Of course, Rodriguez’s and McCourt’s power extend beyond the realm of social inequality.  Within these stories is redemption, for sure, but also selfhood that is at once entangled with and defined by cultural identity.  In his book Volcano, poet Garrett Hongo returns to the Hawaiian town where he was born and unearths a personal history and ethnic heritage that otherwise would have been lost.  “My first trip back was a pilgrimage, an exploration, a reunion,” he writes.  In his prologue, Hongo remembers his mother drilling Mainland English into his head in the kitchen of their small Los Angeles apartment -- and forcing the Hawaiian pidgin out.  He was six.  So much of his story is a reclamation of himself through rich, often arrestingly beautiful language.  Such language bewitches a reader so that Hongo’s identity is laid bare, and the place where he reconciles his otherness becomes vivid, relevant and real. 

Like Hongo, Lydia Minatoya must return to the source to come to terms with her identity.  For her, this is Japan.  She does not return because family secrets are buried, but because she feels obscured from herself.  “I am a woman caught between standards of East and West,” she writes.  “All these incongruities came flooding back while visiting my Japanese family.  The pull to be deferent.  The push to be bold.  The tension and richness between.”  There is no solution to this tension, but Minatoya finds acceptance in it.  She travels to China, Nepal.  She finds more of herself, and in the people she meets she finds a common goodness that seems to stream through humanity.  “Time after time, there it was again: in courage and generosity, in wonder and simplicity, in genuine gladness of heart.” 

Published in 2005, Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava shares a timeliness with other acclaimed Arab American memoirs like Reading Lolita in Tehran and Lipstick Jihad.  Abu-Jaber’s book, in its artfully honed majesty, appeals to all the senses, particularly taste.  Food is the centerpiece of Abu-Jaber’s tale.  Her large Jordanian family gathers around it, and it is the richness with which Abu-Jaber describes these feasts that invites readers into the culture.  And in the process she humanizes what media and ignorance have allowed to become our newest monster: the Arab male.  In Jordan, Abu-Jaber’s uncles gather in her apartment, indulging in foods usually forbidden to them by their wives – pastries, candied chickpeas, ice cream.  They argue about politics.  They talk about America.  “Why is it, they wonder, that America gets fatter … while the rest of the world gets leaner, hungrier, sicker, angrier?  Can this be right?”  But then, instead of planning America’s destruction, they talk about their children, their children’s spouses, their concerns for their families.  When it’s time, they silence themselves and watch The Bold and the Beautiful, which they believe, Abu-Jaber says, depicts American life. 

            In a way, the ethnic memoir marks the quintessential power behind the genre.  Memoir is constantly creating tension between empathy, solidarity, alienation and understanding.  And ethnic memoir does even more so – almost always there is the other, someone of a different race, culture, religion, staring a reader in the face.  It is a challenge.  It can be an invitation.  When it’s good, it’s both.  Of course, the beauty is in the telling.  When the writing works, the simple, ubiquitous poetry of human emotion is laid out for everyone to feel.