6 Scripting Fertility: Desire and Regeneration in Japanese North American Literature

Alien Bodies

Japanese Canadian Hiromi Goto’s second novel, The Kappa Child, features a female protagonist who has an “abnormal pregnancy” (12) resulting from a dalliance with a strange creature on an airport strip during the “last total eclipse of the twentieth century” (119). This stranger, with otherworldly features, appears in the narrative only briefly but is pivotal to the novel. The extraterrestrial figure, along with the mythical Kappa creature who results from the pregnancy, add an unexpected twist to the book, shifting it generically from a seemingly realist narrative about growing up on the Canadian prairies to a magic realist or science fiction novel. The Kappa Child was the winner of the 2001 Tiptree Award for a work “that explores and expands gender roles in science fiction and fantasy.” Like Goto’s first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), and recent works by other Asian Canadians, such as Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002), it represents an attempt by a racially minoritized writer to go beyond the boundaries of the autobiographical or the first-person ethnographic text, a genre most frequently associated with ethnic and postcolonial writing before the mid-1980s.1 In The Kappa Child Goto makes use of a form that until recently had been targeted to a primarily male audience in addressing the concerns of globalized and minority subjects.2 Goto employs science fiction and fantasy not only to write about gender, as the Tiptree Award announcement notes (James Tip-tree Jr. Award Council, “The 2001 James Tiptree Jr. Award”), but also to explore different forms of otherness. Instead of using the form of a traditional Bildungsroman, Goto uses a popular genre to look at some of the most pressing questions facing global and ethnic subjects today—gendered and racialized identity in a multicultural society, female self-hood, representation in an increasingly homogenized world, and the psychic consequences of being an other in North American contemporary culture.

Hiromi Goto says, “I have not been abducted by aliens but I live well aware of race, the alien space I inhabit in a colonized country. If you want out of alien space, you must pretend not to notice daily references to the fact that you are an alien” (“Alien Texts, Alien Seductions,” 263). For people of color, the notion of the alien has a particularly negative resonance. No matter how long one has lived in North America, people with racialized bodies are “resident aliens” or strangers, always being asked to demonstrate their right to belong or else constantly being reminded of their status as Other in one’s country. The heroine of Goti’s second novel, aware of the corporeal dissonance between what is expected of Asian women and what she feels, says, “You go your whole life without seeing yourself as you really are. All you know is how you are treated” (The Kappa Child, 14). In The Kappa Child Goto literalizes3 this condition of nonbelonging and self-estrangement by having her protagonist embody the state of corporeal anomaly by harboring another body, that of a strange creature, within her own. Expanding on the arguments of feminist science fiction critic Sarah Lefanu, Rosi Braidotti notes that there is a “deep empathy between women and aliens [ . . . ]. As a matter of fact, in science fiction written by women, women love aliens and feel connected to them by a deep bond of recognition” (“Cyberteratologies,” 152–53). Braidotti explains that this feeling comes about because “of a structural analogy between woman as the second sex [. . .] and the alien or monstrous Other” (152). The same could be said of minority subjects, who are also regarded as others in a predominantly white cultural space.

The alien becomes a material and embodied reality for Asians in North America through the example of Goto’s Japanese Canadian science fiction version of Little House on the Prairie. The heroine’s seduction by the stranger and her pregnancy, which results in the birth of the Kappa, a water sprite from Japanese myths, bring out some of the concerns prevalent in Goto’s fiction—that of the stranger within the self and that of racial alienation in North American. In addition, other themes found in her first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, resurface here: food as a means of social cohesion, female bonding, and the importance of the small local community. Because of her problematic father and family life, the heroine of The Kappa Child has to find sustenance and emotional support from outside of her nuclear family. Wendy Pearson notes, “Thematically, [ . . . ] Kappa Child is really about families, both the ones you’re born into and the ones you make for yourself; it’s about the difficulties and joys of human relationships, of friendship, of sisterhood, and of love” (“Saturating the Present with the Past,” n.p.). The protagonist finds support and forms ties with women who understand her invisible pregnancy and her craving for specific foods, such as the Japanese cucumber. In Goto’s novel the heroine’s unusual condition paves the way for an eventual scene of regeneration and reconciliation between the self and other, between reality and fantasy, between Asian and Canadian. The heroine aptly comments at one point, “Every event in my life has led to this. To normalize the incredible. And really, what other choices are there?” (The Kappa Child, 218).

