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Jun 16, 2015Wong_Anne rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Although only 129 pages long, this novel packs a punch. It is the story of mail order brides from Japan who travel to San Francisco. Each of the 8 chapters deals with a different adjustment and historical period: Come Japanese!, First Night, Whites, Babies, The Children, Traitors, Last Day, Disappearance. Each paragraph deals with the women as a collective, but describes their individual experience in a sentence. “They gave us new names. They called us Helen. They called us Margaret, They called us Pearl (pg 40)”. It is an immigrant story, but also the story of first generation Americans, and of the resettlement camps of WWII. It offers speculation, rumour, innuendo, and myth as a way of dealing with the unknown. A quick read but not a light-weight one.