Obasan Quotes

Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men —even children. You turn into an Oba-san the instant you lose the will to evolve.

From my years of teaching I know it's the children who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain.

Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?" "The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back

Some people," Aunt Emily answered sharply, "are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power.

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky.

we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant".

I hate to admit it," she said, "but for all we hear about the States, Canada's capacity for racism seems even worse." "Worse?" "The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn't liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren't allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We've never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government's whole idea—to make sure we'd never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada.

In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.

some memories, too, might better be forgotten. didn't Obasan once say, "it is better to forget"? what purpose is served by hauling forth the jar of inedible food? if it is not seen, it does not horrify. what is past recall is past pain.

She is here. She is not here. She is reaching out to me with a touch deceptive as down, with hands and fingers that wave like grass around my feet, and her hair falls and falls and falls from her head like streamers of paper rain. She is a maypole woman to whose apron-string streamers I cling and around whose skirts I dance. She is a ship leaving the harbour, tied to me by coloured paper streamers that break and fall into a swirling wake. The wake is a thin black pencil-line that deepens and widens and fills with a greyness that reaches out with tentacles to embrace me. I leap and wake.

Some people are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power.

She seems to have forgotten her reason for coming up here. I notice these days, from time to time, how the present disappears in her mind. The past hungers for her. Feasts on her. And when its feasting is complete? She will dance and dangle in the dark, like small insect bones, a fearful calligraphy—a dry reminder that once there was life flitting about in the weather.

What else would anyone want to know? Personality: Tense. Is that past or present tense? It's perpetual tense.

Aunt Emily's writing is as wispy and hard to decipher as the marks of a speed skater on ice.

The sofa is a mountain to climb, a valley for sleeping in, a place of ambush for surprise attacks on passing parents.

It is always so. We must always honor the wishes of others before our own. We will make the way smooth by restraining emotion. Though we might Grandma and Grandpa to stay, we must watch them go, To try to meet one's own needs in spite of the wishes of others is to be “wagamama” — selfish and inconsiderate. Obasan teaches me not to be wagamama by always heeding everyone's needs. That is why she is waiting patiently beside me at this bridge. That is why, when I am offered gifts, I must first refuse politely. It is such a tangle trying to decipher the needs and intents of others.

The senior matriculation exams obliterate everything. Even, it seems to me, if a war were on in Canada, I'd be found studying like deaf Beethoven playing his piano while Vienna burned.

Gentle Mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction.