Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home

                In Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, Tropic of Orange there is a consistent blurring of borders; the borders between the US and Mexico, between Asian culture and American, between reality and technology, between rich and poor, as well as the border between right and wrong.  This continuous blurring of border lines makes it difficult to distinguish between all of these things but on a higher level, it complicates the question of “what is home?” During the freeway debacle we see a shift between classes as the homeless overrun a space otherwise occupied by people of a higher socioeconomic status (at least people who have enough money to afford a car).  This is just one of many instances where borders are played with and homes become misidentified.  The homeless people occupy the freeway as if it were a local playground in which they spent their day wandering or night sleeping.  At the end of the novel, Buzzworm describes the freeway madness depicted homeless men barbequing in the destruction (264).  The homeless transformed freeway into their own home.

                We see more confusion with the identification of homes when it comes to Gabriel.  After speaking with a jolted Rafaela, Gabriel heads to his home in Mexico to make sure everything is alright with her.  Upon discovering a battered Rafaela in the road Gabriel tells her they are a ways from home.  Rafaela confronts him with a look of confusion as they are within eyesight of his home.  Gabriel, a man of Mexican descent, has spent so much time in the US that he is unable to identify the home he’s building for himself in Mexico; “I hadn’t recognized my own place” (224).  Gabriel is one of the biggest culprits in the novel who blurs the line between Mexico and the US, continuously traveling back and forth between his two homes.  With all his transporting back and forth, Gabriel still fails to recognize the home he made for himself in Mexico.  In doing so, Gabriel subconsciously has chosen the US as his true home, even though his roots may lie in Mexico.

                Throughout the novel there are many more examples of mistaken home identities as well blurred lines between cultures, races, etc.  Bobby who is the epitome of multiracial is a prime example of a character playing with the line between different cultures.  Bobby is “Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown” (15).  Bobby could call any of those ethic ties home.  Even Manzanar, a once prominent surgeon, now calls his home on the freeway directing traffic.  From this novel one can gather that one’s true home is not so much predestined as it is the product of one’s lifestyle.