How Identity Is Shaped in Lois-Ann Yamanakas Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers - Essay Example

Planting Roots in Shallow Ground - How Identity is Shaped in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. Identity is shaped by numerous factors including one’s ancestral culture as well as one’s present conditions and the values and ideals these represent. This has been demonstrated in science yet is generally an echo of literature, which has long demonstrated this concept. According to Rocio G. Davis (2005), “Literary texts are emblematic of the structures that generate or manipulate meanings at specific historical moments as they offer a larger critique of culture and ideology” (233). The importance of place to the formation of identity is among the more dominant themes explored in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. The story is set during a time before those seeking indigenous sovereignty chose to separate themselves from the locals, during a time where the only foreigner was the white-American. The main character is Lovey Nariyoshi, an immigrant descendant of Japanese ancestry desperately trying to find her niche in this multi-layered society. Her observations regarding her classmates, her parents, her neighbors and the world they inhabit prove that she is shaped more by the environment she lives in than the bloodline she claims. Understanding that she has less of a claim to her Hawaiian homeland than the natives yet more of a claim than the rich American mainlanders, Lovey nevertheless maintains a high regard for both of these other ethnicities and devalues her own as somehow less authentic. Her struggle illuminates the space that she, as a Japanese Hawaiian local, inhabits between two historically antagonistic yet highly coveted positions – a space that also exhibits its own set of class distinctions. Yamanaka’s story brings to light the precarious situation of those with comparatively shallow immigrant roots. Through Yamanaka’s focus on class, race and language, an exploration of culture and ideology, Lovey is finally given the right to claim Hawai’i as her homeland and establish her own sense of identity. Class Within Yamanaka’s novel, one of the key factors guiding Lovey in her development of individual identity is her idea of her social class and status. The concept of class can be defined in almost as many ways as there are individuals to make up each division. Karl Marx, one of the key social scientists in modern times, identified the key elements by which classes are defined and structured as being based on work and labor activities and ownership or possession of property (Gingrich, 1999). Although Marx only identified two major classes within his philosophy, the bourgeoisie (owners) and the proletariat (the workers), common usage has divided the classes into three divisions – the upper class owners, the middle class workers and the lower class laborers or unemployed. In this context, Lovey’s world is a complicated blending of classes originating with her family at a level somewhere near the bottom. While she identifies herself as being among the lower class, based upon the descriptions she provides of her father’s and their neighbor’s occupations as compared to the little known world of the adults, she also attends school with a number of children representing all economic levels as evidenced by their possessions and activities. This concept of class distinction is also formed, as will be discussed, as a result of her Japanese descent and her heavy use of Pidgin English, the dialect of lower class Hawaii. Although Lovey tries to find ways of proving she is in a higher class, she must ultimately accept where her family ranks within the greater society. One indication of Lovey’s economic class can be found in the early introduction of Lovey’s father’s wage-earning weekends, which are not all confined to weekend activities. While his job is never mentioned, his various schemes to earn more money for the family to spend on small necessities receive a great deal of attention. The first of these indicates the subsistence level of Mr. Nariyoshi’s regular earnings as the tremendous effort involved in trying to earn extra money becomes emphasized by the very small amount of money that must have been required. “The last Family Money Pot was spent on a portable heater from Sears for the kitchen in the winter. All those weekends of odd jobs or sitting in the garage full of junk for the weekly garage sale for the dinky heater” (Wild Meat, 33). Other schemes that emerge through the book include growing flowers for the lei stand that Lovey and her mother string, raising livestock and hunting for food and breeding rabbits for fur. Lovey’s neighbors participate in similar activities as a means of gaining the money necessary for basic living needs while her schoolmates demonstrate much more affluent lifestyles. The popular Japanese girls are described as belonging to their own social clubs, indicating more affluent activities, while their possessions are often described with a somewhat covetous note. “They’re all so rich. They got gold chains with lots of gold charms on charm holders and plenty pairs of high-heel Famolare shoes. … They live in places called Sunrise Ridge or the Heights” (Wild Meat, 186). Yet this concept of rich is also quantified when Lovey goes into a lengthier discussion regarding the family of Lori Shigemura, one of the members of the Japanese Ray of the Rising Sun social group that