Character Analysis: Aunt Emily

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The novel raises strong arguments on discrimination, racism, and other challenging experiences of the Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s. Aunt Emily is a character that seems to be relentless and outspoken on Japanese traditional view of females in the society among other setbacks her community was facing. Aunt Emily portrayed as a loud political activist, tries to liberate her niece, Naomi through her work by introducing ideologies that were different from the usual convectional traditional ways they were accustomed to.
‘We are the country’ is a statement made by Aunt Emily in response to Naomi, who was convinced that the entire country (Canada) was hostile and did not see the need of digging up the past in an effort of making a change; ’Why not let the dead bury the dead?’, she asks Aunt Emily. Naomi felt that she was not a part of the Canadian society; she had a traumatizing childhood and had experienced firsthand racism in her war and post-war years. The theme of cultural identity emerges at this point; Aunt Emily believes that everyone living in Canada was …show more content…
Cultural identity has much to do with the past and it is that which makes one’s future. Aunt Emily tells Naomi, ‘You have to remember… You are your history, if you cut any of it off, you are an amputee… Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene’. The past should be embraced in order to move on to the future without bitterness in the hope of a multicultural Canadian democracy. As the novel precedes, we begin to notice Naomi’s changing attitude and her readiness to embrace Aunt Emily’s words and revisits her past, reminiscing about her tragic childhood memories, learning the truth about her mother, and finally gaining knowledge about what happened to her relatives. The facts uncovered saw her becoming more peaceful as reliving her history proved to be therapeutic; relieving bottled bitterness and frustration in
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