rev. of Talking to High Monks in the Snow by Lydia Minatoya

Talking to High Monks in the Snow 
An Asian American Odyssey by Lydia Minatoya. Harper Perennial, $20.00 cloth, $11.00 paper. Reviewed by Leila Philip.

"I am a woman who apologizes to her furniture," states Lydia Minatoya halfway through her engaging memoir about growing up as a Japanese American. " 'Excuse me,' I say when I bump into a chair. My voice resonates with solicitude." Reflecting on her girlhood in upstate New York in the 1950s, Minatoya goes on to explain that while her American peers were learning the rites of individualism -- to ask, to demand -- Lydia and her sister were being taught the rites of traditional Japanese femininity -- to be dutiful, quiet, yet strong, to put the rights of her possessions even before herself.

Such humorous yet telling moments of insight characterize Minatoya's thoughtful first book, which chronicles her struggle to reconcile the opposing cultural forces that have shaped her as a Japanese-American woman. As a young psychologist in Boston, Minatoya suffers from a pervading sense of being out of place, despite early success. When a budget cut eliminates her job, she decides to travel to Asia, hoping to resolve her unhappiness by coming to terms with her Asian roots.

Minatoya's subject -- personal identity and its complex relationship with culture and circumstance -- is always interesting, and as one would expect, her journey is full of surprises. While she may have grown up feeling out of place as a Japanese in the predominantly Caucasian community of Albany, once in Japan she discovers that she hardly fits in there, either. In a reunion with her mother's family that had long been estranged because of a shameful family divorce, Minatoya is confronted by the family patriarch. "Remember and be proud," he shouts at her, shaking a scroll that represents some eight hundred years of samurai family history.

Mortified, then deeply moved, Minatoya recognizes for the first time the apologetic attitude of assimilation which she has absorbed from her diligent Japanese parents. She leaves her fast-track career in Boston to teach on an Army base in Okinawa, in the University of Maryland's overseas program, and it is in the strange cultural mix of Army base life that she finds an apt metaphor for her own situation. "It is no accident that I am a psychologist. All of my life I have wondered: who am I? But as I lived in Japan, my anxiety eased. I was a Japanese American, teaching cross-cultural psychology, on American bases in the midst of Japan, and the sheer intellectual tidiness of my situation pleased me."

As the book moves forward, chronicling Minatoya's adventures in Japan and Asia, it also moves backwards through a series of flashbacks to Minatoya's previous professional life in Boston and her early childhood in Albany. Not surprisingly, some of the most poignant writing in the book are the portraits of her dreamy, scientific father and plucky seamstress mother.

Despite the harshness of discrimination they have faced as Japanese Americans, including the outrage of being herded into Japanese relocation camps during the war, Minatoya's parents refuse to abandon the promise of America. In a moving scene, Minatoya describes her father's immense dignity when three years before retirement he discovers that he has only been paid the salary of a high school graduate, even though he has a doctorate degree. Lydia and her sister scream that he should sue his company; he shakes his head and refuses. "My father studied his American daughters. He gently smiled. 'Before I could sue, I would have to review my life. I would have to doubt the wisdom of such loyalty. I would have to call myself a victim and fill myself with bitterness.' He searched our faces for signs of comprehension. 'I cannot bear so great a loss.' "

With this debut, Minatoya joins the fast-growing list of Asian-American authors. Unlike writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, however, who insist that being Asian American is to be neither Asian nor American, but a third cultural entity altogether, Minatoya identifies and assigns distinctly American and Japanese sides to herself and her experience. For Minatoya, the struggle to come to terms with her identity is resolved through journey -- first the journey out to Asia, then back to the United States -- and through the experience of writing this moving and graceful memoir.

Leila Philip, currently a Bunting Institute Fellow, is the author of The Road Through Miyama
(Vintage Departures), a narrative account of two years that she lived in rural Japan as an apprentice to a master potter.