Speak, Okinawa

November 16, 2020
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.

Starred review from January 1, 2021

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no longer able to communicate with her daughter in her native language, her father, experiencing PTSD, was alternately withdrawn and controlling.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

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2021
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.

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February 1, 2021
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.

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