Multiethnic Literatures in the U.S.

Jerry Battle, the main character of the book, who was around sixty years old, retired from his own company, Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, which was established by his grandfather, and developed to a landscaping company by his father and uncles. Jerry was a kind of rich guy. He had got plenty of money, his own house, and even his own plane. It looks like this book all talked about an old guy’s retired life. So this book is kind of tasteless, isn’t it? 

How about let us imagine the life when people retire? People may still get up early in the morning, watch TV for an hour or two, then, water their plants outside the front door. They probably would take a walk in a warm afternoon, or have a cup of tea in the backyard. But after reading through the book a little bit I have found out this book was not just talking about an ordinary story about an old people’s life. From one point, I felt the author tried to express some unique ideas through Jerry’s emotionally change to display some phenomenon of the society. 

Although Jerry’s wife, Daisy Han, died very early, he still should have had reasons to satisfy with his old age. His overeducated daughter Theresa was engagement to her boyfriend Paul, and his son, Jack, had plans for expanding his original business. He accumulated himself more than enough wealth for retirement. Also, it looked like he always had female friends around him, no matter his ex-girlfriend, Rita, his coworker, Kelly, or even Terri, the woman he dated in a summer, no matter how close to him they were. But he was still lonely.   

When he sold his shares in his company he had not realized there was no place left for him to go. That was why the first paragraph in the first Chapter was mentioned “From up here, a half mile above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me.” While I was reading through the book, I was feeling Jerry hinted us from the first sentence that he perhaps wanted to escape from something. He liked to travel with his plane a lot, used to with Rita, but most time himself. When he flew aloft he thought he had left everything on the ground. He tried using his plane as the tool to release himself, but he did not realize that when the plane landed, he still needed to pick up whatever he had to bear, and whatever he had to face.  

It is helpless and contradictory, not only to Jerry, but also to most of the people in the world. People always tried to hide themselves and escape from reality. And to some of them, when they find out they have to face their situation, they can not even afford it.

Karen Tei Yamashita

Date of Birth: January 8, 1951 (Oakland, California) (57 years of age)
Education: Carleton College in (Minnesota)
Graduated Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in English and Japanese Literature
Yamashita spent her junior year I college as an exchange student at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Occupation: Japanese American writer, Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. Karen Tei Yamashita teaches creative writing and Asian American Literature.
Books: Circle K Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997, Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990)
Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer as well as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yamashita grew up in Los Angeles California before attending Carleton College in Minnesota. She also spent a year in Japan as an exchange student as a junior. In 1975 Yamashita moved to Brazil where she lived for nine years in Sao Paolo. In Brazil she was able to study Japanese immigration to Brazil. Also, in Brazil she met her current husband Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira (Architect). In 1984 the family, Karen, Ronaldo, and her two children Jon and Jane moved back to California. They currently live in Santa Cruz, California.
In California Yamashita continued to write short stories and plays. Her first book was published in 1990, Through the Arc of the Rainforest by the Coffee House Press. She received awards for the book, the American Book Award and the Janet Hedinger Kafka Award. Later in 1992, Yamashita’s second book was published, Brazil Maru, followed by Tropic of Orange (1997), and Circle K Cycles (2001).
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Tei_Yamashita http://faculty.washington.edu/kendo/yamashita.html http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/yamashita_karen_tei.html

Karen Tei Yamashita – Bibliography

Kusei: An Endangered Species. Yamashita, Karen Tei, and Karen Mayeda. 1986.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Brazil-Maru. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Circle K Cycles. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001
Yamashita, Karen Tei. O-Men: An American Kabuki. 1978
Yamashita, Karen Tei. “The Dentist and the Dental Hygenist.” Hermes. 55 (1995)

Yamashita, Karen Tei. “The Orange.” Chicago Review. 39.3.4 (1993)

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rainforest. Minneapolis: Coffee House
Press, 1990.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993.

Karen Tei Yamashita Annotated Bibliography

Campbell, John R.B. 1991. Through the arc of the rain forest (book review). The New York Times Book Review. 16.
In the article referenced above, Mr. Campbell reviews Yamashita’s first book- Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. He speaks positively about the book for the most part saying Yamashita “captures… the complexity of Brazilian culture.” He also comments on her ability to show readers the terrible truth of reality in a poetic fashion.

