No-No Boy is about main character, Ichiro’s experience in a Japanese Internment camp during WWII, and his struggle to put his life back together following this nightmare. That is the basic plot, which makes this interesting historical fiction. But more than that, the story is a thought-provoking glimpse of America that captures not only the immigrant perspective, but translates to all of humanity.

The American Dream is often simplified to the single desire of obtaining a home surrounded by a white picket fence. Now that I think about it, this simple desire is quite ironic considering our founding fathers were running away from moat-surrounded monarchies and other forms of elitist superiority. In No-No Boy, John Okada taps into this fence fascination and adds his own perceptive spin to it. In theory, a fence is an encapsulating unit that surrounds and protects, keeps out strangers. Okada refers to fences in only a few discrete places in the text, yet the idea of the fence resonates as the overall message of his book. Beyond the obvious uses of the fence in his book, such as the internment camps and the prison in which the main character spends two years, Okada observes the many ways in which humanity tends to utilize the fence.

To Okada, America seems to be divided by fences. On one side you’ll find the Asian American and any other form of brown people, and on the other side you’ll find the white people. Keep the fence in mind as you read this passage from the book, where two of the characters, Ichiro and Kenji, explore the Asian American section of Seattle:

“They walked down the ugly street with the ugly buildings among the ugly people which was a part of America and, at the same time, would never be wholly America.”

Fences, Okada demonstrates, are not put up solely to keep out strangers. The fence theory can be applied to the great divide that existed between the Japanese American community as well, between those who were willing to denounce their Japanese citizenship to fight in the war for America, versus those who were unwilling to give up their heritage: “They rolled down the alley, clawing at each other and straining muscles to seek a victory in the senseless struggle.” The “senseless struggle,” of course, depicts the no-win situation this divided Asian American community experienced at this time.

There is also the suggestion of a fence that Japanese Americans put around themselves to keep out America, to hold onto their culture, rather than submitting to American culture. Kenji says to Ichiro: “I got to thinking that the Japs were wising up, that they had learned that living in big bunches and talking Jap and feeling Jap and doing Jap was just inviting trouble.” Here, Okada suggests that the fence around their community could somehow contribute to the racial divide and feeling of otherness.

Of course there is also the generational fence in the story, between parents and their children and their differing opinions on assimilation into American culture. Okada writes: “Ichiro was young and American and alien to his parents, who had lived in America for thirty-five years without becoming less Japanese and could speak only a few broken words of English and write not at all.”

Toward the end of the book, Ichiro finds himself freed from the fence that his mother attempted to force around him, but witnessed many people who were still fencing themselves in. He rationalizes, “it was a free world, but they would have to make peace with their own little world before they could enjoy the freedom of the larger one.”