The Buddha in the Attic

I have just read a book that affected me deeply, because I knew people who experienced this story. I knew people, and yet I never really understood what they went through. Until now.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is about the Japanese in California from about 1920 to the beginning of WWII. She tells the collective story of a group of "picture brides", who are hoping for a better life in the United States with husbands they only know through photos and letters. Upon arrival in San Francisco, they are mostly disappointed by the much older and poorer husbands than the ones they were expecting, but return to Japan is not an option. They speak no English and don't understand American customs, clinging to their own. They are forced to labor on the fringes of society picking our crops, cleaning our houses and doing our laundry, surrounded by suspicion and mistrust. They labor in childbirth, over and over, and continue to work in the fields. They don't give up, and expect their children to work just as hard. Through sheer determination they come to own their farms and businesses, and their children attend Stanford and Cal. Then the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and these American Citizens lose everything.

The Buddha in the Attic is exquisitely written and powerfully told. It is bittersweet, poignant and heartbreaking. It is also the story of most of us who live in America, because most of us were immigrants at one time or another. It makes you think. As the saying goes: Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.

TBC