99% Americans

Discrimination has been prevalent since the beginning of American history but what makes the segregation of the Japanese Americans during World War II so shameful is that the people in these camps were completely Americanized. In the beginning of the book when the author was describing the woman, I imagined the housewife in an old sitcom from the 1940’s and 1950’s who always wore pearls and high heels while working around the house stopping only to give her husband a peck on the cheek when he came home from work saying, “Honey, I’m home!” Also, I imagined that they celebrated the Fourth of July at their neighbor’s barbeque and drove a Ford. The family most likely didn’t speak a lot of Japanese around the house and did not have Japanese accents but even though they did still connect with their roots by having statues of Buddha, kimonos, and other pieces of Japanese culture around the house, they could have been considered an average American family if it weren’t for their ancestry.

While on the train and in the stables and into the camps, everyone was speaking English and only some older people would only speak Japanese. This was what made it especially shameful because chances are that they had emigrated here about twenty years before. If there were more young people who only spoke Japanese, there would be more of a chance that they would be disloyal but there weren’t. The boy played cowboys and Indians and fantasized about horses while looking out into the desert and the girl liked American candy and music and also actress, Dorothy Lamour. However, when they went into the camps, they lost their identity and dignity. They lived with the bare essentials and a few personal belongings but other than that had nothing but their regrets and false sense of guilt looming over them.

Abdul

As an adult, Abdul will not have the emotional and physical scars that Precious had and will supercede his parents. He did not grow up in a child-friendly environment and was not always perfectly cared for for the first few years of his life but he will not have as many mental road blocks that Precious had as a result of constant abuse and terrorization which kept her from living up to her dreams.  One day Abdul will know the truth about who his father is and will be forced to experience his mother’s death at a very young age but at that point, Precious will have most likely pushed him through school with exceptional grades and he will have more than his parents and grandparents ever had. However, if it weren’t for the Each One Teach One program that Precious attended, she would not have the same attitude about life and, as a result, restricted Abdul’s chance of escaping from a lineage of abuse. Instead of having Precious’ full attention and expectations, Abdul would only have been used to collect welfare and would probably experience everything Precious did as a child, including his father/grandfather’s abuse. After thinking this life was normal, he would continue being illiterate and would be another statistic that slipped through the cracks in Harlem. Precious is now smart enough to protect him from everything she experienced and her pride and happiness will help him succeed in life and inspire him to do anything he dreams.

Where would she be?

The language in Push showed signs of Precious’ illiteracy even before she mentioned that all of the pages in her math book looked the same. Most of the words were spelled incorrectly and grammatical errors were ubiquitous. In the beginning, her anger which was heavily emphasized by profanity, was not just a result of her troubles at home but also the frustration of being trapped and surrounded by a world of failure.

The pregnancy of her second child, although a result of rape, resulting in expulsion from school actually saved her. She recognized that she was overweight and compared herself to her morbidly obese mother whom she estimated to be at least three hundred pounds. She resented her mother for being ignorant and cruel and Precious saw herself in her mother if she did not change something now. Precious would be living with her mother while being beaten and raped every night resulting in more pregnancies while on welfare until someone would unfortunately die if she did not leave and start her own life.

Precious was a sixteen-year-old eighth grader who did not have many friends and despite her intimidating façade, was scared and self-conscious to the point of incontinency (as a child). Her defiant attitude towards school and the Teach One Each One program almost kept her from meeting Ms. Rain and her classmates but after Ms. Rain’s calloused method of teaching leveled Precious’ bullying, she was tamed into wanting to go to school and write in her journal. Eventually, after learning to read and write she sees the new students with the same insolent mind-set she once had and for the first time in the book, was happy and enthusiastic because she tested as reading and writing at an eighth grade level.

Deprived or Delighted?

The pictures in Fun Home depict Alison’s parents as angry and depressed with a touch of defeat. Although her father was already having homosexual affairs in Germany, he and Alison’s mother were starry-eyed and completely in love. Bruce wrote multiple love letters that Alison compared to famous authors. They would have occasional fights as all couples do but other than that living in Germany with the love of each other’s lives seemed like a utopia.

However, at the same time as Alison’s mother became pregnant Bruce’s father dies and is forced to transform from romantic soldier in Europe to funeral director with three children in a mundane town in Pennsylvania. The dream was over. Alison’s parents needed to find ways to replace the happiness they once had but nothing could replace what they once had. I am not sure what having kids is like but from Alison’s depiction of her parents emotions draws me to the conclusion that it cannot always compare to the romantic years in a distant country.

Conversely, Alison’s childhood was not as disturbed or traumatizing as most people would expect if they hadn’t read the book. She does mention that her family was not as physically affectionate as other families and that her surroundings were either morbid or a beautiful cover up for the ugly truth (for example an old house or sexual taboos), but she was a happy child with friends and hobbies. Her homosexuality was apparent at a very young age but wanting to wear plaid shirts and manly boots is not related to radiating depression around her. In the first panels she plays airplane with her father and he teaches her to swim in the last panels; whether her father is faking this playful image or he is genuinely having fun with his only daughter, Alison was not deprived or disturbed as a child.

Dark Humor

 

Although Fun Home is a tragic yet stirring novel, Alison Bechdel presents it comfortably using her own humor to express how she has come to terms with the misfortunes she has encountered in her youth. The title of the book, for example, shortening a very morbid word into a word to describe joy and amusement shows how she has accepted the concept of death. Even though she has grown up around funerals, seen cadavers, and experienced the loss of an immediate family member at a young age, you would think it would still be as unnerving to hear jokes about death as it is for everyone else. In several instances, Alison laughs or smiles during some of these moments like when she first arrives home for her father’s funeral and she sees her brother they both smirk at each other as if their father did something only mildly reckless like fall off a ladder while painting the house. However even in the midst of her ignorance, she would make cynical remarks or be sarcastic. For instance, when she sees her father leaving for a town known for its mental institution, she teases him only to find out he really is going to a therapist.

This dark playfulness could also be stemmed from her mother’s constant negativity or a mixture of that and her innocence. Her mother always had a depressing one liner to every question. When she, Alison, and her brothers watch their grown uncle move into a trailer next door to their parents house her mother says, “After you graduate, I never want to see you again.” Although it was a joke, it is something that, if taken out of context, would sound like she is more than ready to abandon her young children. Through all she had gone through in her childhood, which would probably force most people into years of therapy, her jokes helped her cope with her awkward childhood, disintegrating family, and sexual confusion as a young woman and also used it as a method of healing, not an extension of any remaining anger or depression.