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How to Be an American Housewife, by Margaret Dilloway
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A mother-daughter story about the strong pull of tradition, and the lure and cost of breaking free of it.
When Shoko decided to marry an American GI and leave Japan, she had her parents' blessing, her brother's scorn, and a gift from her husband-a book on how to be a proper American housewife.
As she crossed the ocean to America, Shoko also brought with her a secret she would need to keep her entire life...
Half a century later, Shoko's plans to finally return to Japan and reconcile with her brother are derailed by illness. In her place, she sends her grown American daughter, Sue, a divorced single mother whose own life isn't what she hoped for. As Sue takes in Japan, with all its beauty and contradictions, she discovers another side to her mother and returns to America unexpectedly changed and irrevocably touched.
- Sales Rank: #873831 in Books
- Published on: 2011-08-02
- Released on: 2011-08-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.18" h x .87" w x 5.06" l, .63 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In this enchanting first novel, Dilloway mines her own family's history to produce the story of Japanese war bride Shoko, her American daughter, Sue, and their challenging relationship. Following the end of WWII, Japanese shop girl Shoko realizes that her best chance for a future is with an American husband, a decision that causes a decades-long rift with her only brother, Taro. While Shoko blossoms in America with her Mormon husband, GI Charlie Morgan, and their two children, she's constantly reminded that she's an outsider--reinforced by passages from the fictional handbook How to Be an American Housewife. Shoko's attempts to become the perfect American wife hide a secret regarding her son, Mike, and lead her to impossible expectations for Sue. The strained mother-daughter bond begins to shift, however, when a now-grown Sue and her teenage daughter agree to go to Japan in place of Shoko, recently fallen ill, to reunite with Taro. Dilloway splits her narrative gracefully between mother and daughter (giving Shoko the first half, Sue the second), making a beautifully realized whole.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Shoko was a young woman in Japan during WWII. Once her parents realized that Japan was going to be defeated, they encouraged Shoko to marry an American and obtain a better life. She did so at the expense of her relationship with her brother, Taso, who could not forgive her for betraying her country. Jumping ahead many years, it’s clear that Shoko has done what she could to be the best American housewife. She now longs to return to Japan and reunite with Taso, but she is too ill to travel. She enlists the help of her daughter, Sue, whose own failings as a housewife have caused a rift between the women. Despite their strained relationship, Sue makes the trip and discovers another side to her mother, and family secrets that have come between them. Dilloway narrates from both women’s perspectives, sensitively dramatizing the difficulties and struggles Shoko and Sue faced in being Japanese, American, and housewives. --Carolyn Kubisz
Review
"Margaret Dilloway is wise and ironic. She has created wonderful characters who never, in spite of hardships, stop finding ways to love each other." ---Luanne Rice, author of The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners
Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Exquisite novel of love, identity, motherhood
By Megan
I started Margaret Dilloway's HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE just before bed last week, distracted by my busy day and unable to calm my mind enough to sleep. From the opening sentence, I was surprised at how quickly I sunk into this beautiful, lyrical story -- and how enchanted with Dilloway's world I became. I didn't put the book down again until 2 a.m. -- and only when my eyes were literally shutting.
In this novel centering around identity, growth, healing and motherhood, our protagonists are Shoko and Suiko, or Sue. The Japanese wife of a former American GI, Shoko has become American through assimilation. She chose to marry Charlie, a shy redheaded military man, and left her native Japan after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima left her culture, land and family devastated. Sue is Shoko and Charlie's divorced American daughter, a lovely woman with a 12-year-old daughter, Helena, who understands her mother little and their Japanese heritage even less. Now aging and facing serious surgery, Shoko is looking back at the life she left in the Japanese countryside -- and the family that disowned her when she married an American. After her father chose her future husband out of a photo line-up of American suitors, Shoko said goodbye to her native country . . . and hello to a world even more foreign than the frightening one she abandoned. But toward the end of her life, did Shoko make the right choices? Could she have changed things for herself, for Charlie, for their son Mike -- or for Sue?
