Karen Tei Yamashita
(b. 1951)
Karen Tei Yamashita’s writing, like her life, has
been specially attuned to the histories, stories, and meanings of movement and
migration. Born in Oakland, California, Yamashita moved to Los Angeles when she
was one. Her writing career properly began in 1975 when she traveled to Brazil
to study the experiences of Japanese immigrant women there. What was to have
been a one-year research project turned into a nine-year stay that gave her the
material for her first two books, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and
Brazil-Maru, both published after her return to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s.
Those
novels bear traces of Yamashita’s experiences in Brazil, a country that she
describes as having a “generous and gracious acceptance...of strangers,” in a
peculiar mix of developed and developing worlds. They also attest to her range
as a writer, which moves from the complexly woven, multiply narrated voices
that make a three-generation tapestry of Japanese immigrants in Brazil-Maru to,
in Through the Arc, the fantastic world of miraculous pilgrimages, which draws
equal parts from Latin American magical realism and Brazilian soap operas.
Long
before the term globalization was being bandied about by politicians and
cultural critics, Yamashita was chronicling the sometimes tragic and sometimes
beautiful effects of a world folding in on itself. This view of the shrinking
world finds expression in the frequent lists that populate her fiction, such as
the one from Through the Arc, which describes a junkyard of “F-86 Sabres, F-4
Phantoms, Huey Cobras, Lear Jets and Piper Cubs, Cadillacs, Volkswagens, Dodges
and an assorted mixture of gas guzzlers,” swallowed up by the vegetation to
create a “rainforest parking lot.” But while Yamashita, with her eye for the
irreconcilably polyglot—that which simultaneously demands and denies easy
categorization—describes the collision of worlds in Brazil, her sensibility has
also been nourished by the equally fascinating racial, geographical,
architectural, and migratory stew that is Los Angeles. In her third novel,
Tropic of Orange (from which the following in the anthology is taken), she turns her
attention to this city. Not only does her characterization of Los Angeles stand
in stark contrast to Hollywood’s schizophrenic treatment, which shuttles between
Pacific paradise and disaster-prone dystopia, but she accurately describes the
extent to which the city of angels is being shaped and re-shaped by those who
have traveled to make their homes there. A character like Bobby Ngu, “Chinese
from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in
Koreatown,” speaks of a place where disparate worlds collide and commingle.
The
consistent line that links Yamashita’s novels is her deep engagement with the
social world and her continual questioning of “standards” of justice and equity
through characters who struggle to make such abstract concepts real in the
collective project of community. Whether through the destruction of rain forest
in the name of corporate expansion, through the corrupting influence of
“business” and war on a commune of Japanese idealists, or through the
unsettling contradictions that the global marketplace has thrown up between the
United States and Mexico, Yamashita’s narratives and characters speak to the
necessity of making community in spite of and because of a humanity that
struggles against its own flawed nature to realize that which it has imagined
to be possible.
A
world traveler herself, Yamashita currently makes her home in Santa Cruz,
California. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Santa
Cruz.
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