Obasan
ObasanOBASAN
From Naomi’s birth in 1936 until 1942, her family lives a typical middle-class Canadian life in Vancouver. She lives with her mother, father, and brother, Stephen. Her mother plays the piano, her father studies medicine at a rolltop desk in their basement, and the children have all the toys they could ever ask for. Naomi describes her room in Vancouver: “My bedroom with its long white-lace-curtained windows looks out over the neighbors’ yard. A peach tree is directly outside my window. Above my bed with the powdery blue quilt is a picture of a little girl with a book in her lap, looking up into a tree where a bird sits.”(64) They all have secure family ties, but those begin to disintegrate when their freedom is restricted and Naomi’s mother and grandmother leave.
On May 22, 1942, Obasan, Uncle, Naomi, and Stephen go the better-than-average relocation camp of Slocan. They live in a small scrap of a house for three years, until 1945. The children start school here and enjoy playing in the lake nearby. These are the first times when Obasan and Uncle seem to become immediate members of the family. Naomi describes their house: “Our own house was just a two room log hut at the base of the mountain. It was shabby and sagging and overgrown with weeds when we first saw it on that spring day in 1942.” (140) For the children, living in this house is the first shot of the reality that their lives are never going to be the same.
In 1945, the family packs up and moves to Lethbridge, Alberta. They live in a “small hut, like a toolshed, smaller even than the one we lived on in Slocan.”(229) The only source of heat they have in the house is a small round stove in the middle of the room. They have no beds and sleep on the floor on quilts. Together, the family works on a beet farm . Naomi says that the only term to describe it is “Hardship.”
While living in Lethbridge, Naomi and Steven go to school in Granton, a town that is about seven miles away. Uncle and Obasan later move, in 1951, to Granton and live on land owned by a farmer named Mr. Barker. Granton is a quiet place, with high grass all around and a river nearby. They live in a mid-sized home that is just the right size for Obasan, Uncle, and occasionally Stephen and Naomi. ( Stephen leaves for college in 1952, and Naomi leaves for a teaching job in 1965) Naomi says that, although the house is not quite as nice as their first in Vancouver, “The new house is at least a house.”(251) She says, “This house is now her [Obasan’s] blood and bones.”(18)
As was earlier stated, Naomi traveled to Cecil, Alberta, a town approximately 150 miles from Granton, to start a job teaching the fifth and sixth grades at a school called Cecil Consolidated. She lives there by herself, shuffling back and forth from Cecil to Granton.