Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (my multicultural example)

 

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996) tells the story of Lovey Nariyoshi and her experiences growing up in a working-class family of Japanese descent in Hilo, Hawaii during the 1970s. Lovey is dissatisfied with everything about her life at present, so she dreams of a new, different life. All Lovey wants is to be “haole” (white) with blonde hair and a big chest, living in a nice neighborhood with her “normal” white family, and speaking perfect middle-class English without an accent. Instead, Lovey is poor, Japanese, speaks English in the Hawaiian Creole dialect (i.e. with a heavy Hawaiian accent), and her crazy but wonderful family and best friend are all sorts of outside the white, middle-class American ideal. 

The novel traces Lovey’s adolescent transition from dreams into reality and from dissatisfaction to acceptance. Over the course of the novel, Lovey learns to love herself for who she is rather than strive for the unattainable, a powerful message for any reader who does not see him or herself and their reality as “good enough.” This is what makes Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers a necessary book for adolescents (high school aged) and adults to read. At first glance, Lovey and her adolescence seem very different. However, despite Lovey being from a different class and background from most readers, the reader comes to see that Lovey has similar worries, fears, and ideals to any other American adolescent. And this realization allows readers to see commonalities and make connections to Lovey and her story in deep and meaningful ways. For this reason, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a great text to get students to learn about and accept themselves as well as to learn about and accept people who are from different cultures.

 Finally, adolescents and adults should read Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers because it is a superb book. Lovey's story is told in an engaging prose that is highly entertaining and funny yet painful and sad at the same time. And Yamanaka's use of both Standard English and Hawaiian Creole English gives the narrative an authentic feel that transports the reader to Lovey and her family's working-class Hawaiian world.

--Ashley Cleeves