In spite of the one crucial scene that involves an extraterrestrial encounter, most of The Kappa Child does not involve “extraterrestrial settings, futuristic technologies, alien creatures, and other strategies that defamiliarize” the fictional world (Hayles and Gessler, “The Slipstream of Mixed Reality,” 482). Instead, the novel can be described as “slipstream fiction,” which Bruce Sterling defined as “works that occupy a borderland between mainstream and science fiction because they achieve a science-fiction feeling without the usual defamiliarizing devices” (quoted by Hayles and Gessler, 482). The mystery that drives the plot of The Kappa Child is whether the protagonist is actually pregnant, as she believes, or not, and if so, who is the father of the child. Flashbacks present us with insights about her childhood and adolescence on the prairies and the ways in which the nameless protagonist’s early life is so unlike that described in Little House on the Prairie, a book she reads when the family moves to Lethbridge, Alberta (The Kappa Child, 33). The intertextual references to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book are significant: Wilder’s book is about moving a Euro-American family into new territory (Indian) and about settlement from the perspective of a female protagonist; Goto’s novel is about moving a Japanese Canadian family into mainly white territory (formerly Indian). If the move westward by American pioneers of the nineteenth century greatly transformed America, Goto is suggesting that a similar kind of migration is happening today. Roy Miki has observed,“The influx of ‘asian’ capital, goods, and populations into the urban core of Canadian cities (more so on the west coast) is rapidly transforming the scripting of ‘asian’ in what is still a white man’s country [ . . . ]. How these changes will reconfigure the lexicon of current cultural politics—and thus the mutations of racialization—waits to be seen” (Broken Entries, 214). Goto’s novel suggests that this contemporary movement of Asian peoples will not become the kind of wholesome and adventurous family entertainment that Ingalls’ move was. Before the end of the summer, the protagonist burns her copy of Little House on the Prairie as her reality falls short of that seen in the American classic.

Like Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, The Kappa Child is concerned with healing—the regeneration of individuals as well as humanity and the earth. Pregnancy and childbirth are offered as partial solutions to a broken world. In both books the protagonists are not great men but inconsequential, sometimes bungling and seemingly ineffective women. These heroines serve to debunk the myth of the Asian American model minority and the stereotype of the exotic Oriental, for both do not hold particularly good jobs, are not exemplary citizens, and are not “geishaized” Japanese women.4 Goto remarked in an interview that even if her characters are “small and their power is defined within a finite sphere, they are capable of, first, really seeing their circumstances and second, making a self-award choice.” She noted, “I’m a firm believer in the accumulative power of small actions” (Kong, “Sook C. Kong Interviews Hiromi Goto”). Hence, the unnamed protagonist of The Kappa Child is a bit of a drifter, suffering from a lack of self-esteem and possibly depression. She works as a shopping cart collector, a job that is hardly typical of Asian females and does not require delicacy, nimble fingers, or sexual largess. From her marginalized position, however, she sees that the world around her is in need of repair or help.

The imagery that permeates the first few pages of The Kappa Child is that of the wounded and hurt. Rather humorously, the protagonist tells her boss on her CB that she is bringing in some shopping carts: “I have incoming wounded. I repeat. I have incoming wounded” (10). Later she calls them her “maimed and scattered carts” (11). The evening is described as “the crest of night splinters” (11). This language of hurt and pain is continued in the descriptions of the protagonist’s state of mind and body. She talks about the way she leaves “a huge trail of dispirit which meanders everywhere” she walks (11). Her life seems to be rather empty of passion, and she feels reluctant to go home at the end of the day: “There are no love stories waiting for me and I’m not up to invention. Too bad, barbed wire’s always easier to crawl through when there’s someone else to make the space wider with a helpful hand and foot” (11). Instead of one who is a full participant in capitalist consumer culture, the protagonist is one who does not use shopping carts but finds wounded carts. Her relation to global capitalism, like her relation to the rest of society, is that of an outsider, a retriever of the wounded.

The protagonist’s sense of alienation comes from a strong sense of difference and otherness that she feels, partly because of things that happened in the past in her family and partly because of her perception of her Asian body. She says: “A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the damage was already done” (13). Like her shopping carts, she and her sisters are “wounded” and “maimed.” They have had difficulties dealing with their hybrid Japanese Canadian identity, and this problem is revealed by their awkward names or lack of names. The protagonist, as mentioned, is nameless throughout the book. Her sisters are known by demeaning and pejorative names because people around them could not remember their Japanese names. The narrator says, “Okasan gave us all Japanese names too, but folks couldn’t remember for nothing, as the saying goes. Hard to know what was worse. Having names no one could say or being called names not our own” (15). So, according to the narrator, she makes up names for them, “based on the animal of our birth year, names that would disguise and protect us” (15). Her sister, born the year of the boar, becomes Pig Girl, or PG for short. Her other sisters are called Mice and Slither. These unfortunate names stick to them, and the negative qualities of the animals become linked to the women. They become associated with these animals, lower than humans on the scale of living creatures, living furtive, subterranean existences.

