disease. Tan also writes admiringly of Vladimir
Nabokov and the lessons she has learned from
reading him. The fifth section, “Luck, Chance, and
a Charmed Life,” discusses Tan’s living arrange-
ments, from good luck charms to ghosts, to squir-
rels, and to a rescue from a mudslide. The sixth
section, “A Choice of Words,” deals with linguistic
issues, from her first award-winning essay written
at age eight in appreciation of the library, to her
struggle to categorize and appreciate her mother’s
“broken” English, and to the difficulties inherent
in translating one language into another, as well
as the uniqueness of each language’s worldview.
Also included are a speech she made to a graduat-
ing college class, where she gives five writing and
living tips that concern language, a dissertation
on “required” reading and the label of “ethnic”
or “multicultural” literature, a description of the
painstaking process of writing a second book, and
an introduction to The Best American Short Stories
of 1999 that elucidates the power of the story to
affect our lives.
The last section of the book, “Hope,” contains
three essays. “What I Would Remember” discusses
how Tan began to listen to her mother’s stories
after a medical scare, then promised to take her
to China, and subsequently began work on The
Joy Luck Club. “To Complain Is American” de-
tails the nature of our culture as it relates to our
personal lives. “The Opposite of Fate” deals with
personal trauma, medical scares, and unexpected
results. Throughout the book, Tan discusses both
her personal and professional lives, gleaning from
each glimpses of how she was able to envision and
re-envision her formative experiences and create a
meaningful existence through the forces that gov-
ern us all: fate, faith, and memory.
Vanessa RasmussenOtsuka, Julie (1962– )
Born in Palo Alto, California, on May 15, 1962, Ot-
suka moved with her family to Palos Verdes at the
age of nine. Her father, a first-generation Japanese
American, was employed as an aerospace engineer.
Her mother, a second-generation Japanese Ameri-
can, worked as a lab technician prior to giving
birth to Otsuka and two sons. Upon graduation
from high school, Otsuka attended Yale Univer-
sity, where she developed a passion for painting
and sculpture and earned her B.A. in art in 1984.
After spending several years in New Haven, Con-
necticut, working as a waitress and building up her
portfolio, and after attending the M.F.A. program
at the University of Indiana for a few months, she
moved to New York to take classes at the New York
Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture
and to continue to pursue a career in art.
In her early 30s, however, Otsuka abandoned
painting and turned to fiction. Some of her early
work won her acceptance into Columbia Univer-
sity’s prestigious M.F.A. program in creative writ-
ing in 1994. While she was a graduate student at
Columbia, one of Otsuka’s stories was selected for
inclusion in the 1998 Scribner’s Best of the Fiction
Workshops. This story, “Evacuation Order No. 19,”
would become the first part of Otsuka’s first novel,
When the Emperor Was Divine, which she com-
pleted after earning her M.F.A. from Columbia in- In 2002, within days of submitting the man-
uscript to her agent, Otsuka’s novel was accepted
by Knopf. It appeared in hardcover in September
of that year and was released in paperback by An-
chor Books in October 2003.
When the Emperor Was Divine charts the expe-
rience of one family during the World War II evac-
uation and internment of Japanese Americans. As
one of the only recent works of fiction written by
an American of Japanese descent, it marks an im-
portant milestone in the literary representation of
the Japanese-American internment experience. In
its unusual narrative style and innovative approach
to character development, it breaks new aesthetic
ground, returning public attention to a shameful
moment in U.S. history, a historical moment that
took on new relevance for many people after the
events of September 11, 2001.
Structured as a novel in five parts, each section
of Otsuka’s narrative centers on a different mem-
ber of an anonymous Japanese-American family.
When the novel opens, the father has already been
arrested and incarcerated, leaving the mother to
prepare her family for the evacuation alone. The
232 Otsuka, Julie