the 'second generation experience'

I felt that Okada’s No-No Boy was an incredible novel that aptly and brilliantly dealt with many of the issues that the Nissei went through during and especially after WWII, which are issues that can consistently be sent throughout the ‘Asian American experience’. In particular, he deals with their issues of identity, nationality, ancestry, among other struggles. In this way, he provides an archetypal experience of a second generation person, through his depiction of Ichiro, a Nissei.

While one cannot claim an all-encompassing homogeneous second-generation experience, Okada nonetheless deals with many issues that children of immigrants often must negotiate with. These principally includes the struggle between his American nationality and his Japanese heritage (heavily enforced by his overbearing mother), his Otherness as a nonwhite in the United States while struggling to define himself and his place in the United States, and the intertwining of these struggles into his identity struggle. Ichiro’s own issues in the process of his Americanization, however, constantly puts him at odds with his immigrant parents, creating a widening gap that even at the end, seems to have very little chance of ever closing. In fact, Ichiro appears to blame his mother for most of these struggles, and sees her as the reason for his unbearable shame. Indeed, by never acclimating to her home of numerous years in America, Mrs. Yamada is the cliché immigrant parent. She is both overbearing in her urges for her sons to succeed (the reason many for many to immigrate), as well as unyielding in her allegiance to the country she left behind. This puts her constantly in a struggle with her sons as they can’t help but assimilate in such a multicultural city. However, this assimilation is never complete for Ichiro and his fellow immigrants of color, and they are forced to the marginalized outskirts of society. For Ichiro and other Nissei, this is compounded by WWII and the U.S.’s instantaneous hatred of all things Japanese. They are forced to chose between the country they were born in but are not accepted in, and the almost unreal country of their parents, which although they would never see, they nonetheless were raised within its culture and values.

The hardest struggle for second generation Americans of color is often the intertwined problem of on the one hand, assimilation to the country thus driving the children away from their immigrant parents, and on the other, the enduring stigma as the Other regardless of their shared legality as U.S. citizens. These common second-generation experiences are highlighted by the fact that Okada focuses on the Nissei during the 1940s, where racial tensions and hatred directed at the Japanese heightened these issues. The resulting socialization of hating anything Japanese related thusly led to a kind of self-hate in Ichiro, and a disavowal and disassociation of many other Nissei to Japan, their culture, and even their own parents. This same socialization and the war led to a division between Nissei, with those who attempted to fully embrace their Americanization by shedding all aspects of being Japanese/Japanese American and others that clung to their Japanese heritage or some that simply became the hyphenated Japanese-American. This division becomes a crevasse with the enlistment and draft of Japanese-Americans into the U.S. Army.

Okada does not just resonate with contemporary immigration and second-generation experiences, but with current Asian American theorists as well. While trying to come to terms with his simultaneity as a Nikkei and as an American, Ichiro thinks of how “… it is not enough to be American only in the eyes of the law”. Here Okada demonstrates plainly what Lisa Lowe argues in her chapter entitled ‘Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique’, that is, the racialized formation of ‘citizenship’. Despite Ichiro and the other Nissei being legal citizens of the United States, due to the racialization of Asians, they are rather continually seen as foreigners, and the “Other”. The idea of the Nissei holding rights is clearly a contemptible thought, as their civil liberties are swept under the door and the Japanese/Japanese Americans are sent to interment camps. Moreover, further in line with Lowe’s arguments, the memory of this great injustice remains permanently embedded in the U.S. because of the lasting presence of Japanese-Americans, despite the United States’ attempt to forget.