The Gender and Nationalism Binary in Okada's No-No Boy

Even before reading Kandice Chuh’s chapter from Imagine Otherwise, I was preoccupied with the representations of nationalism and gender that are mapped onto Ichiro’s parents in No-No Boy. Therefore, Chuh’s argument that Ichiro’s parents represent the opposite poles of both a gender and a nationalist binary was useful in pushing my thoughts on the same subject. However, while I agree with most of her reading of Ichiro’s mother and her madness, I do not think Chuh adequately accounts for Ichiro’s re-gendering of his parents: “[Pa] should have been a woman. He should have been Ma and Ma should have been Pa” (Okada 112).

First of all, to quickly establish the obvious, Ma is a woman, she believes Japan won the war and wants to return, and Japan is feminized and associated with women in American history and Japanese American writings. Pa, on the other hand, is a man, he knows the US won the war and is resigned to remaining, and the US is always figured as the masculine opposite to the feminine Japan. According to Chuh, these facts align Ma with Japan and femininity and Pa with the US and masculinity. Of course, as the reader and Ichiro accurately realize, Ma has usurped Pa’s patriarchal position in the family – she makes the decisions and, though Pa knows the truth that Japan has lost the war, he is silenced by her authority. Chuh, however, sees Ma’s position as the head of the family as a product of both parents’ sickness: Ma’s madness and Pa’s alcoholism (Chuch 73). Though I agree that Pa’s alcoholism is proof of the weakness that allows Ma to usurp him, that weakness can also be seen as a sign of feminization, effectively flipping the genders of Ichiro’s parents. What then – and this is what I’ve been grappling with – does it mean to suddenly associate inappropriate masculinity with Japan and inappropriate femininity with the US?

My initial thought – with which I think Chuh would agree – is that this gender reversal still maintains a binary, but an unstable one that cannot be sustained and is righted once Ichiro’s mother kills herself. Pushing beyond that, however, these negative and problematic embodiments of gender relate to the separate nationalisms represented by each parent. Ma represents masculinity and Japan; Pa represents femininity and the US. If the gender binary is really not so much a binary, but an embodiment of both in one (Ma is female, but represents masculinity, albeit a problematized version of it), then the same can be seen as a solution to Ichiro’s identity problem. Ichiro thinks to himself, “I am not Japanese and I am not American” (Okada 16), but what he needs and wants to be is both collapsed into one: “Japanese-American.” Not only is this what Ichiro wants to be, but it is also what Okada’s text wants the US government to recognize – an inseparable union of Japanese and American, not a dual identity with two separate parts where one half or the other gets privileged depending upon what is most convenient for the US to acknowledge.