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asianamlitfansWritten by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Absolutely floored by this elegantly crafted yet searing narrative! In Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir (Knopf, 2021), readers are in for quite the autobiographical journey. Let’s let the marketing description provide us with some tidbits: “A searing, deeply candid memoir about 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.” The description provides us with perhaps the most crucial element to this memoir with the phrase “decades later.” It is the retrospective positionality which is Brina’s most sparkling tool. With the advantage of time and reflection, she certainly comes to understand much more not only about her personal life and her complicated inheritances but her larger position within a genealogy of war in the Asia-Pacific. Perhaps, one of the most arresting aspect of Brina’s work is a kind of collectivized narration, which explores the violent history of Okinawa. It is in this sense that Brina is working to reclaim part of her heritage, the part that she willfully tried to push away as she grew up. The description also employs the phrasing, “typical American childhood and adolescence,” but I would argue against that type of rendering. The narrative consistently reveals how abnormal that Brina felt her own childhood was, as a mixed race child. She intuitively understood how different her background made her, so she willfully distanced herself from anything related to Okinawa and her mother. In this way, the memoir enacts a form of reparative narration, something that reminds me of E.J. Koh’s similarly poignant work, The Magical Language of Others. The wistfulness that we see in this work and Koh’s is no doubt related to the retrospective positionality of the memoirist: if only she would have understood sooner what she has now come to know.
Buy the Book Here
Edited by Lina Jiang
Absolutely floored by this elegantly crafted yet searing narrative! In Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir (Knopf, 2021), readers are in for quite the autobiographical journey. Let’s let the marketing description provide us with some tidbits: “A searing, deeply candid memoir about 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.” The description provides us with perhaps the most crucial element to this memoir with the phrase “decades later.” It is the retrospective positionality which is Brina’s most sparkling tool. With the advantage of time and reflection, she certainly comes to understand much more not only about her personal life and her complicated inheritances but her larger position within a genealogy of war in the Asia-Pacific. Perhaps, one of the most arresting aspect of Brina’s work is a kind of collectivized narration, which explores the violent history of Okinawa. It is in this sense that Brina is working to reclaim part of her heritage, the part that she willfully tried to push away as she grew up. The description also employs the phrasing, “typical American childhood and adolescence,” but I would argue against that type of rendering. The narrative consistently reveals how abnormal that Brina felt her own childhood was, as a mixed race child. She intuitively understood how different her background made her, so she willfully distanced herself from anything related to Okinawa and her mother. In this way, the memoir enacts a form of reparative narration, something that reminds me of E.J. Koh’s similarly poignant work, The Magical Language of Others. The wistfulness that we see in this work and Koh’s is no doubt related to the retrospective positionality of the memoirist: if only she would have understood sooner what she has now come to know.
Buy the Book Here
