Jenna's February post

This post is from Jenna:
Kyung-Jin Lee’s Asian Americans piece sheds light onto the intent of Okada’s novel, and through it draws out even more questions pertaining to the Asain American culture in America. As illustrated in the novel, the “state-sanctioned vulnerabilities” stemming from the internment experience, which was little more than a political exercise of racial subjugation by the threatened dominant race, forced Japanese Americans to abandon a part of their cultural identity and assimilate into the national culture(176 Lee). However, as Lee explains, only vertical assimilation into the socially powerful dominant races was catalyzed, and horizontal assimilation into other minority groups was inhibited further by the general practice of Japanese American disidentification with anything but white America. No-no Boy is an embodiment of this assimilation. At the time of publication in 1957, Okada could not have known that by 1966 Asian Americans would embody the “model minority” schema that America had created. Although the relationship between the identities of “yellow peril” and “model minority” is strongly linked to economic standings, the transformation between the two schemas was initiated by active conformation to American standards and values. However, Okada senses that conformity is the only method by which Japanese Americans could possibly survive, and reflects this belief in the symbolic nature of his characters.

The two key deaths in the novel symbolize drastically different ideas. Ichiro’s mother’s suicide was plainly representative of the necessity for Japanese Americans to ‘kill’ the part of them that linked them to Japan. Her astute and dislikable character already pitted her against Okada’s mainstream audience, and he cleverly conceives her faults as stemming solely from her Japanese roots. The embodiment of Japanese culture and fanatical loyalty, the mother’s suicide comes at a time when, in reality, hording these traits publicly would have resulted in immitigable persecution by the hands of America and the internal community. While her death mimics the cultural suicide committed by most Japanese Americans at the time, Kenji’s death represents the impossibility of an ideal America where democratic law is fully replicated in societal constructs. Kenji dreams of existing in a place free of “Japs or Chinks or Jews or Poles…” but instead inhabited solely of people(165). Far ahead of the time, Kenji’s colorblind ideal world is presented as a dying man’s bumbling words, not to be taken seriously but as wishful thinking. True to their nature, the words that construct the ideal world that, even today, cannot come into being without intensive struggle to overcome multiple social, cultural, and economical barriers, die with the loyal American Kenji.

By setting boundaries with mortality, Okada stipulates that Americanism must be embraced without question, and with it the American structurally founded practice of racism. He further enforces this solution with Emi and Mr. Carrick’s characters. Emi’s arguments with Ichiro seem manufactured to such a degree that the fakeness aids in drawing attention to the subliminal message that the Japanese American community must undertake the “often unspoken complicity with an Americanism which requires assent to white supremacy in order to survive” (177 Lee). The other solution she offers Ichiro, one of isolation and comfort in her arms, shows its own failure in solving anything from its total lack of means with which improvement of life can be attained. Ichiro, repenting for his lack of assimilation, struggles to take Emi’s words to heart, but he too realizes that assimilation is necessary in order to proceed in life. He firmly believes that a veteran that proved his worth and loyalty was better suited than he for Mr. Carrick’s offer, for no other reason than his own failure to cut himself free from his mother, his Japanese culture, in time to assimilate into the dominant race of America. Additionally, Ichiro subtly understands that Mr. Carrick represents an ideal that is much too good to be true, one where race, background, and social standing mean nothing. This is seen through Mr. Carrick’s construction of a snowplow that will never be put to use – the plow and his ideology may function perfectly, but both are inconsequential in changing the face of the world outside.

In the larger picture, Okada represents countless other Asian American authors that exploit the Asian American experience and transform it in such a way that Americanism is celebrated. Whether to get mainstream approval for the work itself, or to provide a way for Asian Americans to relate to the dominant culture, the embracement of American culture seems to be the only solution to so many problems. However, as seen in this book, the problem can never be truly resolved, for racism is ingrained into every fiber of this nation’s structure.