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Kesaya Noda's Essay 'Growing Up Asian In America'

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This paragraph from Kesaya Noda’s autobiographical essay “Growing Up Asian in America” represents the conflict that the author feels between her Japanese ethnicity, and her American nationality. The tension she describes in the opening pages of her essay is between what she looks like and is judged to be (a Japanese woman who faces racial stereotypes) versus what she feels like and understands (life as a United States citizen). This passage signals her connection to Japan; and highlights her American upbringing. At this point in the essay, Noda is unable to envision her identity as unified and she describes her identity as split by race. Using the image of a line, she writes, “My race is a line that stretches across ocean and time” (K.
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This is one of the most significant quote in the book. Instead of comparing her immigrant mother to Linda, who was American born, Linda uses the example of being in a privileged white family. Linda mentions, “from the age of seven to eighteen, there was nothing Asian about me except my body” (169-70). Linda stated that she looked Asian, but she didn’t feel Asian what so ever. She used the quote, “Since leaving Boiling Springs, I was often asked by complete strangers what it was like to grow up being Asian in the South.

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The poem has life experiences of a fourteen-year-old girl who is caught between the Japanese and American culture. The young girl claims that she does not know how to use Japanese chopsticks that are symbolic of the Japanese culture. In fact, the girl claims that she understands more the hot dogs as opposed to using chopsticks (Rhea 7). This means that the girl seems to understand the American culture as opposed to her Japanese culture. The girl identifies more with the American culture and thus the issue of American identity.

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Reluctance perpetrates erasure and invisibility. Despite the stagnancy in social perception of Asian Americans, one must also recognize how both narratives bring up consciousness of the issues. Persistent push of political action in the tribunal and in the commission brings about an emergence of ethnic identity. Tenacious and determined, both the Cambodians and the Japanese embraced their pasts to amend the

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In the Story “Growing Up Asian in America” by Kesaya E. Noda, she discuss many of her life events that helped her become who she is today. Noda throughout the story struggles to find her true identity. She struggles to take her three identities, Japanese, Japanese-American, and Japanese-American- woman and make them all turn into one. A great example of Noda’s struggle to find out her identity in the Japanese culture would be, “My race is a line that stretches across the ocean and time to link me to the shrine where my grandmother was raised” (lines 44-45). This means that no matter where in the world she goes she will always be connected her family.

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Moreover, the way she introduces herself in terms of a group or as “we” (24) focuses on the Japanese or rather Eastern norm of importance attached to a group rather than an individual which deviates from the Western notion of

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