Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | BIO BRINA | 31478010178334 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | B BRINA | 32114002617943 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY BRINA, EL. | 31330009000898 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | B/BRINA | 33934004452638 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Burlington Public Library | BIO BRINA, E.M. | 32116003783715 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | BIO BRINA | 32117002057580 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | BIOG/BRINA | 31480011450555 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | BIO/BRINA, E. | 31482002977927 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/BRINA E | 31479007438566 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | 921 BRINA, ELIZABETH | 32122002834012 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | BIO BRI | 31549004849401 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library | B BRINA, E | 39965002310091 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | B BRINA, E. | 31481005500736 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | B BRINA 2021 | 32124001960731 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | 92 BRI | 32125001417887 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | BIOGRAPHY BRINA E | 32128003902872 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | BIOGRAPHY BRINA, E. | 31550002414933 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | B BRINA | 32129002431020 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | BIO BRINA | 32133002548882 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | B BRINA | 31990005031419 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | BIOGRAPHY BRINA | 32136003533761 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A "hauntingly beautiful memoir about family and identity" (NPR) and a young woman's journey to understanding her complicated parents--her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran--and her own, fraught cultural heritage.
Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood and adolescence. Yet even though she felt almost no connection to her mother's distant home, she also felt out of place among her peers.
Decades later, Elizabeth comes to recognize the shame and self-loathing that haunt both her and her mother, and attempts a form of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people. Clear-eyed and profoundly humane, Speak, Okinawa is a startling accomplishment--a heartfelt exploration of identity, inheritance, forgiveness, and what it means to be an American.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Brina captivates in her stunning and intimate debut memoir. Brina's mother, born and raised in post-WWII Okinawa, where the feuding forces of China, Japan, and the U.S. left the local population impoverished, married Brina's father, a white American soldier from a wealthy family, in 1974, only to find herself a lonely fish out of water after they moved to suburban Fairport, N.Y. As an American child in a largely white community in the '80s, Elizabeth found her mother's foreign culture embarrassing and acted out as a result. (She writes, for instance, of giving her mother a paper-cutout heart with "I love you" written in Japanese for Christmas, and later tearing it to shreds: "When my mother sees what I have done, she covers her face with her hands and weeps.") On a trip to Okinawa with her parents after her own broken engagement, she had an epiphany, realizing that her parents' love is genuine but fraught with an unsettling power dynamic, evidenced by the fact that, on the trip, her father played tour guide, showing his naive "country gal" the rest of her own nation. This nuanced tale goes both wide and deep, and is as moving as it is ambitious. Memoir lovers will be enthralled. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Most memoirs are about resolving an identity crisis of some kind. And this is an extreme one. Born to a mother from Okinawa and a father who was a US soldier, Elizabeth Miki Brina grows up in New Jersey and Fairport, New York, faintly aware of her history but unable to really assimilate it for years. As a child, she clings to her father, to Beverly Hills 90210, to Chuck E Cheese dinners, to Aerosmith cassette tapes; she cuts up her mother's kimonos and, as soon as she is old enough, dyes her hair blond. She wants blue contact lenses but her parents draw the line at that. Even at the age of 18, when she starts to say the words "half-Japanese" out loud, she is not able to explain "what Okinawa is", the place where her mother was born and raised. As the author explains, the words "internalised racism" were not in anyone's vocabulary at that time - and they certainly weren't familiar to her parents, two people who were young and naive when they fell in love and spend the rest of their marriage just trying to do their best, with the kind of quietly disastrous consequences that secretly make up many ordinary family lives. With the benefit of hindsight and the beady eye of a ruthless biographer, Miki Brina's life story becomes an extraordinarily compelling and involving account of what it means to grow up denying a part of yourself. This is how a woman in her 40s comes to terms with her identity in a supposedly racially aware America. It's a story written with pathos, humour, grace and a massive dose of cringe. Her father, with Elvis Presley looks, was a serviceman in Okinawa, the smallest and southernmost of Japan's main islands and used as a base after Vietnam. Okinawa is the long-term subject of a tug of war between Japan and various other powers, still not entirely resolved. Miki Brina visits the island - and her grandparents - as a toddler, when she still speaks a few words of Japanese. But after that her mother never returns home again and the link is lost. For most of Miki Brina's childhood, Okinawa is something that is never spoken of. It's like it doesn't exist. As the years pass, her mother's own sense of self begins to fade. This marriage was initially a fairytale: she, the waitress serving the Americans, he, the handsome foreigner. She was the exotic prize whisked away to the land of plenty. Of course, things go awry fast. America is loud, disappointing and harsh. The mother never really learns to speak English properly, the father speaks no Japanese and the daughter takes refuge in being as American as possible. Miki Brina, an only child, finds herself growing up with a strange sense of self-loathing combined with a feeling of being fiercely patriotic. She is confused when classmates and neighbours treat her as "other" and when teenage jocks seem to want to count her as a one-off trophy conquest. But she is so desperate to belong that she doesn't question any of this, directing all the rejection inwardly and blaming herself. The real skill here lies in the empathy the author has for her parents and for her younger self. Yes, her father is sometimes difficult and authoritarian, but he holds things together. Yes, her mother drinks too much ("We never uttered the word 'alcoholic'"), but she does not try to leave and she loves her family as best she can. Yes, Miki Brina as a child was obnoxious and biased towards her father's side of the story, but she didn't know any better and couldn't see things how they really were. This is ultimately a study in the intricate survival mechanisms we use to cope with what's going on around us. The family story is interwoven with the mind-bendingly unfortunate history of Okinawa, which is recounted here in fascinating, vivid historical asides. As Miki Brina ages, she comes to identify more strongly with her mother's roots and strives to find the kind of peace of mind that comes with accepting that you can be two things at the same time. Her writing is so warm and honest that you find yourself rooting for her and her parents, thrilled at her "adult learner" conversations with her mother in stilted Japanese, willing them all to find a way to understand one another. This is quite simply a brilliantly original and affecting memoir.
