boy, name their fourth daughter “Boy” and raise
her as a son. With humor, the play explores how
time and place affect the ways in which concepts
of gender and sex are constructed. Son’s interest
in identity politics is further articulated in another
full-length play, Stop Kiss, which was written in
1997 and premiered in 1998 at the Public Theater.
In this love story, two heterosexual women, Cal-
lie and Sara, find themselves falling in love with
each other. When Callie kisses Sara at the Green-
wich Village Park, however, a homophobic person
attacks the two women, causing Sara to become
disabled. While the play focuses on love, it also
delves into the process of self-discovery. In 1999
Son worked as a staff writer for NBC-TV’s drama
series The West Wing, but she left the TV show in
- Overall, Son’s works examine the quest for
self-discovery. Even though some of her characters
are Asian Americans, her themes address the gen-
eral concerns of humanity.
Bibliography
Kim, Esther S. “Diana Son.” In Asian American Play-
wrights: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook,
edited by Miles Xian Liu. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 2000.
Tanaka, Jennifer. “Only Connect: An Interview with
the Playwright.” American Theatre 16, no. 6 (July/
Aug. 1999): 26–27.
Hyunjoo Ki
Sone, Monica (1919– )
Born Kuzuko Monica Itoi in Seattle, Washington,
Monica Sone is best known for her autobiographi-
cal work, Nisei Daughter (1953). This book tells
the story of a second (ni) generation (sei) Japa-
nese-American girl in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Monica, the second of four children, was raised in
Seattle, where her parents managed a small hotel.
Her father immigrated in 1904 with hopes of re-
suming his legal studies, but he eventually took
over the hotel. Her mother, an amateur poet, was
the daughter of a Japanese Christian minister and
arrived in the United States two years before Mon-
ica’s birth. Sone contracted tuberculosis as a teen-
ager, but a nine-month stay in a sanitarium cured
her of the disease.
During World War II, her family was incarcer-
ated briefly at Camp Harmony before they were
transferred to Camp Minidoka in Idaho. Monica
and her remaining siblings (Henry and Sumiko)
were eventually permitted to leave the camp; she
later entered Hanover College. Her parents, how-
ever, remained in the camp until the war’s end.
Monica’s father died in 1948, but her mother was
finally permitted to become an American citizen
after the Naturalization Act of 1952. Monica stud-
ied clinical psychology at Case Western Reserve
University and practiced for 38 years. She mar-
ried Geary Sone, a nisei World War II veteran, and
raised four children. She contributed a new preface
to the reprint of Nisei Daughter (1979) that called
for the American government to apologize for its
wrongful imprisonment of Japanese Americans
during the war.
Nisei Daughter, dedicated to her parents, began
as a series of letters Sone wrote to her friend
Betty McDonald during the war. A groundbreak-
ing work, it is the first in a series of autobiogra-
phies by second-generation Japanese-American
women, including FAREWELL TO MANZANAR (1973,
JEANNE WAKATSUKI HOUSTON); Through Harsh
Winters (1981, Akemi Kikumura); OBASAN (1981,
JOY KO G AWA); and Desert Exile (1982, YOSHIKO
UCHIDA). Decades later, David Guterson used
Sone’s text as a source for his popular novel Snow
Falling on Cedars (1994).
In some ways, Nisei Daughter is a typical Amer-
ican bildungsroman, a story of initiation and iden-
tity formation. The central character’s growth in
this novel is complicated by her conflicted sense
of Japanese and American identities. Nisei Daugh-
ter is also a typical immigrant’s story from early
20th-century America that centers on issues of
language, education, and wealth. The tension sur-
rounding these assimilation issues is heightened
by the dual loyalties of the central character dur-
ing the war. Lastly, Nisei Daughter is a story of gen-
erational conflict. The children in the novel keenly
feel the generational gap; in particular, the female
narrator exhibits a teenager’s angst in her relation-
ship with her mother. The generational gap is even270 Sone, Monica