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Speak, Okinawa : a memoir
2021
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I WORSE THAN THE DOG I asked my dad why all the great stories were sad ones. "Most good stories are mysteries," he said. "The author is like a detective trying to get to the bottom of some truth, and happiness is a mystery that can come apart in your hands when you try to unravel it. Sadness, on the other hand, is infinitely more resilient. Scrutiny only adds to its depths and weight." --Bliss Broyard, "My Father's Daughter" My first memory: a dog bites me, on the arm, not hard, but just enough to jar me into consciousness. His name is Shiro, which means "white" or "castle" or "generation" in Japanese, depending on how it is written. Shiro has long white hair, blue eyes, and a grayish-pink nose. I am three years old and he is just above my height, but I can still look him in the eyes. I believe we understand each other, our arrangement. I believe, at age three, I've earned his subservience. He carries himself proudly. Majes­tic, like a horse. So one day, when no one else is around, in the backyard, beside the cinderblock fence, as he lowers his head to drink from a shiny porcelain bowl of water, I try to mount him. He growls and bites me. He doesn't frighten me. He embarrasses me, shames me. And as a small child, an only child, accustomed to endless doting, I wouldn't tolerate these strange emotions. I cry and run to my mother. I don't tell her why I'm crying. I'm afraid that if I tell her she'll scold me worse than the dog did. Shiro is not to be ridden like a horse. Shiro was my obaasan's dog. Obaa, my grandmother, my mother's mother, found Shiro when he was still a puppy, eyes closed, curled up into a ball, quivering on a pile of garbage. Often at night, Obaa pushed a cart through the streets of Kadena, a town located on the island of Okinawa, where my mother was born and raised, where I lived for six months when I was three years old. Often at night, when the air thinned and cooled, when the sounds of jets, helicopters, and gunfire com­ing from the nearby military bases quieted, Obaa pushed a cart through the streets and rummaged through trash heaps, search­ing for cans and bottles to sell, scraps of wood and metal to reuse. She lived in a house with a rusted tin roof, a rusted tin gate, a floor raised from the mud by cinder blocks, with a single room for cooking, eating, drinking, sleeping, and playing cards, a back­yard for bathing and growing sweet potatoes, which she ate for every meal. She lived almost all her life in this house, the house where my mother grew up, the house my grandfather built after their previous house was destroyed during the battle. The Battle of Okinawa. That is how most of us have heard of Okinawa. But as a battle fought and won, and quickly disre­garded. Not as a battle on which our entire contemporary history depends, from which we are still recovering. It began in April of 1945 and lasted eighty-two days. In Japa­nese, the battle is referred to as "tetsu no ame." In English, the phrase means "rain of steel." The Okinawans simply refer to it as Okinawa no Sensho, "Okinawan War." Although a conquered nation for many centuries--first as a tributary of China, then as a colony of Japan--Okinawa had never known such carnage. For eighty-two days, thousands of planes dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs on the island, crushing and burning count­less creatures, plants, houses, and buildings. For eighty-two days, hundreds of thousands of troops invaded the island, wield­ing tanks and guns, throwing grenades, and shooting into hid­ing places. One hundred forty thousand Okinawans, a third of the population, were killed. That does not account for all those who died of injury, illness, starvation after the battle. That does not account for all those who were forced to commit suicide. Of those killed, some were conscripted soldiers called Boeitai, boys as young as twelve, ordered to fight in the front lines. Some were nurses or members of relief teams called Giyutai, girls as young as fourteen, ordered to cook and tend to the wounded. The rest were civilians. One hundred twenty thousand civilians. Who died in a war they didn't choose, sacrificed to protect Japan, the precious mainland. Many Okinawans believe that those who died had died in vain. Or, rather, what they refer to as "a dog's death," inujini. When news spread that Okinawa would soon be attacked, Obaa was living by herself with her four children, my mother's older brother and older three sisters. My grandfather, conscripted four years earlier, was somewhere in Korea, being held prisoner. When the sirens blared, days before the troops landed, before the ships could be seen from shore, Obaa and her four children--her son, age four, and her three daughters, ages three, five, and seven--grabbed sacks of potatoes they had been gathering and storing for months. They hid in caves while the ground shook with each explosion, while their island, their home, crumbled and turned to ash. They fled from cave to cave, while their sacks emptied, while their clothes loosened and unraveled from their shrinking bodies. For two years after the war, they wandered from camp to camp, slept in tents or under tarps. They bathed in the ocean. They ate what they could scavenge. They collected rain and drew from low muddy wells for drinking. When my grandfather returned from Korea, he was a different person. He returned, but he was gone. Somehow Obaa kept herself and her four children alive and unharmed through one of the most horrific battles in history. A story I wish she could have told me. Yet these memories are impossible to forget, regardless of whether we actually lived through them. I believe they stay in our bodies. As sickness, as addiction, as poor posture or a tendency toward apology, as a deepened capacity for sadness or anger. As determination to survive, a relentless tempered optimism. I believe they are inherited, passed on to us like brown eyes or the shape of a nose. I had not learned this history, my mother's history, my his­tory, until I was thirty-four years old. Which is to say that I grew up not knowing my mother or myself. Three years after