Another reason for the protagonist’s unease with her self and her body is her childhood in a dysfunctional family. Having grown up with an abusive, temperamental father and a fearful mother, she has not had the love and nurturing that she ought to have had. At their Easter dinner, Mice accidentally drops some turkey on the father’s lap. He yells and raises his hands, and the family cringes in anticipation of his blows: “We cringe to the thud of blood in our heads. Anything more and Okasan will shatter like a pane of glass, we will only slice our hands if we try to salvage her. Don’t move. Be still” (27). However, as they are now adults, for the first time all the sisters stand up to face his rage, and he is unable to strike them. Instead he “grabs two fistfuls of tablecloth and pulls. Turkey, carcass, stewed cabbage rolls, buns, sashimi, sekihan, potato salad, peas and carrots. The hours of work Okasan has spent, wasted on the floor” (27). The narrator cleans up the mess while her sister, Slither, decides to run away. The narrator concludes: “There’s no use in sitting here. And if we stick around, our mother might get it into her head that her children ought to notice her and give the love she always wanted but could never receive. Ha! That’s a laugh. We can’t even love ourselves” (31). This incident is indicative of many such incidents in her childhood and youth that contribute to the protagonist’s disabling sense of herself.

This inability to love herself shows in the way the protagonist dresses. She claims to have “the most expansive collection of pajamas in the western hemisphere” (51) and wears nothing but pajamas every day. She describes her body as one atypical of exotic Asian women:

I am not a beautiful Asian. I am not beautiful. There is a difference between being petite and short; one is more attractive than the other. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter about my lack of physical beauty. My beauty lies beneath a tough surface, like a pomegranate, my Okasan is fond of telling me [ . . . ]. Clothing does not fit me. My big-boned arms, my daikon legs, my beta-beta feet, and splaying toes. My bratwurst fingers and nonexistent neck. And my head. My poor colossal head, too huge even to dream of a ten-gallon hat. (51)

Comparing herself to the ideal Western figure, which in itself is an unattainable ideal for most Western women, the protagonist finds her body lacking. In her description of herself she uses food imagery—the pomegranate, daikon, and bratwurst. The protagonist feels that she will be consumed or fears being eaten up by society. Sandra Lee Bartky has argued that the ideal body in our modern society is a “practiced and subjected body” that needs to be “made-over” with cosmetics, exercise, and surgery (“Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” 71). She writes: “The disciplinary project of femininity is a ‘setup’: it requires such a radical and extensive measure of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail. Thus, a measure of shame is added to a woman’s sense that the body she inhabits is deficient: she ought to take better care of herself; she might after all have jogged that last mile” (71). This sense of failure can be exacerbated for ethnic and racialized women who live in North America. Their sense of shame and failure is even greater because they feel that they do not have the right color of hair, eyes, or skin or the right kind of nose, hair, or proportions compared to the Euro-American women on magazine covers, in TV commercials, and in Hollywood films.

Furthermore, the description of the protagonist’s body is grotesque and hyperbolic. She talks about her “colossal” head and “nonexistent” neck. Mary Russo notes that one form of the grotesque is associated with the uncanny; the grotesque body is “doubled, monstrous, deformed, excessive, and abject” and is “not identified with materiality as such, but assumes a division or distance between the discursive fictions of the biological body and the law” (The Female Grotesque, 9). In addition, Russo points out that the sense of the uncanny was associated by the German Romantics with “a generalized alienation from the-world-which-has-become strange” (9). This sense of the grotesque is applicable to the condition of the protagonist, who sees her body as monstrous and deformed and who lives as if the world around her is not part of her but always laughing at her, ready to harm her, or about to eat her up. She lives alone in a basement apartment, and even when her own sister asks if she can spend a night at her place, the protagonist gets nervous. The protagonist thinks: “She’s my sister! She’s done nothing to hurt me! But she could hurt me all the same. She’s so needy. [ . . . ] What if she wants me to save her and I can’t? What if she tries to take more than I can give?” (The Kappa Child, 58). Unable to see her own strength and beauty, she is unable to offer love to anyone around her, even her needy sister. Having been rejected by her parents and abjected by society, the protagonist is jumpy and scared and fears that she experiences “paranoia” and “schizophrenia” (62).

