Jean Dao - R6 Excerpts and Response

Alexa Ebert

Despite all that Jewel’s boyfriend does to her, she still bails him out of jail, because if she doesn’t help him, no one would. She gets so upset when Teddy is with another girl even though it means she won’t get beaten up anymore. Love is so powerful that people would willingly take pain to have love. This instance relates to the title of the novel because it depicts the idea of a valley of love. When you have nothing left, you can still have love deep inside of you to cause irrationality and pain.

Marian Stacey
The only thing that I could think of was that Francie was terrified of losing yet another person in her life and she superstitiously believed that if she and Mark had some form of similarity to bind them together they could not be separated. I think her superstitious nature also helped her decide what image she wanted to permanently place underneath her skin. Francie chose a “flower vine from an ancient Japanese panel,” which speaks to her ancestry on her mother’s side and her love of plant life. It’s also interesting to point out that although she initially asked if the flower could be red, she changed her mind after Carl told her that “red will fade. In about ten years all you’ll have left are the outlines and the other colors,” so Francie definitely wants to keep the tattoo as a symbol of permanence.

Angie Woodmansee
Though not overtly political, Yamamoto’s work nevertheless deals with social issues that were and continue to be relevant in the lives of her American readers. The difference is that she doesn’t beat the reader over the head, so to speak, with her politics. Yamamoto’s subtlety may trick the first-time reader into assuming that it reflects a lack of drive to provide thorough criticism, just as I was tricked in the beginning of Kadohata’s novel.
What makes these works so remarkable is that both authors allow their politics to speak through the narrative, as opposed to using their narrative solely as a tool for commentary. These texts are multifaceted, and they are all the more effective because they cannot be easily simplified and read as some sort of manifesto.

Mary Martin
America’s pockets of wealth are often inhabited by whites and by those fulfilling the “model minority” stereotype in examples like Typical American, A Gesture Life, and Better Luck Tomorrow. Yet Kadohata’s Richtowns of 2052 are explicitly white. Furthermore, the long exclusion of non-whites has yielded a veritable dichotomous racial demographic of “other.” Today’s pervasiveness of the term “model minority” and its suburban embodiment provides a stark contrast to race dynamics in Kadohata’s grim society. More noticeable than the Richtowns’ whiteness is the absence of the Asian American, or any minority, community. However, America’s reclaiming of this title and its social benefits from the Asian American community is not inconceivable since white acceptance of the model is repeatedly proved as a dichotomous construct to be freely given and taken from the literary and cinematic protagonists. The attempt to inhabit any grey space serves as a slow catalyst for Kadohata’s world.

Marlene McManus
Francie does not witness nor engage in personal racial/ethnic identity struggles due to the unique position race holds in the political and socioeconomic realities of Kadohata’s 2052 dystopian Los Angeles. Kadohata clearly states in her interview with Hsiu-chuan Lee for the MELUS journal that she chose to set her novel in that particular year so that she might literarily fulfill the predictions of “an article that said by the year 2052 white people would become a minority in the United States.” Francie, a half Japanese, half Chinese-black mixed-race character, is, in the year 2052, not a racial or ethnic minority, a fact that is no doubt difficult for present day American readers to process. The lines of difference that are drawn throughout the novel are primarily those between classes, not skin colors.

Response to Excerpts
What I found fascinating about the reading responses from this week was that there was such a wide range of topics discussed. Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love was clearly different from the other novels we have read for this class, and so it comes as no surprise that we have lots to say about it. Angie’s observation that Kadohata’s novel is “multifaceted” cannot be contested: the novel critiques and brings up all manner of social constructs, from love and loss to permanence and class struggles. The brilliant manner in which Kadohata weaves the very basic and human emotions of love and the desire for constancy in with the “dystopian Los Angeles” that Marlene brought up really makes this novel unique. After I finished reading it – as lame as this will sound – my heart ached because of the overall sense of impending doom that looms over Francie and her community.

Angie’s comments on the subtlety of Kadohata’s politics, combined with Mary and Marlene’s points about how In the Heart of the Valley of Love focuses more on class than on race, resonated with me, but I also wanted to note that while race no longer seems to be a huge issue, it is still the white people who hold all the wealth and power, and so the “race card” still exists. Of course, such is the case in 2009, with socioeconomic status frequently correlating to race. I do like, however, that Kadohata included that small detail, as if to say that, yes, things have changed, but not that much, and certainly not for the best. On the other hand, as we noted in class on Friday, Francie and her friends do seem to operate outside of that awareness of socioeconomic imbalance. They focus on getting by rather than moving up the ladder, possibly because they know that the ladder is about to fall. This is where the more prominent themes of love, loss, and permanence come into play; they are important for the immediate survival of the soul and the person in a completely different way than wealth and status are.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I for one am thankful for this class and everyone involved in it. Thanks for making my Friday afternoons fun AND edumacatin'! =)