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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Buddha in the Attic, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender and Autonomy
Racism, Assimilation, and Cultural Identity
Community and Inter-Asian Prejudice
The Power of Collectivism
Summary
Analysis
Many of the women give birth in difficult conditions, usually outside of hospital settings and even outdoors, and often with no one’s help but their husband’s—if anyone helps at all. On rare occasions, a doctor or Japanese midwife is present at the birth, and the women can receive necessary care. Sometimes, the women’s husbands are off working or gambling, causing their wives to stop speaking to them. Other times, the woman has no husband and must give birth alone or has had an affair and must give birth secretly.
With childbirth, the women’s threatened autonomy takes on yet another shape, as they’re forced to give birth in suboptimal conditions regardless of whether they actually wanted to mother a child. Here, Japanese husbands’ overt lack of care toward their wives combines with the racist attitudes of white Americans who don’t want Japanese people in their hospitals, again isolating the women in an emotionally and physically painful (and potentially dangerous) time of need.
Themes
Childbirth causes a variety of emotions in the new mothers. Some of the women find their newborn babies beautiful and admire features such as long earlobes or the baby’s resemblance to a lost family member. Other women find their newborns ugly and worry about their future. Some of the babies are born with significant health problems or physical deformities, and some of the babies pass away during labor or as children. In some cases, the women find their babies inadequate and choose to end the infants’ lives. Some of the women face such difficult conditions in labor that they pass away themselves.
As the women give birth to their first children, it’s clear that so much is at stake: some women and babies lose their lives due to physical complications, and some women even commit infanticide because they believe that their children won’t live up to the standards or demands of Japanese American society. Considering that many of the women had never even engaged in sexual relations prior to coming to the United States, childbirth is yet another experience that they weren’t prepared for and have to undergo without much guidance.
Themes