In The Colonization of Psychic Space, feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver argues that blacks, minorities, homosexuals, women, and “those othered” who are “excluded from positions of power and not accepted as fully rational autonomous subjects” in our society experience a “colonization of psychic space” in which the “unwanted” and “negative affects of the oppressors are deposited into the bones of the oppressed” (87, xix). She explains, “Those othered within mainstream culture are excluded from the world of meaning except as abject or inferior [ . . . ]. The meaning of their own lives and bodies has already been defined as inferior, deficient, or sick; but more than this, they have been defined as incapable of defining themselves” (88). The result is a form of “social melancholy” that is characterized by “suffering, pain, depression, shame, anger, or alienation” (88).

In The Kappa Child the attitude of the protagonist toward her own body can be understood as a manifestation of this “social melancholy.” She feels ashamed of her name, her nonexistent romantic life, and her physical features, a shame that “is the result of internalizing the contempt of others, which becomes contempt toward the self,” to use Oliver’s words (117). Oliver points out that in the United States the rates of depression and psychiatric disorders are highest among the lowest social classes and among blacks, Hispanics, and minorities.5 She notes: “In a culture where women and men of color have been pathologized, abjected, ridiculed, and hated, it is difficult for them to avoid some incorporation of self-hatred or a sense of inferiority or lack of legitimacy” (122). In The Kappa Child, although Goto does not highlight scenes of overt racism, there are several small incidents that suggest the way the protagonist and her family are repeatedly rendered “other” by those around them. On the first page of the novel, a woman driving a mini-van almost hits the protagonist and her shopping carts and yells, “May Jesus forgive your heathen soul!” (9). Later, in a flashback scene, the protagonist remembers that when they arrived in Alberta the man checking them into the motel wished them well and remarked, “I always thought it was terrible what was done to you people” (70). Although the comment is meant to be sympathetic to the plight of Japanese Canadians during the war, it reveals the way racialized bodies are always regarded as other, never just people but always bearing the mark of their ethnicity or race. The motel clerk thinks of them as “you people,” assuming that they are non-Canadians, or aliens. The father replies with indignation, “We are canadian!” (70). But the motel clerk can see only the family’s Japanese features, which act as a mask or screen that covers up other aspects of their hyphenated Canadian identity.6

One way to counter the protagonist’s sense of alienation is through fantasy and science fiction. Unable to connect to the people around her, she encounters a stranger during “the last total eclipse of the twentieth century” (119). This stranger encourages her to take off her clothes and to “be naked when the three celestial bodies align” (122). In the moonlight, the stranger looks “almost greenish, skin hairless and moist [ . . . ]. No nipples. Nor a bellybutton” (122). They suma wrestle, Japanese style, and both fall to the ground. At that point, the protagonist says, “something cool-wet spilled, covered me in liquid sweetness” (124), and the creature “came in waves of pleasure” (124). For the first time in a long time, the protagonist gives herself up sexually to someone else. The strange and ambiguously gendered creature touches her between her legs, and she notes, “Time spiraled and inflated, how could I know? A moon rising to seek the darkness, the earth just a mote in the breath of the universe. I wanted to laugh, to weep, to keep this moment forever” (124). Whether this scene actually took place or took place only in the protagonist’s mind matters less in the narrative than does the restorative powers it seems to provide the protagonist. The scene marks a turning point in the protagonist’s life. She remarks, “I wake up smiling for no reason” (136). She feels energized, thinking that she is no longer alone, because there is a creature growing inside her, even though her pregnancy test comes back negative. Jenny Wolmark says that feminist appropriations of science fiction are “cultural interventions which result in texts that are recognizably structured by partiality and difference, rather than unity [ . . . ]. What the narratives of feminist science fiction can do is to test the limits of the dominant ideology of gender by proposing alternative possibilities for social and sexual relations which conflict with the dominant representations” (Aliens and Others, 55). Here Goto envisions a situation in which pregnancy results not from a heterosexual sexual encounter but from a friendly, pleasurable encounter with a strange creature who is not clearly sexed. The encounter challenges patriarchal norms and heterosexist ideologies at the same time as it negates racial stereotypes and assumptions.

Another way to resolve the protagonist’s feelings of disaffection in contemporary Canadian society and her social melancholia is through the use of poetic, lyrical passages that describe the process of her impregnation, gestation, and childbirth. These passages destabilize the narrative and disrupt the science fiction genre because they seem out of sync with the rest of the book. In contrast to the descriptions of the cold, concrete city and the sometimes angry and violent domestic scenes, these passages depict warmth and solidarity. For example, there is a section that is narrated from the point of view of the protagonist’s egg: “I linger briefly in the waving cilia passage, easy as a speck of sand among undulating ribbons of seaweed. Lovely and rich. How wondrous, being an egg. I am surrounded by six thousand of my egg sisters. Laughing softly, their presence a comforting murmur of water. And how I feel! The perpetual sense of potential, vibrant and miraculous” (The Kappa Child, 18). This scene is evocative of the community, pleasure, and comfort that the protagonist does not experience in her daily life. In a different passage, this egg narrator highlights again the “six thousand sister eggs,” their “comforting murmurs,” and the way their “beautiful siren voices hum living songs in endless harmony” (30).

