Liz Brina walks around her house looking at the walls, shelves, and windowsills for objects which might tell a part of her story. She picks up a single bamboo plant in a large glass vase, plucks a coin from her room, and sets down a vase of paper cranes. I’ve asked her to pick these material objects which litter her large wooden kitchen table as a framework for talking about her new memoir, Speak, Okinawa which was recently released from Knopf in February 2021.

I met Liz six years ago when we both were studying nonfiction together at the University of New Orleans MFA program. Her work has always looked inward, searching her internal landscape for ways to understand the world around. It feels appropriate to discuss her new book, her family, meditation practices, drinking, and how language is only the beginning of how we can communicate as we sit at her kitchen table one afternoon, the sun lighting the objects she has selected:

TB: I’ve seen this baby bamboo around your house before. Tell me why you picked this as an object?

LB: Well, before I lived in New Orleans, I moved from Oakland, California to Kansas City, Kansas with a boyfriend. We were very much in love, or at least I thought we were. He wanted to move back to his hometown, and I made the terrible mistake of going with him. We lived for a while with his mother and sister, and I felt really alone there and isolated. Especially after coming from Oakland where I felt very comfortable and at home, it was retraumatizing and felt like I was returning to Rochester, the town in New York where I grew up and where a lot of the book takes place. I felt than I was outsider again. But then it dawned on me than this is what my mother felt like when she came to the US—only someone in relation to her partner. Only Arthur’s wife. I started thinking about her a lot and for the first time in my adult life, I really wanted to be with my mom. She and my Dad drove from Rochester to Kansas City, and she carried this bamboo in her lap the whole time. At the time it was six stalks but now there is only one. I felt then than she understood where I was in life and what I was thinking and feeling even we didn’t have the words to express those complicated parts.

TB: Language and its borders seem to be one of the major conflicts of this book. Your mom speaks Okinawan/Japanese primarily and English is your first language. There is a bit of a language rift between you two. In one chapter you write, “Sometimes I believe the cruelest injustice my mother has had to suffer, surpassing the war that ravaged her homeland, surpassing the poverty, surpassing the beatings from her oldest brother, the negligence of her father, the ongoing yet forgivable distractions of Obaa, is the fact that she can’t communicate with her daughter in her native language. The Japanese I don’t understand and speak measures the enormity of her inner world that is impenetrable, blocked, hidden from me” (28). As a writer and someone who has dedicated your life to words, have you found alternate methods for sharing the deep recesses of the self? Are words and language a hard boundary or just suggested signposts for knowing a person?

LB: We rely on the English language so much in American culture. It’s supposedly a measure of intelligence and communication. Writing is how you learn and also how to know someone, and I was always taught there are no other alternatives. I think it took me a long time, because of the social and political dominance of English to learn that her language is just as important as mine. For a long time I didn’t think it mattered. I denied that it hindered our closeness. But then once I acknowledged it, I learned to look. I used to focus on all the things I couldn’t say to her and what she couldn’t say to me instead of what we do share. I always thought it was superficial than we talked about foods and plants. Now I see those are the most meaningful exchanges. And I try to speak Japanese, even if it’s bad. I tried to learn; I’m still trying. That helped heal a rift. The intention, the acknowledgement.

TB: In your reading at Octavia books a few weeks ago, Randy Bates asked you a question that I am still thinking about. He asked about how your mother influenced your voice as a writer and you, sort of in than moment, realized that your mother’s ability to speak simply and bluntly about her struggle allowed you to develop your voice in writing a memoir—to put your own vulnerabilities and troubles on the page.

LB: I didn’t realize how true that is until Randy asked that question. I didn’t realize how much she influenced my voice and my style. The simplicity, the directness, how she just got drunk all the time and said things. What an amazing thing that she never hid her pain from me. I too learned to not hide it. That’s a really valuable lesson with vulnerability, sharing it all on the page.

TB: Tell me about the next object—a glass vase filled with paper cranes.

LB: It’s a Japanese legend that if you make a 1000 paper cranes, you are granted three wishes. In the book I write about how when my mom was 16, she made 1000 paper cranes. This was right after she started working as a cocktail waitress. Her three wishes were to marry an American, to have a big house, and to have a daughter. It’s so sweet that I was her wish, but it also makes me sad. She dreamed of leaving her home, her family, her language, and her culture to go to the place than had in many ways decimated the future of that place. And once she got here, it was so hard for her. She didn’t speak the language, understand the culture, and her husband became her only point of entry into the world. I hate than, but also, what it taught me is that my mom is a dreamer. She gave that to me too.

