Tita

Like some of my classmates, Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre really surprised me. I hadn’t expected reading her poems to feel like a punch in the gut. Yamanaka’s style is very in your face. She doesn’t shy away from topics that make the reader uncomfortable; for instance, I felt like there was a lot of commentary about race within her works. In particular, I noted that there were a lot of comments about not just being an Asian-American woman in Hawaii, but rather, being a woman in general.

One poem that really stood out to me was “Tita: Japs,” which by the title, already sort of threw me off considering “Jap” is used as a derogatory term. I couldn’t understand why she would choose such a title for this piece considering that she is a Japanese-American. But once I started reading, I really got pulled into the poem.

There were so many times that I could relate to this work, especially the parts about westernization and how what is considered beautiful is this westernized image of white faces and large eyes with double eyelids. Right now across Asia, the big fad in the plastic surgery industry is double-eyelid surgery. It’s so common that it’s not even really regarded as anything significant. People aren’t shocked to find classmates with bruised or bandaged eyes. The way that Tita phrases this, “I tell you, my next birtday / when my madda ask me what I like, / I going tell her I like go Honolulu/ for get one double eye operation. / I no care if all bruise” (Yamanaka 33). With this, I really felt like Yamanaka was commenting on the pressure to be beautiful that not just Asian-American feel, but all women. That we all feel this pressure to conform to society’s standard of beauty. That we must subjugate ourselves to eyelid glue or tape (which, from experience, I can tell you is highly unpleasant) in order to feel beautiful.

Yamanaka also continues her comments with the constant mention of make-up and buying make up or who has what sort of make-up. These girls are so obsessed with these American beauty products and with being beautiful that that’s all they can talk about. And considering that Yamanaka usually writes about young, middle-school aged girls, this is particularly interesting. Middle school is when girls are starting to play with things like make up and concepts like beauty. It’s when we’re most susceptible to influences about beauty or our own image of ourselves.  With Tita’s brazen, rude, arrogant voice flowing through the poem – it brings me back to memories of my own middle school days and feeling that pressure from not just my fellow peers, but society.

Her characters’ voices are so distinct and the pidgin and manner of which they speak really add volumes to what she’s trying to say. With Tita, she’s trying to make a comment about how ridiculous this all is. She’s trying to get across this feeling that well, these really young girls are starting to understand themselves and their bodies and how they feel about those things. I think her characters are really good at making us feel uncomfortable about these nonchalant talks about make up and self-images; it feels as though we are privy to those conversations…the real conversations that actually happen in today’s schools.

-- Tanya Tsoi