Jane Jeong Trenka's Fugitive Visions

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Following up on stephenhongsohn's earlier preview-review of Trenka's second memoir and my comments on Trenka's first memoir The Language of Blood, here are some of my impressions of Fugitive Visions (Graywolf Press, 2009). I was eager for this book to come out and bought it on its release date (kinda geeky). I really liked The Language of Blood, a book I also had a chance to teach last fall with great success--many of the students noted it was their favorite reading of the semester.

Fugitive Visions is very much a sequel to The Language of Blood, primarily tracking Trenka's experiences in the past few years of living in South Korea after leaving the United States and all vestiges of her former life behind. The memoir is a thoughtful reflection on what it means for a Korean adoptee to make the choice to return to South Korea to live (perhaps permanently) and offers accounts of Trenka's relationships with other returned adoptees in the community that has formed. Like in her first memoir, Trenka often plays with the language and genre in this book. There are fewer moments in which the narrative breaks out into a different kind of writing (like a play or a personals ad or a fairy tale as in the first memoir). Instead, different kinds of narratives are incorporated more tightly into the overarching narrative or more consciously seem to stand out as epigraphs. The book as a whole is structured around Sergei Prokofiev's "Visions Fugitive," a work for solo piano comprised of a number of shorter pieces. Trenka takes as section headings the Italian terms used in classical music to denote different kinds of musical movements, volume, tempo, and so on. Trenka discusses her own relationship to music via the piano early in the memoir, and the idea of musicality and performance becomes both an underlying theme for her memoir and the implicit organizing logic of her relationship to this moment in her life.

There is also, understandably since she is now living in a Korean-centered world, a lot more engagement with Korean language in this memoir, with "lessons" embedded throughout that both highlight the move of translation between English and Korean, the United States and South Korea, the past and the present as well as point constantly to (the fear of? promise of?) the ambiguity of translation--what is always exceeding or missing. (Trenka acknowledges her friendship and indebtedness to Sun Yung Shin who was working on Skirt Full of Black at the same time that she was writing this memoir--both texts have a very reflective engagement with Korean language.)

Mothertalk: The Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka by Roy Kiyooka, Edited by Daphne Marlatt (NeWes

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of Mothertalk: The Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka by Roy Kiyooka, Edited by Daphne Marlatt (NeWest Press, Fall 1997)

 

In my bid to continue to review more creative nonfiction, today I discuss the incredibly affecting Mothertalk: The Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka.  This book is really quite original in its approach toward creative nonfiction as it seems to recall something of Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill in that it might be classified as a “biofiction” rather than an autobiography or biography.  As Roy Kiyooka’s mother, Mary, advanced in age, the younger Kiyooka undertook a project of chronicling her life.  At the same time, Kiyooka did end up embellishing some of the stories, while still attempting to create a voice that reflected that of his mother.  In this respect, the narrative reads as if Mary herself is the speaker.  That is, it seems to operate as an autobiography, but the vast majority of the text was actually written by Roy Kiyooka.  Adding to the complications of textual origin points, the germ for the stories that appear in Mothertalk were first told by Mary in Japanese and translated for Roy, where he then moved to reconstruct these stories with a particular vision in mind.  Part of the impetus in this approach certainly stems from giving his mother the voice that she perhaps could not provide herself.  At various points in “the life stories,” there is the reminder that it is Roy’s father who eventually becomes attached to reading, whereas Mary consistently remarks her English has not necessarily been her strong suit. The text is edited by Daphne Marlatt in part because Roy Kiyooka did not finish the project, so there are multiple layers of writing, re-writing, reconstruction, and levels of fictionality layered on to this text.  With such a complicated and intricate approach to representation, it is no surprise that Mothertalk has already received much critical interest, with work have been completed by Sally Chivers (“ ‘This is My Memory, A Fact’: The Many Mediations of Mothertalk: The Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka” in Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions) as well as a chapter from Joanne Saul’s Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature). 

 

Mothertalk paints very poignant and personal look at his mother’s life, which includes her background and marriage and her movement to Canada, her difficulty adjusting a different country’s culture, the experience of racism, and most acutely, the challenges of raising six children, many of whom would have vastly unique paths in life.  I am struck most by this text in terms of its prose, which is unadorned, but nevertheless reveals an “autobiographical” character with much spirit and whimsy.  Mary comes off as a flexible subject, with much critical self-awareness that appears in episodic accounts of her family’s life.  In particular, she is able to delve into the extreme challenges faced by her husband as he seeks to make a living for their large family.   There is much transnational movement between Japan and Canada during Mary’s early years and these movements serve to represent the strong link that Mary keeps with her Japanese heritage, one that is most clearly addressed in her desire to remain grounded in the Japanese language.  During the Japanese Canadian internment period, the family is not interned, but is nevertheless forced to live in a secluded and rural area in Northern Alberta so as to minimize the chance that their family might be caught up in anti-Asian violence.  This particular period requires the family to develop serious agricultural expertise.  It is the small moments which appear unbidden that often shine with the most acuity as Roy and one of his brothers both lose the tip of the same fingers decades apart, or that the chasm that is eventually bridged between Mary and one of her daughters, Mariko.  Questions of assimilation are continually queried as Mary does not with much understanding how many of her children end up in relationships with individuals of another racial background.  Given the fact that they were often one of only a handful of Asian Canadians in any given area, Mary is not really surprised.  Interspersed in Mary’s own recollections are excerpts from Roy’s writings and in this way, the polyvocal nature of the text continually emerges. 

 

Buy the Book here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Mothertalk-Life-Stories-Kiyoshi-Kiyooka/dp/1896300243