Elizabeth Miki Brina’s memoir about coming to terms with her Japanese-American heritage is warm and affecting

Most memoirs are about resolving an identity crisis of some kind. And this is an extreme one. Born to a mother from Okinawa and a father who was a US soldier, Elizabeth Miki Brina grows up in New Jersey and Fairport, New York, faintly aware of her history but unable to really assimilate it for years. As a child, she clings to her father, to Beverly Hills 90210, to Chuck E Cheese dinners, to Aerosmith cassette tapes; she cuts up her mother’s kimonos and, as soon as she is old enough, dyes her hair blond. She wants blue contact lenses but her parents draw the line at that. Even at the age of 18, when she starts to say the words “half-Japanese” out loud, she is not able to explain “what Okinawa is”, the place where her mother was born and raised.

As the author explains, the words “internalised racism” were not in anyone’s vocabulary at that time – and they certainly weren’t familiar to her parents, two people who were young and naive when they fell in love and spend the rest of their marriage just trying to do their best, with the kind of quietly disastrous consequences that secretly make up many ordinary family lives. With the benefit of hindsight and the beady eye of a ruthless biographer, Miki Brina’s life story becomes an extraordinarily compelling and involving account of what it means to grow up denying a part of yourself.

This is ultimately a study in the intricate survival mechanisms we use to cope with what’s going on around us