has been presented as so fine. “Say something about her mother, who works in the macadamia nut factory with the little white kerchief on her head and white gloves and waves to the tourists … Say something about her father, who is the part-time custodian at Uncle Ed’s school, who mops the kindergarten and vacuums the library carpet … Say something about home-sewn Simplicity clothes from cheap Kress fabric” (Wild Meat, 195). In addition to material possessions such as gold chains, charms and tape recorders, there is a great distinction made among the various groups that attend Lovey’s school regarding where they live. The Japanese girls in the social clubs, for example, have already been indicated to live in named suburban neighborhoods while Lovey’s house, as evidenced by her father’s keeping of goats, cows, chickens and rabbits, is in no such carefully zoned and restricted area. Crystal Kawasaki’s house, which is within walking distance, presumably, from both the school and the Nariyoshi house, is described as “a rich house with a koi pond in front and fat, golden-orange, white-gold, black and bright neon-yellow koi swimming in and out of the lily pads” (Wild Meat, 205). The white people, the haoles, live on Reed’s Island in houses that “look like Gone with the Wind or like the sugar plantation owners’ houses on the cliffs above the Big Island Sugar Mill” (Wild Meat, 103) and act accordingly, condescendingly allowing the mothers to park at the bottom of the driveway while the kids trick or treat. Caught somewhere in the middle, Jenks, part Hawaiian and part Japanese, is nevertheless ranked higher than his neighbors regardless of his possessions thanks to his ethnicity and a shared belief, among the lower ranks anyway, that “Hawaiians are the only people who can claim Hawaii as their lahui, or nation” (Trask, 1999: 170). This unique close association among the various social classes leads to the development of a fierce class distinction at the microscopic level. The distinction highlighted in Yamanaka’s book is supported elsewhere. “Many critics and writers of Hawaii’s ‘local’ literature insist that Hawaii’s local culture, from which Yamanaka’s work originates, is quite distinct [from] Asian American culture, due to particular historical conditions that have shaped cultural formation” (Nguyen, 2002: 157). This insistence upon shades of difference is found within academia as well as Rob Wilson relates his struggles to bring true Hawaiian flavor to his English department at the University of Hawaii. “In fact, I was even told by a person in power that my research on Murayama [a local writer using Pidgin English in poetry] and publications and poetry in Bamboo Ridge journal would do my career no good at all, since it would be considered a kind of ‘slumming with the natives’” (Wilson, 2001: 401). This is but one example of how the classes were and still are largely divided along issues of dialect, which will be discussed shortly. In terms of class, however, “Hawaii Creole English carried with it overtones of class and race. Because Standard English was associated with the European American oligarchy, children of plantation workers felt uncomfortable in using it” (Tamura, 1996: 440). Those who tried were ostracized as trying to be haole, a concept Yamanaka illustrates throughout her book, while those who didn’t were not afforded many opportunities. “Those who learned Standard English could more easily advance professionally and economically, but their perceived rejection of their primary social groups and shift in allegiances made them seem like ‘cultural traitors.’ … On the other hands, those who preserved their native tongue faced barriers to further advancement in the larger American society” (Tamura, 1996: 141). Through his struggles in trying to bring recognition to the works and products of those individuals who spoke the Pidgin English dialect as their native language, Wilson was also forced to acknowledge the deep-seated class divide that still exists in Hawaii in many respects. “The attitude was to some extent expressive of white colonialism, rephrased of course in the more delicate tones of its liberal-political unconsciousness and American imperialist disavowal: Harvard and California Ph.D.s teaching high Euro-American culture in the Pacific who remained in, yet not of, the place and culture in which they taught and who, for the most part, maintained a cautious distance from, if not snobbery towards, the local and native languages and ways” (Wilson, 2001: 401). For Lovey, who dreams of the “Perfect Haole House” which has “a Dixie bathroom cup dispenser with cups that have blue and pink flowers around the bottom … a knitted poodle covering the next roll of toilet paper, rose-shaped soap in matching porcelain dishes, and rose-colored towels” (Wild Meat, 20), there is little chance to see herself as anything more than less than. She is not as good as the white people because she does not live in a big plantation style home on Reed’s Island with the perfectly coordinated bathroom, nor is she as good as many of her Japanese schoolmates who live in suburban neighborhoods and wear gold chains. Even those individuals who live close to her or have similar homes or lifestyles are seen as better than because they have Hawaiian blood and therefore a prior claim to the islands that trumps even the mighty haoles. However, when Lovey finally realizes that her family, too, has had an investment in the land, as she goes on her solitary trek to gather dirt