From the novel's first words to its rapid conclusion, I was enchanted with everything about Dilloway's story. In the cover blurb, author Jamie Ford calls the story "tender and captivating" -- a description I second whole-heartedly. I can think of little I disliked about HOUSEWIFE, except that it ended far too soon.
Alternating between Shoko's memories of her early life and teenage years across the Pacific and the present in California, Dilloway seamlessly moves us from time to the next. Shoko herself tells us her story, providing background and details in flawless language. We know that Shoko has faced discrimination in forms: especially after she arrived in the U.S. We know, too, that her English language skills are limited and her accent hard to understand. But as a narrator, Shoko is intelligent, witty, deft; she's wonderful. The details Dilloway shares strike the impeccably perfect balance between telling and showing.
This novel was exquisite -- one of the finest I've read this year -- and I highly, highly recommend it to lovers of literary fiction, historical fiction and plain ol' fine storytelling. If it's any further proof of my love, too, I completed HOUSEWIFE on a long lunch break from work. I desperately wanted to finish it just as much as I didn't want it to end. I wound up returning late to my desk, shame-faced and tearful, after the conclusion of a beautiful story -- and I was thrilled (thrilled!) with the ending though, after everything, it felt hurried to me. Anything I allow to purposely make me late, busy worker-bee that I am, has earned my devotion.
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Been there but still enjoyable
By Pippa Lee
If you have read Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," then you'll be on familiar territory when you take up Margaret Dilloway's debut novel, "How to Be An American Housewife."
Dilloway's heroine is Shoko Morgan, a Japanese woman who marries a Navy medic not so much for love, but out of duty to her parents and for the opportunity of a new life in America. The story is told by two voices. The first part of the book is narrated by Shoko, old and seriously ill, remembering her childhood and youth in Japan, her estrangement from her brother Taro, and the challenges she faced as a military wife in a biracial marriage and as a mother witnessing the growing emotional and cultural gap between her and her two children, Mike and Sue.
The story then switches to Sue's point of view. Sue, along with her own teen daughter, Helena, embarks on a trip to Japan on Shoko's behalf to find Taro. As Sue travels the country to Shoko's village, she finds herself not only pondering on the mother-daughter bond with both Shoko and Helena, but also on her own cultural identity.
As I read Dilloway's novel, I couldn't help but think about what her book has in common with Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club." The mother-daughter relationship theme is strong in both as it is the immigration and assimilation experience and the tension that belonging to different cultures can cause in an individual. In spite of the similarities, I enjoyed "How to Be An American Housewife." Shoko is not a shrinking wallflower. Instead, she's a beautiful woman who knows she's beautiful and is not afraid to say it. Her defiance may bring admiration from the readers as she incites her children to ignore those kids who make fun of them. But Shoko cannot escape from the traditions instilled by her parents. Ideas such as dutifulness to the parents, bringing shame to the family name, kissing a boy only if one is going to get married, reminded me of my own mother's views so much that I thought Shoko was being "so Chinese". The quotes from the supposedly published handbook that gives the title to Dilloway's book are both revealing and funny. At one point I wished the handbook were a real book. I would have loved reading it.