the war, my mother was born. She was born into poverty and chaos. She was born into a family, an entire peo­ple, stunned by violence and grief. When my mother was born, Okinawa was still considered an "enemy territory." This meant that the occupying U.S. military was under no obligation to restore the battered landscape, and Okinawa was still a vast ruin of decay and rubble. This meant that the occupying U.S. military guarded and patrolled the wreckage of an island, and Okinawans relied on bare subsistence rations of bread and milk, cans of red chili, popcorn, and candy. Some of the troops gave the prettiest girls bright new clothes to wear and called them "honeys." Some of the troops broke into homes, robbed and raped Okinawans inside homes, because there were no laws against it, no laws at all. In 1952, three years after my mother was born, around the age she would have formed her first memory, Japan officially relinquished rule of Okinawa to the United States. My mother witnessed the U.S. military devouring the island, constructing immense complexes of bases. She witnessed forests and fields, wetlands and beaches becoming concrete. She witnessed farm­ers and fishermen, carpenters and potters, cooks and shopkeep­ers becoming mere labor. Her brothers were hired to help build the bases. Her sisters were hired to serve food in the cafeterias. Obaa cleaned barracks. My grandfather also cleaned barracks, but mostly he just stayed in bed, too sick with grief, humiliation, and alcoholism to do much of anything else. For many years after the war, in order to supplement her income, Obaa cooked breakfast and lunch for a few of her neigh­bors; a couple of them were orphans, older than her youngest children, old enough to work, but still needing someone to care for them. She cooked on a portable gas stove while they drank tea and played cards in the same room. They paid her one dollar to sit on her floor and eat food she prepared. Not much, just potato and broth. Not long after her own children moved out and moved away, after my grandfather gambled and drank himself to death, Obaa found Shiro on a pile of garbage and brought him to her home. She held him like a baby and fed him with a bottle. Then he grew older and bigger, and they would sit together at the same table, which was already low to the floor, perfect for a dog, and share from the same bowl. One piece of potato for her, one piece for him. She would slurp some broth and give the rest to him. Back and forth. For every meal. Shiro trotted beside her as Obaa pushed a cart through the streets. Shiro was not to be ridden like a horse. My first memory of Shiro biting me is all I remember of the time I lived in Okinawa. There are many photographs of my aunts and uncles holding me and smiling, my cousins holding me and smiling, Obaa carrying me on her back and smiling. We are not just posing for photographs. We are smiling because we are happy. I am a small child and I don't know what sadness is yet, and therefore I make everyone happy. There is a photograph of me at a beach, lying on my stomach on the sand, wearing a red-and-white polka-dotted swimsuit and sunglasses much too large for my face. I am laughing, probably because the person behind the camera is laughing. There is a photograph of me in the park, standing on a pair of giant bronze statue boots, each boot bigger than my whole body, wearing braids and bow-shaped barrettes in my hair, arms crossed and brow furrowed, trying to look tough, probably because the person behind the camera is showing me how to look tough and I am mimicking her. We are having fun, pretending and playing together, because I am happy and everyone loves to play with me. But I do not remember any of these moments. They are just photographs my mother had taken and framed, and hung on walls or put on shelves around the house. They do not belong to my life. They belong to hers. What I do remember is walking through Newark Airport. I am walking with my mother, staying very close to her, holding her hand. A man walks beside us. He smiles a lot and wants to hold my hand, too, but I won't let him. I won't let him because I don't know him. I don't remember him because my first memory is of Shiro biting me. My mother tells me the man is my father. She tells me that he stayed behind, here, where we are now, in the United States. She tells me that he was traveling, looking for a better job and a better place for us to live. That is why we had to live with my aunt on Okinawa for six months. That is why we have returned. Because the man is my father and her husband. We belong with him. She says "Otosan . . . Otosan . . . Anata no otosan." Father . . . Father . . . Your father . She tells me in Japanese, because back then I could understand and speak Japanese. I hold my mother's hand tighter, hiding from him behind her. And for a long time, that is the closest I ever felt to my mother. When I was still in her world. What my mother and I share now is an understanding that precedes words. It is an understanding that comes from being the same body, being fed, bathed, clothed, held in her arms every day, loved every day, then becoming separate, growing apart, then remembering how much that hurt, remembering and being grateful for the distance we traversed, the distance we were able to recover. It is an understanding that comes from forgiveness. My mother and I communicate through layered small-talk, subtexted chitchat, a shorthand that took years and years to develop, and satisfies our desire to be close. But will that ever compensate for the years and years of silence, for the time we missed, the time I squandered? Excerpted from Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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Trade Reviews
Library Journal Review