Chuh, Kandice. Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World. American Literary History. 18.3: 618-37.
Chuh discusses how Yamashita’s novels have impacted Asian-American and hemispheric studies through her writings on Brazil and a national identity. She analyzes how Yamashita’s works challenge us to look at what drives people and how their desires affect individuals as well as the community around them.

Kaye, Janet. 1998. Tropic of orange (book review). The New York Times Book Review. 103 (1):16.
This article is a book review of Tropic of Orange and it appears in The New York Times Book Review, published weekly. The author gives credit to Karen Tei Yamashita for being witty and giving us a plot that allows us to see that some individuals (in this case Emi & Gabriel) can be so consumed in their own lives, they don’t notice the destruction of the world around them. The critical part of the article comes when she writes that the book becomes disappointing toward the end with a little too much formal controversy.

Lee, Sue-Im. 2007. “We Are Not the World”: Global Village, Universalism, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange(Critical Essay). MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 53.3: 501-527.
Lee examines how the book looks at the globalist “we” and how it affects universalism. In Tropic of Orange, Yamashita strips people of their “material inequalities” so they will see how similar all people really are. Lee also discusses the representation of a global village in Tropic that is based on logic of consumers, meaning that because people can taste another culture’s food or see it’s people, they have experienced another culture.

Mallot, J. Edward. 2004.”Signs taken for wonders, wonders taken for dollar signs: Karen Tei Yamashita and the commodification of miracle.” ARIEL 35.3-4: 115(23). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. CIC University of Illinois Chicago. 17 Feb. 2008.
The basic style of Mallot’s piece is quoting a passage from Yamashita’s books and describing what is represents in the real world. He discusses Yamashita’s representation of Brazil, economic situations, money, commodities and even men. He concludes that people will try to exploit miracles because consumers will insist on having them.

Rauch, Molly E. 1998. “Tropic of Orange.” The Nation 266. n7. 28(3). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. CIC University of Illinois Chicago. 17 Feb. 2008
Throughout the article, Rauch discusses oranges, from the one on Gabriel’s ranch to the shipment of spiked oranges from Brazil that lead to the freeway destruction. She refers to the book as a collage in which Yamashita has given us seven days and thrown the lives of seven people on a path to entanglement with metaphors operating untamed.

Rody, Caroline. 2000. Impossible voices: ethnic postmodern narration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Contemporary Literature. 41.4: 618-41.
This article looks at the post modern use of narrative voices in Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Morrison’s Jazz. They give us new perspective on narrators, abandoning the know-it-all that is much too common. Instead, they use a mystery person who seems to know just enough.

Shan, Te-hsing. 2006. Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita. Amerasia Journal. 32:3: p123-142.
This is an interview with Karen Tei Yamashita, in which she talks about her family as well as her heritage.

Parable of the Talents
By: Octavia E. Butler
Dave McAndrew

I was really disappointed while reading Parable of the Talents. I thought it was just another Parable of the Sower. As a matter of fact I would say it is just like it. The passage I was assigned is just like the passage everyone else was assigned. It’s the circle the book has been driving down since we started Parable of the Sower. After being interested in the first book and then losing interest by the end, I was not so thrilled in reading Parable of the Talents. Octavia Butler tries hard to keep you interested in the book by putting shooting and rape into a passage after you have already lost interest.
I thought of the passage as a huge circle. Lauren is this girl that speaks of change, yet doesn’t want change. She knows that the building of Acorn could be a positive step to a new life, yet doesn’t allow anything but Earthseed to be taught. Therefore, no change was taking place. I related the passage I read to everyday life. There are some that think everything that is happening now is good, and some that think change is what makes things better. Lauren’s positive change came when she was reunited with Marcus, this would have been a great step to take to rebuild what she had before. Yet she doesn’t think so since Marcus wants to preach Christianity and doesn’t believe in her religion.
Lauren wasn’t taking any steps for a positive change. She was living with what she had, although things are going to change. She had a child named Larkin, no matter what she didn’t want to change, it was going to happen. Bankole was offering Lauren a better life in a new community, but she wouldn’t leave Acorn and Earthseed behind. She didn’t want to teach anyone another points of view or religion. She was “stuck” and she wasn’t going to do anything different. I didn’t like certain parts of the book because there was nothing really going on, nothing was happening.
The thing that caught my eye the most was this “Choose you leaders, with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward, is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool, is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.” Lauren didn’t want anyone to choose their own leaders, she was their leader and that was the end. I thought of Lauren as a coward throughout the whole book because she didn’t choose the better life with Bankole in Halstead over Acorn. I would consider her a fool because I thought Jarret was running her in some way or another. She kept people in Acorn just to soon be defeated.
I summed it up into a circle like I said in the beginning. I knew what was happening before I read this passage, while reading it I thought of what was next before it happened. In my opinion it’s not a great way to write a book. I don’t write books so I may not know.

