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Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America

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Author: Linda Furiya
Publisher: Seal Press
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$15.95~~
Buy Used: $3.00
You Save: $12.95 (81%)

New (26) Used (26) from $3.00

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

8 reviews
Sales Rank: 107009

Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: illustrated edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1

ISBN: 158005191X
Dewey Decimal Number: 977.214004956
EAN: 9781580051910
ASIN: 158005191X

Publication Date: November 30, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life. As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya's life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it.
As immigrants, her parents approached the challenges of living in America, and maintaining their Japanese diets, with optimism and gusto. Furiva, meanwhile, was acutely aware of how food set her apart from her peers: She spent her first day of school hiding in the girls' restroom, examining her rice balls and chopsticks, and longing for a Peanut Bullter and Jelly sandwich.
Bento Box in the Heartland is an insightful and reflective coming-of-age tale. Beautifully written, each chapter is accompanied by a family recipe of mouth-watering Japanese comfort food.

Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

I was in the same class as Linda's brother June 14, 2008
This was an incredible journey for me as I lived two blocks from the Furiyas until 1977 when my family moved from Versailles, Indiana. I remember the family fondly and this book put the rest of the story to many of my childhood memories.

I remember the summer Linda went to Japan and had always wondered what the trip was like. Now I know!

I bought the book this morning and finished it this evening. It's a great read and I'm now looking forward to trying some of the recipes.

4 out of 5 stars

Mmm, mmm, good March 31, 2008
I grew up half-Japanese in a whitebread small town in Illinois during the same period author Linda Furiya lived in her small Indiana town, and I can relate to much of her story. Was that the old Star Market in Chicago that her family made special trips to just like my family did? The author paints quite a revealing portrait of her life, wanting desperately to be like the other kids and confused about where she belongs and how to merge her two cultures. The racism she encounters and must deal with on her own will pull the heartstrings of readers. Her dream trip to Japan as a ten-year-old where she discovers her roots and her family is a deeply felt learning experience and creates a bond with her somewhat distant mother. Perhaps it is a typical immigrant story where children raised in America have a difficult time understanding the ways of parents of a foreign culture. Furiya offers a no-holds-barred commentary on this difficulty as well as the frustrations and confusion she felt as an alien in the country she was born and raised in.

Despite the disjointedness that often occurs in the flow between chapters, the subject of food and its meaning in her life provides a connectivity that culminates in a beautiful final chapter where Furija is able to look back on her childhood and come to a sense of understanding and peace. I quite enjoyed this book and plan on trying out some of the recipes.

2 out of 5 stars

Great title, and that's about it October 26, 2007
1 out of 7 found this review helpful

I was so anxious to read this book- I loved the title and expected some kind of knowledge or insight to come from having read it. Unfortunately I found it to be a very humdrum account of childhood angst in the midwest. I was surprised to learn that the author was a professional journalist; the grammar and punctuation were just awful in places and the flow was practically nonexistent, with the author going back and forth in time as if to teach the reader a lesson about something, but no lesson ever came, except possibly that people of Japanese heritage are annoyingly nonconfrontational and midwestern American men are dirty old predatory geezers. I can live without that type of pigeonholing, thank you.

4 out of 5 stars

Food as the Balm for the Sometimes Unsteady Bridge Between Two Worlds April 18, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

As a Japanese-American raised first in California and then in Texas, I can relate to many of the experiences that author Linda Furiya, a food columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, shares in her childhood memoir of growing up as a Nisei in a small Indiana community, in particular, the complex interdependency evident in her relationship with her Japanese-born mother. In fact, Furiya spends little time writing about her father or her brothers because of the especially symbiotic connection with her mother. Her particular back story as an atypically liberated woman in a male-dominated society lends an intriguing twist on the stereotype one usually associates with the traditional Japanese woman.

Similar to Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, the book is a series of vignettes organized around selective memories of preparing and eating food reflective of the author's heritage. Whereas Esquivel opened each of her chapters with a recipe, Furiya chooses to close each chapter with one for family favorites such as Chinese Home-Style Tofu and Japanese Pot Stickers. Although the recipes make nice transitional points within her episodic structure, they actually aren't that necessary since she otherwise captures the pervasive dichotomy of having a racial identity utterly different from her surroundings in ways that are both poignant and painful. Some of the episodes felt so familiar to me that it made me wonder just how well Asian-Americans in general have assimilated into the mainstream.

The book's title refers to the Japanese box lunches that her mother would meticulously prepare for her to take to elementary school where her classmates had their regulation sandwiches. Rather than face embarrassing stares and questions, she would hide in the bathroom eating her mother's homemade onigiri. That palpable sense of isolation informs many of the anecdotes Furiya shares here, as they highlight the subtle forms of racism and sexism she experienced firsthand while attempting to make sense of her place between two distinct cultures. Moreover, she makes precisely calibrated observations on the generational conflict that seemed inevitable in serving to alienate her from her heritage only to embrace it later through her love of Japanese food. Despite some heavy-handed passages, the book is a relatively light read that taps into darker themes in a most affecting manner.

5 out of 5 stars

Delicious read April 10, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Furiya has a voice that is warm, approachable, and intimate. Reading her work, you feel in the company of a friend who also happens to be a masterful storyteller. She weaves a tale that's both exotic and profoundly American, one that combines family and food in a way that's lyrical but never sentimental. Wherever you grew up, and whatever you mother put in your lunchbox, this is a treat to savor.

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