So growing up outside Rochester, New York, all Elizabeth Mickey Breena knew was that she was different, an outsider.
And she blamed her mom, a first generation immigrant from Okinawa, for a doll.
Elizabeth's mom was working as a nightclub hostess on US occupied Okinawa when she first met the American soldier who was deployed during the Vietnam War and would eventually become her husband.
And leaving her home, her family, friends and culture to move to the US.
The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship would follow them into the predominantly white upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise Elizabeth, who would then feel perpetually othered among her friends and her peers, turning that feeling into this cocktail of anger and rebellion.
And decades later, Elizabeth came to recognize the sense of shame and self loathing that haunted both her and her mom and began this process, process of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family, but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people.
And she came to see the profound courage and strength and saw her parents enduring marriage in a very different light.
We dive into this journey, which is beautifully detailed in Elizabeth's haunting memoir, speak Okinawa, which is this heartfelt exploration of identity, inheritance, forgiveness, and really what it means to be at peace with who you are.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
There's so many things I'd love to explore with you, but, I mean, I think there's this really interesting starting point for me, which is I knew nothing about Okinawa, but for one thing, when the first time I heard of Okinawa, it was in the context of the sort of famous blue zones.
So it was this notion that there are a handful of these places around the world where people seem to live forever and be astonishingly healthy until the latest days, where there's an unusually high number of people who are over the age of 100.
And Okinawa was one of those.
And when people tried to deconstruct what's going on here that would make that happen, like the thought process was from the researchers.
Well, it's a blend of community and ikigai, a clear reason to get up in the morning.
And it was primarily with okinawan women, not men, actually.
So it had always been on my radar in that context.
And I'm thinking, wow, it must be this sort of magical place that's always been that way.
And you open and then pepper through the book that the history is actually way more complex and complicated and in entire generations and seasons really dark as well.
Yeah, I thought of that, too.