Chorus of Mushrooms

by Hiromi Goto

  The synchrony of naming, being, and eating is the key to healing in Chorus of Mushrooms. Keiko, because she tries so hard to be white and cooks and eats only white Canadian food, becomes Kay—literally a pale version of herself. Towards the end of the novel, when the Tonkatsu family eats their surname, which means “breaded pork cutlet,” they finally become themselves, and the grief and dysfunction that has held the family in thrall since the beginning of the novel is finally broken. To eat one’s traditional food is essentially to become oneself.

  To teach Chorus of Mushrooms this way is, I hope, to empower students and young people to see that they can also exercise the power of their own imaginations to make the world anew. This is an old lesson, but perhaps one that is increasingly forgotten in the world of commodity culture. It is really difficult, particularly for younger readers, to come to terms with the fact that acts of making are always ideological, and always embedded in a hegemonic culture that needs to be seen as such. But I think such a recognition is both rewarding and a necessary part of a humanities education, especially in a historical moment that claims to be “post-race,” not to mention post-modern, post-structural, and post-human.

  It is important also to teach the critique of race, racism and racialization that unfolds in the novel. Goto lays out for us in no uncertain terms the conundrums faced by Japanese Canadians growing up in a white settler society that universalizes and normalizes whiteness as a visual aesthetic and as cultural practice. In the 1994, when the novel was published, these were difficult but important topics for conversation, cultural work and cultural critique across the country (and particularly in large urban centres). Since the shutdowns of the early 2000s, and the rise of the concept “post-race,” these conversations, never easy, have become even more difficult. The subject of race is more of a taboo in the present historical moment than it was twenty years ago, even as race remains a highly active force in contemporary society. As I said above, racialized bodies and texts have been incorporated into public and private institutions to a greater or lesser extent, as signs of those institutions’ liberalism (see Scott Toguri McFarlane’s essay “The Haunt of Race” and my essay “Strategizing the Body of History”). But there is a state of exception at work in these locations in the sense that the appearance of racial equality forecloses the need to actually enact it at any depth. The only real substance our moment can have is what any one beleaguered text or body, placed in a tokenized position, can carry. Chorus is a text that carries a lot!

  And to be fair to both myself and my students, when I tell them we need to have this discussion, and tell them why, they do engage. Without a doubt, there is a silent, but palpable air of dismay in the room when I say that the topic under discussion will be race. I am fairly sure that most have been taught somewhere along the line that colour-blindness is the ideal to embrace and that any discussion of race is rude and uncivil. They have been taught that there is a simple solution to racism, which is to stop it. The logic that follows from this is that, because the solution appears to be simple, the concept must be simple as well, and thus only simple people choose to engage it. Fear and shame are made to circulate around the concept, and the consequence, in my opinion at least, is the shut down of a concept that, while perhaps uncomfortable, profoundly shapes the lives of those called into being through it. But when I tell them why I think we need to discuss it, and they settle down and we can be friends, or at least members of a civil, intellectual community, then we can talk. These are the reasons I give:

  We live in a multicultural society and yet the subject of race is taboo.

  Race erupts to the surface of our lives in tense moments, or when we are not paying attention.

  Race was one of the major organizing principles of the British Empire. We still live within its structures whether we want to or not.

  It’s not enough to wish it away, even if it is not an organizing principle we’d choose now.

  It’s hard to stop something that is entangled and embedded in our legal system, our language and our everyday lives.

  It is not necessarily racist to talk about race. The challenge lies in how we talk about it.

  Goto wants to talk about it.

  Chorus of Mushrooms is a particularly wonderful text for teaching these issues because it leaves race open as a question. For the most part, it does not determine it in any essentialist kind of way, but articulates it as experience. While the concept of essentialism is a struggle even at the fourth year level, students in first year get the concept of misrecognition right away.

  We talk about the Coke anecdote, which is told in Murasaki’s voice:

  I stand in the wind. I face the wind. It blows my hair. I like it. I am six.

  I can talk. I can talk anything I want. Try and stop me.

  “Me Chinese, me play joke, me go pee pee in your Coke!

  Hahahaha!”

  “But I’m not Chinese,” I protested. (60)