These passages about eggs, creatures “without skin” (30), and about swimming in a “watery place” (105) are rather surreal and redolent of another time and place. They lead up to or prepare us for the birth or appearance of the kappa. Goto takes the legend of the kappa, a water sprite, a froglike creature from Japanese folktales who can be mischievous but also has supernatural powers, and blends it with the other stories in the novel—those of an immigrant family’s life in the prairies, of the protagonist’s isolation in a modern landscape, of a real or imagined encounter with an alien, and the daughters’ coming to terms with an abusive father. For the protagonist, who is isolated and disengaged with the world, the birth of the kappa, real or psychosomatic, is a way of getting out of her depressed state. Although a kappa can be evil, it can also be heroic and regenerative. At one point the narrator tells the story of a girl who coerces a kappa to teach her how to heal. She becomes a “famous bonesetter and many people come to benefit from her skills” (75).

The kappa is attributed with bringing life, hope, and energy. In another section of the novel, the protagonist recalls the only summer that her father’s dream of growing rice on the prairies became a reality. It was a summer when the rains fell, and “the land flourished with greenage” (226). It was also the summer that the family saw a webbed footprint of a kappa in their fields. Later the protagonist’s rebirth is also associated with the kappa figure. She imagines or sees a green face in the mirror one day. This stranger tells her to stop worrying about her pregnancy and get a haircut. This haircut changes the protagonist’s sense of herself completely: “My pumpkin head. He’s cut my hair short, shorter than it has ever been, and the weight is off my head, the bones in my face pronounced. My neck emerges from my shoulders, not graceful swan-like, never that, but a neck, definitely long enough to kiss. I shiver at the thought” (248). With her hair short she feels “a little jauntier” and even contemplates changing her wardrobe (249). She no longer sees herself as alien and strange. After this change, the protagonist is able to confront some of the ghosts of her childhood—making up with her childhood friend, Gerald, whom she had hurt because of her insecurity, returning to her father and confronting him with her anger, and finally getting enough courage to ask her female friend Bernie to come out with her. Her sisters also come to terms with their past, and by the end of the novel they symbolically shed their animal names for their given names. The last pages suggest that the protagonist and her sisters will be able to lead new, more empowering daily lives.

Organic Politics

Unlike Goto’s The Kappa Child, Ozeki’s All Over Creation does not use science fiction or fantasy. However, like Goto’s novel, All Over Creation depicts protagonists whose lives badly need an element of magic or fantasy. Help does not come from aliens or strange creatures in Ozeki’s novel. Instead it comes from a group of young activists concerned with the environment, ecology, and people’s health, who happen to land in Liberty Falls, Idaho, the home of the Idaho potato farms. The description of their vehicle, the Spudnik, makes it sound like an alien spaceship in middle America:

It had the unmistakable shape of a Winnebago, boxy and inelegant, but the body of the vehicle was covered with pop-riveted patches of tin and aluminum, like scales, while its roof had been shingled with some sort of dark, rectangular paneling. A conning tower rose from the roof. It looked like a robotic armadillo, a road-warrior tank, a huge armored beetle—it was the most radical thing Frank Perdue had ever seen. (All Over Creation, 47–48)

The members of the activist group, named the Seeds of Resistance, travel around the country targeting “a range of food-related issues” such as genetic engineering, biotechnology, and the use of pesticides on and in fruits and vegetables (52). The members and their strange beliefs and activities function in the same way as the strange creature in The Kappa Child. They are the means by which regeneration and hope are brought to two female protagonists, Yumi Fuller and Cass Unger, who were best friends and neighbors when they were young.

Through the group’s activist work Ozeki is able to make her readers aware of a number of pressing issues concerning our food products and farming methods. For example, at a local supermarket the group presents shoppers with a lecture about the use of pesticides on and in potatoes; the use of genetically modified corn or soy in a range of products, such as “infant formulas, baby foods, pizza, soda, chips” (92); and the fact that manufacturers are not obliged to label genetically altered food products for their consumers. Scattered throughout the novel are lessons about the dangers and the potential destruction of our vegetables and fruits caused by commercial production. The activists become environmental gurus, while Frank, the foster boy who gets involved with them, functions as a naïve character, like the reader, to be educated. For example, group member Geek tells Frank:

Did you know that the Aymara of Peru have hundreds of different kinds of potatoes, and they can tell them apart by taste, and they have names for each one? [ . . . ] We only have maybe a dozen kinds left in commercial production here, because engineers have decided that potatoes all have to be the same size. Diversity is inconvenient to mechanized farming. This is what happens when agriculture becomes agribusiness. (125)

Through these minilectures Ozeki is able to use her novel to critique current farming and business practices. Her novel is more than social comedy; it becomes a form of social resistance.

