America’s ability to assimilate different ethnic groups is both represented directly or indirectly in Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game and Cynthia Kadohata’s kira-kira. While The Westing Game talks about a bunch of heirs working together to solve a puzzle—who kill Sam Westing, the president of Westing Paper Product Corporation, the kira-kira mainly focus on two Japanese girls’ glittering sisterhood and their life in the United States. Although the latter one seems to convey some bad impressions of what Japanese went through in America, generally, the two works both reflect what we called benevolent assimilation in the U.S., which makes this country unique and vibrant.
For instance, in the The Westing Game, people from a variety of backgrounds live together, meet together, and work together toward a common goal, which is finding out the true murderer of Westing using as many resources as they could. There are the Hoos who come from China. There is a female Judge J. J. Ford, who is proud of her African-American heritage. They all changed and even transformed tremendously during their time with others. An example would be the change toward Chinese food and culture. At first, only a few go to eat in Mr. Hoo’s restaurant despite a lot of great deals are being promoted. However, as the story goes on, due to their connections of living in the same apartment, parties and meetings started to be held at that restaurant, allowing people to get to know some traditional Chinese cuisine, like striped bass. Later, Grace Wexler, who shows a great passion of running this restaurant, joined their restaurant and renames it as Hoo’s On First, which achieves an astonishing success. The restaurant even attracts some famous athletes to eat there. Eventually, instead of being a house decorator, who Grace wished to be before, she creates a chain of Chinese restaurants. Yet Hoo starts to concentrate on his patent on shoes innersoles, and his business is successful. They two, who belongs to different ethnic groups, significantly transform themselves when living together. Living together allows them to know about new elements brought by each other, and further discover their passions.
What is also worth-mentioning is that the book is centered around Sam Westing, who to some extent represents the America. Sam Westing is a second generation of immigrants, while America is exactly formed with immigrants from across the globe. The heirs, who come from a variety of different backgrounds, are actually like the residents and citizens of U.S. Also, Westing surely loves all of his heirs, as the end of the book mentions. Considering the whole book, I figure that the thing he actually loves is exactly no more than the diversity of his community.
While The Westing Game mainly focuses on how diversity contributes to each member of their community, Kira-Kira describes how much things different people, especially children, shared in common. Lynn and Amber’s friendship is an excellent example of this. Lynn, the elder Japanese girl, and Amber come to be really good friends, who nearly stay together all the time. As their original ethnic group lives so far away from each other, it’s easy to form all kinds of misconceptions and stereotypes. However, when they live and study in the same place, they still have a lot in common. They both like to be a model in the future, so they try to practice walking like the way models usually do. They even put books on their heads. In addition, they also talk about boys and all other things they would like.
Katie, the younger sister, also owns the same experience. She met an American girl Silly, who later becomes the little Japanese girl’s buddy, at the parking lot of the hatchery, where Katie’s mother works. From then on, Silly often comes to Katie’s house for fun. The thing is that they just act as if there is no barrier between their racial groups; even it is just after World War II.
