This week we start looking at Part Two of Chorus of Mushrooms, which begins with
Naoe's departure from the family home (I'm reading up to page 108 in my edition
of the book for this week, ending with the part about the salamander). Murasaki
doesn't know what happened to her, but makes up several different answers when
asked. Why do you think she does this?
I'm also still thinking about what it means to be Asian
Canadian in Chorus of Mushrooms.
Sometimes, it can mean you know things: how to pick out a Japanese eggplant,
how to speak Vietnamese. Other times, it means you don't know things: the
difference between a cat and a skunk, for example. And there are other things
that Murasaki doesn't know that she
or someone else questions, like when the woman in the supermarket asks what a
vegetable is called in "your language", assuming she is Chinese. In
our latest episode of the Sounds Japanese Canadian to Me podcast, Raymond
Nakamura and I talk about going to Japan as a Japanese Canadian and how it can
be valuable to get to "know what you don't know", and I think that
kind of double-awareness is relevant here: in the supermarket scene, Murasaki
doesn't just know about the Japanese eggplant, she also knows what she doesn't
know about Chinese vegetables, and she knows what the woman asking her
questions expects her to know (Chinese, even though it's not "your
language") . Can you think of other ways that Asian Canadian identity is
about knowing or not knowing certain things, or certain ways of knowing/not
knowing, either in the book or from your own or others' experiences? How are
these different ways of knowing/not knowing related to Murasaki's impulse to
make up different answers to people asking about her grandmother's fate?
Other things I'm thinking about:
Are the jokes funny? Are there some genuinely funny moments,
and others that aren't? How do you tell the difference?
Food is really important in the story: from Naoe's secret
stash of dried squid and osenbei to the pomegranate, seaweed, and other things
she pilfers from the fridge; and also Murasaki's eggplant and "Jap
oranges". Is food a necessary part of (cultural) identity? Why, or if not,
why is it so important to Naoe and Murasaki? What food makes you feel connected
to your culture/heritage?
Now that I have married into a Chinese Canadian family, I have become more familiar with some Chinese vegetables. I never heard of mikan being called Jap oranges, but they seem to be in quite an isolated situation. Maybe having lots of relatives made me feel like I was in a community where those things were normal. When I lived in Japan, the grad students at the lab received mandarin oranges from the families they would tutor and so we would have this mountain of oranges all winter. Didn't get scurvy. I had not eaten eggplant in Canada, but I noticed every time I had it in Japan, I felt ill, so I have been staying away from it. I don't know if that has some metaphorical significance.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was growing up we called mikan mandarin oranges, but actually, I heard recently that they were originally called Japanese or Jap oranges in North America (they do come from Japan, after all) and it was around the time of WWII that they started calling them mandarins so they wouldn't be associated with the Japanese. Yikes...
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