Although politics and resistance have always been part of Asian American literature, what is different about Ozeki’s novel is the subject matter. It is no longer about dominant white culture against Japanese Americans but rather is part of a fight against global and transnational corporations and practices. Although the novel is located mainly in Idaho, its concerns have far-reaching implications. Rachel Kamel notes, “By understanding that every local story is part of a global ‘big picture,’ we can open up space for dialog and sharing of experiences—especially across barriers of language, nationality, gender, race and class. And as that process of communication moves toward networking and coalition-building, the vision of a multi-national movement can become a reality” (as quoted by Dirlik in “The Global in the Local,” 37). Ozeki has had a history of consciousness-raising activities. Her first book, My Year of Meats (1999), was about the use of growth hormones in the American beef industry, and as Monica Chiu observes, the “slaughterhouse scenes reveal larger issues surrounding the rise of unions and prohibitions against child labor as well as more recent laws concerning safe and sanitary working conditions and the standardization of hygienic food processing” (Filthy Fictions, 139). In the same way, All Over Creation is concerned not just with how to grow potatoes but with a number of larger issues. In an interview Ozeki said of her second novel, “I wanted to bring in this idea of creation because that’s so much what the book is about, generations and regenerations. But also it’s about this need we have to imitate God and to impose our own creative will on nature” (Weich and Ozeki, “Ruth Ozeki, Bearing Witness,” n.p.). She feels that biotechnology is moving at such a rapid pace that most people cannot keep up with it, so we end up like the protagonist of All Over Creation, Yumi, losing hope.

So many of the troubles we have derive from fear: It’s too scary. It’s too threatening. It’s too complicated. It’s too much to look at, so therefore I’m just not going to look. We have a real bias in this country toward reductive thinking. The media certainly has created that. That kind of reductionism is a real problem. Yes, it’s overwhelming, and maybe we can’t do much about it—but I do think we can do something about it.

As citizens in a capitalist culture, we vote with our dollar. The more we know, the more we can vote in the right direction. Consumers have an enormous amount of untapped power that we’re just beginning to understand. We can only tap that through information, through really understanding some of the very complex issues that go into our food or our politics or our international policy. (n.p.)

All Over Creation thus goes beyond identity politics to tackle the complex problems of the food industry and international politics. Her books are Ozeki’s way of lobbying her readers, not through the distribution of pamphlets and speeches but through a comic and entertaining narrative.

Ozeki’s strategy is similar to those of a number of recent Asian American novelists who deliberately write against the stereotype of the model minority in order to point out structural racial inequities and/or class and global injustices. In addition to Goto’s nameless protagonist in The Kappa Child, other examples of Asian North American protagonists who do not follow the ideal of the hardworking immigrant who rises up the economic and social ladder include Han Ong’s William Paulinha in Fixer Chao, Brian Roley’s Tomas and Gabe in American Son, Larissa Lai’s Miranda in Salt Fish Girl, and Ying Chen’s protagonist in Ingratitude. Although it would be a dubious distinction to claim that these protagonists have “progressed,” as they tend to be engaged in criminal and violent activities or to lead somewhat makeshift existences, in terms of issues of representation they demonstrate the ways Asian North American writers have felt more at ease about writing beyond the confines of the model minority myth.

The difficulty of the model minority myth has been articulated by a number of critics. Tomo Hattori points out the problematic link between the model minority and capitalism in America:

The stereotype of the model minority as the ideal immigrant, often ascribed to Asians in America, predicates social acceptance upon exceptional capitalist achievement. Model minority discourse is the term that describes the Asian American psychic institutions that emerge from this predication and, to the extent that model minority discourse is the term that describes the Asian American culture and studies, describes the process of minority collaboration in dominant cultural motives within works and institutions allegedly devoted to ethnic and racial emergence, provocation, and resistance. (“Model Minority Discourse and Asian American Jouis-Sense,” 231)

Ozeki’s protagonist, Yumi, fails as a model minority because she has been a drifter since her affair with and pregnancy by her high school teacher, Elliot. In spite of the fact that she now teaches some English classes in Hawaii and sells real estate on the side, Yumi does not fit into the stereotype of the “good Asian.” She lives dangerously and rather haphazardly as a single mother with three children from three different men. Her home is near a place

where you can walk right out onto an active lava flow [ . . . , where] the crust is so hot you can feel it burning through the rubber of your soles. If you go at night and look down, you can see cracks in the black crust and the red-hot molten lava flowing underneath, just inches from your feet. And you know that if you take a wrong step where the crust is too thin, your foot will go right through and that’ll be the end of you. (226–27)

The description of this molten area is a rather appropriate reflection of Yumi’s existence, always on the brink of self-destruction. She is not what Hattori ironically described as a “reliable middle-class consumer of Third World sweatshop products.”

