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A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection"
A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection"
A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection"
Ebook32 pages22 minutes

A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 6, 2016
ISBN9781535822817
A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection"

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    A Study Guide for Hisaye Yamamoto's "Eskimo Connection" - Gale

    5

    The Eskimo Connection

    Hisaye Yamamoto

    1983

    Introduction

    Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story The Eskimo Connection, published in 1983 in the Japanese-American magazine Rafu Shimpo, tells of the curious relationship between Emiko, a widowed Nisei poet living in Los Angeles and now primarily taking care of her grandchildren, and Alden, a young Eskimo in a federal penitentiary. Alden initiates a correspondence with Emiko, saying that he saw a poem of hers in a magazine and would like a critique of an essay he wrote for the prison newsletter. Emiko is, at first, very hesitant to respond to Alden, fearing that her negative impression of his writing would hurt him; and besides, she cannot imagine what they have in common. But she does answer his letter, and a two-year relationship between the two unlikely correspondents is initiated.

    Yamamoto wrote this story late in her career, a good thirty years after she had received the first applause for her short stories but before she received the Before Columbus Foundations American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1986. The Eskimo Connection is a story of empathy between a woman, who spent time in the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II as Yamamoto did, and a fellow Asian American as Alden refers to himself, who is living under similar restrictive circumstances. In fact, Valerie Miner in the Nation lauds Yamamoto’s multicultural casting in many of her stories, including The Eskimo Connection, and credits Yamamoto’s rich variety of experiences growing up in California and other incidents, including living in an internment camp and working for the Catholic Worker, for giving her an unusually broad but sympathetic view of the world. King-Kok Cheung, in her introduction to Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, which includes The Eskimo Connection, also notes that Yamamoto’s themes include the relationship between Japanese immigrants and their

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