Kirkus Review
In a debut memoir, the daughter of an Okinawan Vietnam War bride and an American soldier grapples with her complex familial roots. Brina's doting father once told her: "Ask me the time and I'll give you the history of watchmaking." The author shows a similar tendency to overelaborate in this heartfelt but meandering account of her effort to understand what it means to be an Okinawan American whose mother was born on an island most Westerners only know as the site of a World War II battle. Growing up in the mostly White suburb of Fairport, New York, Brina heard confusing racist slurs. "When I was growing up," she writes, "White was always what I strived to be, and White always felt just beyond reach. Except I already was White. White was how I viewed the world, looked out at the world, no matter what the world saw when it looked back at me." Such paradoxes fostered shame, guilt, and an anger toward her lonely mother, who often inadvertently embarrassed her. In adulthood, the author saw links between her family's conflicts and the tortured past of Okinawa--claimed by turns by the Chinese, Japanese, and Americans--and visited the island with her parents, which helped her reconcile with her mother. Her account of her transformation is lyrical and well observed, and the author is to be commended for her dedication to excavating family history. However, despite the poetic flourishes, the text is too overburdened with literary contrivances, including first-person plural narration (used too frequently, it becomes disorienting), abrupt changes from present to past tense, and nonlinear chronology; one chapter has more than 40 shifts back and forth in time. Especially disorienting is a section that purports to reveal thoughts of a subordinate of Commodore Matthew Perry without revealing the sources for its material or the degree to which it has been fictionalized. A multilayered exploration of Asian American identity hampered by too much literary artifice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Brina opens her first book with the story of her grandmother's survival, four children in tow, of the brutal 82-day Battle of Okinawa. "I had not learned this history, my mother's history, my history, until I was thirty-four years old. Which is to say that I grew up not knowing my mother or myself." Interludes like this one characterize Brina's uniquely structured memoir, which investigates her own past as the daughter of an Okinawan mother and a white American father, and the history of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. In several passages, Brina writes in a collective voice: of Japanese women who married American GIs, of Okinawans during WWII, of American men on Commodore Perry's 1852 expedition to the island. These episodes inform the rest of Brina's forthright and tunneling inquiry into how she came to understand the many inherited layers of herself and her racial identity. Deeply human portraits of her parents emerge alongside her own candid snapshots: stories of both disappointments and unconfined, unconditional love. Artfully concerned with the DNA-altering effects of trauma and the almost unfathomable power of language, Brina's work opens a window on a lifelong search for peace, and the life-giving work of listening.
Library Journal Review
Brina begins this masterful debut by sharing her first memory--a dog bite in her mother's native Okinawa--and the following series of recollections serve as an apology to her mother and her former homeland for forgetting Japanese after moving to the United States and for distancing herself from her mother in an effort to become more American. Although this is Brina's story, it's her parent's story as well. The author movingly depicts how her mother, the fifth of sixth children born to a poor family, married a U.S. serviceman, stationed at a military base in Okinawa, in order to escape poverty and ongoing abuse from an older brother. While her mother turned to drinking, feeling isolated in the suburbs of Rochester and no longer able to communicate with her daughter in her native language, her father, experiencing PTSD, was alternately withdrawn and controlling. Brina is at her best when illustrating her own isolation; striving to be white, like her father, but always feeling like parental warmth was out of reach and engaging in flings in order to find affection. Trips to Japan to visit extended family lead to poignant chapters on the history of the Okinawa islands. VERDICT A can't-miss memoir that will stay with readers after they finish the last page.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal