Southland

1. From what I read, prologue through chapter 2, Southland tells story about how Los Angeles used to be. As it was called Angeles Mesa (there’s no specific time), and many people around the world moving there. California was a place where difference is doesn’t matter, because it was said in the book “It was impossible to walk through the neighborhood without seeing someone different from you”. In the first chapter I was brought back to 1994 and introduced to the first characters, a young Japanese-American woman, named Jackie Ishida who just lost her grandfather (ten days before), and on February, 1994 she visited her aunt named Lois Sakai, who completely screwed after her father’s death. The storyline was about Jackie who really likes her aunt how she doesn’t really like her parents, also how she just realize her grandfather’s love towards her. At the end of the chapter she felt shame and awful for not feeling the sorrow that her families felt after her grandfather’s death. Next, in chapter two, the story was about Lois Sakai’s life in 1994 and further brought me back in 1963. It started with how Lois remember the time she spends with her father, Frank Sakai, and her little niece when her sister and her brother-in-law so busy with their education. Then started when Lois reminisced the day her family divides, back in 1963. When her mother, Mary Sakai, scolded her for almost ruined her sister’s tennis games. Everyone, including her grandmother, but not her father. She believed that her father is better that any man in Gardena. Also, she thought she never wanted to married by looking from his parents’ marriage life. At the end, it was after her mother, grandmother and sister scold her, and she still had her father.

2. So far, I haven’t got the big picture of the conflict in this book. This book is very complicated, yet thoughtful. The author brings us back to some years in the past and that must be hard. For me who likes to write, it’s difficult to keep the