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Interweaving his own experience with that of other Japanese Americans, award-winning poet David Mura reveals how being a model minority has resulted in a loss of heritage and wholeness for Japanese Americans. Mura explores America's racial and sexual taboos, the consequences of assimilation, and raising children in a world that refuses to honor racial diversity.

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Library Journal Review

Mura (Turning Japanese, LJ 2/1/91) here explores how his race, his upbringing, and American culture have affected his self-understanding and his sexuality. Weaving his memories of growing up with the lives of his paternal grandfather and his father, he creates a brutally honest examination of his search for a place in a sometimes racially hostile society. Mura blames the Japanese racial shame wrought by the internment experience of World War II for his feelings of isolation while growing up and for his sexual behavior: his attraction only to white women, interracial marriage, promiscuity, and obsessive use of pornography. Yet not all sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans) responded as he did. His intimate exploration of his sexuality and its accompanying drug use will make some readers uncomfortable, but his story demonstrates that there is no monolithic "Japanese American experience" and that the "model minority" stereotype is fallacious. Recommended for public libraries.‘Katharine L. Kan, Hawaii State Lib., Honolulu (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A third-generation Japanese American, Mura ascribes his promiscuousness, addiction to pornography and marital problems to race discrimination. In a jumble of diary excerpts, recollected conversations with his therapist, wife, friends and family, he muses on his parents' efforts to become mainstream Americans, the lasting effects of their humiliating internment during WWII and his own rebellion and rage against culture barriers. The husband of a white woman, Mura also discusses the destructive attitudes of white Americans towards interracial marriages. Although this frank account of his difficulties gives circumstantial evidence of the effects of racial discrimination on Japanese families and individuals, the link is somewhat weakened by the fact that many of the very problems he attributes to it‘e.g., rebellion against parents, infidelity‘are common in all groups; and the disordered nature of Mura's discourse lacks the impressive style of his acclaimed earlier work, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Mura, a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, has mined his preoccupations with race and eroticism in his latest book of poetry, The Colors of Desire (1994), as well as in two previous personal chronicles, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction (1987) and Turning Japanese (1991), so it should come as no surprise that these themes form the crux of his provocative memoir. Mura is at his best in his evocations of life in the Japanese American internment camps during the forties and in his descriptions of his struggle to fit into white, Midwest culture during the fifties and sixties. His candor on the subject of how white-perpetuated stereotypes of Asian Americans affected his sexuality is also quite striking. When Mura was growing up, beauty meant blonde, and he shares some stinging revelations regarding his sexual experiences with white women and the mix of tension, love, and understanding that is his marriage. Much of this commentary is unique, invaluable, and skillfully conveyed, but Mura's confessional narcissism is beginning to wear thin. It's time for this talented writer to expand his field of vision. --Donna Seaman

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

David Mura is a poet, memoirist, essayist, playwright, writer of fiction, performance artist , and literary critic.