Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Obasan, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Identity, and Citizenship
History and Memory
Speech vs. Silence
Selflessness and Decorum
Summary
Analysis
Though Aunt Emily once told Naomi that she was a quiet child, Naomi disagrees with this generalization, remembering that she was confident and vocal in her house in Vancouver, but afraid and quiet out in the world. Naomi flashes back to a day in her childhood shortly after her parents bought a dozen chicks to populate the family’s chicken coop. She puts the chicks in the coop with the adult chickens, and a hen begins to kill them all. Naomi runs to Mother, who rescues the surviving chicks with a matter-of-fact swiftness that Naomi deems characteristic of Japanese motherhood. Naomi’s mother tells her, without blame or pity, that “if there is not carefulness, there is danger.”
When Naomi is a young child in Vancouver, she feels safe and supported by her family, which allows her to be confident. That confidence is challenged when Naomi faces the first of what will become many upsetting childhood experiences: her endangerment of the chicks. This moment teaches Naomi that she must always be careful of danger. However, the lesson is delivered by Mother without judgment or anger, which lessens the extent to which the incident traumatizes Naomi.
Themes
Naomi’s thoughts shift to Old Man Gower, her next-door neighbor in Vancouver who sexually abused her as a child, and to a boy who abused her in Slocan. Her memories are interwoven with her recurring dream of captive, naked Asian women who attempt to save themselves by seducing the white soldiers holding them at gunpoint, only to be killed anyway. She flashes back to Old Man Gower molesting her when she is four years old. The young Naomi doesn’t know how to resist, because she has been taught to obey adults. She feels incapable of speaking in his presence, and every time he abuses Naomi he warns her not to tell Mother. The secret makes Naomi feel separated from her mother, and she feels even more distant and confused as she begins to crave Gower’s attention.
Unlike the incident with the chickens, Mother is not there to support Naomi through Old Man Gower’s abuse, which leaves Naomi unconfident and vulnerable. The values of obedience, respect, and selflessness that Naomi’s family has taught her leave her especially vulnerable to Gower’s abuse, since the idea of resisting an adult is alien to her. This sexual abuse is also racialized as Naomi reflects on the fetishization of Asian women and the violence inflicted upon them by white men. Young Naomi conceives of silence as a force Old Man Gower inflicts upon her to enable his abuse, painting silence as sinister and oppressive.
Themes
