Yamamoto was awarded the American Book Award
for Lifetime Achievement from the Before Colum-
bus Foundation. The now-out-of-print anthology
of her short stories from Kitchen Table: Women of
Color Press was published two years later and was
honored with the Award for Literature from the
Association of Asian American Studies. Rutgers
University Press reprinted the collection, SEVEN-
TEEN SYLLABLES AND OTHER STORIES, in 1998.
Bibliography
Cheung, King-Kok. Introduction. Seventeen Syllables
and Other Stories, 3–16. New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Cheung, King-Kok, and Stan Yogi. Asian American
Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. New York:
Modern Language Association, 1988.
Anne N. Thalheimer
Yamanaka, Lois-Ann (1961– )
A third-generation Japanese American, Yamanaka
was born on the Hawaiian island of Molokai and
grew up with her parents and three younger sisters
in Pahala, a small sugar plantation village on the
big island of Hawaii. Although her mother and fa-
ther held fairly normal jobs as a schoolteacher and
a principal, her father also practiced a more earthly
and eccentric occupation as a self-employed hunter
and taxidermist. Living in a small house filled with
dead stuffed animals both contrasted with and
complemented living on a vast, wild, and lush is-
land. Yamanaka’s family lived off the land; they kept
their own animals, grew their own produce, and
hunted their own meat. She frequently accompa-
nied her father on his hunting expeditions for wild
boar, sheep, and sharks for eating and stuffing.
As a native Hawaiian, Yamanaka grew up out-
side the island’s privileged white populations. Most
immigrants from Asian countries, particularly
from Japan and the Philippines, had come to the
islands in the 1800s to work on the sugarcane and
coffee plantations. Due to a history of settlement
by European Christian missionaries and American
capitalists, Hawaii’s native Polynesian community
and Asian immigrant workers became second-
class citizens. The rift between white and “other”
in Hawaii solidified with the ensuing industrializa-
tion, land development, and consumerism of the
islands in the middle and late 20th century.
The racial and cultural clash surrounding Ya-
manaka during her childhood profoundly influ-
enced her writing, career, and use of language. As
a child, she suffered ridicule and criticism from
white teachers and white classmates for her “pid-
gin” English, a Hawaiian dialect spoken by most
Asian Americans in Hawaii. This dialect is the
language of Yamanaka’s fictive Asian-American
characters in Hawaii, where almost all of her short
stories and novels are set. Just as her characters
fight against institutional discrimination within
the educational system, Yamanaka began her ca-
reer with this goal in mind. She studied education
at the University of Hawaii, where she earned a
B.Ed. (1983) and an M.Ed. (1987), and went on to
teach “at-risk” students in predominantly Asian-
American and economically suffering areas of
Honolulu. Due to her own personal experiences
of discrimination caused by institutional racism
in Hawaii’s public schools, Yamanaka could espe-
cially relate to her students and help them navigate
the sharp divide between white and “other” in Ha-
waiian society.
Yamanaka’s island life has also infused her writ-
ing career with sharp realism and cultural criti-
cism. Her first book, Saturday Night at the Pahala
Theater (1993), set a precedent in her later novels
for the wide use of pidgin English and a visceral
portrayal of growing up Asian-American in Ha-
waii. Structured as a collection of verse poetry,
or vignettes, Saturday Night at the Pahala The-
ater drew attention for its treatment of racial ste-
reotypes, sexual violence, and adolescent angst.
Yamanaka’s young characters are “prematurely
exposed to a racist and sexist world which blinds
and debilitates them.... The authority figures in
the work perpetuate this dark world of fear and
ignorance” (Shim 86). These themes continue
with Yamanaka’s following novels: WILD ME AT AND
THE BULLY BURGERS (1996), BLU’S HANGING (1997),
Heads by Harry (1999), Name Me Nobody (1999,
young adult fiction), Father of the Four Passages
(2002), and Behold the Many (2006).328 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann