The Buddha in the Attic is told through the perspective of Japanese women traveling from their homeland to the United States to meet their new husbands. These women wanted middle class, loving husbands, and a house with a chimney. To the dismay of the women when they arrive in the land of opportunity, their spouses look nothing like their pictures and have lives nothing like what they described in the letters the men sent them to convince them to move across the world to marry them. The women worked long hours on farms and fields and then were raped nightly by their. The book tells the story over decades as children are born and raised in predominantly white environments and want to have nothing to do with their culture or their parents. …show more content…
The textbook accurately describes the hardships Japanese immigrants faced on their way to United States. As stated in the first chapter, the immigrants slept down in the steerage on narrow metal racks with mattresses stained from other journeys. While none of the women in my account died due to sickness on the boat, it was very common amongst other immigrants. Towards the end of the book families were disappearing and being relocated as described both in the novel and the …show more content…
It focuses on the their struggle with nativism, which is over-favoritism towards native-born Americans. There is no mention of the mistreatment of Japanese wives or the lies there husbands told to convince them to move across the world so they would marry them.
The Buddha in the Attic enhanced my understanding of American History due to its raw and unrelenting truth about America in the twentieth century. From the multiple accounts of women getting raped on their first night in the United States, to the woman who jumped overboard on their way to the United States, this book held nothing back. Since the descriptiveness in The Buddha in the Attic is rare to find in any writing at all, I feel a textbook author’s biases and moral judgements could come in the way of the