This passage is from a story collection about Japanese Americans living in California which detail from the passage shows that visiting Mama during the 1920s and 1930s. It is set in a fictional town in San Francisco's East Bay. inspires the narrator?
The Woman Who Makes Swell Doughnuts
1. "There is nothing I like to do better than to go to
There is nothing I like to do better than to go to her house and knock on
her house and knock on the door..."
the door and when she opens the door, to go in. It is one of the experiences
(Paragraph 1)
will long remember-perhaps the only Immortality that I will ever be lucky to
meet in my short life-and when I say experience I do not mean the actual
2. "When I visit her she takes me to the coziest
movement, the motor of our lives. I mean by experience the dancing of
chair in the living room..."(Paragraph 3)
emotions before our eyes and inside of us, the dance that is still but is the roar
and the force capable of stirring the earth and the people.
3. "And before I can turn a page of a magazine she
2 Of course, she, the woman I visit, is old and of her youthful beauty there is
is back with a plateful of hot doughnuts."
little left. Her face of today is coarse with hard water and there is no question
(Paragraph 4)
that she has lived her life: given birth to six children, worked side by side with
her man for forty years, working in the fields, working in the house, caring for
4. "sing gratefully that such a simple and
common experience becomes an event, an
the grandchildren, facing the summers and winters and also the springs and
autumns, running the household that is completely her little world. And when I event of necessity and growth." (Paragraph 5)
came on the scene, when I discovered her in her little house on Seventh Street,
all of her life was behind, all of her task in this world was tabbed, looked into,
thoroughly attended, and all that is before her in life and the world, all that
could be before her now was to sit and be served; duty done, work done, time
clock punched; old-age pension or old-age security, easy chair, soft serene
hours till death take her. But this was not of her, not the least bit of her.
3 When I visit her she takes me to the coziest chair in the living room, where