Brina begins this masterful debut by sharing her first memory--a dog bite in her mother's native Okinawa--and the following series of recollections serve as an apology to her mother and her former homeland for forgetting Japanese after moving to the United States and for distancing herself from her mother in an effort to become more American. Although this is Brina's story, it's her parent's story as well. The author movingly depicts how her mother, the fifth of sixth children born to a poor family, married a U.S. serviceman, stationed at a military base in Okinawa, in order to escape poverty and ongoing abuse from an older brother. While her mother turned to drinking, feeling isolated in the suburbs of Rochester and no longer able to communicate with her daughter in her native language, her father, experiencing PTSD, was alternately withdrawn and controlling. Brina is at her best when illustrating her own isolation; striving to be white, like her father, but always feeling like parental warmth was out of reach and engaging in flings in order to find affection. Trips to Japan to visit extended family lead to poignant chapters on the history of the Okinawa islands. VERDICT A can't-miss memoir that will stay with readers after they finish the last page.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
Publishers Weekly Review
Brina captivates in her stunning and intimate debut memoir. Brina's mother, born and raised in post-WWII Okinawa, where the feuding forces of China, Japan, and the U.S. left the local population impoverished, married Brina's father, a white American soldier from a wealthy family, in 1974, only to find herself a lonely fish out of water after they moved to suburban Fairport, N.Y. As an American child in a largely white community in the '80s, Elizabeth found her mother's foreign culture embarrassing and acted out as a result. (She writes, for instance, of giving her mother a paper-cutout heart with "I love you" written in Japanese for Christmas, and later tearing it to shreds: "When my mother sees what I have done, she covers her face with her hands and weeps.") On a trip to Okinawa with her parents after her own broken engagement, she had an epiphany, realizing that her parents' love is genuine but fraught with an unsettling power dynamic, evidenced by the fact that, on the trip, her father played tour guide, showing his naive "country gal" the rest of her own nation. This nuanced tale goes both wide and deep, and is as moving as it is ambitious. Memoir lovers will be enthralled. (Feb.)
Booklist Review
Brina opens her first book with the story of her grandmother's survival, four children in tow, of the brutal 82-day Battle of Okinawa. "I had not learned this history, my mother's history, my history, until I was thirty-four years old. Which is to say that I grew up not knowing my mother or myself." Interludes like this one characterize Brina's uniquely structured memoir, which investigates her own past as the daughter of an Okinawan mother and a white American father, and the history of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. In several passages, Brina writes in a collective voice: of Japanese women who married American GIs, of Okinawans during WWII, of American men on Commodore Perry's 1852 expedition to the island. These episodes inform the rest of Brina's forthright and tunneling inquiry into how she came to understand the many inherited layers of herself and her racial identity. Deeply human portraits of her parents emerge alongside her own candid snapshots: stories of both disappointments and unconfined, unconditional love. Artfully concerned with the DNA-altering effects of trauma and the almost unfathomable power of language, Brina's work opens a window on a lifelong search for peace, and the life-giving work of listening.
Kirkus Review
In a debut memoir, the daughter of an Okinawan Vietnam War bride and an American soldier grapples with her complex familial roots. Brina's doting father once told her: "Ask me the time and I'll give you the history of watchmaking." The author shows a similar tendency to overelaborate in this heartfelt but meandering account of her effort to understand what it means to be an Okinawan American whose mother was born on an island most Westerners only know as the site of a World War II battle. Growing up in the mostly White suburb of Fairport, New York, Brina heard confusing racist slurs. "When I was growing up," she writes, "White was always what I strived to be, and White always felt just beyond reach. Except I already was White. White was how I viewed the world, looked out at the world, no matter what the world saw when it looked back at me." Such paradoxes fostered shame, guilt, and an anger toward her lonely mother, who often inadvertently embarrassed her. In adulthood, the author saw links between her family's conflicts and the tortured past of Okinawa--claimed by turns by the Chinese, Japanese, and Americans--and visited the island with her parents, which helped her reconcile with her mother. Her account of her transformation is lyrical and well observed, and the author is to be commended for her dedication to excavating family history. However, despite the poetic flourishes, the text is too overburdened with literary contrivances, including first-person plural narration (used too frequently, it becomes disorienting), abrupt changes from present to past tense, and nonlinear chronology; one chapter has more than 40 shifts back and forth in time. Especially disorienting is a section that purports to reveal thoughts of a subordinate of Commodore Matthew Perry without revealing the sources for its material or the degree to which it has been fictionalized. A multilayered exploration of Asian American identity hampered by too much literary artifice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
A "hauntingly beautiful memoir about family and identity" (NPR) and a young woman's journey to understanding her complicated parents--her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran--and her own, fraught cultural heritage.

Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood and adolescence. Yet even though she felt almost no connection to her mother's distant home, she also felt out of place among her peers.

Decades later, Elizabeth comes to recognize the shame and self-loathing that haunt both her and her mother, and attempts a form of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people. Clear-eyed and profoundly humane, Speak, Okinawa is a startling accomplishment--a heartfelt exploration of identity, inheritance, forgiveness, and what it means to be an American.
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