Hey Everybody!

I was taken when I read Amy’s post. She talked about how she felt when she read a letter from an adult reader of Obasan to Kogawa expressing her thanks to her. In that letter, the writer said that she felt “emotionally immobilized” by the book when she read it and Amy felt the same. How are you supposed to digest such shocking, racial information when it happened in an internationally known multicultural nation?  What are you supposed to think?

When I read Obasan, I wasn’t as shocked as I already had some substantial knowledge of what happened in the camps due to my Social Studies and Geography teacher in high school. He was interned in these camps when he was just a kid and would occasionally bring up this topic in his classes. When he did however, he would only talk about the people that he knew and the circumstances surrounding him at the time; but he never said anything about himself. Whenever we asked him, my teacher would always deflect the question to another topic. This could be due to him not wanting to remember what happened to him in the camps, like Stephen in Obasan when he tries to forget his Japanese heritage.

Just some of my thoughts

Fiona Tse