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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Buddha in the Attic, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender and Autonomy
Racism, Assimilation, and Cultural Identity
Community and Inter-Asian Prejudice
The Power of Collectivism
Summary
Analysis
After giving birth, the young women must figure out how to keep working while keeping their children close by because their husbands generally refuse to assist with childcare. Working this way proves difficult: the young mothers must often leave their infants unattended in the fields as they work, and even when they’re able to keep working with their infants strapped to their backs, harsh weather conditions cause the babies’ ears to freeze and bleed. Nonetheless, the children learn to keep themselves occupied outdoors as their mothers work, and recognizing that their mothers’ jobs are physically taxing, the children also learn to take care of their mothers and treat them gently. Despite the difficulties of motherhood, the children’s astuteness encourages the young women to feel close to them in ways that they’re often not able to with their husbands.
The presence of their children changes the young women’s lives in two main ways: first, the women’s workload increases exponentially because their husbands expect women to complete all duties related to childcare, demonstrating how harmful gender roles can be. Second, the women experience a new form of love that isn’t complicated by violence or gender or racial hierarchies. The pride and love that the women feel for their children are an unexpected yet powerful combination of emotions that provides some comfort as they further acclimate to life in the United States, especially as the children naturally begin to take care of their mothers—care the mothers haven’t experienced in some time.
Themes
As soon as the children grow old enough to work, they begin to take on the same farm labor as their mothers, or if they live in the suburbs of J-Town, they take on cleaning and service jobs. Even after doing physically demanding labor, the children maintain enough energy to play with other Japanese children, and they often demonstrate curiosity about animal life. From other children, they learn that “strange” and “pale” children who don’t have to work in the fields and aren’t allowed outside exist, too, and from their parents, they learn Japanese manners and commonly held prejudices against other ethnicities, like Filipinos and Koreans.
As the Japanese children grow older, they demonstrate how questions of race and ethnicity are impossible to ignore in the United States. After all, while Japanese American families and the white townsfolk may try to live as separately as possible, there’s no preventing the Japanese children from learning about their white American counterparts and questioning the rules and demands of their own culture. It’s also important to note that the Japanese American children absorb racist ideas from their parents and from white Americans. This results in a lack of inter-Asian community.
Themes
As the Japanese children go to school and spend increasing amounts of time with non-Japanese classmates, they begin to grow more culturally American. The children forget Japanese words and religion, picking new, American names for themselves and growing taller and larger than their parents anticipate. As the children insist on eating American breakfasts and conducting themselves in an American manner (like moving with “undignified haste”), their mothers feel that they no longer recognize the children to whom they once felt so close. When the young women realize their children have grown ashamed of them for not knowing English and not being able to provide spacious homes, they’re heartbroken.
The Japanese American children illustrate an important aspect of assimilation that American-born children of immigrants must face—that is, they must grapple with both their families’ native culture and the majority culture of their new country. In other words, they learn that white Americans view Japanese culture as inferior, and because the children would ideally like to fit in, they feel ashamed by their cultural backgrounds and begin to distance themselves from Japanese culture, and thus, their parents.
Themes
