Paper short abstract:

On mission to uncover the stories of women in my community, my questions were met - like clockwork - with self-dismissal. In an insightful twist, what first felt like lack of data has emerged as unarticulated discourse that now lies at the heart of my storytelling - it is time to break the silence.

Paper long abstract:

My frustration was painfully more obvious than the substance of my mother's contribution when, in wrapping my interview with her I had asked, "So, what did you do all day, mama?" I was gathering data for my project on women's stories in our community, beginning with my most accessible informant, only to find myself thoroughly annoyed by my mother's apparent lack of self-awareness. I first got a baffled stare back, almost as if she had found my question absurd. Then she trumped it by summing up a solid hour's recount of her early married life as a lonesome 'gaijin' housewife in Japan in one word - "Nothing." I followed faithfully by gawking in turn. Day-in-day-out, for days on end, to my mother, she had spent her days doing "nothing". This was what was absurd – this illogical sequence of rich detail followed by total negation. To my mother however, that was just how it was, for this is how it has always been. That her matter-of-factness irked me so bore deep insight did not occur to me immediately. But then auntie after auntie interviewed revealed a pattern of dismissiveness. Be it the reality of their trauma from war-time separation; the hardships of their adjustment to alien country as new brides; their roles, in the daily sustenance of their diasporic settlement – it all came down to nought. I now had a theme of silence emergent, more poignant than the stories I sought; itself precisely the story to tell.