Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

6. Scripting Fertility: Desire and Regeneration in Japanese North American Literature

A number of Japanese North American novels have explored the traumatic experience of dislocation, internment, confiscation of property, and dispersals of the Japanese Canadian and Japanese American communities during and after the Second World War and the consequences of these events. The best-known example is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, which delineates the mostly silent suffering of Japanese Canadians during that period. Other works about Japanese Americans during the war include Monica Itoi Sone’s Nisei Daughter and John Okada’s No-No Boy. Recently Japanese Canadian and Japanese American novels have been moving away from focusing on that subject and have attempted to go beyond an ethnographic account of the way the issei, nisei, and sansei cope with the internment and dispersal. Two novels that have appeared in the last few years have employed a deliberately playful tone, focused on protagonists who are decidedly not silent, acquiescent subjects or model minorities and whose trajectories are not from the west coast to the camps but involve a great deal of displacement across North America . Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child (2001) and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation (2003), though different in genre, share similar concerns and are noteworthy examples of a shift in tendency in Japanese North American literature. 6 Scripting Fertility: Desire and Regeneration in Japanese North American Literature 108 No longer limited to a mainly realist account of immigrant experiences of assimilation and acculturation, Asian North American authors such as Goto and Ozeki take on wide-ranging issues, such as normative traditional family values, globalization, contemporary capitalist culture, ecology, sexuality, and desire outside of what Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality” in her book of that name. The protagonists of both The Kappa Child and All Over Creation are women who lead rather unorthodox lives. They do not follow the usual pattern of the immigrant character struggling to fulfill the American dream. They are not particularly interested in the corporate definition of success but instead attempt to find different ways of achieving wholeness and harmony in their lives. Coincidentally, they both come from dysfunctional families and, by the start of each novel, have escaped, at least physically, from their families , who are on farms. Much of the narrative of each novel is taken up with coming to terms with the heroines’ painful pasts, as well as with their strong-willed patriarchal fathers, whose parenting skills, like their farming efforts, leave something to be desired. The protagonists’ rejection of their fathers parallels their rejection of the values taught by them—rugged individualism, competition, the importance of profit and business, and eventually desirable assimilation as model minorities. It might seem, at first glance, that questions of representation and stereotypes of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians—as model minorities or exotic Oriental dolls—do not have much to do with issues of globalization and globality. However, Asian female bodies have been consistently produced and reproduced in Western media and transnational culture in particular ways that have facilitated their work in specialized areas. As Laura Kang argues, Asian female bodies “have come to matter” in transnational labor: in “political economies of assemblyline manufacturing, military prostitution, and sex tourism” (Compositional Subjects, 165). Kang explains:“Through the attribution of such inherent characteristics as childlike innocence and docility, digital nimbleness, physical stamina, keen eyesight, sexual largess, and muscular flexiblity, Asian women have been figured as especially suited to conduct certain labor needs of transnational capitalism” (165). In previous chapters we have seen how authors like Kwa, Keller, and Lai have highlighted and problematized the work of Asian women in military prostitution, in the sex industry, and in assembly-line manufacturing . In this chapter I argue that although Goto and Ozeki do not Scripting Fertility 109 deal with these types of work, they intentionally and good-humoredly rework stereotypes of Asian women’s docility, reliability, innocence, and sexual pliancy in order to challenge what is expected, and in some cases required, of Asian women globally. Thus, in their novels the representation of characters who might be considered “failures” in capitalist society, and also of Asian North American women who do not possess delicate, agile bodies or nimble fingers, becomes a tactic of subversion. Alien Bodies Japanese Canadian Hiromi Goto’s second novel, The Kappa Child, features a female protagonist who has an “abnormal pregnancy” (12) resulting from a dalliance with a strange creature on an airport strip during the “last...