Yellow is the derogatory term often used to describe Asians and to represent cowardice, but it is celebrated as the color of royalty, wealth and prestige in Asian cultures. Yellow is also the running theme of Amy Uyematsu's collection of prose poetry, The Yellow Door, which contrasts her experiences as a Christian-raised Sansei (third-generation) Japanese American with the cultural traditions of her Buddhist heritage. The first piece, "Riding the Yellow Dragon," celebrates yellow in all its Asian glory; later pieces examine the alienation and insecurity of her Asian American duality through the metaphor of a dance. She writes in "Carnival Nights in the New Country" of her visit to Japan's Buddhist Obon Festival, hovering on the periphery as a spectator of her own cultural heritage: "Nobody knows me here and I feel safe..../ I am a stranger here only by accident/ of two generations and grandfathers/ who weren't firstborn sons."
Uyematsu (Stone Bow Prayer) touches upon the same alienation in "From Tatsuya to Little Willie G.--An Argument for Dark-Eyed Romeos," as a child asked to a dance by a white boy: "I can't forget that long night/ when everybody stares--/ the message so clear,/ till I'm mad at sweet Andy/ for ever asking." This racial tension appears again with "In Our Yellow Boats," where the endless horizon of azure seas upon which her grandfathers journeyed from Japan fades into the arid desert of a World War II internment camp, in a painful courtship of bitterness and acceptance over livelihoods lost and remade.
The Yellow Door reads like a prose-painted Hokusai woodblock that illustrates the pain of the immigrant experience, but it is also a celebratory dance of acceptance and courage in recognition of one's dual heritage. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant