Name Me Nobody

Yamanaka, L. (1999). Name me nobody. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 078680452-1

Why read this book

The Hawaiian teenagers in this book will show you what life is like in a part of the country that most of us don’t know much about. Although the issues around friendship and love, including girls falling in love with girls, occur in all communities, the way that Yvonne and Emi-lou’s families and friends support them and complicate matters has a distinctly Hawaiian spirit.

Plot summary

Emi-lou Kaya is 14 years old and in 9th grade in a school in rural Hawaii. Her friends call her Lou or Louie, but she doesn’t have many. Her best friend is Yvonne, whom Louie calls Von. They are the same age and they’ve been raised together like sisters. They’re really tight. Louie’s a little fat, and she gets teased a lot. Von always stands up for her. Von knows Louie’s tough on the inside, and Louie helps Von through her tough times, too.

Von’s a good athlete, and when she joins the local girls’ softball team, Louie joins, too. Louie’s an awful ball player, but she’s there for Von. She knows Von has a chance for an athletic scholarship, and she knows Von needs her close by to make sure Von makes the most of her opportunities. Things get complicated when Von takes an interest in another ballplayer, Babes. Louie is worried Babes is going to displace her in Von’s affections, especially as Louie gradually realizes that Von and Babes have feelings for each other that are different from what Louie and Von have ever had. Meanwhile, Louie’s got a crush on Kyle, Babes’ cousin, and another guy named Spencer is kind of interested in Louie. They and all their friends and families are hanging out together all the time in their small community, and things are complicated as these high school students try to figure out how to negotiate love and friendship.

Critical evaluation

Three factors set Name Me Nobody apart within the young-adult novel crowd. First, it deals with lesbian relationships and how they are both similar and different from non-sexual relationships among teenage girls. Louie knows that she’s isn’t a lesbian – she’s very attracted to Kyle, despite the fact that he treats her badly – but her friendship with Von is as intense as any lover’s could be. Plus she has to deal with everyone assuming that she might be a lesbian because she and Von are so close. This creates confusion on her part that drives much of the narrative of the novel.

Second, all the dialogue in Name Me Nobody is traditional Hawaiian pidgin (Hawaiian Creole American). The authentic dialogue adds character to the narrative, helping non-pidgin readers understand the unique setting of the story and helping pidgin speakers see themselves in the story. However, the non-dialogue narrative is standard American English, which presents a bit of a problem. Since the narration is in the first-person, from Louie’s perspective, we are presented with a situation where her dialogue is in pidgin while her background narration is in another language. Since the background narration presents Louie’s unspoken thoughts, it is awkward to adjust to the concept that she thinks in standard English while she speak in pidgin.

The third factor that distinguishes Name Me Nobody is the role that community plays in the story. Unlike many young-adult novels, where the parents, teachers, and other adults are distant figures or absent altogether, Louie’s story plays out in a traditional Hawaiian community where the generations interact extensively and where everyone knows everyone else’s past and present. Louie’s grandmother has raised her, since her own mother was only 16 when Louie was born and has moved to the mainland. Von’s father was Louie’s grandfather’s best friend (Louie’s grandfather has died some years before the story), and the two families are together constantly, sharing meals, watching movies, playing cards, etc. Spencer’s grandmother coaches the girl’s softball team, Babe and Kyle are cousins, and everyone’s family is everyone else’s auntie, uncle, or cousin. This complex web of relationships complicates the narrative, as can be seen in this passage:

They all think I don’t know what’s going on. I know Von wanted to distract Viva when she gave her all of those extra duties outside of the bus. I know Viva wants to make me jealous by asking Kyle to sit by her. I know why I’m sitting in front of Von and Babes, too. That must’ve been part of the deal. So I can’t see. So I can’t interfere. So I’m not the third wheel. And does Sterling really want to sit with me or is that just a part of this game? (p. 113)

As with Matt de la Peña’s Mexican WhiteBoy, the community becomes a force in the narrative, a dynamic that I am beginning to see characterizes the best of ethnic young-adult literature.

About the author

Lois-Ann Yamanaka was born in Hawaii in 1961 into a working class family that had emigrated from Japan several generations earlier. Hawaiian Creole English (Hawaiian pidgin) was her first language. When she decided to become a writer after teaching school in Hawaii for several years, she began using pidgin in her poetry and fiction, which generated unexpected opposition to her work. The Hawaiian school system banned her first publication, a collection of short stories titled Saturday Night at the Palaha Theatre (1993), although the book won several awards. Persevering despite the controversy, Yamanaka produced a trilogy of coming of age novels set in working-class Japanese-Hawaiian families (Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, 1996; Blue’s Hanging, 1997; and Heads by Harry, 1999). As with Name Me Nobody, Yamanaka integrates gay and lesbian characters into the families and communities she writes about in these adult novels (Lois-Ann Yamanaka biography, n.d.). Since publishing Name Me Nobody in 1999, Yamanaka has written two more adult novels (Father of the Four Passages, 2001, and Behold the Many, 2006), and a children’s book (The Heart’s Language, 2005) (Lois-Ann Yamanaka, 2009).

Genre: Asian American, LGBTQ

Curriculum ties

If the novel were to be used in a literature class, I think one of the most interesting points of discussion would be whether students think Louie was right or wrong to confide in your grandmother after her return from the volleyball championships in Honolulu. This issue brings into question the concept of a hero or heroine in a novel. Readers are generally presumed to identify with the narrator of a novel; is Louie a flawed heroine, and, if so, is that okay?

Book-talking ideas

• Read Chapter 1 (two pages), where Louie introduces herself by talking about her names. This surfaces her estrangement from her mother, who was 16 when Louie was born.

• Ask students whether they think writers should write in dialects like Black American English, with which they are probably already familiar, and discuss the controversy that Yamanaka encountered when she wrote in Hawaiian pidgin. Briefly explain the history of Hawaiian pidgin and read a passage with interesting pidgin dialog amount the teen characters, such as Chapter 10, where Von talks to Louie about losing weight.

Reading level/interest age

The story is accessible and appropriate for both middle school and high school students (five middle school libraries and five high school libraries in the San Francisco Unified School District own copies of Name Me Nobody), but I am afraid that some will find the use of pidgin for the dialogue difficult to get into.

Challenge issues

There is no sex, violence, or profanity (in English, at least; I can’t tell about the pidgin) in Name me Nobody. Yamanaka’s work has been challenged in Hawaii for her use of pidgin, which some readers feel stereotypes and denigrates the image they would like others to have of Hawaii. The usual crowd might challenge the lesbian themes.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Cite the author’s defense of her use of pidgin in her writing: “… I came to terms that pidgin was not an ignorant language, that I was speaking a dialect and that my feelings and thoughts were so connected to the language that in order for me to write truthfully, I needed to connect to that voice. But it was hard. Very, very hard” (Takahama, 1996).

Why I chose to read this book

I was reviewing the list of books about lesbians in Herald’s guide to young-adult materials and was glad to find something set in Hawaii, about which I know very little.

References

Lois-Ann Yamanaka. (2009, November 17). Wikipedia. Retrieved November 25, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois-Ann_Yamanaka

Lois-Ann Yamanaka biography. (n.d.). biography.jrank.org. Retrieved November 25, 2009, http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4852/Yamanaka-Lois-Ann.html

Takahama, V. (1996, February 15). Controversial adventures in ‘paradise’: Bully burgers and pidgin. The Orange County Register. Retrieved November 25, 2009, from http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/engl52a/engl52a.1999/yamanaka.html