from the Kauai plantation her father grew up on and dirt from their own home, she begins to determine she, too, has value and history in this, her homeland. Race As it is expressed in Yamanaka’s novel, race played a large role in determining class status in 1960s Hawaii and continues to play a large role in how people shape their own identity. “The 36-year-old author … is known for her brutally honest portrayal of the islands’ locals, exposing in revealing detail the prejudices, idiosyncrasies and insecurities of her mostly Asian American characters” (Seo, 1998: E1). A study conducted into how race figured into the formation of identity in a generally similar situation – Haitians working on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic – revealed that being a part of the lowest ranked race, such as Lovey was in Hawaii, automatically indicated that the individual was not worth noticing, regardless of economic classing or efforts to appear otherwise. “One Dominican of Haitian descent said ‘Here, to be black is Haitian. And to be Haitian is to be poor, hungry, ignorant, everything that is bad’” (Fainaru, 1999: 19 cited in Eide, 1999). While the situation of the Haitians is strongly affected by the extreme animosity felt between the two nations, a factor that did not reach such high degrees in the Hawaiian Islands, the effect of being separated out through language and race as being a member of the lowest class, and then realizing you were among the lowest of the lowest class, is daunting upon a person’s attempt to form a positive sense of identity. This is expressed in the same study’s citation of a Haitian migrant worker woman who expressed, in the Creole French of the Dominican Republic that equates to the Pidgin English of the Hawaiian Islands, “We’re not people” (Wucker, 1996: 16 cited in Eide, 1999). With this kind of worthless self-identification, the self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps these workers among the lowest class regardless of their opportunities or lack of them only serves to reinforce these concepts in the other races. Race plays almost a larger role than class in Yamanaka’s novel, perhaps because the class splits are almost exactly drawn along racial lines. The white people are rich, the Hawaiians are respected and the Japanese can occasionally, on very rare occasions, reach an acceptable middle class status yet remain the peasants of the populace. An example of how race relations in Hawaii had detrimental effects upon the development of identity can be seen in Hubert’s story regarding his experiences off the plantation. “Before, I wanna be one veterinarian. And I smart. Even though I no talk too much in school days, I know I smart. But the plantation owners, they make us think we so dumb. No can do nuttin’ but stay on the plantation” (Wild Meat, 147). While he attempts to take pride in his Samurai heritage from Japan, this has little effect on Lovey’s identity just as it had little effect on her father during his developmental years in Hawaii. In every occasion in which white people are mentioned, it is in conjunction with wealth and high status. Lovey’s descriptions of the houses she’s seen, her strong desire to be like the haoles and her father’s directives to learn how to speak haole if she wants to be able to get good jobs in the city all speak to the dominant race on the islands with a heavy sense of resentment mixed in as it is realized that they are only dominant because they have control of the rulebooks. Some of this resentment between the races can be seen in Hubert’s frustration over Lovey’s haole dreams: “I telling you, got one in a hundred haoles, just one, worth being call your friend. … I got any haole friends? Just one. Wilcox. But the bugga half Chinese, so no really count to me. One in a hundred, just one. And if I was you, I wouldn’t even bother to look” (Wild Meat, 27). Although racial mixtures in mainland America were often given significant difficulties and automatically dropped to the bottom level of the racial hierarchy, this was not determined to be the case in Hawaii as it is portrayed in Yamanaka’s novel. For the people in Lovey’s world, the degree of status one was according depended entirely upon which races were mixed and to what degree on which side of the family. For example, Jenks is described as half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian with a little haole mixed in. This Hawaiian blood, regardless of what else he might have in him, makes him immediately desirable. “Everybody wants a part Hawaiian person” says Lovey, while she indicates that a part Hawaiian going with a pure Jap is an ultimate coup for the Japanese half of the couple (Wild Meat, 217). Despite the resentment felt toward the haoles who ensured those of Japanese ancestry remained at the bottom levels of the racial structure, Kawehi Wells, a girl who is part Japanese and part haole, is also considered to be among the upper ranks because her father is the white person and the family is therefore rich. She may be resented as her father “sends her to tennis lessons at the hotel with a real pro and never the Parks and Recreation League with the rest of us” (Wild Meat, 222), but she enjoys a higher rank because of her blood than she would have if her mother had married another Japanese. Rather than automatically moving mixtures down on the social ladder as was done on the mainland, racial mixtures in the novel and in reality in Hawaii were often seen to provide a boost to a Japanese