Water Thicker Than Blood

Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood

By George Uba.  

This beautiful, impressionistic memoir chronicles how the author, like many  Sansei (and Nisei) across the United States, grappled with dislocation  and trauma, while seeking acceptance and belonging.

Augmented by cultural and historical research, Uba’s personal account of his family’s efforts to gain acceptance as  Americans unfolds as racial demographics in America are shifting. He  struggles with inherently violent mid-century educational and  child-rearing practices and a family health crisis. The result is a  turbulent, exceptionally guilt-ridden childhood. Uba describes boy  scouts and yogore (community rebels and castoffs) in vivid  detail, but he also uses these vignettes to show how margins were  blurred and how both sets of youth experienced injury through the same  ideological pressures.

Water Thicker Than Blood is not a conventional story about  community recovery, identity formation, or family repair. But it offers  an intimate look at the lasting—in some ways irreversible—damage caused  by postwar, Anglo-centrist ideologies of “being accepted” and “fitting  in inconspicuously” and by the self-limiting behaviors requiring mimicry, quietism, and obedience. This memoir unpacks a story of  compliance and outward success, whose shadow masquerades even today as a  master narrative of Asian American triumph-over-adversity but whose  lasting scars only begin to heal through efforts of understanding,  compassion, and painstaking reinvention.

Paper: 230 pp.

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