Fiction

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Wild Meat and the
Bully Burgers

By Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 240 pages.

The Hawaii of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's first novel is not the beautiful Eden we've come to expect in the literature of the Pacific Rim, but rather the setting of a hardscrabble life of an impoverished family as seen through the eyes of its eldest daughter, Lovey, as she grows from childhood to adolescence in the 1970s.

Lovey Nariyoshi is the descendant of Japanese agricultural workers who emigrated to Hawaii two generations earlier to work in the sugar cane plantations. Her dominant emotion is shame, which Yamanaka unearths in great detail. Even the very language Lovey speaks at home -- a pidgin English dialect that is the lingua franca of agricultural migrants and workers in the Pacific Islands -- is belittled by her teachers. Lovey experiences this contempt of her language as contempt for her. Because the novel is written in this dialect, the narrative itself becomes an act of defiance and liberation.

Lovey is also ashamed of her family's second-hand, make-do existence, which the other children ridicule. "Next Daddy going tell us eat dirt for dinner because good for our body and you going believe him," Lovey complains to her sister. "He take us to the dump and tell us thass treasures and you believe. Not me. I ain't being dumb no mo."

In vivid and often violent vignettes, Ms. Yamanaka describes Lovey's defeats and triumphs as she learns to celebrate her origins and her individuality. Yamanaka has created memorable characters who inspire Lovey: her open-hearted, coarse, and vulnerable father Hubert; her best friend Jerry; and angelic, tragic Crystal, Lovey's tutor whom she idolizes. This exotic coming-of-age novel culminates on a moving note of reconciliation.

--Anne Whitehouse

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