Kadohata, Cynthia - Weedflower

[oyceter]

So I went from a depressing book about hazing to... Japanese internment camps! No wonder I feel down this morning.

Sumiko's aunt and uncle own a flower farm in southern California; Sumiko and her brother Takao have been living with them since their parents died in a car accident. I, um, tend to try and avoid books about the Japanese internment camps largely because they make me want to shoot myself, strangle other people, and disavow my citizenship. I picked this one up because the cover flap said it took place in Poston, and that it had a friendship between Sumiko and an Indian boy living there.

Intra-POC friendship, yay!

Poston was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, and the American Indians unsurprisingly are rather hostile toward the Japanese people being moved in there. The Japanese are similarly afraid of Indians, thanks to most impressions taken from popular media at the time.

The book sadly isn't about the culture clash, but I like Sumiko a lot, and I very much like how Kadohata gets into the details of flower farming and the day-to-day life in the camps. It feels so mundane after a while, until you stop and think about how much everyone there lost.

I thought I was mostly prepared to read this, but I found random little things enraging, like all the white people who bought to-be-interned Japanese Americans' furniture and belongings and cars and everything for dirt cheap prices, acting somewhat embarrassed to be doing so, but never enough to not do it or to pay what something was worth. I wanted to strangle the US government when they began to draft the very people they had robbed of land and belongings and freedom, and all that after those people were denied citizenship.

I also really liked the tentative, not-quite friendship between Sumiko and Frank, a Mojave boy. They both distrust each other at first. Frank resents the Japanese because even though they're interned, they still get electricity and running water, much more than the government has given to his tribe, and Sumiko resents Frank for resenting her and her family for something she has no control over.

It makes me want to hit people over the head with a shovel, the way white supremacy works.

The book has a lot of anger behind it; Kadohata's father was an internee at Poston. But she just keeps it there in the background, behind Sumiko's simple, twelve-year-old language. And it's not only anger over the treatment of Japanese Americans, it's also anger over how American Indians were treated. There's a note at the end of the book about the almost-all-Japanese and American-Indian regiments that served in WWII, how high the death rate was and how dedicated the troops were, and it makes me so angry at the government and society.

I did want more Frank and Sumiko, just because I liked watching them interacting, and I like the book in general.

Comments

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

I've got this book on my to be read list. So I only sort of skimmed this, not wanting to be spoiled in any depth.

Have you read Kira-Kira? I almost picked that one up instead of this.

[oyceter]

I haven't! I plan on getting that one next time I head over to the library.

[delux-vivens.livejournal.com]

have you read maryse conde's segu and children of segu yet?

[oyceter]

No, will check that out, thanks!

[octopedingenue]

This sounds fascinating and awesome. I'm adding it to my look-for-at-library list, thank you!

One of my favorite books (of novels told through short stories, and of just books ever) is When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, a novella of linked stories about a nameless Japanese-American family interned in the war. It is gorgeous and all the more merciless for its conciseness; every time I read the final story "Confession," it's poetry and acid in my lungs all at once.

I wonder about the Guantanamo Bay stories we'll hear, at least while I'm still alive.

[oyceter]

I like it! It's just.. not happy cheery reading. And it's not spectacular, but it's solid and touches on a topic that I don't think gets covered that often (Poston).

And ooo, thanks for the novella rec!

[sanguinity]

:: It makes me want to hit people over the head with a shovel, the way white supremacy works. ::

Very much so.


Thanks for the review and the history lesson. I don't know much about the individual camps as distinct-from-each-other places, and the conjunction of Poston and the Colorado River Reservation is worth looking into more.

...Oh, crap. And while I was looking around for more information about Poston... Did you know that the U.S. also interred the Aleuts during WWII? (Clicking is not recommended if you're still in shoot-strangle-disavow space.) And the book review which alerted me to this had the temerity to note that "lest all the blame for the Aleut tragedy be laid at the doorstep of the American government," that the death rate was higher in the single Aleut village interred by the Japanese.

As if it frackin' matters who was eviller. Can I borrow your shovel, please?

[oyceter]

Aiiieeeeee I did not know that GAH.