A Fire in Fontana

"Here I was on a bus going back to the camp in Arizona where my father still lived, and I knew there was a connection between my seatmate's joy and our having been put in that hot and windblown place of barracks."

Hong's analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto's work touches on pretty much all of the major themes we've covered thus far - racialization, citizenship, property rights, white privilege, the nuclear family, segregation and suburbanization. Clear and interesting, but no need to really rehash all of that here. I'm going to talk more about Yamamoto's piece.

I thought "A Fire in Fontana" was really poignant and expressive in showing how Yamamoto, as a young Japanese-American woman whose family was placed in an internment camp, came to align herself with a community and a movement that was not typically tied to Asian-Americans at all. She never formally identifies this, and it's almost as if she can't quite put her finger on why she was so personally affected by the experiences of African-Americans around her, only that she was. It was "some kind of transformation" - her "inward self being burnt black in a certain fire." I really like the way she describes this process of change within herself. It's not that things were happening without her control, it's that they were happening before she even had the idea to consider what they meant. Totally true to life. We can recognize that change is happening, but we need to look at it retrospectively to really understand it.

Her reaction to the blond girl who expressed delight at a young black man being forced to drink from an outside tap, shows that she felt the power of this girl's racism without ever defining it as that - racism. She "knew" that this individual's joy in inequality had something to do with the inequality she experienced as a girl - and recognized a kinship in this, between the African-American experience and her very own.