Tropic of Orange

"Her novel has seven characters of different ethnic backgrounds. Not one of them is Caucasian. One character is Chicano, who grew up in the United States, in Los Angeles. One protagonist is a Mexican citizen who has relocated to the United States as a permanent resident. Two characters are Japanese American. Another is of Chinese descent but came from Singapore and grew up in LA in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood. And there is an African American character. Yamashita also has one character named Archangel who is a mythical figure, very much a trickster as we talked about earlier, who claims to be 500 years old and remembers events central to the European colonisation of the Americas. By bringing such a mix of characters together, Yamashita’s trying to show similarities between them. For example, many characters are immigrants. One of the most striking examples she gives us is a 12-year-old girl from mainland China who arrives on board a ship in Mexico. This character then has to cross the border between Mexico and the United States undocumented, just as many folks from the south do. So her story shows that it’s not just people of Mexican descent or Mexican nationals that are coming to the United States undocumented, but it’s a variety of people from different backgrounds, including people from China. The conditions under which these various people arrive and the reason they come are very similar. Her novel develops a different map of the city. Again, maps are very important in her work, too, just as in Leslie Silko’s. She shows us how the city is fragmented and how there are internal borders among people of different ethnicities and class status. But she also develops characters that are able to move among these neighbourhoods and different economic classes. She also includes mixed-race characters, offspring of parents of different ethnicities. One of the characters, Bobby, came from Singapore and grew up in a Latino neighbourhood in LA. He speaks Spanish and Mandarin, and incorporates different cultures and traditions into his own life. He’s married to somebody who is from Mexico. They have a son. But then there are also characters of upper or middle-class status who develop relationships with undocumented immigrants and homeless people. That’s where Yamashita is developing a different view of Los Angeles. It acknowledges distinctions within the city as another instance of how borders work, but at the same time her vision tries to overcome these borders by developing different kinds of characters. That’s one of the reasons we should be reading fiction . It has the power to develop a completely different version of not just the past and present, but also of the future in ways we can’t see – definitely not in political discourse. Even in social science research, some things that might manifest themselves as a minority phenomenon don’t always reach the level of acknowledgement. Fiction can do this. Yamashita has said that her Chinese character from Singapore who speaks Spanish and has a Mexican wife was modelled after an acquaintance of hers. The fact that she fictionalises this character and makes him so central to the novel makes it possible to see that there are many more people like that. There are many people of Asian descent in South and Central America, for example, and we have those communities here as well. To focus on these people who otherwise might not be given a voice or become the main focus of our research – fiction can do that in interesting ways. And fiction like hers can also point to similarities among individuals and communities that also have been overlooked."