Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
| Author | Lois-Ann Yamanaka |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Fritz Metsch |
| Country | United States and Canada (simultaneously) |
| Language | English-Hawaiian Pidgin |
| Genre | Japanese Americans-Hawaii-Fiction |
| Publisher | Farrar Straus, New York; HarperCollins, Canada |
|
Publication date
|
1996 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 276 pp |
| ISBN | (hardcover 1st edition) |
| OCLC | 32431468 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3575.A434 W55 1996 |
| Preceded by | Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre: A book of Poems written in Hawaiian Pidgin (1993) |
| Followed by | Blu's Hanging (1997) |
Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a Japanese American-Hawaiian adult fiction novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Its tonality is distinctive to that of a local Hawaiian culture in that all the main characters speak in Hawaiian Pidgin. Although it is an adult fiction novel, the plot follows a young Japanese girl throughout her years in middle school. The major themes of the novel include comparing a mother-daughter relationship with a father-daughter one, finding one's identity, and the politics of Japanese Hawaiian culture in a white America.
Sections of the novel were adapted for the award-winning film, Fishbowl [2](2005), by Hawaii filmmaker Kayo Hatta, that aired nationally on PBS in 2006.
The novel's characters and setting stay true to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's local upbringing on the Big Island of Hawaii. Written in both English and Hawaiian Pidgin, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a coming-of-age first-person narrative of Lovey Nariyoshi, a local Japanese girl growing up in Hilo, Hawaii in the 1970s. During the anti-Japanese wave that flowed through the United States during this time period, Lovey looks back at all of the key events and people in her life that help shape the young girl she becomes in the end. By only seeing white stars on TV, discovering the birthing canal with her pregnant teenage-neighbor Katy, rationalizing her best friend Jerome's homosexuality and other events, Lovey tries to find her place in the world - a world that constantly tells her that being pure Japanese is not beautiful.
Apart from being the title of the novel, "Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers" is also the title of the eleventh chapter in the book. Here, Lovey describes the wild animals that her father, Hubert, hunts, kills, and cooks for the family. One day Hubert brings home a black-and-white calf that Lovey's sister Calhoon names Bully. The chapter ends when Hubert fries hamburgers for the girls, burgers made with Bully meat. The wild smell of the Bully burgers fills the entire kitchen, and neither of them can eat dinner that night.
The novel takes place, roughly, over a period of three years. Part One begins when Lovey is in the sixth grade and she and her best friend Jerry are watching a Shirley Temple movie. Lovey comments on how there is always a happy ending in movies, but never in real life – especially in her own life where she is pure Japanese, and not pretty like the haoles and hapa children in her class. And so she and Jerry constantly make up their own obituaries when they are playing together.
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