Speak, Okinawa

“It was my responsibility to understand her, not her responsibility to make herself understood.”

Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina was a very personal reading experience for me. The author and myself share similar life stories within my family, and just like Brina, I am half Okinawan and half white. Okinawa is a small group of islands off the mainland of Japan, and has a complicated, little-known history. I tell people it’s the “Hawaii of Japan,” as it was its own kingdom thousands of years ago and at one point was officially ordered to become a prefecture of Japan. I never in my life thought I’d ever read a memoir of the Okinawan-American experience, let alone, a great one. My grandmother rarely speaks of her childhood or young adulthood during the Battle of Okinawa, and the research and history that Brina brought to her memoir answered questions I had my entire life. The presence of U.S. military bases are an accepted reality by the Okinawan people, but the U.S. has long overstayed their welcome. This memoir is also incredibly representative of the child-of-an-immigrant/mixed-race-experience. Being half-Japanese (Okinawan, but no one knows what Okinawan is—unless they or someone they know served in the U.S. military), and half-white, you aren’t accepted for being “white” and you aren’t accepted for being “Japanese.” You really don’t feel like you belong anywhere. With brutal honesty and without sugar-coating, Brina describes the shame and embarrassment she felt towards her mother throughout her childhood and young adulthood. I battled the same feelings towards my grandmother, in the same vein as little David in the film Minari, “You’re not a real Grandma.” Real grandmas baked chocolate chip cookies, they didn’t ask their grandchildren to help them shave dried smoked fish to make katsuobushi for miso soup. I carry the shame of that embarrassment to this day. This memoir isn’t for Okinawans only, as it shamelessly and bravely tells the truth of what it means to feel less American in America, merely because you’re not white. The intergenerational trauma gets passed down generation after generation. Reading these stories help us confront that shared trauma and find the pride deep within us for where we come from. It also helps others better understand our experience.