  Goto recognizes here both the violence and the instability of racial language. It still has damaging effects even as its signifiers are attached to no real signifieds, in other words, even as the racist language doesn’t seem to attach to any actually existing person. In addition to being racist, the Coke joke misrecognizes its Japanese Canadian "target" or "butt" as Chinese. The racialized object of the joke is still called into being as “other” in an alienating way. But because Murasaki is narrating, we see also the racism and ignorance of the joker. In other words, we are able to see the joker’s racism and ignorance all the more clearly because the speaker relaying the story of the joke’s unfolding is Japanese Canadian. There is thus something very powerful about the fact that the story of the Coke joke is told from a Japanese Canadian point of view. But in saying this, we run the danger of solidifying (or reifying or essentializing) that Japanese Canadian subject, and her experiences. So then, we need the concept of “the subject” and the fact that there is nothing essential about it, in order to recognize again the instability of the term “Japanese Canadian”. In making this recognition, we can recognize the socially constructed nature of any idea of race. But just because race is socially constructed does not mean that Murasaki’s experience of hurt and dismay is not real. The trek through these poststructural loops is not easy, and yet it is necessary in order to grasp the democratic labour of the text. For without these ideas, we are trapped in an older, stupider, crueler racism from which there is no escape. It is not simple, and it is not a matter of just stopping. While the instability of subject positions may be an easy enough thing to grasp intellectually, it is emotionally very difficult when one depends on subjective stability for the personal dignity that therapeutic culture as much as national belonging depends upon. The wisest response possible to this anecdote is acceptance of its radical undecidability. Hard enough at midlife. Brutal at eighteen. But I do still believe that my generation owes it to a younger one to show it what we know, so that they are armed with the best thinking possible on the subject, and not encouraged to repress their concerns about it.

  The second raced encounter that we deal with in the classroom is the one that addresses the complicated reverberations of internalized racism, again told in Murasaki’s voice:

  I met this guy at the airport in the departures area. Where are you going, he said. Japan, I said. Back to the old homeland, huh, he said. I just shrugged and smiled a bit. You know, he said, you’re pretty cute for a Nip. He said. Most Nips are pretty damn ugly. Even now. He said. Well, have a good one. He said. And boarded his plane. And I felt really funny inside, him saying Nip and everything. Because he was one too. (60–61)

  This anecdote is an interesting one because in order for it to work the reader must understand the man whom Murasaki meets at the airport to be white, until the last line. If we read this way, then—until the last line—we understand the incident as a straight forward racist episode, one more plausible than ever in the moment of this essay’s writing. What it does depend on, however, is a contemporary for
m of racism in which Western readers unconsciously posit generics as white, unless they are explicitly told otherwise. And, in fact, we can only make sense of the anecdote if we do so. This moment in the text, then, is exemplary, because it both calls us into and shows us our own racist expectation. The vignette is structured like a joke, and we know we’ve been had by the punchline: “Because he was one too.” We can try to squirm out of it. I do. My students do. But when we attempt to do so, then the anecdote becomes pure nonsense. We can pretend we don’t understand. But I’d suggest that one would really have to come from Mars not to get it because, in fact, the racist logic that makes it possible is built deeply into the structures of the English language. Refusing the logic of the anecdote cannot be a simple matter of saying “I’m not like that” or “I wasn’t brought up like that.” We are called deeply into the norms of our culture, and if we don’t understand them, then we can’t have the simplest conversations with friends, family, or neighbours. This anecdote calls us to recognize that we do understand, even when the understanding is uncomfortable and we’d really rather not. In a sense we are called into confession— therapeutic or Judeo-Christian—for many of us an even more uncomfortable thing. Another instance of undecideabilty, another moment of ambivalence.

  The anecdote also illustrates the way that internalized racism works, in the sense that the Japanese Canadian man feels perfectly fine about racially insulting the Japanese Canadian woman while complementing her on her looks. One of my wise students noticed that the man in the anecdote is in fact flirting with Murasaki, but that the self-deprecation often engaged in such encounters gets twisted because of the history of racism that both inherit.

  Chorus of Mushrooms is full of undecidable, knotted stories like these two. Some of the ones that my class works on in lectures, in tutorials, in papers or in exams include: Grandma Naoe’s stories about her family’s presence in China (53); the anecdote about the school friend, Patricia, who thinks the Tonkatsu home smells like warm toes (67–68); the anecdote about the “jap” orange (66); the anecdote about “press-out Oriental-type girl” valentines (68–69); the passage on vegetable politics (96–98); and the section about the boyfriend who wants to have “Oriental sex” (126–127). The newspaper stories also teach well. Goto has very carefully thought through the ways in which the media shapes public ideas about Japanese Canadians, and the ways in which these ideas have direct and often unsettling consequences in “real life” interactions, and for entire lives marked as Japanese Canadian.

  It is in light of all these small entanglements, which in fact make up the experience of being Japanese Canadian in a small town, that the scenes of magical alternatives become so powerful. The healing meal described above, the scene in which Grandma Naoe spins cartwheels when asked to prove to a racist police officer that she can walk in a straight line, and the scene at the end in which she presents herself at the Calgary Stampede in the guise of the Purple Mask are all whimsical and yet profoundly political dreams which allow everyone involved an alternative to the painful, entangled undecidabilities that make up the daily lives of all the characters. The reward, for students and professors of literature, is the recognition that imagination is necessary for freedom. Though Goto’s novel offers no solutions for the ways in which contemporary forms of race and racialization still shape our lives, it shows us the contours of that contemporary functioning with tremendous clarity. Hiromi Goto trusts our intelligence enough to work with those contours and change them. I very much hope that the present moment is one that will continue to rise to the challenge. It is not as simple as stopping racist behaviours. But it is as democratic as real considered thought, discussion and action.

  REFERENCES

  Bachinsky, Elizabeth. “Wolf Lake.” Home of Sudden Service. Gibsons: Nightwood, 2006. 26-27.

  Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1979. 110-118.

  Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

  Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity— Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

  Findlay, Stephanie, and Nicholas Köhler. “Too Asian?” Maclean’s. 22 November 2010: 76-81.

  Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.

  Goto, Hiromi. The Kappa Child. Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2002.

  hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.

  King, Thomas. “‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened’ Is Always a Great Way to Start.” The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: Anansi, 2003. 1-30.

  Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

  Ladha, Yasmin. “Beena.” The Lion’s Granddaughter. Edmonton: NeWest, 1992. 1-17.

  Lai, Larissa. “Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation.” Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography. Eds. Eleanor Ty and Chrystl Verdun. Waterloo: WLUP, 2008. 87-114.

  McFarlane, Scott. “The Haunt of Race: Canada’s Multiculturalism Act, the Politics of Incorporation, and Writing Thru Race.” Fuse Magazine. 18.3 (1995): 18-31.

  Perrault, Charles. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Blue Fairy Book. Ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Dover, 1965. 51-53.

  Rader, Matt. “Wolf Lake.” Miraculous Hours. Nightwood: 2005. 52-53.

  Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. London: Penguin (Signet Classics), 1998.

  Smith, Michael V. “Wolf Lake.” I.V. Lounge Nights. Eds. Myna Wallin and Alex Boyd. Toronto: Tightrope, 2008. 66-67.

  PERMUTATIONS:

  THE MANY STORIES IN

  CHORUS OF MUSHROOMS

  SMARO KAMBOURELI

  INTERVIEWS HIROMI GOTO

  SMARO KAMBOURELI: It’s hard to believe that it’s been twenty years since the publication of Chorus of Mushrooms. It’s a novel that has had an extraordinary life. Beyond launching your career as a writer, it has been read and taught widely, and has remained in print all this time, a feat for a first novel. What do you think when you revisit this novel now?

  HIROMI GOTO: I feel a measure of bemusement as well as gratitude—I never imagined this kind of staying power. But I’m also saddened because many of the conversations I had hoped to generate around ideas of race, representation, identity, and agency are still so necessary today. As a society we continue to live inside many systems of oppression and violence. That my book remains current speaks to the need of continuing these conversations. When will our societies evolve, I have wondered, probably rather naively. That said, I have come to the conclusion that we will always need to engage with these issues. There will never be an arrival at a utopian state—an impossibility, really. So the only thing we can do is to continue engaging in difficult conversations, across histories and diverse cultures, toward an unsettled future.

  SK: Would it be fair to say that this is the story you had to tell first, before writing anything else?

  HG: [grin] Well, it’s the novel I had to write first. I published several short stories before Chorus was released. But I was led to this novel because the character and voice of the obāchan—the grandmother figure—wouldn’t leave me. She kept popping up in my stories and I came to understand that I needed a much longer tale where she could abide—she was a very big character that had much to say. My own grandmother’s influence was such a big part of my life—I wanted to share her force as well as honor her. The person of my grandmother saturated the “fictional” obāchan. As I inscribed this chimeric obāchan set on the Alberta prairies, the need to speak back to the gaps in Canadian literature and the misrepresentations of Asian Canadian and Asian women roared out of me after a long childhood of silence.

  SK: Can you say more about your own grandmother, her influence on you?

  HG: My grandmother joined us in Canada a few years after our family immigrated upon the birth of my younger sister. She rem
ained with us for the rest of her life and was our primary caregiver throughout our childhood. She was a quiet woman, but had a steely core that most visitors would never perceive. She was, and remains, the strongest person I know. She also had a sense of humor and a generosity of spirit. She was the bedrock during an unsettled childhood, and I am still learning from her today when I think back to how she lived her life.

  Many of the details of the obāchan in Chorus are based on my own grandmother’s personal history. I also used her real name. I had to ask my grandmother for her permission, of course, and I was a little worried that she would not like some of the things I had written. I told her that there were scenes in the book of the grandmother having sex with a stranger, and, also, a scene that suggested masturbation. "Is it still okay to use your real name?" I asked, rather awkwardly and more than a little nervous. My grandmother was quiet for several long seconds. "It’s okay," she finally said, "as long as you don’t have her stealing or killing anyone." When the book was finally published I brought to her the first copy and set it upon her lap. She was very proud of me, and I felt like a child again. She had a low bed and I would set my head upon her lap. She would stroke my hair. “You’re a good child,” she’d say. “A good child.” My grandmother couldn’t read English, and I was both sad and glad. Sad that she couldn’t see what I’ve done, glad in case it was a disappointment. The next time I visited she told me that she was reading the book. “Really!” I said, surprised. “How are you reading it, obāchan?” “I just read it,” she said. “There are English words I understand, and there are Japanese words as well. And the words I don’t understand I just make up.” I was surprised, and delighted at the irony. I had thought I’d written a rather clever novel, with some postmodernist techniques that would be entirely beyond her. And here was my grandmother, in her low bed in a farmhouse on the Canadian prairies, doing a postmodernist reading of my text.