#elizabeth miki brina

[me-a-mess-morelikelythanyouthink]

and when I tell you that I’ve never managed to learn another language, that i am unable to separate them in my minds eye. that i can not translate a phrase, I simply know what it means because she cradled my head as she spoke it. that i have tried german and french but can’t form the words of my mother(‘s) language. that I’m scared of saying i love you with the enemy’s accent. i love you do you love me i love you do you love me i love you

ocean vuong, on earth we are briefly gorgeous // elizabeth miki brina, speak okinawa // hieu minh nguyen, buffet poetry // mitski, class of 2013

[ikuhisa-yi09]

Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess / Salman Rushdie, East, West / Sleeping at Last - Heirloom // Lidia Yuknavitch, Letter to My Rage: An Evolution / Elizabeth Miki Brina, Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir / Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous // Louise Bourgeois, He Disappeared into Complete Silence / Yiyun Li, “What Gardening Offered After a Son’s Death” / Heidi Priebe, “As Long As There Is Love, There Will Be Grief” / Eden Robinson, “Writing Prompts for the Broken-hearted”

[fleeceyang]

tagged by @huiven thanku cat 💋

last song: xtasy (remix) - ravyn lenae, doechii

fave place: home—my neighbourhood park, the library courtyard, the cinema, wherever my friends are!

fave book: speak, okinawa: a memoir by elizabeth miki brina, the bluest eye by toni morrison

currently reading: black cake by charmaine wilkerson, mickey7 by ashton edward

fave movie: everything everywhere all at once, minari, the farewell <- this run help. oh and amelie!

fave tv show: breaking bad, better call saul, OZARK, alice in borderland, love, death & robots

fave food: pho forever and everrrrr

tagging @sheawolfmp3 @neonsbian @1hyunjae @myundyinglove @liefdesbriefjes @duovxq @deadbeatson @heartual and. and you guessed it the girl reading thisssssss #yass ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

[rockislandadultreads]

Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month: Nonfiction Recommendations

Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina

Elizabeth's mother was working on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance defining their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood, while feeling almost no connection to her mother's distant home and out of place among her peers. This account is a heartfelt exploration of identity and what it means to be an American.

Asian American Histories of the United States by Catherine Ceniza Choy

Original and expansive, this volume is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the U.S. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.

Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow

Born two years after her parents' only son died just hours after his birth, Kat Chow became unusually fixated with death. She worried constantly about her parents dying - especially her mother. Four years later when her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her two older sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. In this memoir, Kat weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family's history of loss spanning three generations and their immigration from China and Hong Kong to America and Cuba.

Rise by Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, & Philip Wang

In this intimate, eye-opening, and frequently hilarious guided tour through the pop-cultural touchstones and sociopolitical shifts of the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and beyond, authors Yang, Yu, and Wang chronicle how we’ve arrived at today’s unprecedented diversity of Asian American cultural representation through engaging, interactive graphics, charts, graphic essays from major AAPI artists, exclusive roundtables with Asian American cultural icons, and more.

[ragnarockz]

3. What were your top five books of the year?

12. Any books that disappointed you?

18. How many books did you buy?

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

And one of my own because I'm curious...

26. What books genres do you read?

Home from work so I can answer these now!

3. I use TheStoryGraph so these were my highest books I rated this year:

We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People - Nemonte Nenguimo

1666: A Novel - Lora Chilton

Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir - Elizabeth Miki Brina

Tripwire - Lee Child

Stay True - Hua Hsu

12. A Pale View of the Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro - I felt like there were so many loose ends and the ending was very lackluster; it was an easy read and it wasn't like I was trying to pull teeth to finish it but it just didn't do anything for me. It also tried to be creepy and missed the mark too many times.

18. I actually have no idea but it's EASILY over 50. I buy all my books second hand so I get them for cheap!

24. I will read a book all the way through so, nothing is a DNF for me even if I can't stand it 😂

26. This year my top genres were: Literary, Historical, Classics, Thriller and, Crime (honestly, I will read just about anything - I just love reading!)

[dearthinkingoutloud]

If you liked this movie/book, you might also like... (pt. 1)

This concept are some of my favorite videos to watch on YouTube/BookTube (Youtube videos about books) or booktok (tiktoks about books), so I thought I would try my own version with some of the books and readings we discussed in class! In this post, I will recommend you, my viewers, a form of media based on some of the literature my class discussed this semester.

If you liked

Then you might also like...

I read the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan in my senior year of high school as a choice novel and THOROUGHLY enjoyed it! The Joy Luck Club is a fictional story about 4 Chinese mothers who emigrate to San Francisco, meet, and become friends through a tradition of playing mahjong and telling stories about their past. The story is told from the many points of view of the mothers as well as their daughters growing up as first-generation Chinese-Americans. Similar to Speak Okinawa, the book tackles the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters of different backgrounds and generations as well as the distorted idea of fulfilling the "American Dream." 

