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A Memoir from California

 

 

A Memoir from California (2017)

 

For this performance Tsuchimoto did a remote performance via Skype from California to the audience in Stockholm. She recited the short story Wilshire Bus written in the aftermath of World War II by Hisaye Yamamoto, a Japanese-American writer. She tells the story of a Japanese-American woman who encountered an act of anti-Asian harassment toward a Chinese couple by a drunken white man while taking a bus to visit her hospitalized husband. Yamamoto describes racial complexities, and questions how immigrants identified themselves, and their feeling of belonging according ethnicity and nationality in post war American society. Tsuchimoto invited the audience to reflect upon racial issues of majorities against minorities and within generalized minority groups, as well as her self-representation as a Japanese immigrant in the present globalized, individualistic social context.

 

Performance at Pacific Beach, San Diego shown via Skype at SPRING CLEAN! performance weekend, Marabouparken, Stockholm, Sweden

Adaptation of the story Wilshire Bus (1950) from the book Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto

 

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