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摘要
摘要
Winner of the 1991 PEN/Jerard Fund Award, Talking to High Monks in the Snow captures the passion and intensity of an Asian-American woman's search for cultural identity.
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
In this often delightful memoir of a Japanese American woman's youth in upstate New York, caught between her immigrant parents' culture and her own American experience, two sketches in particular are most revealing. Minatoya's father, a research scientist long employed by the same firm, is nearing retirement when he discovers he has been paid the same wages as his lab assistant. His two outraged daughters, perceiving racial discrimination, cry out: ``Sue them blind!'' But his Japanese dignity is at stake; besides, he has loved his work and was grateful for the chance to do it, and he feels strong loyalty to his employers. On the other hand, the daughters are entranced when their mother--a clothes designer and seamstress proud to have a career--plucks ancient tunes on her okoto for them, like a traditional Japanese woman. Minatoya is at her lyrical best with such family scenes, and there is both humor and pathos in her account of a visit to relatives in Japan, where she is as much an outsider as she is at home in the U.S. But when she focuses on her American self, her insights falter. The details of a disastrous first teaching job in Boston are sketchy, and her teaching adventures in Okinawa and China are richer in travelogue color than in personal revelations. Despite such weakn e sses, however, the book's charms are many. Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
A finely worded memoir of coming to terms with a Japanese heritage, by a Japanese-American who's a community-college counselor in Seattle. ``Feudal Japan floats around my mother,'' Minatoya writes. ``It followed her into our American home and governed my girlhood life....In that feudal code, all females were silent and yielding.'' But Minatoya is an American brought up on ``iconoclastic choice and irrepressible hope,'' uncomfortable with ``being in-between.'' Here, her spiritual journey begins with memories of growing up in Albany in the 1950's and of the tragic figure of a grandmother she knew only from one photograph. Her mother's mother had been divorced, ``banished'' from her samurai- descended family, and separated permanently from her children--the price of having a love affair. From Boston, where the author had a ``tenure track contract'' at an unnamed university, Minatoya takes us on her travels ``in the disguise of a soul unfettered by convention'' to Japan and China (she taught in both countries), and finally to Nepal. What will leave an impression with readers are the fragmentary accounts of her family's experiences. Her immigrant father in Washington State, for instance, made his way from being a ``child servant'' who ``cooked and cleaned and tended the cool long lawn that sloped away from the big house like a dowager's ample evening skirt'' to being a research scientist. And unforgettable is the revelation that Minatoya's grandmother tried to poison her children when she was condemned to separation (``murder-suicide was considered an honorable act''). One can't help compare this to In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (p. 981), in which Norma Field uses her Japanese-American bicultural perspective to penetrate some of the struggles of contemporary Japan. Minatoya, though eloquent and sometimes moving, only flags along on the steep path of introspection.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Minatoya's memoir rings with the pure energy of stories well told. Her deftly sketched vignettes and animated anecdotes vibrate with sorrow, revelation, and delight. Her family's odyssey is the journey from Japan to America; her own odyssey takes her to Japan, China, Nepal, and, finally, back home, feeling refreshed and renewed. Minatoya's childhood was shaped by her parents' internment in a Wyoming desert relocation camp during World War II, where they and their fellow Americans faced the ordeal with dignity and stoicism. Later, pride and resiliency were again required, as racial discrimination intruded on every aspect of their lives. Minatoya charts her feelings of alienation as an Asian American in white schools and her plunge into overwork and loneliness as an adult. She overcomes her miasma by traveling to Japan, visiting her mother's family, and working as a teacher. A psychologist, Minatoya is attuned to emotional nuance and the subtext of conversations, while her keen sense of humor captures the hilarities of her travels and the incongruities of her East-West heritage. An affecting and arresting examination of the puzzle of identity and the elusiveness of belonging. ~--Donna Seaman