Amy Tan does a wonderful job as depicting the struggle of navigating two different cultures as first-generation immigrant children and how this struggle can create a strain between the parent and child. In this instance, the mothers desperately want what is best for the daughters and constantly try to immerse them in their culture, but the daughters brush off their mothers' efforts complaining that it is overbearing. The daughters don't understand their mothers' sacrifices and the magnitude of their love until they grow up and experience hardships in adulthood. 

Elizabeth Miki Brina tells a similar story in her memoir, Speak, Okinawa, about her growing up as a second-generation immigrant of a white-American father and Okinawan mother. Along with this, her relationship with her mother suffers as Brina goes through the unfortunately common internalized racism amongst mixed-race children.

Both stories touch on the hardships that come with differing backgrounds between immigrant children and their parents as well as the relatable minority experience especially amongst Asian-Americans.

♡ dearthinkingoutloud

[neoneun-au]

A post for my book recommendations, to be continuously updated as I read and remember more. Because without reading, I would not be writing. 

All time favourites are marked with a ☆

All are sorted by genre and will be linked (if able) to their Goodreads pages so that you can dig deeper into whatever catches your eye. [edit: as of January 2025 I've reached the link limit]

(ps if you have a Goodreads account, you can add me here)

Anthology/Short Story Collections

Behold This Dreamer - Walter de la Mare ☆

Difficult Women - Roxane Gay

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories - Ken Liu

The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami

Essays

Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay ☆

Bluets - Maggie Nelson ☆

On Freedom - Maggie Nelson

In Praise of Shadows - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Malleable Forms - Meeka Walsh ☆

Fiction (Classic)

Persuasion - Jane Austen ☆

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

If on a winter's night a traveller - Italo Calvino

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress - Daniel Defoe

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell ☆

Siddhartha - Hermen Hesse

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera ☆

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Fiction (Modern)

All’s Well - Mona Awad ☆

Bunny - Mona Awad

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach

The Pisces - Melissa Broder

White Oleander - Janet Finch

For Today I Am A Boy - Kim Fu

The Vegetarian - Han Kang

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova ☆

Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - Eimear McBride

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

The Road - Cormac McCarthy ☆

Under the Hawthorne Tree - Ai Mi

The Song of Achilles - Madeleine Miller ☆

After Dark - Haruki Murakami ☆

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami ☆

Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox - Helen Oyeyemi ☆

A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

The Overstory - Richard Powers ☆

The Godfather - Mario Puzo

Blindness - José Saramago

How To Be Both - Ali Smith

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt ☆

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

Ru - Kim Thúy

Brooklyn - Colm Tóibín

Big Fish - Daniel Wallace

Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto

Horror/Thriller

The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty

Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton

Gerald’s Game - Stephen King

The Shining - Stephen King

Audition - Ryū Murakami

I’m Thinking of Ending Things - Iain Reid

Manga/Graphic Novels

Basilisk - Futaro Yamada, Maseki Sagawa

Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata

Eureka Seven - Jinsei Kataoka, Kazuma Kondou

Nana - Ai Yazawa ☆

Paradise Kiss - Ai Yazawa

Uzumaki - Junji Ito

xxxHolic - CLAMP

Memoirs/Journals

Everything I Know About Love - Dolly Alderton

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby ☆

Speak, Okinawa - Elizabeth Miki Brina

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness - Susannah Cahalan

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty

I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi

Henry and June - Anaïs Nin ☆

The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls ☆

Non-Fiction (General)

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking - Susan Cain

The Red Market - Scott Carney

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - Stephen Greenblatt

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right - Jane Mayer

The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson

The Elements of Style - William Strunk Jr, E.B White

Non-Fiction (Philosophy/Spiritual)

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge - Carlos Castañeda

Silence: In the Age of Noise - Erling Kagge ☆

The Kybalion - Three Initiates ☆

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo - Chögyam Trungpa

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

Plays

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

Poetry Collections

I Love My Love - Reyna Biddy

Let Us Compare Mythologies - Leonard Cohen

The Prophet - Khalil Gibran

The Anatomy of Being - Shinji Moon

The Beauty of the Husband - Anne Carson ☆

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth - Warsan Shire

Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong

Speculative Fiction

Dune - Frank Herbert

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel ☆

Battle Royale - Koushun Takami

True Crime

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders - Vincent Bugliosi

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote ☆

Young Adult

A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray ☆

The Diviners - Libba Bray

The Sun is Also a Star - Nicola Yoon

[kazuoishiguro]

My mother and I speak different languages. Her native language is Japanese. My native language is English. This might seem like a mundane fact about us. It’s not. It dictates everything. Because even though my mother understands and speaks English at a highly functional level, there are places inside me she can’t reach, nuances of thought and emotion I can’t express in words that make sense to her.

Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Speak, Okinawa

By Elizabeth Miki Brina.

Cover design by Janet Hansen.

