Picture Bride

Contemporary American Literature: 

Contemporary American Literature Mary Carl Zordilla Ma Engl 1 January 25, 2012

About the Author: 

About the Author Born on August 20, 1955 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father, Andrew Song, was an air pilot; while her mother, Ella, was a seamstress who was also an immigrant from China. As a child, Song and her family traveled a lot which got her interested in writing about the scenery she saw and the different places she experienced

About the Poem: 

About the Poem defines a kind of 'third-world' writing .“ won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was also nominated for that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award was influenced by her grandmother coming to America from Korea for a marriage arranged through the exchange of pictures, hence the name “Picture Bride”. Inspired by the movie “The Picture Bride” by Yoshiko Uchida

About the Poem: 

About the Poem Definition: Women who wed who have arranged marriages with strangers - usually of the same nationality - in foreign lands that were facilitated by the prior exchange of photographs and letters Significance: Picture bride marriages were especially common among Japanese/Korean immigrants to the United States and Hawaii before World War II. The experiences of picture brides--especially their conflicts with their husbands as a result of differences in age, education level, family background, personal aspirations, and taste- -are a constant source of inspiration for writers and artists.

Historical Background: 

Historical Background Immigration Issues: Families and marriage; Japanese immigrants; Women The popularity of marrying picture brides among Japanese/ Korean immigrants can be attributed to a combination of social, cultural, economic, and historical factors . It was first of all a logical extension of the tradition of arranged marriages . The lesser gender value placed upon daughters also encouraged their departure from their homeland into an alternative opportunity.

Poem Analysis (The Picture Bride): 

Poem Analysis (The Picture Bride) She was a year younger than I, twenty-three when she left Korea. Did she simply close the door of her father's house and walk away. And was it a long way through the tailor shops of Pusan to the wharf where the boat waited to take her to an island whose name she had only recently learned, on whose shore a man waited, turning her photograph to the light when the lanterns in the camp outside

Poem Analysis (The Picture Bride): 

Waialua Sugar Mill were lit and the inside of his room grew luminous from the wings of moths migrating out of the cane stalks? What things did my grandmother take with her? and when she arrived to look into the face of the stranger who was her husband, thirteen years older than she, did she politely untie the silk bow of her jacket, her tent-shaped dress filling with the dry wind that blew from the surrounding fields where the men were burning the cane ? Poem Analysis (The Picture Bride)

Sources and Reference: 

Sources and Reference From PICTURE BRIDE (Yale University Press, 1983 ) Hoobler , Dorothy, Thomas Hoobler , and George Takei. The Japanese American Family Album . New, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ichioka , Yuji. The Issei : The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 . New York: Free Press, 1988. Makabe , Tomoko. Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada. Translated by Kathleen Chisato Merken . Ontario: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1995. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/cathy-song http://apa.si.edu/Curriculum%20Guide-Final/songbio.htm http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/song-cathy