Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan
Penguin Books 2010

Locke, California, 1928. Three bedraggled Chinese women appear out of the mist in a small Chinese farming town on the Sacramento River. Two are unknown to its residents, while the third is the long-lost wife of Richard Fong, the handsome manager of the local gambling parlor. As the lives of the townspeople become inextricably intertwined with the newly arrived women, their frightening power is finally revealed.

An imagining of what happens when a Chinese ghost story comes true,Water Ghosts is a tale of human passions and mingling cultures. . . (Publisher’s Description)

Author’s Website

Shawna Yang Ryan was born in Sacramento, California.  Water Ghosts, originally published as Locke 1928, is her first book.  Ryan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, then went on to receive an M.A. from the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Davis.  Currently she is one of the  Distinguished Writers in Residence at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.  Click Here to see an interview with Shawna Yang Ryan on Water Ghosts.

Water the Moon

by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Marick Press Press, 2010.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain was born in Singapore, and grew up in a hybrid of cultures. After receiving a British education, she moved to the States, and graduated from Columbia University and New York University before pursuing a Ph.D. at Paris IV-Sorbonne. A zheng concertist, she has performed worldwide. One of the editors at Cerise Press, she writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. She lives in both New York City and Paris, France. (Publisher’s information)

Water the Moon demonstrates Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s depth as a poet of international background.  Her poem, “Moon,” is particularly noteworthy . In its five stanzas she reveals the anxieties of moving to a new country (multiple times), and captures just how much something so dead as the moon can haunt you from your past into your future.

Drifting House

by Krys Lee
The Viking Press 2012

Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee’s stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.

In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants’ unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter. (Publisher’s description.)

Although born and currently living in Seoul, South Korea, Krys Lee spent much of her childhood in California and Washington, and even stayed a while in England. This year she recieved a special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In 2006 she was included in a short list of finalists for the Best New American Voices. Krys Lee is truly a product of our globalized society as her writing truly reflects the pain, and sometimes the beauty, that migrates with people across borders, into new homes, away from painful pasts.

Haoles in Hawai‘i

Haoles in Hawai‘i
Judy Rohrer
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010
xii + 124pp.

by Alexander Mawyer, Lake Forest College, Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology

Judy Rohrer’s potent Haoles in Hawai‘i illuminates highly charged categories of personhood in a Hawai‘i sometimes characterized as free from the fraught politics of race familiar in other U.S. contexts. Inspired by and drawing on recent work by Native Hawaiian scholars who have systematically demonstrated that long-enduring narratives about Hawaiian history and society are illusions that place the islands’ true histories under erasure, she suggests that the well circulated story of the islands as an ethnic or racial melting-pot is the insidious Western fantasy of paradise extended to the fabric of social relations. Resulting in processes of historical displacement and disconnection, such erasures simultaneously support odious legacies of the domination of Hawai‘i by foreign elites since the nineteenth century and the political annexation of the islands by the United States. Against this historical backdrop, Rohrer critically reexamines the narratives and putative common-sense understandings of haoles as a socially privileged class. Whiteness studies, the social construction of personhood with particular attention to race, discourse analysis of the presence of ponderous history, and barbed politics in everyday conversations—all these are deployed in service of making sense of the category of haole across island contexts from classrooms to courtrooms. Haole is not, Rohrer notes, a natural category but one that emerged and changed over time and requires considerable scholarly attention to its historical, social, and cultural dimensions.

Though Haoles in Hawai‘i is a slender volume, the reader will be struck by the author’s offerings of numerous profound and stimulating conversations with ‘ohana, neighbors, colleagues, and strangers met across the aisle of the new Tamura’s in Barber’s Point, while paddling out to the break at Makaha Beach, or in line at the Starbucks on Kapahulu Avenue. A central theme of the work is that the history of social personhood in the Hawaiian islands is complicated. It is not enough to note that there are Native Hawaiians, locals, and haole persons. The content and lived experience of each of these categories is overlapping, performative, politically charged, sometimes ironic, sometimes deadly serious, and changing in time. Certainly, Rohrer argues, race matters in the fiftieth state, as it does elsewhere within the U.S. political sphere. At the same time, she notes, “race works differently in the islands than on the continent, including being an everyday part of conversations” (68), and the different groups that make up Hawai‘i’s society would benefit from a renewed broader conversation about the politics of personhood with attention to racialization. It is to this conversation that Haoles in Hawai‘i most directly seeks to contribute. However, Rohrer’s work also will be of broad interest to scholars of race and ethnicity and to those in the emerging field of whiteness studies.

In an important chapter, Rohrer sensitively and incisively critiques broadly circulating claims—e.g., in local media, state courts, the national legislature—that haole have somehow become victims. With historical sensitivity, and penetrating simplicity, she observes that programs and social structures supporting the Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian community, do not erode or damage the status of other communities in Hawai‘i. Does social life need to be conceived or experienced as a zero-sum game? Many readers will be interested in Rohrer’s analysis of the conversational, performative aspect of haole. Being haole is not simply a matter of one’s skin, place of origin, or enduring concrete identity, though all of these features of our identities, among others, may indeed matter. Being haole is also a matter of how one acts and interacts, of attitude, understanding, affect and emotional life. Drawing on a particularly telling anecdote, Rohrer asks readers consider at least three kinds of haole personhood—haole, dumb haole, ****ing dumb haole—in and out of which individuals move, some more or less regularly than others. She also notes that these categories can include Native Hawaiian or other local persons as well.

In a critical point, also woven throughout, and drawing on the underlying observation that categorizing ‘others’ is a human universal, she notes that social processes of categorizing and labeling selves and others is not only a means of making sense of the world around us but is also caught up in collective attempts to impose order upon it. In the colonial context of Hawai‘i’s long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this is evident in such Western labels as native, savage, primitive, and bush, which often were brought to bear on Native Hawaiian persons as part of their political, social, and material disenfranchisement—or dismemberment, in Osorio’s sense. For Native Hawaiians, the everyday use of the term haole can sometimes be seen as a form of subtle resistance to colonial hegemony over the very categories of social life. If not able to dissolve the colonial context, such improvisational play with ‘race’ can be argued to offer Kanaka Maoli persons the means to exert control over aspects of the colonial, for instance as a subtly potent localization of others in indigenous terms. The inability of Euro-Americans to wrest semantic control of the term haole away from Native Hawaiian and other local persons thus stands as evidence of the enduring dignity and commitment to cultural identity in a long period of political and social domination.

Rohrer’s significant work will serve as a prolegomena to future studies of haole and other categories of person in Hawai‘i. I trust Haoles in Hawai‘i will be read and discussed by many with felicitous results for readers and the collectives they constitute alike.

Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa

edited by Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson
University of Hawai’i Press, 2000.

Modern Okinawa has been forged by a history of conquest and occupation by mainland Japan and the United States. Its sense of dual subjugation and the propensity of its writers to confront their own complicity with Japanese militarism imbues Okinawa’s literary tradition with insightful perspectives on a wide range of issues, including the ongoing discrimination against ethnic minorities in both Japan and the United States and the conflicting desires for Okinawa’s assimilation to, and autonomy from, mainland Japan.

But Okinawa’s literary tradition is as deeply rooted in the region’s lush semi-tropical landscape as in the forces of history. In the hands of skillful writers, the brilliant flora and dense forests, the pastel waters and coral reefs, are revealed as sites not only of breathtaking beauty but of horror and depredation. Okinawans’ quest to recover their region’s ancient cultural heritage is invariably haunted by the phantoms of war and occupation, phantoms that have been all but effaced from the mainstream literature of contemporary Japan. Yet as this anthology demonstrates, Okinawan writers often suffuse their works with a lyricism and humor that disarms readers while bringing them face to face with the region’s richly ambiguous legacy.

Michael Molasky is professor of Japanese at Connecticut College in New London.

Steve Rabson is professor of Japanese at Brown University.

Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas

by Oshiro Tatsuhiro and Higashi Mineo
translated by Steve Rabson
Institute of East Asian Studies, UCB, 1989.

Although the novellas differ sharply in tone and form, both are first-person narratives of individual protagonists whose lives are profoundly affected by the U.S. occupation and military presence. The novellas are presented here in translation together with an introduction providing historical background and a concluding essay that compares and evaluates them. The introduction is intended to supply information that will help the reader understand specific points in the stories. For both essays, the author has drawn on Japanese and English-language sources including materials collected in Okinawa during eight months of a 1967-68 overseas tour in the U.S. Army and on subsequent visits to the island.

