Blog #5: Required Topic: Respond to your experience at the Kogawa Fonds with one of these questions in mind:

-What kind of artifacts does the Fonds contain? Reviews of Obasan? Reader letters to Kogawa? Historical documents that Kogawa used for research? Consider the kinds of genres that you find.

On tuesday, instead of our regular ASTU classes, we went on a trip to the Rare Books Collection beneath the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and were given the chance to explore the Kogawa Fonds, which included a wide variety of documents that Kogawa donated to UBC. Throughout the visit I was able to find a number of documents of different genres, with five particular types being reader letters, book reviews from newspapers, historical documents that Kogawa used for research, scribblings of ideas, along with documents relating to the publication process of Obasan, all which have been both pretty interesting and inspiring to me to some degree at the same time, and thanks to this experience organized by Dr. Luger, I was able to learn much from the visit to the Rare books section.

First, there were the reader letters that Kogawa received from students who were studying her work, especially from lower grade students who included drawings and interesting comments in regards to Obasan, such as the queries into the fate of some of the characters. This, I believe, is a very distinct genre from so many of the academic work we have been reviewing and reading in the process of getting our Literature Reviews done throughout this week. However, what surprised me the most, was the complexity of the literature that schoolchildren here in Canada were exposed to when compared to the literature that schoolchildren back in Hong Kong were exposed to in local secondary schools,  how very junior schoolchildren here are already exposed to the understanding of the histories behind Obasan in their curriculum, comapared to how local Grade 7 schoolchildren were still studying books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was simply surprising, and is something, which I believe, is something that is much more beneficial to the development of society in general, which sort of leads back to the importance of Obasan as what communciations scholar Marita Sturken coins as a ‘technology of memory’, where society would not only remember but also renew and improve.

Secondly, there were various book reviews from newspapers from around the world discussing Obasan and the history behind it, with a copy of the Ubyssey included in it, which sort of gave me a sense of deja vu. Most of these book reviews from newspapers and journals, coming from many different places such as the Washington Post from the United States and the Daily News coming from the United Kingdom, seemed to play a huge emphasis on what their audience might encounter in regards to Canadians, and what their audiences may have perceived Canadians to be like in their stereotypes, with the United States initially comparing Canadian morals to American actions in the Vietnam War, which itself was an event not far behind at the time of the publication of Obasan, while the Daily News seemed to point out the cases of Americans in Europe trying to identify as Canadian over American. Both of these book reviews also try to, as in their genre as part of newspapers, to inform readers about the background in regards to the books that they are reviewing, which explains why many of those book reviews seemed to have described more about the contents of the book rather than give commentary on Obasan itself, as the Japanese-Canadian internment in Canada was an event which was less heard of outside of the specific communities in Canada. From that, I understood more about the nature of book reviews from newspapers, as I haven’t really touched much upon book reviews in newspapers back then.

Thirdly, there were some of the material that Kogawa had based on in the making of Obasan, mainly the scribblings in Kogawa’s process of writing the book, such as the ideas, family trees and other information. To me,as someone who aspires to write books, and who is in the process of planning layouts and other ideas of such things, it allows me to have a glimpse at how Kogawa tackled the planning in the writing and brainstorming process in the making of Obasan. This has been facilitated mainly due to the importance stressed by the UBC library in keeping these documents in order such that people would learn what the donor might have been thinking in arranging these documents in such an order. To me, it allowed me to glimpse into the mind of another author and discovering how someone like Kogawa would try to make a sense of the mess of so many notes.

Fourthly was the historical documents that Kogawa had utilized and worked with as research in the making of Obasan. Even though this visit to the Rare Books Section was not my first time, and I have seen much more older and more genuine historical documents such as papal bulls and 13th Century manuscripts and bibles during my last visit to the Rare Books Section as part of my Medieval Studies Course. The historical documents, or rather, their copies, were much more interesting to me due to the fact that they were not only significant because of their history, but they were also significant in that Kogawa had used them to create a much more believable background in the making of Obasan. Aside from that, I suppose another difference is that the documents I was able to encounter were mostly also different as a genre compared to the manuscripts I have encountered. While the medieval documents I have encountered were mainly used in a more official sense, the historical documents that were in the Kogawa Fonds had more of an emotional touch to it– the telegrams showing the restriction of movement of people caused by war and suspicion, conveyed an emotion which was very much present in my reading of Obasan, which was something I could not encounter in my reading of historical documents and medieval manuscripts in my last visit to the rare books section.

Lastly were the documents pertaining to the publication of Obasan, from the rejection letters from various publishers to Kogawa in the process of getting Obasan published, to the letters and replies made between Kogawa and her publisher, which included exchanges in opinions and suggestions of improvements which perfected Obasan into the book we know today. Once again, this was not only something which allowed me to further understand the process of being a writer, and how that there is no silver bullet in the path of getting your work published, but rather, it is a process of encountering failures, improving, and moving on. This also reminded me not only of the process of getting work published as mentioned in lectures in my Creative Writing Course in UBC, but allows me to have a first hand look at things such as rejection letters in a context other than just the pure mentioning of rejection letters in a lecture, and allows me to understand that even though the genre of the rejection letter has more or less the same aim, they could still vary from letter to letter, depending on the amount of information provided in the rejection letter, and whether publishers would be willing to give comprehensive feedback in regards to manuscripts. In addition to that, it also allowed me to understand that even if a manuscript is accepted, the process of getting it in place and published is still a long and hard road.

All in all, many of the items in the Kogawa Fonds comprised of genres of many natures, and all have more or less inspired me, or contributed to my increased understanding of not only society but also emotion, and the process of publishing and many other things.