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Article Excerpt
This is the second part of a three-part series begun in the November/December 2002 Horn Book with the article "How the Little House Gave Ground: The Beginnings of Multiculturalism in a New, Black Children's Literature."
Yoshiko Uchida
For more than half her long writing life, the Japanese-American writer Yoshiko Uchida was a Model Minority in comportment, a goodwill ambassador by conviction. Then the restive black minority demanded its full legal rights and gained respect for its own, African-American culture--and Uchida was impelled to think differently and write differently.
Born in California in 1921, the daughter of Japanese immigrants ineligible for citizenship, Yoshiko Uchida graduated from Berkeley in 1942 in absentia: with her family and other West Coast residents of Japanese descent, she was en route to a desert internment camp. As a child, Uchida had wanted to be totally American; after the crushing experience of internment, she took a new, restorative interest in her Japanese heritage and began writing about Japanese ways for American children. From her 1949 collection of Japanese folktales, The Dancing Kettle, to her late-1960s stories about contemporary Japanese youngsters, such as Sumi's Special Happening and In-Between Miya, Uchida published a steady stream of well-received books that added substance to the postwar American fascination with Japanese life.
Once, early on, Uchida also wrote a story nominally set in her native Berkeley, New Friends for Susan, that tiptoes around the situation of a Japanese-American child. Susan Sasaki is separated from best friend Margie when their school is closed for earthquake repairs, then finds another, equally good white friend in new classmate Carolyn. For the school's annual spring festival, when the children dress in "the costume of some other land" (a sheeted boy is an Arab, etc.), the two girls come dressed alike in a pair of Susan's kimonos. Admiration for Susan's collection of little Japanese dolls, displayed on Japan's Girls' Festival Day, helps her make still further "new friends." Was it reasonable to expect, in 1951, that emblems of Japanese culture would win friends for a Japanese-American girl in an overwhelmingly white, recently hostile setting? Then, we liked to think so.
Twenty years later Uchida set a second book in Berkeley, her first about the wartime internment. Journey to Topaz is closely based on her own experiences but told, expediently, from the viewpoint of eleven-year-old Yuki Sakane. For all the vividness of the events, Journey to Topaz is a measured, outwardly traditional kind of book, where every angry brow conceals a kind heart and every tragedy has its consolation. In a prologue to the 1985 reprint edition, Uchida asks readers to remember how things were for Japanese Americans at the time. "In 1942 the voice of Martin Luther King had not yet been heard and ethnic pride was yet unborn. There was no awareness in the land of civil rights." Uchida is explaining why Japanese Americans quietly acquiesced to internment; she might also be justifying her original, temperate treatment of the subject.
In Journey Home, published in 1978, Uchida continued the story of Yuki Sakane and her family with their postwar return to Berkeley. In the book's time, the voice of Martin Luther King had not yet been heard, but it has transformed Uchida: Journey Home has depths and shades beyond the imagining of Journey to Topaz, and a fabric of stark reality. Yuki's best prewar friend, a white girl, is a bubbly stranger. There are no jobs Yuki's father can have, no houses the family can rent. They are subject to name-calling and open, violent hatred. And Yuki, looking at herself in the mirror, pondering her uncertain identity, asks herself where her loyalties lie: "She was ... neither totally American nor totally Japanese." In contrast to Journey to Topaz, Journey Home is Japanese-American California of the 1940s through the lens of the 1970s.
With A Jar of Dreams, which appeared in 1981, Uchida went back to the real Berkeley of her 1930s childhood--when, as she wrote in her memoir Desert Exile, she felt rejected, inferior, afraid to speak out--and along the way, revisited scenes from New Friends for Susan. When eleven-year-old Rinko Tsujimura is separated from best friend Tami Nukaga by the closing of their school, she can no longer count on having "at least one friend" in a new, mostly white school. But Rinko, the sharp-eyed, plainspoken narrator, has more gumption than Uchida had as a child. Her parents and their friends, too, provide an alternative to the accommodating Japanese-American adults of Journey to Topaz. When Papa's barbershop falters, Mama sets up a home laundry; and when the racist owner of the local commercial laundry tries to drive the new A-1 Home Laundry out of business, Papa confronts the man and faces him down.
He's emboldened to stand up for his rights by the book's most vivid character, Aunt Waka--Mama's kimono-clad, unretiring sister from Japan. Aunt Waka, comfortably and confidently Japanese, also helps Rinko acknowledge the two parts of her divided self and embrace--without wearing a kimono--"the part that's Japanese." Acceptance of a dual identity is a crucial step beyond the neither-nor discomfiture of Yuki in Journey Home and in keeping with the coalescing multiculturalism of the 1980s, albeit rather unlikely in a Japanese-American girl in California fifty years earlier.
Never mind the anachronism: in A Jar of Dreams and two further books about Rinko, The Best Bad Thing and The Happiest Ending, Uchida is as attentive to vivifying, enveloping detail, and as imaginative withal, as in her earlier stories of Japanese girls Sumi and Miya. "The rich warmth and complexity of family and community life that radiate from this story," the School Library Journal reviewer wrote about The Best Bad Thing, "make a refreshing change from the relentless trivialism of much modern fiction." Rinko's gain is a social, cultural, literary gain; and a prime example of what multiculturalism is all about.
The Council on Interracial Books for Children and Censorship
Well, maybe richness and complexity aren't all that multiculturalism is about; as an issue, its ramifications are endless. A few years previously Uchida came a cropper with the Council on Interracial Books for Children, guardian of diversity since the 1960s, for a single winsome slice of 1930s Japanese-American life, The Birthday Visitor. In 1976 the Council published a 280-page book selection guide, Human (and Anti-human) Values in Children's Books, sternly subtitled A Content Rating Instrument for Educators and Concerned Parents. Past a discussion of the designated values, the book consists of evaluations of some two hundred books published in 1975 "on minority and feminist themes, as well as books that [deal] with world problems and concerns." One of these specimens is The Birthday Visitor.
To open the CIBC guide and scan the tabular "values checklist" is to see political correctness at full...
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