In the first chapter of Parable of the Talents, by Ocatvia E. Butler, Lauren has a conversation with one the surviving members of the Dovetree family, Aubrey. They talk about the attack on the Dovetree’s house, killings, and the destruction. Aubrey started talking about the description of the attackers and the way they acted.

“…attackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics – black dresses, she called them – which hung to their thighs.”
“They all wore big white crosses on their chests – crosses like in church.”

These two phrases sound all too familiar. They sound like a description of cloths that Ku Klux Klan wear, however, it is not. The current Ku Klux Klan is white robes with a variation of red or black cross on the chest or back area. The people who Aubrey talks about were black tunics with red crosses. This illustrates to me that the whole country, nation, is back to where we were when the Ku Klux Klan could walk the streets and literally kill people who they thought were not fit in their society. However, this might be not be the case since these people wear black tunics, which might show that it is similar to what has happened in our history, it is not the same, but very closely related. I once heard someone say something similar to, “For every country to move forward, it needs a revolution once in a while.” Revolutions happen when something drastic happens where people do no like what is being done (in a simple way). “Desperate times call for drastic measures.” When there is a revolution the nation is pretty much is set to the beginning. New rulers need to be put in place, new laws have to created, and new ways of living have to be established. In Parable of the Talents, this isn’t the case. Even thou they don’t call the people who attacked Dovetrees Ku Klux Klan, they are. We are back at the begging and things are going to go bad again. This is another circle of life which repeats itself, different time same concept.

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, ‘simpler’ time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same god, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country.”

There was a time when all this was considered the right thing to do, however, it was never established as a law in a society we live in today. Taking this phrase and looking at the present state of the United States religion, there is no way US will ever be “taken back to that magic time of one religion.” US is one the religiously diverse nations and that cannot be taken away from a nation like the United States of America.

In the novel, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, the characters and other inhabitants of the future United States face an all too familiar world of little access to essential resources. This world in which it is difficult to obtain an income, food, and adequate medical care is not all that foreign if compared to today’s society. Today, those who are not on the top of the social class hierarchy deal with limited access almost daily. They fight to obtain a job in which will pay enough for them to get out of debt, they struggle to obtain healthy foods (without having to travel long distances), and they attempt to gain adequate and affordable healthcare and justice. This is exactly the picture that Butler paints in her novel, except that instead of only affecting the poor, it sweeps the country on a large scale, making a full life even more difficult to obtain.

            One of the first and most obvious things that the characters in Butler’s world do not have is access to money. The only money they are able to obtain is by either stealing or by taking money from the dead. If any characters are able to hold a job, it usually does not pay enough for them to support a family or to buy necessities to live on. Butler writes, “Wages – surprise! Were never enough to pay the bills” (288). Even when people were able to earn some type of wages, they couldn’t afford water and food. These kinds of occurrences are strikingly familiar to today’s world. Jobs that pay a low salary never quite get people out of debt. They also leave people with a low amount of money to buy food. Another similarity between this fantasy world and our current one is the distance people are made to travel to obtain food. Butler’s characters cannot find adequate stores that sell food and clothing at affordable prices. This is not a far off idea if the poorer areas of cities today are closely examined. People must travel further distances in order to buy the things they need, much like the people in Butler’s world. This problem of access to resources is what sets classes apart from each other in today’s society, and unfortunately, in Butler’s world, this lack of access is what keeps Lauren and her followers on the streets.

