel became a lake, in which I saw the fish, as well as my reflection. From my experience, a common characteristic in Asian households is a determination to appear as strong as possible on the outside. This often means bottling up any feelings of pain or hurt, mostly because we want to be as little of a burden as possible.
I considered this in regard to a trope often seen in various media — that of the model minority myth. This stereotype views individuals of Asian descent as being smart, mathematically-inclined, straight-‘A’ students. More often than not, this also includes depictions of Asians, particularly women, as meek and submissive. In short, some attribute Asians as being “self-sufficient” and taking things with “cold detachment.” These people assume such harsh experiences have no emotional effects on our communities.
While it may seem easy to say stereotypes are based on false characteristics and shouldn’t be taken seriously, it occurred to me that there are some in Asian diasporic communities who were forced to be silent about their experiences as a means of survival. Reading this novel, I wondered how many Japanese elders have refrained from talking about these traumatic experiences because they don’t want to cause trouble for their descendants.
Kogawa “did not want to be thought of as Japanese” and, like many other Japanese Canadians, attempted to think of herself as “a white person” in order to “forget the painful past.” It wasn’t until she read letters written by another Japanese Canadian woman when Kogawa realized that forgetting can be just as harmful as remembering.
Through the surface of the lake, as well as obasan’s memories, the purpose of Kogawa’s text became clear — in Kogawa’s words: “Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you, we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside.”
Purchase Obasan online at Massy Books’ website: storestock.massybooks.com.
