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Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America
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About Bento Box In The Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood In
Product Description While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life. As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya's life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it. As immigrants, her parents approached the challenges of living in America, and maintaining their Japanese diets, with optimism and gusto. Furiva, meanwhile, was acutely aware of how food set her apart from her peers: She spent her first day of school hiding in the girls' restroom, examining her rice balls and chopsticks, and longing for a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. Bento Box in the Heartland is an insightful and reflective coming-of-age tale. Beautifully written, each chapter is accompanied by a family recipe of mouth-watering Japanese comfort food. From Publishers Weekly When Furiya started eating lunches in the elementary school cafeteria, she was profoundly embarrassed by the rice balls her mom packed instead of a sandwich like all the other kids ate. She was already feeling self-conscious about being the only Japanese family in her 1960s Indiana hometown, and her parents' insistence on continuing to eat their native cuisine—they grew their own vegetables and drove for hours to visit big-city supermarkets that stocked Japanese imports—was frustrating because it intensified the differences between her and her classmates. But the exotic dishes were also a source of delight, and Furiya ends each chapter with a recipe for one of her favorite meals. There is more to the story than food, though, and she describes the anger she feels when shopkeepers make fun of her father's accent, or the amazement when her mother takes her back to Japan, with the same vividness she applies to recreating the sensations of her first taste of wasabi. Though she continues to chafe against her parents' emotional reticence, partly inspired by their arranged marriage, Furiya also comes to appreciate the values they handed down to her, and it's this love that dominates her nicely told story. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist In her syndicated newspaper columns, Furiya has written about Asian cooking as well as growing up in the only Japanese family in a small Indiana town. In this memoir-cum-cookbook, she expands on those subjects in chapters that close with family recipes. Food is always at the center of Furiya's stories, which begin with her grade-school realization that her bento-box lunch sets her apart from her 1960s peers. In a voice that's angry, yearning, and direct, she remembers the bewildering pull between American and Japanese culture, and her complex struggles to form a cohesive, proud cultural identity. The specifics are moving and vivid, as is Furiya's universal wonderment about who her parents are, how they ended up together, and what her own grown-up life will be: "Someday you will shoot and follow your arrow," her father tells her. "My arrow, it landed here." Pair this with Diana Abu-Jabar's beautiful The Language of Baklava (2005), another culinary memoir of growing up with immigrant parents. Gillian Engberg Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Linda Furiya hails from Versailles, Indiana and graduated from Purdue University. She soon moved to San Francisco where she discovered her love of writing and felt emboldened by the Asian American community. She began writing about ethnicity and food in 1992 when she wrote a syndicated monthly column titles, "From Where I Stand," for S an Francisco's Nichibei Times, Los Angeles' Rafu Shimpo, Sacramento's Nikkei West, Seattle's Northewest Nikkei and Montreal Canada's Montreal Bulletin. Linda's freelance writing experience spans fourteen years and includes food and tr
