Stubborn Twig

STUBBORN TWIG is "narrative nonfiction" in need of a compelling personal narrative. The premise is promising. Kessler follows three generations of Japanese immigrants, beginning with the arrival of Masuao Yasui in Oregon in 1903. Using personal narratives to elucidate history is a compelling and popular format. Yet Yasui's story never feels personal, but rather a framework over which to hang historical facts and demographic research. Narrator Christine Williams reads rather than performs. Her narration lacks emotional suspense and drama, although this is in part due to their absence in the text itself. Lauren Kessler's work will be best appreciated by a select group of academics, students, and historians. J.T. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

October 4, 1993
The Japanese immigrant experience is documented here in a detailed social history of three generations of an Oregon family. Beginning with the life of 16-year-old Masuo Yasui, who arrived in 1903 from an agricultural village in the Honshu region of Japan to work as a railroad laborer in Oregon's Hood River Valley, the book reaches to the lives of his grandchildren--lawyers, doctors, teachers and filmmakers--some of whom have married non-Asians. Kessler, a journalism teacher at the University of Oregon and author of six books, takes us through the obstacle course which Asian immigrants typically had to overcome, from the early exclusionary laws barring them from citizenship, to WW II internment camps. Her research into each of her subject's lives is diligent and she recounts the intimate tragedies (suicides, illnesses), the determination, hard work and family solidarity that characterized the Yasuis' rise to affluence and success. Kessler has created a praiseworthy chronicle of the ``process and meaning of becoming an American, of promise and prejudice in a new land.'' As she writes in her preface, ``Being an outsider is the quintessential American experience. It is, in fact, our single common bond.''