Oshiro Tatsuhiro was born in 1925 in Nakagusuku, Okinawa Prefecture. He has published numerous books and articles on Okinawa’s culture and history a well as works of fiction and drama. His work The Cocktail Party was awarded an Akutagawa Prize in 1967.

Higashi Mineo was born in 1938 in Mindanao, The Philippines. His work Child of Okinawa was awarded an Akutagawa Prize in 1971.

Okinawa Explorer: A Complete Guidebook to Okinawa

by Kenny Ehman
TK2 Productions, 2005.

In order to help visitors plan a wonderful trip to Okinawa, the Okinawa Explorer first provides background information about local customs, language, public transportation, costs, and much more. There is also an easy-to-follow Navigation section that enables visitors to choose the best locations for enjoying what interests them the most.

Kenny Ehman has lived in Okinawa since 1992. He is an English teacher at a local elementary school and has been writing professionally since 1997. Ehman is the Vice President and co-founder of NPO Okinawa O.C.E.A.N. – a non-profit organization that educates Okinawan children about marine conservation. He is currently writing a children’s book and a book of short stories about Okinawa.

Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology

edited by Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon
Columbia University Press, 2005.

To represent the past century of Korean fiction, this collection extends beyond familiar writers, challenges cultural norms, and crosses political borders. By including stories from neglected female, North Korean, and “wlbuk” writers (those who migrated to the North after 1945 and whose works were widely banned in South Korea) and by bringing politically engaged works together with experimental ones, this anthology articulates the ruptures and resolutions that have marked the peninsula.

From sketches of desperate peasants in straitened circumstances to fast-moving, visceral tales of contemporary South Korea, the works in this collection bear witness to the dramatic transformations and events in twentieth-century Korean history, including Japanese colonial rule, civil war, and economic modernization in the South. The writers explore these developments through a variety of literary and political lenses, revealing with precision and poignancy their impact on Korean society and the lives of ordinary Koreans. This anthology includes an introduction, which synthesizes the key developments in modern Korean literature, and a comprehensive bibliography of Korean fiction in translation. (Publisher’s description)

Bruce Fulton occupies the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia. He is the co-translator of Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers; Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction; and A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction.

Youngmin Kwon is professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University.

And So Flows History

by Hahn Moo-Sook
translated by Young-Key Kim-Renaud
University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.

A saga of love, jealousy, honor, and greed, And So Flows History (Yŏksanŭn hŭrŭnda, 1948) depicts the relentless power of exterior forces on the individual lives of three generations of the illustrious Cho family—from the waning years of the Chosŏn dynasty in the late nineteenth century to the tumultuous post-liberation era. The novel opens with a tragic confrontation between two classes: the rape of a young slave by her master, the respected magistrate Cho Tongjun. Within a year, the magistrate has been murdered by Tonghak rebels, and his two sons are leading the family to ruin—one on account of his blind adherence to tradition, the other owing to his collaboration with the Japanese. Only Tongjun’s youngest child provides hope for the future through her marriage to a enlightened young teacher and patriot. (Publisher’s description)

Hahn Moo-Sook (1918–1993) is one of Korea’s most celebrated writers of modern realist literature. She received many awards for her writing, including the 1986 Grand Prix of the Republic of Korea Literature Award for her novel Encounter. And So Flows History, Hahn’s first novel, received first prize in a 1947 contest organized by a major Korean daily.

Young-Key Kim-Renaud is the eldest daughter of Hahn Moo-Sook. She is chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and professor of Korean language and culture and international affairs at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present

by Noriko T. Reider
Utah State University Press, 2010.

Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically, they are threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism. They also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctively gendered social and cultural meanings.
Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, they remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reider’s book would be the first in English devoted to oni. Reider fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as “others” to the Japanese. (Publisher’s description)

Noriko T. Reider is associate professor of Japanese at Miami University. She is the author of Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan: Kaidan, Akinari, Ugetsu monogatari (2002). Her articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as Asian Folklore Studies, Japan Forum, Film Criticism, and International Journal of Asian Studies.