background while pure Japanese were given little to no room for social advancement based upon racial characteristics. As is hinted in the bitter tones that emerge in the various statements regarding the other races, particularly as they apply to the haoles, these racial attitudes reveal much about the culture and the values of the society in which Lovey lived. Money was seen to be the true measure of a man as those with money were respected with a certain kind of grudging awe while those without money were dismissed as little more than dirt. Ironically, the majority of the population is seen to be at a low or, at best average, income level that still required both parents to work at a time when most middle class mothers in the mainland were thought to be stay-at-home mothers. “Japanee girls all want haole last names like Smith or Cole. Tall blond haoles with hairy legs and bushy underarms. Blue or hazel eyes and with a real haole accent, or better yet they grew up here and their grandparents were missionaries, so they can talk local if they want – but don’t” (Wild Meat, 24). This demonstrates strongly how the white culture minority dominated the values systems that were in place in Lovey’s world, removing the constructs of the past and of a different country all together and replacing it with the purely economic capitalistic system of the United States. While they acquiesced to it, the inhabitants of the islands, Hawaiian and Japanese, were forced to determine for themselves whether they would adopt the culture and values of the upper white class and try to make a better life for themselves, in the meantime throwing away their own culture and heritage, or if they wanted to retain their connections to family and friends and live a subsistence life on the fringes of the white man’s world (Tamura, 1996). This concept is echoed again and again throughout Yamanaka’s story as Lovey first wishes to be like her haole heroes of the perfect houses and rich bank accounts and then swings back to her Japanese roots with the Alexander Fu Sheng films and Shesiedo makeup parties. The conflict is clearly delineated in the mixed messages Lovey receives from her father, “you wanna be this, you wanna be that, you better learn how for talk like one haole like me” (Wild Meat, 148), and from her neighbor, “Sometimes you act too haole-ish to me. You crazy – you like be haole or what?” (Wild Meat, 45). While it is clear that the only way to hold on to tradition, family and friends is to remain just like them, it is also clear that the only way to break the grip of poverty is to abandon them and take on the haole culture, presenting a frightening choice for a young person to try to make when also trying to decide who she is and who she really wants to be. This is complicated even further in the book with the influx of racial stereotypes that insisted a Japanese girl be slim, beautiful, smooth-skinned and smart. Lovey doesn’t play the flute, “like all the good Japanee girls” (Wild Meat, 57) and is scolded in math class because Japanese people are supposed to be good at math. “Mrs. Bell always says my Japanee name like it’s not supposed to be there with the other names on the Slow Boat” (Wild Meat, 236) and examples of English compositions that are graded with D-/F indicate her lack of academic skills or interest in these subjects either. About the only subject she is interested in, speaking like a haole, gives her similar lack of encouragement. Although she asserts she’s going to be what she wants to be when she grows up, Lovey’s teacher responds to her with a sarcastic sneer, “OH REALLY! … Not the way you talk. You see, that was terrible” (Wild Meat, 12). Simply by being Japanese, Lovey finds herself at the bottom of the social order, but her race continues to bring her lower as she fails to live up to the stereotypes surrounding her. This introduces a similar pattern as what had been seen in the investigation into class. Although Lovey can claim Hawaii as her homeland, symbolized in the dirt she gathers for her father, she can claim none of the status of that heritage. While she continues a family tradition that links family with the soil of home yet remains completely collected within the islands, she is given no place that is her own. Through her race, she is equally divided, at once reviled as stupid and incompetent and expected to perform well in academic subjects. “Lovey Nariyoshi embodies a learned self-defilement in Hilo’s racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood and school district” (Chiu, 2004: 97). Her denial of self is so strong that her dreams are filled of nothing more than wanting to be a haole or as closely associated with haole as possible even as she begins to understand her own right to be where she finds herself. Language Yamanaka utilizes Pidgin English to tell her story, tempering it in the narrative with a more standardized and almost accepted academic version of the dialect. Despite this, Lovey conveys a deep shame that she is only able to communicate in Pidgin, realizing its part of what classifies her at the bottom rung of society and will keep her there unless she can figure out how to master the Standardized English her teacher yells at them about. She recites, in the most proper English form she can muster, “My name Lovey. When I grow up pretty soon, I going be what I like be and nobody better say nothing about it or I kill um” (Wild Meat, 12). In response, her teacher yells at her and the rest of the class for their