Just as Goto’s protagonist seems alienated from the largely middle-class world in which she lives, so is she eccentric and out of place compared to her friends and family from her Idaho community. Yumi is like the prodigal daughter who has misspent her youth and talents, while her friend Cass Unger has stayed home and taken care of the farm and Yumi’s aged parents. Yumi is quite irresponsible, gets depressed, and drinks, while Cass, who is unable to have children and adores babies, often takes care of Yumi’s baby for her. In Yumi Ozeki has created a character with whom it is hard to sympathize or identify. As the hippie or the teenager who never matured, Yumi becomes an interesting example of the shift in representation of Asian Americans. No longer do Asian Americans have to constantly fit into certain expectations or fantasies of the dominant culture. Yumi’s unpredictability and her unconventional behavior create instability in the category Asian American as conceptualized and understood by the dominant culture.

On the issue of minority representation, David Palumbo-Liu notes,

It would seem that the task for minority cultures is not to lament their eternal marginalization, for the minor is always already located in varied positions within the hegemony; nor is it to accept defeat before an eternally evasive dominant, for the dominant always has constantly to renegotiate, to finesse its contradictions, and that maneuver in turn reshapes what one regards as the “dominant.” The hard part is to insist upon a certain agency as minor subjects, to negotiate the status of cultural citizen, even given the ways that a dominant culture can absorb and domesticate the cultural production of minority culture. (Asian/American Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, 202)

Similarly, Hattori says,

The last thing Asian Americans need now is a new face. It does not take criticism to tell us who we really are, what our cultural “truth” really is. Asian America does not need a face-lift: [ . . . ] Asian American culture needs to be liberated from the obligation of compulsory auto-ethnography. We need to be liberated from the endless rehearsal of the trauma of our identity, from the prison of the endless performance of the yellowness of our bodies. (“Model Minority Discourse,” 244)

Even though stories about marginalization, exclusion, and problems of identity are extremely important and integral to the development of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians as a group, both critics emphasize the need today to break away from these positions, because the articulation of abjection and victimization, while a necessary form of identity formation and resistance, can also act as a form of containment, prescriptive representation, and misidentity. Ozeki and Goto, in representing their protagonists in their unconventional ways, are not simply responding to existing cultural expectations but taking charge of symbolic power, what Stuart Hall calls the “power of representation,” including the “power to mark, assign and classify” (Representation, 259).

As an answer to the way Asian Americans have been homogenized, Lisa Lowe, in her oft-reprinted essay Immigrant Acts, stresses “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity in the characterization of Asian American culture” (66–67). Lowe uses the term “heterogeneity” to “indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category; that is, among Asian Americans there are differences of Asian national origins, of generational relation to immigrant exclusion laws, of class backgrounds in Asia and economic conditions within the United States, and of gender” (67). By “hybridity” she refers to the “formation of cultural objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations; for example, the racial and linguistic mixings in the Philippines and among Filipinos in the United States” (67). What is fascinating about Ozeki’s novel is her exaggerated use of the notion of heterogeneity and hybridity. She takes the notion of hybridity and heterogeneity literally, with somewhat comic and ironic effects. First, Yumi is the daughter of a white father and a Japanese mother. Her three children are not only of mixed races; they all have different fathers of different racial origins. Baby Poo’s father is a musician and Hawaiian; Ocean’s father “sells surfboards in Waikiki,” but because no racial origin is mentioned, he is presumably white; and Phoenix’s father is a plant scientist who is Japanese (All Over Creation, 96). Ozeki seems to be self-consciously playing with notions of botany and race, using the comments made in the chapter called “The Promiscuity of Squashes” (111) to reflect the sexual propensities of human beings. In this chapter, which is a flashback to a scene in the past, Yumi’s mother, Momoko, tells her husband, Lloyd, about her difficulties in “keeping her Shanghai squash from cross-pollinating with her Mammoth Kings, and her Sweetbush from her Whangaporoas” (115). In chapters before and after this one, we find accounts of Yumi’s cross-pollinated family, as well as the sexual exploits of Charmey, a French Canadian from Quebec, and Frank Perdue, a local Idaho boy. Yumi’s master’s thesis, called “Fading Blossoms, Falling Leaves: Visions of Transience and Instability in the Literature of Asian-American Diaspora” (42), is “about the way images of nature are used as metaphors for cultural dissolution” (42).