TB: So, I see you haven’t made it to 1000 yet yourself though…

LB: Yeah. I started making them during quarantine. Like everyone, I had a lot of time on my hands. I wasn’t really making them to get wishes though, I was making them more as a meditative practice. The repetitive act allows you to focus and have more intention on what you want and to really think about it. The act of folding and being still for so long is really hard to do. And to set aside that time is a challenge. The dedication of making 1000 shows if you really want something or not. So, I think I’m still waiting to find what I want. I do it now for prayer.

TB: One of the chapters included in the book was published in New Delta Review in 2018. I wonder, did this chapter evolve at all since you published it in NDR and how your relationship with both sides of your family were reflected in this book?

LB: It actually didn’t evolve than much. It was one of those essay/chapter I wrote than just came out fully formed. It wasn’t easy to write, but when I started writing it just came out. Sometimes that happen and it just comes out right.

TB: Can you tell me about your final object?

LB: I traveled with my parents to Okinawa right after I had broken off an engagement. When we arrived, my Okinawan family had planned a huge banquet. There are 50 aunts, uncles, cousins there, some of them I had never met before. At some point during the banquet, my uncle makes an announcement. The whole family all stand and come to my table to drop off envelopes. I had no idea what was going on. I turned to my mother and asked what the envelopes were for and at first, she didn’t respond, and then she said they are wedding gifts. I open the envelopes and there either 5000 yen which is about $50 and there were $50,000 yen which is $500. That is a lot of fucking money. I told my mother immediately we have to give them back. I thought, I’m not even getting married! But my father told me to keep them and thank them. They all knew I wasn’t getting married but wanted to give me a gift anyway. They wanted me to feel supported, I think. It was crazy but after that, I felt deeply connected to a family I hadn’t seen in two decades.

Also, its tradition to only give money in increments of five. The Japanese word for five yen, go-en, also means love. So, it’s a tradition to give an increment of five for weddings.

TB: Now that the book is out, do you feel some relief? Also, can you talk a little bit about your experience with getting published?

LB: I was very, very nervous about the release of the book because it is just my version, and it’s a sad version, which is the story I needed to release. In writing memoir, my experience is always mine alone and I worried about other people in the book would feel that my portrayal wasn’t fair or “real”—as if it’s not subjective. I worried if the prose would get across what I needed to? Was anyone was going to listen? I really wanted other people to hold that space with me. But, I’ve gotten so many messages from people.

TB: And what about the technical aspect of getting published? How did you find your agent?

LB: I went to Breadloaf Writer’s Workshop with a draft of this book that was by no means a finished draft, and I submitted the first chapter to the workshop. Francisco Cantu was a fellow there. He also comes from multi-cultural heritage and my story resonated with him. I could have been in any other workshop with someone who didn’t appreciate this story. Anyway, I made a point to ask him if we could talk and he said he thought his agent would really like this. His agent read it and loved it. The agent said, send me stuff whenever you are ready. I said, I don’t know when I’m going to be ready, but I sent it anyway because I needed to do it now. So don’t wait till it’s perfect or you’re ready. I didn’t think I was but if someone wants to see it, they will see the potential. And it ended up in Knopf.

It took me a long time to figure out that the story I wanted to tell and needed to tell, wasn’t the story I thought it was. That is key. It’s the story you are most afraid of. It’s the one you think is too hard to tell and maybe it’s the one you think no one will care about. In my experience, that is what it was. When I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking about where or if it would be published. It was just than the story needed to be told. It got me in a chair every fucking day to do it.

Once you have a story like that, that you care about deeply and that maybe only you can tell, that is close to you and only you know about; once you have a story like that, it will stand out. The rest is just about putting yourself out there.

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Elizabeth Miki Brina‘s debut novel, Speak, Okinawa, is out now from Knopf. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Bread Loaf Scholarship and a New York State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship. She currently lives and teaches in New Orleans.

Tori Bush is a writer based in New Orleans. Her work has been featured or forthcoming in Southern Quarterly, Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture, 64 Parishes, and more. She is co-editor of The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing published by University Press of Florida in 2021. She is a PhD candidate at LSU and an Assistant Fiction Editor at New Delta Review.