Nisei Daughter

This study will examine the concepts of ethnicity, stereotyping, culture and discrimination in the context of Monica Sone's autobiographical Nisei Daughter. The study will focus on the roles these concepts played in the forming of the identity of the author as a second-generation Japanese-American living a relatively happy life with her family in Seattle, Washington, before World War II, and then undergoing increasing discrimination as a result of prejudices against Japanese-Americans as war approached and finally erupted between the United States and Japan.

This study will argue that the book demonstrates how these concepts or forces should be seen as both negative and positive in terms of the shaping of Monica's character. One can condemn stereotyping and discrimination, for example, but, for better and worse, to remove them from the making of this woman is to eliminate forces which created her as a strong, sensitive and intelligent character. Discrimination and stereotyping are destructive, but they are cold hard facts which Monica and millions of other Japanese-Americans experienced in the years surrounding World War II. Her identity, in other words, depends in large part on her responses and resistance to such destructive forces. She could have been beaten down into submission by her experiences, but instead they played a part in making her a powerful individual and a fine writer who speaks her mind for herself and her people.

"Ethnicity" can be an ambiguous term, al

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n understanding Sone's experiences and the formation of her character. However, she makes it clear that in the early years of her life, when many psychologists believe the personality is primarily formed, she was hardly aware of ethnic differences between herself and others, although she was fully surrounded by them: The first five years of my life I lived in amoebic bliss, not knowing whether I was plant or animal. . . . One day when I was a happy six-year-old, I made the shocking discovery that I had Japanese blood. I was a Japanese (Sone 3). From that point forward, up to the writing of her Preface some twenty-six years after the publication of the book in 1953, Sone is aware indeed of her ethnicity, that is, the differences between herself and the majority white population of the United States. Of course, the ethnic differences between herself and others are intensified, especially in the pre-war, war and post-war years, by the fact that her appearance sets her off as "different" from the majority. Sone was a happy "Japanese-American" child who was not aware of either her "American" or "Japanese" aspects. Her life in her father's hotel in a relatively socioeconomically deprived area of Seattle exposed her to a broad v

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