Yet the novel is not a lament about the “cultural dissolution” or the profligacy of Asian Americans. The tone of the novel is more irreverent and farcical than it is moralistic or didactic. Yumi has not been the model Asian American, yet her one-time best friend and neighbor Cass, who has stayed home in Idaho, led a conventional life as a farmer’s wife, and been faithful to her husband, has not fared much better in life. Cass is apparently infertile. It seems that being the home-grown, hometown girl has not made her the all-natural, healthy woman one expects. The inability of Cass and her husband, Will, to have children may be due to Will’s exposure to Agent Orange while he was in Vietnam. But their health may have also been endangered by the couple’s use of pesticides on their potato farm. The same company that manufactured the herbicide used in Vietnam, which contains dioxins and PCBs, are now manu-facturing potatoes engineered with chemicals that make them bug resistant. Will remarks, “Cynaco made Agent Orange for the army. They make GroundUp and now the Nulifes, too” (219). Ozeki is not advocating promiscuity, but she is asking us to rethink traditional ways of farming, our relation to nature, and our familial structures. An important point to note is that the novel concludes with a happy regeneration brought about by an untraditional family structure. Cass and Will’s longing for a baby is ultimately fulfilled not by artificial insemination or adoption from a Third World country but by the baby left to them by Charmey and Frankie. It is through the makeshift family or conglomeration of the Seeds of Resistance that baby Tibet is conceived and nourished. And Geek, one member of the group, is sufficiently committed to Yumi that he might follow her and her three children to Hawaii, again to help sustain an untraditional family.

The point I am making is that Ruth Ozeki consciously tries to confound any easy assumptions about home and away, about self and other, about white and nonwhite, about good and bad. Using botanical, gardening, and ecological metaphors, she demonstrates that there is no “pure” or authentic species, for plants and seeds have been transplanted, hybridized, cross-pollinated, or, more recently, genetically engineered. Of course the important message of All Over Creation is the need to resist excessive harmful biochemical intervention akin to colonization, but at the same time Ozeki shows that cross-pollination and hybridization have been occurring and do occur in nature, with or without our intervention. Her analogy of plants to the human world enables us to see Yumi and the other rebellious characters, like Charmey and Frank, in a different, perhaps more tolerant, light. Their rootlessness and mobility, their various sexual partners, their refusal to stay at home, their traveling across North America are all part of a process of evolution, of survival and collective human experience, especially for diasporic people. In his book Routes, anthropologist James Clifford writes,

Diasporic cultural forms can never, in practice, be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms [ . . . ]. Diasporia discourse articulates, or ends together, both roots and routes to construct what Gilroy describes as alternate publics spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference. (251)

Hence what is suggested by the constant movement and displacement of many of the main characters of Ozeki’s novel is not so much their otherness or nonbelonging; rather, they are part of culture, which is always in the process of crossing and interaction. Even those who remain steadily in town, like Cass and Will, are affected by “travel,” for they inherit precious baby Tibet, who, as her name suggests, is a gift from afar. For Ozeki it is not only Asian American culture that can be characterized by what Lowe calls “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity”; it is all of America. When asked to identify a vegetable that looks something like a zucchini but feels like a squash, Yumi’s mother, Momoko, looks at the large mutant squashes and giggles, “Maybe a little bit zuke, and a little bit Delicata, and little bit [ . . . ] whatchamacallit. Sweet Pumpkin.” She points to Yumi’s children Ocean and Phoenix and says, “Like them. All mixed up” (All Over Creation, 118). Ozeki’s novel cautions us against playing God with genetic engineering and the natural world, yet at the same time demonstrates that natural processes of hybridization and being mixed up are already “all over creation.”

Goto and Ozeki’s novels both critique the normative structures of contemporary patriarchal society, with its valorization of competitiveness, power, consumerism, and capitalism. Incorporating fantasy and myth, these novelists tell stories of the lives of everyday women who challenge corporate notions of success, along with ideals of improvement and perfectibility through cosmetics, science, and technology. They refuse to be co-opted and hailed by the model minority myth, with its seductive promise of belonging and acceptance. Instead, both novelists rewrite the terms of what constitutes a good “family,” what is acceptable behavior for a racialized female subject, and what our society means by progress. Uneasy about the well-being of our planet, Goto and Ozeki explore important issues of reproduction, fertility, and the responsibility that comes with our ability to propagate ourselves and other parts of our natural world.