The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Rolling the R's by R. Zamora LinmarkGraham Fraser
R. Zamora Linmark. Rolling the R’s. Kaya, 1997. 149pp. Paper: $12.95.
Of the group of adolescents featured in R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, many are recent immigrants to America from Asia, and most are of mixed racial descent, but all are searching for identity—national, racial, sexual—in a Hawaii described as more volcano than melting pot. The book is a kaleidoscope of narrative forms and perspectives, written in the pidgin English these young people speak. Their dialect raises crucial issues of identity and expression. A Japanese-American teacher is criticized because “her American upbringing has blinded her from reading between the lines of the history textbooks where silenced people choke from invisibility and humiliation,” but Mai-Lan Phan, her Vietnamese pupil, maps out her own expressive freedom when speaking her broken English: “And no need to think American to speak English because, to Mai-Lan, language is not words, but rhythms and sounds.”
These young people move, without differentiation, between the world of physically and sexually abusive adults and institutionalized racism, and the world of the blow-dried glamor of Charlie’s Angels, disco contests, and Scott Baio posters. For Linmark, these televised icons are more than the cultural currency of 1979; they are the scraps of tinsel from which immigrants assemble their American dreams. Their knowledge of this culture is encyclopedic. Linmark’s pop-culture references can also be spot-on, as in the painful plea of Edgar Ramirez, a defiantly homosexual fifth-grader, that Casey Kasem dedicate a song to the boy he’s in love with: “How many times I tried to write like Susie Polish Shutz, her words so true to my heart?. . . . I so hungry for this boy, Casey. And even if I one boy when you get to my name, how come, Casey, how come you no pick my letter for the week?” It’s not only in history textbooks that people choke from invisibility and humiliation. Like William Vollmann’s The Rainbow Stories, Rolling the R’s coaxes the unfamiliar music of these voices out of the margins and into words. [Graham Fraser]