Character Sketch: Aunt Emily

·      “She is the one with the vision” (Page 32)

·      “A word warrior” (Page 33)

·      Voices her opinions vigorously

·      Overwhelming

·      Intellectual

·      “One of the world’s white blood cells, rushing from trouble spot to trouble spot with her medication pouring into wounds seen and not seen” (Page 35)

Aunt Emily is recognized to consistently be a very vocal person. Uncle Sam claims that she isn’t a woman because of her big mouth. She is known to have an opinion about everything and does not hesitate to share it with the people in her surroundings. On page 32, Naomi uses an analogy to express the characteristics and intentions of Aunt Emily: “For my part, I can only see a dark field with Aunt Emily beaming her flashlight to where the rest of us crouch and hide, our eyes downcast as we seek the safety of invisibility.” Aunt Emily brings attention to occurrences and issues that others try to hide and forget about.  Naomi particularly seems to find Aunt Emily annoying and unpredictable. She refers to talking Aunt Emily as “walking through a minefield” because she “never quite know[s] when she’ll explode.” Aunt Emily can be seen as person that would often catch someone off guard with her open opinions, but it is interesting to see that no one in their family ever dares to talk against her. I think this may have to do with the desire to refrain from causing conflict that everyone in Naomi’s family seems to have.

“Injustice rages Aunt Emily” (said by Naomi on page 32). Aunt Emily attacks anything that she deems as injustice. She firmly believes that the racism of Japanese is/ was far greater in Canada than in the United States. Naomi tells us of Aunt Emily’s continuous rants of how terrible the prejudice was that they faced. Aunt Emily also believes that the government has the power. So much power that they broke up their families, controlled where they could live, what they could do and censored all communication. Despite all of this, she proudly claims that the Japanese race in Canada should not be referred to as Japanese, but as Canadian citizens.  She tells Naomi, “What this country did to us, it did to itself” (Page 35). She sees herself, as well as other Japanese Canadians, as part of Canada and in harming the Japanese in the past, they also harmed their own country.