The Buddha in the Attic

These chapters portray the women’s experiences of birth and childrearing. Although different in some ways, these pursuits recall their mothers’ experiences in Japan. Despite the change in location, it is still the early 20th century; whether the women can have children, how many they will have, and how healthy they will be are factors outside of their control. The myriad birthing locations and types of birth are a type of lottery echoing the women’s experiences of marriage. If the husband was the first stranger, the baby and the type of birth are the second.

Even as the first-person plural voice continues, there are also mentions of individual women’s experiences—for example, “[W]e gave birth like Makiyo, in a barn out in Maxwell, while lying on a thick bed of straw” (55). The unique details of this birth indicate the women’s resistance to being an anonymous mass, even as they frame their experience as a collective one. There are also first-person accounts, such as “I watched my mother do it many times” (55), which are individual and collective at the same time.

As mothers, the women try to teach their children various scraps of knowledge gleaned from their own mothers back home in Japan and from what they have learned since moving to America. When the children go to school, they dismiss everything their mothers know as irrelevant and parochial, subduing their Japanese in favor of perfect English and replacing the names their parents gave them with English alternatives. The women are pained to find that their children are ashamed of them for their imperfect English and work-worn appearance. They find that how their tall, heavy, loud children think and behave is another factor outside their control; they belong more to America than to their mothers.

The mothers too serve America at the expense of their children, as both birth and childrearing must accommodate the work that gives them income and purpose. The children, who settle within view of the fields where their mothers work and are tied to chairs when they become older and “more rambunctious” (60), imitate their mothers in subordinating their individual needs. Work often defines the children’s lives, and they strive to both excel and fit in. Prior to the internment camp experience that curtails their freedoms further, the children try to live the American Dream, working hard in the hope of surpassing their parents’ quality of life.