failure to grasp the grammar and structure of the standardized English form he is essentially asking them to learn by an impossible instinct. Even the teachers are implicated in the use of the dialect, quoted by Lovey before the spring dance, “Wear like Sunday best, no miniature high school prom. Nobody better wear gloves or gowns or you going straight home. … No be silly or we’ll cancel the Grad Dance, you wait. Damn kids act like this one prom and all the damn mothers calling the school asking why they gotta spend one hundred dollars for gown, hair appointment, flowers, heels, makeup and limo too” (Wild Meat, 218). Yet this inclusion of the dialect in the story is essential as a means of capturing the spirit and identity of the local conditions as they are different from the rest of the world. “Linguistic identity and cultural identity are skin and flesh. … When you sever one from the other, you make it not OK to be who you are” (Yamanaka cited in Takahama, 1996: E1). Had Yamanaka attempted to place the dialogue of the story within the standardized English format that the schools were attempting to teach yet not even the teachers could adhere to, much of the culture and meaning of the story would have been lost. The concept that English was suddenly the official language of the islands reflects the capitalistic and dominant rulership of the haole upper class just as the idea that the use of Pidgin English denoted the lowest class of society within the real context of Hawaiian education during this time period and well before it. “The linguistic imperialism of English, domineering and at times eradicating the use of Hawaiian, went hand in hand with the political and economic take-over of Hawaii” (Wilson, 2001: 398) just as the Pidgin English spoken by Lovey and her friends was identified as the uneducated language of the slave-like Japanese plantation workers developed for the simple means of facilitating communication between workers and masters without affording a chance for the dominated to rise above their station. The degree to which an individual spoke Pidgin or Standard English was the level of social class they were immediately ascribed to, whether it was an uneducated peasant class despite appearances of money or the affluent plantation owning upper class regardless of a plea of poverty. Based on the writings of Tamura (1996), this segmentation of society based strictly upon linguistic codes is a natural development that becomes stronger as the dominant class feels itself in the numeric minority. “Language intolerance has been especially strong when those in power have felt threatened by people they consider culturally different from themselves. Furthermore, despite considerable advances in the field of sociolinguistics and pidgin and creole studies, middle and upper class Americans have continued to use their dialect of English as a gatekeeper to positions of authority and privilege, illustrating the primacy of power and status in the politics of language” (Tamura, 1996: 432). The only true point at which the languages cross over as a means of a dominant class to communicate, however shakily, with a much lower, barely human, working class and little more. Any evidence of this working class dialect was enough to ban an individual from the upper echelons, or even the middle echelons, of any enterprise on the slightest of grounds. This was supported by a concept that the use of this dialect reflected “’sloppy and disorganized thinking.’ This view was widely accepted, even among Hawaii Creole English speakers, who as a result were reticent in public speaking” (Tamura, 1996: 432) thus fueling the suspicions and assumptions that those who spoke Pidgin were incapable of intelligent thought. In addition to the use of Pidgin English within her dialogue, Yamanaka’s writing style further serves to capture the unique voice and culture of the Hawaiian Islands of the 1960s. The result of a suggestion to write in her own voice, Yamanaka says it wasn’t until she made the attempt that she discovered the importance of language to the connection with thoughts and other associations so important to the conveyance of culture and homeland. “That’s when I came to terms that pidgin was not an ignorant language, that I was speaking a dialect and that my feelings and thoughts were so connected to the language that in order for me to write truthfully, I needed to connect to that voice” (Yamanaka cited in Takahama, 1996: E1). This is illustrated in her more reflective narrative passages as well as her dialogues in which Standard grammatical structure is allowed to fall away in preference of capturing true emotional response and impression. Through her use of the short story cycle format, Yamanaka is also able to communicate the transcultural nature of her experiences. According to Rocio Davis (2005), this format is particularly effective for the type of story Yamanaka presents because of “its link to the oral narrative, the articulation of a fragmented perspective, [and] the presentation of a dynamic process of representation.” The interconnected and yet separate nature of the various vignettes presented illustrate the position of the narrator as the story is told, in bits and pieces, eventually forming a more complete picture by its fragments than would have been possible through a stronger continuity. The stories are linked by their “emphasis on metaphor as unifying factor, plurality of perspectives and polyphony of voices, nonlinear and noncausal