[whilereadingandwalking]

Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina is a memoir about Elizabeth's struggle to understand her mother—about her cruelty when she was young, and her guilt once she grew up, about her mother and father's complicated relationship and the way Elizabeth's views of it shifted. It was extremely educational about Okinawa and its exploitation by Japan and ongoing destruction and exploitation by the US. I thought the memoir could have been much shorter, finding some parts of it very repetitive, but still found it an intriguing read. 

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[me-a-mess-morelikelythanyouthink]

when ocean vuong wrote,

“our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all- but an orphan. our vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in vietnamese, but entirely in war”

and when elizabeth miki brina wrote,

“my mother and i speak different languages... this might seem like a mundane fact about us. it’s not. it dictates everything. because even though my mother understands and speaks english at a highly functional level, there are places inside me she can’t reach, nuances of thought and emotion i can’t express in words that make sense to her.”

and,

“i had not learned this history, my mother’s history, my history, until i was thirty-four years old. which is to say that i grew up not knowing my mother or myself.”

and when hieu minh nguyen said,

“i am forgetting how to say simple things to my mother. the words that linger in my periphery. the words, a rear view mirror dangling from the wires. i am only fluent in apologies.”

and when mitski sang,

“mom, i'll be quiet / it would be just to sleep at night / and i'll leave once I figure out / how to pay for my own life too.“ 

and when I tell you that I’ve never managed to learn another language, that i am unable to separate them in my minds eye. that i can not translate a phrase, I simply know what it means because she cradled my head as she spoke it. that i have tried german and french but can’t form the words of my mother(‘s) language. that I’m scared of saying i love you with the enemy’s accent. i love you do you love me i love you do you love me i love you

[wearejapanese]

By Elizabeth Miki Brina

My mother loved Elvis. She loved his sultry balmy voice. She loved his thick upswept hair, his brooding eyes and chiseled jaw. She loved the rock n’ roll of him, the cool of him, the quintessential America of him. Growing up in Okinawa, she looked for him in the faces and mannerisms of GIs stationed on nearby bases, GIs who ordered drinks at the nightclub where she worked as a waitress. She served them and flirted with them, hoping to find Elvis, his charm, his promise of a heartfelt and soulful life.

My father loved samurai. He loved their pride and stoicism and discipline. He loved their code of honor and sense of duty. He loved their zealous devotion to tradition, their willingness to sacrifice themselves for what they deemed virtuous. Growing up in the United States, my father yearned for his chance to fight for his country, to fight for democratic principles, to become a noble warrior. Which is why he enlisted in the army. Which is why he volunteered for infantry combat.

Perhaps it was her love of Elvis that brought my mother to work at the nightclub. Perhaps it was his love of samurai that brought my father to Okinawa, in between stints at war in Vietnam. Perhaps it was this mutual objectification, this preconceived romanticization, more than history and circumstance, that brought my mother and father together.

In 1977, three years after my parents were married, on the night Elvis died, my mother had a dream that Elvis died. She woke up the next morning and told my father. Distressed. Disturbed. Later that day, they heard the news.

This uncanny fact was told to me as a testament of her love for him, her bond to him. To Elvis or my father? Or both?

My father was the one who told me, as he would do most of the telling. My mother would nod beside him, verifying, as she would let him do most of the telling.

By 1977, the delusional basis for their initial attraction to each other had dissipated. My father was not rock n’ roll. My father was not cool. But he was quintessential America: pursuing his happiness, his career aspirations, earning an MBA at Northwestern University, opting to fight for his country through free and fair enterprise. My mother was not the daughter of a daimyo, not a peasant he rescued. She wasn’t even really Japanese, she was Okinawan—a distinction that was disregarded in my household until relatively recently. But she followed him from city to city, from Kadena, where my mother grew up, to Manhattan, where my father grew up, to Phoenix and then Chicago, and she learned English, though she would never know it as well as my father.

Read more...

https://lithub.com/on-negotiating-and-embracing-the-differences-between-japanese-and-american-culture/

[icharibachoodee]

Coming up on 9/30 at 2pm PST!

One of our co-creators, Mariko, will be be moderating the conversation with memoirist Elizabeth Miki Brina about Speak, Okinawa and Akemi Johnson, Night in the American Village with Tadaima (Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimage)!

Watch here:  https://youtu.be/Hovi5WvoD7E

[angela-yuriko-smith]

"SPEAK, OKINAWA" NEEDS TO BE HEARD

“SPEAK, OKINAWA” NEEDS TO BE HEARD

I don’t know what I was expecting when I cracked open Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina this morning, but it wasn’t this. I just spent the entire day unable to put this book down, weeping and raging. I only paused long enough to send a Kindle copy to my mother and order a copy to keep as mine is from the library. I will be sending copies to my adult children as well, so they can understand…

[quillfulwriter]

"The Americans can destroy in a day what we will never forget."

Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina

[bigtickhk]

Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina

US:https://amzn.to/3wwmNYX

UK: https://amzn.to/2PWrKZS

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9780525657347