Title: Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America

Author: Linda Furiya

Genre tags: autobiography, non-fiction, Asian-American, Japanese-American, coming-of-age

In writing this review, I feel I should start by disclosing that I am half-Japanese. My mother moved to America with her family in the late sixties, and as such was growing up around the same time as the author in a different location. So it was interesting to see a mixture of things I recognized and things that didn't quite match my experience, and wonder whether this difference was regional, generational, or because I only had one Japanese parent. If anyone has any questions on my experience relative to Linda Furiya's, by all means, shoot me questions. I will be sort of skimping on the details from my life otherwise, because that's not really here or there in a review.

The overall tone of the book is simple and straight-forward. It presents events, feelings, and observations as they happened, without particularly trying to be persuasive. These are not the way things should be or the way people should feel, but simply the author's personal journey when it came to identifying with her racial and cultural identity. Many of the discriminatory elements described in her story were familiar to me, as well, and reading this book prompted me to think a lot on my own experiences growing up. In particular, classroom responses to the discussion of the dropping of the atomic bomb struck a chord with me. Supposedly, I talked many people out of cheering when pictures of the atomic bomb explosion were shown in history class. Fortunately, unlike the author's situation, my teacher was on my side.

One aspect of this book that I really enjoyed was the nuance with which the author explored her interactions with her parents. She does not portray them as perfect people, but as people complete with vulnerabilities and weaknesses, often carrying with them the hurts of their past. Where the concept of "pride" has often been presented to me as a response to the shame that people who are somehow in the outgroup experience in our society, Linda Furiya's description is somewhat more nuanced. Pride takes on a focus of the strength it took for our predecessors to survive and overcome the obstacles in the past, to push through that which stood against them. And so, the author's mother is not simply a victim of a family situation that placed her second after her stepmother came into the picture; she is a person who pushed through that and developed values for how she would treat her children in response to that.

Food is also a really wonderful way of expressing family ties and connections. There were actually a few comments I had on her recipes, though - some of them seem a bit Americanized, which I suppose is to be expected. For instance, in most places where she calls for lemon, yuzu would be more appropriate if you can find it. And it's much easier now than it was in the sixties. But in a lot of ways, this is consistent with what she was probably eating while growing up. A lot of Japanese ingredients don't grow properly in America, so Japanese families living here make do with what they can.

All in all, though, it was an enjoyable read, and gave a lot of insight into complex familial gender dynamics.

Another sidenote - oyakodon is written with the characters for parent - "oya" - and child - "ko" - a reference to the fact that this is a dish consisting of chicken and egg. I always find this a bit morbidly funny.