disposition, resistance to closure, [and illustrate] the struggle between individualism and collectivity” (Davis, 2005). Lovey is prevented from being contained within a single definition, being stupid and smart, pretty and plain, Japanese and Hawaiian native, American and other, all at once and one at a time. Lovey’s identity is not only tied up within her social and economic class, but also within her race and within her language. In the late 1980s, hearings regarding whether or not Hawaiian pidgin English should be banned from classrooms concluded that “Banning it from the classroom would silence students, demean them, create a negative self-image and was the wrong way to teach Standard Enlish” (Tamura, 1996: 450). Rather than being ashamed of their dialect, those who speak Pidgin English have recently begun to embrace it as a hallmark of the unique culture and history of the islands separate from and yet concurrent with American capitalistic efforts. No longer simply denoting a slave-like peasant class purposely kept ignorant and bereft of opportunity, the use of the Pidgin dialect is now the badge of a native, “a person born and raised in Hawaii, usually having a casual, friendly, family-oriented lifestyle. Caucasians have been usually excluded from this definition, despite their long historical presence in the islands” (Tamura, 1996: 453-454), reflecting the historical origins of the language and the willful separation of the haoles from it. Conclusion Demonstrating through explorations of class, race and language how the local people of Hawaii, meaning the imported Japanese plantation workers and their descendents as well as the Hawaiians who had traditionally owned the islands, managed to identify themselves, Yamanaka presents a story of the local culture and traditions of Hawaii in one of the most complete formats possible for such an endeavor. Her short story cycle in Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers presents a fragmented view of a young girl’s life as she comes of age in a complex melting pot of culture and tradition that nevertheless manages to portray the various struggles and hardships Lovey faced as she tried to establish her connection with homeland. Discovering the cruel double standards and purposely oppressive aspects of her world, including the positive and negative racial stereotypes, the linguistic difficulties and the economic repression of those individuals who could not learn how to speak Standard English, Lovey nevertheless manages to find a sense of self in the presence of a family history and places of connection from one generation to the next. Vacillating between the culture of her ancestors with their samurai heritage and oriental mystique and the culture of America with its wealth and comforts, Lovey explores the various options open to her and is disappointed to discover that she is able to fit in neither society. While her roots remain necessarily shallow in this new land, Lovey is still able to find the kind of ‘coming home’ peace discovered by her grandfather in his careful preservation of linking to the past and the home of youth through a simple package of dirt. In her action of repeating this process for her own father, she is able to finally understand that her culture is wrapped up in the complicated culture of Hawaii, that she doesn’t belong to America or Japan because she belongs to the islands and that while she does not inherit land by right of ancestral presence or by right of imperial wealth, she remains a part of it. In this final ability to claim Hawaii as her homeland, Lovey is finally able to form an identity of her own, not as Japanese or American, but as Hawaiian. Works Cited Chiu, Monica. Filthy Fictions: Asian American Literature by Women. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004. Davis, Rocio G. “Short Story Cycle and Hawai’i Bildungsroman: Writing Self, Place, and Family in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers.” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Ed. Xiaojing, Zhou with Samina Najmi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 231-248. Eide, Gina Marie. “Haitian Identity: The Effects of Race Through Haitian History and Transnational Migration with a Focus on the Dominican Republic and the United States.” (December 17, 1999). Hamline University. May 10, 2007 Gingritch. “Marx’s Theory of Social Class and Structure.” (September 28, 1999). University of Regina. May 10, 2007 Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Seo, Diane. “Authentic Characters or Racist Stereotypes?: Some Asian Americans Describe Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Writing as Socially Irresponsible; Yet High-Profile Authors and Others Defend Her No-Holds-Barred Style.” Los Angeles Times. (July 23, 1998). Takahama, Valerie. “Controversial Adventures in Paradise: Bully Burgers and Pidgin.” The Orange Country Register. (February 15, 1996). Tamura, Eileen H. “Power, Status and Hawai’I Creole English: An Example of Linguistic Intolerance in American History.” The Pacific Historical Review. Vol. 65, N. 3, (August 1996), pp. 431-454. Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Decolonizing Hawaiian Literature.” From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Wilson, Rob. “Doing Cultural Studies Inside APEC: Literature, Cultural Identity and Global/Local Dynamics in the American Pacific.” Comparative Literature. Vol. 53, N. 4, (Autumn 2004), pp. 389-403. Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Read More