An accomplished first collection by a third-generation San Franciscan. The stories here, most set in California, reflect Sasaki's Japanese-American background in a low-key but poignant way—not so much as a clash of contrasts but as a rivalry of claims: the customs, the foods, even the idioms of the past that still tug, even at a generation who have been spared the earlier prejudices and wartime hostilities. Though the pieces are separate, most are about the Terasaki family. In ``Ohaka-Mairi,'' the family goes to the cemetery to pay respect to the dead, and the narrator recalls her father's bitterness at the death of her elder sister in a climbing accident. Their mother is the central character in the title story: ``It was when Cathy died that the other Terasaki sisters began to think that something was wrong with their mother.'' She had graduated from the University of California in the 30's despite the ever-present prejudice, but had then been interned with her parents in one of the camps. This internment and growing deafness further accelerated her mother's isolation. But a weaving loom is her salvation—soon ``she sat, a woman bent over a loom, weaving the diverse threads of life into one miraculous, mystical fabric with timeless care.'' Other notables are: ``First Love,'' in which a bookish girl falls for a Japanese-born boy who's ``driven to maintain an illusion''; and ``Driving to Colma,'' in which the dying father of the family takes an unexpected detour to the see the ocean ``lit for sunset.'' Quiet, elegiac writing that movingly celebrates the immigrant rite of passage—along with all its implicit heartaches and triumphs.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1991
ISBN: 1-55597-157-1
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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