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Otsuka The Children

1184 Words5 Pages

“The Children” by Julie Otsuka is the story in the life of a picture brides and their children as they live their lives in J- town California. The story starts out with the picture bride describing her early days in America, working in the fields as the children laid in baskets while the men worked and ignore their families. As life goes on the picture bride describes how the children begin to grow and begin to make up their own games and learn from life. Eventually as time went on, the children begin to age and assimilate into their new culture. From changing their names to forgetting how to speak Japanese and so on. Eventually the children even begin to dream what they want to do with their lives. Some want to become doctor’s others want …show more content…

That they can achieve whatever they want and do whatever their hearts desires. It’s not until they arrive and assimilate to a new culture that they realize there’s more needed to achieve certain dreams. Some dreams need people to be a certain class or race in order to achieve them. Something that immigrants like the picture bride in “The Children” didn’t know about until it was too late. Which is why the picture bride in the “The Children” is motivated to not tell her children the truth and to let them continue to dream (Otsuka 738). So that the children can be happy a bit more longer before they face the truth about what they can and can’t do in society like how she and all the other Japanese immigrants had to face when coming to …show more content…

Based on research from Picture Brides by Stephenie Foster states that “Despite what they were led to believe, picture brides did not have an easy life. Many of the women …worked in jobs that were similar to those of men, and those jobs included irrigating crops, weeding plantations… (Foster 1702). By knowing the history and situation these women found themselves in at the time makes it easier to understand why the decision the mothers took made sense. When they came to this land they expected a better life than the one they had Japan only to find out it was all a lie. All there hopes and dreams were shattered and were forced to face the truth. this was awful for the mothers that they didn’t want their own children to face the truth in this way not yet anyway which why they made the decision to stay silent and let them dream

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