            In addition to not having access to money and proper food, the characters in Butler’s world do not have access to medical care or to the criminal justice system. Doctors and hospitals are long gone and the people are left to either not receive medical care, or to simply make due with that they have. Along with no medical care, these people cannot depend on the police for assistance. Often the police charge outrageous prices for routine investigations or worse, they don’t respond to a call for days. Again, while these situations might seem shocking to think about, they are going on in the world today. In poor areas of the city, police many times are slow to respond; if they respond at all. With Bankole’s situation, Butler writes, “The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing.” (316). In this instance, the police didn’t even give Bankole a chance – they had their minds made up that he was a criminal. In the end, the lack of available resources is the community’s downfall. Because of the unavailability of water, food, money, and medical needs, they are left fending for themselves. They steal and share, make their own food, and try the best they can to survive under the less than perfect conditions that now make up their lives, just like some people do in today’s world.

I just finished reading Parable of the Sower and I must say WOW! This book is amazing! At it’s crudest moments are when we see the true elements of human nature. As humans, we feel, we try to be compassionate, we try to help our fellow man. But that is today, not in the 2020’s when our book takes place. People have come to embody their worst forms. People are drug addicts, theifs and killers. Cops & politicians are in it for thier own gain, not the people they are supposed to serve, and there is no one strong enough to challenge them. People have only been left with thier animal instincts. We see these things when comeone notices a human skull lying on the ground & doesn’t flinch. They can only be thankful that “It’s not me.” Or when Lauren’s group comes across a corpse on the side of the road & nobody has a problem with Emery taking the woman’s clothes…”I need to survive”…

What has the world come to when a man will to try snatch a child from her mother’s grasp? It seems the only time purity & innocence come up in the novel is when the chidren are the focus. Doe makes her father take half the pomegranate because they should each have thier fair share. Allie takes in Justin like he is her own child. Natividad & Travis join the group because their child needs strong defenses around him. It is perhaps the children that are able to keep this group sane & together. Everytime Grayson wants to leave, he takes on look at his daughter & knows he must stay, at least for her sake. He needs to survive. Survival is the key to the future Parable of the Sower holds for the people of the United States.

Throughout Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren (the main character) talks about the aspects of her newly discovered religion of Earthseed. The religion states that God is change and that you can shape that change. This means that you control your destiny and the destiny of others with your everyday actions.

In this particular section of the book (p. 167-268), Lauren demonstrates one of the important concepts of the religion. “Embrace diversity, Unite—Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed” (p.197). After pyro addicts and thieves take over and burn down Lauren’s community, her family is killed, and she is forced to live on her own. Lauren has to find a way to survive without a home and without the help of friends or family. She is left with nothing. But Lauren, being the strong girl that she is, does not believe that she is left with nothing. She knows that she has Earthseed. She knows that if she keeps it her mind and actions she will survive. In order to survive, Lauren knows that she has to find allies and head north. She meets two survivors named Harry and Zahra when she looks for a place to sleep. They all sleep in the same garage for a night, and become allies from there.

Their journey north becomes a struggle with savages trying to rob or kill them for their supplies, clothing, and money. As they travel through expressways they meet new and different people. They meet a mixed family of three (Travis, Natividad, and their baby Dominic), a former rich man named Bankole, two prostitute sisters named Allie and Jill and a small child named Justin. Before the family joined Lauren’s group, they were attacked by robbers and wild dogs because they were a small group, and therefore, seen as prey. Before Bankole joined the group, he was seen pushing his cart along the road by himself, and would most likely be robbed or killed like every other individual that was seen alone. Before Allie and Jill came along, they were found trapped in a house after an earthquake and would also be dead if they were not saved by Lauren’s group. After his mother was killed, Justin had no chance of surviving if they did not take him in. The way that Lauren takes these people in and allows them to travel with her as a group demonstrates her belief in Earthseed. She embraces diversity by inviting people no matter what race they are. (there are three white people, three black people, and two Hispanics) She also encourages unity because she knows that that is what it takes to survive.

As each of the individuals join the group, they gradually become a community. They take turns watching for scavengers while the others sleep, they advise each other on what supplies to buy, and they kill anyone who attacks anyone in the group. With her belief in Earthseed, Lauren was able to build this community. She starts to prove that she did not just make it up like some people believe. Surviving as a unite shows that the religion is true, and that others should believe in it as well.

This concept of embracing diversity and uniting seems to be Butler’s way of sending a message to readers. She is trying to show today’s society that the only way to survive and prevent the formation of Robledo’s 2027 society is to unite and accept others no matter what race they are.