"How to Be An American Housewife" treads on territory already chartered by other authors but whether the familiarity is welcome or brings on impatience, it will depend on the reader. I enjoyed it but I admit to a bit of the latter too. Still, I recommend this book for those who are looking for a feel-good read.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting to me, but maybe for personal reasons
By Lou
I would like to explain why I chose to read How To Be An American Housewife as I believe my reaction to the title and the whole premise of the story, therefore my opinion of the book, might be a little different than that of an American. I read it from the perspective of a "foreigner" myself. I am English, living in the USA, married to an American. This is why the book caught my attention. Surely there is some commonality anytime a woman marries a "foreigner" and moves to his country? I expected to be able to relate in someway. Hmm, no, not in most ways it turned out. Shoko did not choose her husband for love, her "culture shock" was more shocking than mine, the views of her family (both good and bad) towards her marrying an American, all very different. Most importantly the strained relationship between her homeland and the USA at the time of her marriage and the prejudices, not something I experienced, thankfully. I do think I was able to appreciate how it seemed on occasion that Shoko did not always feel so akin to her own country after being in the USA for a period of time, yet in other ways remaining fiercely Japanese, and on occasion feeling different than those around her in small but real ways. Sometimes good and interesting ways and sometimes confusing ways. For Shoko more often than not very confusing ways. I felt for her. I found the book fascinating on that level, reading about how she learned to navigate American daily life. There was one situation that I completely understood, had experienced myself several years ago, and I appreciated how the book put into words how I felt. When Shoko's daughter needed to participate in a science fair at school, Shoko, not knowing that there is a definite "formula" to sciences fairs, a way to showcase the projects, a blueprint bascially, did her best to help her daughter come up with something home made for the fair. When she walked into the school and saw all the neat displays (many that seemed very adult in presentation and rather advanced for young children) showcased with ready made supplies and store bought poster boards she felt she had let her daughter down, felt the school and teacher had let them both down and found the whole thing very strange and unusual! I could certainly identify with that. Some things are so American, done over and over here and it seems like EVERYONE but YOU knows how it works, you don't even find out that it is something that is done year in and year out, and that there is a blueprint, until it is too late. I totally got how Shoko felt in that situation. It is always a good feeeling when reading a book, when you have a moment of complete understanding with a character.
I enjoyed the first half of the book written from Shoko's viewpoint more than the second half written from her daughter Sue's perspective, Shoko drew me in more. Perhaps I just liked the romance of the first half, certainly a beautiful young Japanese woman choosing a husband (will she choose for love or for convenience) was more gripping to me than most of the second half. I was fascinated by Shoko's life in Japan as a child and young woman, fascinated to learn the aspects of her culture that were shared and her way, and that of her family, of viewing the world. In the second half, Sue, Shoko's adult biracial daughter works at a job she finds mundane, is a single mother, has a cluttered home that she find uncomfortable to live in. Her life seemed cheerless, and there was certainly no gripping romance!
Sue's life and mind begin to open up when she visits Japan with her own young daughter. The second half was somewhat predictable to me, although heartwarming and very readable all the same.
I found the relationship between Shoko and Sue to be intriguing. I defintiely related this aspect of the book to my own life. I have a teen daughter who is "very American" who has an American father, who has grown up here, who has all American friends, who I know (or believe) views me as perhaps a little odd and quaint in a way more pronounced than most teens view their parents (I suspect most teens probably think us parents to be a bit dated or annoying) because I grew up in a different country and had a very different childhood. Of course the differences between how Shoko and Sue grew up are more vast than that of myself and my daughter, but I could still relate on a personal level to some degree. I think these elements where I could relate personally probably "made" the book for me.
One aspect of the book that I certainly enjoyed and looked forward to reading, and that provided a great deal of food for thought was the excerpt at the beginning of each chapter taken from the fictional book "How to Be An American Housewife" that we were told Shoko used as a guide when she was first married and moved to the USA. Without those excerpts I would not have had such a clear picture of how different her own culture was. I thought they were a genius element to the book that added so much. It was so sad to me, picturing Shoko reading her book and trying to follow the only advice she probably had. The guide highly encouraged Shoko to maintain her Japanese ways when it came to things like housekeeping, keeping her floors spotlessly clean and eating small portions in order to stay petite so as to please her husband, but encouraged (no, TOLD) her to leave behind her religion, her ways of cooking, aspects of child rearing, even the manner in which she could expect to be buried! I can see how Shoko could have completely lost herself. For many years I think she ALMOST did, but not quite, not completely. As I have said, there were some predictable elements, but I still found the book interesting, relatable (for me) and I liked the ending.
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