Major themes of her novels include the absence
of the mother and subsequent loneliness of child-
hood and adolescence; sexual violence and psycho-
logical trauma; children’s difficulty with using and
acquiring the necessary language to narrate expe-
rience; lack of self-control; the difficulty of sexual
maturation and awareness; the challenge of estab-
lishing self-expression, self-control, and self-confi-
dence; the importance of the natural environment
and living with the land; and institutionalized dis-
crimination. Of her writing, Yamanaka has said “I
am devoted to telling stories the way I have experi-
enced them—cultural identity and linguistic iden-
tity being skin and flesh to my body.”
Her books have received widespread acclaim in
newspapers, magazines, and literary circles. Fol-
lowing her first major award, the Pushcart Prize
for Poetry in 1993 for Saturday Night, Yamanaka
received several grants from the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities, a Carnegie Foundation
Grant, the Lannan Literary Award (1998), and
the Asian American Literary Award (1998). These
awards, however, have not been received without
controversy. After Yamanaka received the National
Book Award from the Association for Asian Amer-
ican Studies for Saturday Night at the Pahala The-
ater, the Filipino caucus protested that one of the
poems in the collection presented a racist portrait
of Filipinos. When she received the same award for
Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers the following year,
protests from the Filipino caucus forced the asso-
ciation to rescind the award. The controversy esca-
lated for a third year when Yamanaka received an
additional award for Blu’s Hanging, which includes
a male Filipino character who sexually molests a
child. Yamanaka currently lives with her husband
and son in Honolulu, where she has started an
all-ages writing school called Na’au: A Place for
Learning and Healing.
Bibliography
Chiu, Monica. Filthy Fictions: Asian American Lit-
erature by Women. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira
Press, 2004.
Johnson, Sarah Anne. Conversations with American
Women Writers. University of New England Press:
Lebanon, N.H., 2004.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, Larry E. Smith, and Wimal
Dissanayake. Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender,
Culture, and the Public Sphere. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1999.
Parikh, Crystal. “Blue Hawaii: Asian Hawaiian Cul-
tural Production and Racial Melancholia.” Jour-
nal of Asian American Studies (October 2002):
199–216.
Shim, Rosalee. “Power in the Eye of the Beholder: A
Close Reading of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday
Night at the Pahala Theater.” Hitting Critical Mass:
A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3,
no. 1 (1995): 85–91.
Amy Lillian ManningYamashita, Karen Tei (1951– )
Yamashita initially established herself as a short-
story writer and playwright before she became
widely recognized for her novels such as her debut
work, THROUGH THE ARC OF THE RAIN FOREST
(1990), which won her both the American Book
Award in 1991 and the Janet Heidinger Kafka
Award in 1992; her second novel, BRAZIL-MARU
(1992); and her third novel, TROPIC OF ORANGE
(1997). She also published Circle K Cycles (2001),
a collection of essays and short stories. Praised by
critics for her unique style and dynamic themes,
Yamashita boldly challenges common notions
about sociopolitical issues and experiments with
narrative techniques.
Yamashita was born and raised in Oakland,
California, until her family moved to Los Ange-
les, where she spent most of her childhood. Upon
graduating from high school, she went on to
Carleton College, where she studied English and
Japanese. During her junior year, she spent a year
abroad in Japan as an exchange student, studying
at Waseda University. Following graduation from
Carleton, she began studying Portuguese in an in-
tensive language program, and in 1974 Yamashita
was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship
to conduct research on Japanese immigration to
Brazil, which began as a two-year research project.
However, she ended up staying in Brazil for nine
years, during which time she met and marriedYamashita, Karen Tei 329