Analysis of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 22, 2026

Upon its publication, Blu’s Hanging met with immediate critical acclaim. Critics considered the book “powerful,” “brilliant,” and “mesmerizing.” But when Blu’s Hanging was chosen as the Best Book of Asian American fiction of the year by a panel of judges from the Association of Asian American Studies, the decision provoked strong protest from Filipino Americans. The protesters charged that Yamanaka’s portrayal of a minor character, “Uncle Paulo,” as a sexual predator, was an “insult” to Filipino Americans and reproduced the stereotypes of Filipino-American men, whose sexuality has been perceived and represented as a “threat” to white “racial purity,” particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries when antimiscegenation laws were in effect in many states.

Some critics suggest that complaints from Filipino Americans about the book are related to the marginalization of the Filipino-American community, in contrast to the economic and political power of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. In response to the protests and the demands that the award be rescinded, the board of judges suggested that a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies be devoted to an open discussion on the novel and the issues raised. But the protesters refused to reconcile their demands, and the judges eventually resigned. The award was rescinded.

Not all Asian Americans shared the protesters’ views. In fact, some writers expressed unease about “censorship” and wrote letters in support of Yamanaka. This controversy over Blu’s Hanging is not an isolated incident. Other Asian American writers have been criticized for, or accused of, perpetuating Asian American stereotypes. At issue are the writers’ social responsibilities and artistic freedom, and the relations between literature and society. Even though Uncle Paulo is a minor character, the controversy over his portrayal has generated provocative discussions over these larger issues, including the distinctions between stereotypes and convincing characters.

Blu’s Hanging is a tale of survival and coming of age in poverty, in a social environment of racial hierarchy, and without proper parental guardianship. The story is told from the perspective of the 13-year-old narrator, Ivah Ogata, a Japanese American who struggles to take care of her 10-year-old brother and five-year-old sister as well as her father after her mother dies of kidney failure. Ivah’s task is rendered even more difficult not simply because of the lack of money or the constant absence of her father, who is a janitor and works two jobs, but also because each family member has been traumatized by the mother’s death.

Devastated by the loss, Ivah’s little sister, Maisie, stops talking and wets her pants at school. She is abused by other children and mistreated by haole (white) teachers. Ivah’s younger brother, Blu, turns to food for comfort in his longing for his mother. His insatiable appetite for food and candy increases as he continues to suffer from his grief over his mother’s absence. While his obesity makes him feel even more insecure, his craving for candy and attention renders him vulnerable. He is sexually abused by an old Japanese-American man and is raped by Uncle Paulo. In his trials and tribulations, it is his sister, not his father, who rescues him and takes care of him. Inconsolable in his grief for his wife’s death, the father has withdrawn into himself, becomes bad-tempered toward his children, and often neglects his parental obligations, but still needs his daughter Ivah to attend to his daily meals.

Forced into adult obligations of motherhood and wifehood, Ivah relies on her memories of her mother for guidance and strength in coping with an impossible situation. She later receives advice and help from her much older cousin, “Big Sis,” and her lesbian lover, Maisie’s special-education teacher, Miss Sandra Ito. Homosexuality, though not directly dealt with in this novel, is present in Ivah’s coming-of-age experience. In contrast to the unsettling violence of sexual abuse, the lesbian relationship between Big Sis and Miss Ito provides a nurturing support network for Ivah and her siblings. Gradually all the family members are able to go through a healing process, and Ivah, with the assistance of Miss Ito, receives a scholarship to a Honolulu private high school. Both Big Sis and Miss Ito will take care of Blu and Maisie when Ivah leaves home to pursue her education.

This story of bereavement and deprivation is also a moving story of love that helps the children survive the loss of their mother and hold the family together. Yamanaka is remarkably skillful in weaving into Ivah’s narrative the love story of Ivah’s parents and a secret they have kept hidden from their children.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

At the center of the story is Ivah’s growth, or rather the ethnic, female bildungsroman with a working-class background, in the unique multiracial and multicultural environment of Hawaii. Yamanaka most effectively portrays the differences of race, ethnicity, and class from the perspective of Ivah and through her struggles. Ivah learns about racism against Japanese Americans when her father asks her to go to the parent conference with Maisie’s haole teacher: “I no can handle haoles. Think they so holier-than-thou with their fast-talking mouth and everybody mo’ brown than them is dirt under their feet” (57). He relates this white superiority he perceives in Maisie’s teacher, Miss Owens, to racialized class difference established on the sugar plantations of Hawaii.

When Ivah refers to her mother’s remarks that some whites are regular people, and “Only the real haolified haoles you gotta watch out for,” Ivah’s father responds by saying that only one out of a hundred haoles can be trusted as a friend. In Hawaii, standard English indicates racial superiority and class privilege. The father’s use of pidgin is a way of asserting his difference as resistance to assimilation and as affirmation of his Japanese-American working-class identity. When he answers a telephone call from Miss Owens, he speaks standard English, but when he hangs up, Ivah notes, “He’s mad at himself for kowtowing” (57).

Pidgin, formally known as Hawaiian Creole English, is a marker of racial and social status in Hawaii and a trademark of Yamanaka’s novels, as well as a central subject matter in Blu’s Hanging and Yamanaka’s first novel, Wild Meat and Bully Burgers (1996). Like her father, Ivah insists on using pidgin as a language of her Japanese-American working-class identity. She continues to speak pidgin English during her meeting with Miss Owens even though the teacher tells her that they need to “speak to each other in standard English for the duration of this conference” because she finds pidgin English “so limited in its ability to express fully what we need to cover today” (59–60). But Ivah defies Miss Owens’s request. Yamanaka’s employment of pidgin in Blu’s Hanging and her other novels challenges precisely Miss Owens’s kind of prejudice against the language. Her insistence on using pidgin in all her novels is a gesture of resistance to assimilation, an acknowledgment of the history of colonialism, and a tribute to the vitality of Hawaiian Creole English developed out of plantation culture and a multiracial, multicultural society.

Pidgin in Yamanaka’s novels is more than a form of resistance; it is also a source of creativity. Yamanaka employs a wide range of variations of pidgin English to capture distinct individual voices, including the voices of children. Much of the power and accomplishment of Blu’s Hanging reside in Yamanaka’s characterization through distinct voices in pidgin.

SOURCES
Davis, Rocio. “Children on the Edge: Leaving Home in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on the Mango Street and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging.” In Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, edited by Dominique Marcais, Mark Niemeyer, Bernard Vincent, and Cathy Waegner, 37–47. American Studies: A Monograph Series, vol. 97. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2002.
Fujikane, Candace. “Sweeping Racism under the Rug of ‘Censorship’: The Controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging,” Amerasia Journal 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 158–160.
Harlan, Megan. Review of Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1997: 21.
Rodrigues, Darlene. “Imagining Ourselves: Reflections on the Controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging,” Amerasia Journal 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 195.