Indeed, Lydia’s marriage also reminds us of another important marriage described earlier in the text. Of the many family stories Lydia hears from her mother, the marriage between her parents remains her favorite. Lydia and her sister repetitively urge their mother to re-tell “the whole story [. . .] in correct sequence” (10). Their strong interest in the process of the
courtship and marriage of their parents may be dismissed as young girls’ general fascination with whatever romantic. Or, one may argue that the marital union between parents is always important of their children, for it provides the children with a sense of safety, a feeling of familial belonging, and a guarantee of their familial unity. To me, however, Lydia and her sister’s strong interest in the story of their parent’s marriage could be attributed to this marriage’s special position in preserving and extending Lydia’s family line. And the fact that this marriage takes place during the wartime Japanese American relocation adds further symbolic significance to this marital affiliation. First, the union between a Kibei mother and a Nisei father—two persons of different backgrounds—testifies to the family’s ability to grow by taking in the different. As Lydia asserts, the marriage between her mother and father creates a “new familial network” (11, emphasis mine). Moreover, arranged during the Second
World War, when most Japanese Americans are under the threat of familial disruption and community disintegration, the marriage features a wish-fulfillment for most Japanese Americans. It symbolizes the strength and resilience of a Japanese American family that grows despite the hostile socio-political situation. By formulating this marriage, Minatoya intervenes into the history. She writes Japanese American relocation into a chance-ground for two Japanese Americans, who would otherwise remain strangers to each other, to meet and achieve a marital union.
To conclude, this paper explores the possible domestic interventions into our conception of Asian America. Paying special attentions to the domestic dimensions of Japanese America in The Floating World and Talking to High Monks, I have tried to make clear how an
“unhomely” Japanese American domicile intervenes into the open world through a re-inventing of its own constitutive complexities. Both texts present Japanese American families as temporally-shifting and territorially-unbounded. The familial present is perpetually invaded by the emergence of its past in the form of telling-stories or re-told histories.
Moreover, the open road, be it domestic or international, is—to quote from Obāsan—always of “too much magic” (32) and provides the space of unpredictable development and
emergence of Japanese American families. The writing of a family, a home, and a domestic space remains inseparable from our conception of the community, the nation, and the public domain. The fluidity of families mirrors the heterogeneous constitutions of a nation. Never completely self-enclosed, the family life intervenes into the nation with its everyday convolution. As this paper should have demonstrated, when unfixing the boundary of Japanese American families, both The Floating World and Talking to High Monks help us conceive a Japanese America that ceaselessly stretches to other people and different places.
Making mobility and contacts with others the dominant mode of existence, the two texts restore our conception of Japanese America to its “real” hybridities, porosity, movement, and transgression.
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