[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Gender
In Los Angeles Southland, Nina Revoyr (2003) recounts the tale of lesbian law student Jackie Ishida who does not dig her heritage, but an enigmatic name in her grandfather's will pulls her through Los Angeles's history to the family's old hood of downtrodden Crenshaw, with stops in Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Echo Park. The resulting whodunit, pregnant with the traumas of internment, racism, and riots, inverts the girl's world. Nina Revoyr's (2003) subtle, effective second novel, brings to mind an observation attributed to immigration historian Marcus Lee Hansen and commonly described as Hansen's Law: What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.
Heritage can creep up on you. Jackie may be descended from Japanese parents, but she is as heedlessly cosmopolitan as any American city dweller. A law student planning a corporate career, she lives in Los Angeles's funky Fairfax district, with its mix of bohemians and elderly Jews, and makes a habit of dating white girls. When the death of her grandfather sends her off to locate a beneficiary named in his will, Jackie finds herself in unfamiliar territory. She returns to the Crenshaw district, where her grandfather ran a store in the 1960s, and encounters unanswered questions about the decades-old murder of four black boys.
Through her research, Jackie gets her first-ever glimpses into her family's history. "Her family did not talk," Revoyr (2003) writes. "Her life had been flat and textureless as a starched white sheet." Switching between the '90s, '60s, and '40s, Revoyr (2003) slowly fills in the details: the Japanese internments in 1942; the realities of segregation; the Watts riots of 1965. Soon Jackie has a whole new understanding of her past. It is painful but, paradoxically, a relief.Nina Revoyr (2003) has a history of trying to make the characters in her novels as multifaceted as possible, and her second novel is no exception......
