bonsai

A Japanese-American is someone who has been trained in the Japanese ways of ultimate courtesy, but who has a quite independent and secret American sensibility locked into that pleasant and self-effacing exterior—like a bonsai. A tree trying to grow, but forced, through clipped roots and wired branches, into an expected shape. Like bonsai, a Japanese-American can be considered warped or deformed, or an object of uncanny beauty.

A Japanese-American is someone who, after a lifetime of being asked if she’s Japanese or Chinese, or how long she’s been in the States, or where she learned her English, will laugh when some white guy who has taken two semesters of Beginning Japanese tells her that she’s mispronouncing her own family name.

Being Japanese-American means being imbued with certain values treasured by Japanese culture—values such as consideration, loyalty, humility, restraint. Values which, when exercised by white Americans, seem civilized; but they make Japanese-Americans seem unassertive, not willing to take risks, lacking confidence and leadership qualities.

Some sansei are like brash young redwoods, so new and naive. It’s so clear why the Nisei didn’t talk. The Nisei, whose psyches were wired like Japanese baby pines by the internment. They wanted the third generation to grow up American, like redwoods. They wanted them to shoot for the sky, tall and straight, to walk ahead like gods. To free themselves of the past like a rocket that discards its used stages as it shoots into space. Let go of the past; if you carry your spent burden with you, you will never reach the moon.

(First published in Into the Fire: Asian-American Prose, Greenfield Review Press, 1996.)

“Bonsai“: Courtesy of Norio Nakayama. Licensed under cc by SA 2.0