Immigrants always face a difficult transition when leaving their home country. The challenge arises to keep alive old traditions while adapting to a new culture. Rosie's mother, Tome Hayashi, in "Seventeen Syllables" exemplifies the phenomenon of two cultures combined; she enjoys writing Japanese poetry, but she pursues her writing alone and for her own gain and not for family honor. By allowing poetry to come between her and her family, Mrs. Hayashi departs from the role of a traditional Japanese wife. Tome Hayashi embodies a clash of Japanese and American cultures; she loves haiku, but she also harbors a strong sense of individuality that departs from Japanese values.

The first time I met Jen, we were only four, and it didn't occur to me that she was an immigrant. Eventually, I realized that her mom was white, and Jen was Oriental, South Korean to be exact. I never realized that her brother was not her real brother, either; they were both Korean, so I assumed they came over together. Her ethnicity never affected our friendship or my opinion of her in the early years. We played together, usually pretending to be Star Wars characters.

Mrs. Hayashi harbors a very Japanese enjoyment in haiku. The story begins as she explains haiku to Rosie. She describes it as "a poem in which she must pack all her meaning into seventeen syllables only, which were divided into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables" (2164). Mrs. Hayashi not only describes the poem's form, she stresses the need to make her poems meaningful. Anyone can describe haiku's structure, but a true poet like Mrs. Hayashi discusses the challenge of making the words in that structure significant. She talks about how she "tried to capture the charm of a kitten, as well as comment on the Japanese superstition that owning a cat of three colors meant good luck" (2164). Haiku appears to be Mrs. Hayashi's connection to her Japanese roots; not only is it Japanese itself, but her subjects are greatly Japanese as well. Mrs. Hayashi's love of haiku does not stop with merely reading and writing for enjoyment; Rosie explains, "Once a week, the Mainichi would have a section devoted to haiku, and her mother became an extravagant contributor" (2164). As a writer, Mrs. Hayashi seeks gratification for her work; she also yearns for the honor of publication. Although she may work on an American tomato farm by day, Mrs. Hayashi encompasses an extremely Japanese pastime and writes with a particularly Japanese style.

The inevitable questions came up one day in lunch: "Do you ever want to go back to Korea and find your real mom?" She gave us a weird, almost resentful look and told us that her mom who raised her were her real mom, and that she had no interest or need to find her birth parents. Jen said she did not know much about her birth mother, but she and her adoptive parents assumed that her mother had been very young. In later years, we realized how many different unpleasant circumstances could have led to her birth, and we never pressed the topic again.

Haiku, though an innocent pastime, makes Mrs. Hayashi feel independent of her family. When she begins writing for the Mainichi, Mrs. Hayashi takes a pen name and starts to break away from her family: "Ume Hanazono Mrs. Hayashi's pen name, who came to life after the dinner dishes were done, was an earnest, muttering stranger who often neglected speaking when spoken to" (2164). She isolates herself when she writes, and her focus on only writing makes her act rudely toward the rest of the family; both actions depart from the traditional Japanese wife's role. The family unit carries great importance in the Japanese culture, and Mrs. Hayashi puts her own wishes before her family when she becomes the stranger Ume Hanazono. From a Japanese standpoint, her actions border on selfishness. Rosie's parents used to play games occasionally before going to bed, but, "now if her father wanted to play cards, he had to resort to solitaire (at which he always cheated fearlessly)" (2165). Rosie's mother does not include her husband in her world of haiku. When they visit with friends, Mrs. Hayashi only talks about haiku, and she leaves her husband to entertain anyone not interested in poetry; when Rosie's mother talks with Mr. Hayano, "Rosie's father was sitting at one end of he sofa looking through a copy of Life, the new picture magazine" (2166). Rosie's father does not take part in the haiku discussion, and he becomes rather irritated at Rosie's mother for ignoring him. Although he says nothing when Rosie and her mother get into the car to leave the Hayanos' home, his anger, though forcefully repressed, clearly shows through his silence. He does not respond to Rosie's mother, and Rosie becomes angry with both of them, "for her mother for begging, for her father for denying her mother" (2166). Rosie's mother allows haiku to come between her and her husband, and the independence she feels from the separation causes the malcontent in Rosie's father. His displeasure becomes evident again when Rosie's aunt and uncle visit: "when she finally returned to the parlor, she found her mother still talking haiku… Her father was nowhere in sight" (2169). The rift in the marriage finally reaches a peak when Rosie's mother entertains a man from the newspaper instead of doing her duty to the family; she fixes tea for him, but she is needed in the fields to help with the tomato sorting (2170). Although all her diversions involve a thoroughly Japanese hobby, she goes about it in a very un-Japanese way by putting herself and her interest before her family.

Jen started to change when the school started giving us the puberty talks. When they started stressing to the girls that we should talk to our moms about the hereditary tendencies, she started to feel like an outsider. All the rest of could talk to a mom who knew exactly what we were going through; her mom could only repeat the school nurse's words. When she and her mom argued, like all teenage girls and their mothers do, she had an argument the rest of us did not: the "real" mother card. She probably refuted it, though, because she knew her life would be completely different if she had not been adopted. If she had been from North Korea, she would have been killed instead of sent to an orphanage. I think realizing that both options would involve pain and unhappiness began to depress her. Maybe she started wondering about her birth mother's mental conditions. In middle school, she told us that as soon as she turned eighteen, she was leaving a bag of money on the doorstep and never coming back.

Mrs. Hayashi's views on marriage and men ultimately separate her from traditional Japanese values. When she lived in Japan, she had an affair with a boy from a rich family, which culminated when "she had given premature birth to a stillborn son" (2171). Her lover married a girl from another rich family, and Tome's family hated her for her discretion. She disgraced them even more than her drunken gambler of a father. After the incident, "her family did not turn her out, but she could no longer project herself in any direction without refreshing in them the memory of her indiscretion" (2171). Simply by remaining with them, she reminded her family of how she had dishonored them. Japanese culture, like many others, does not favor affairs outside of marriage, and because family honor carries so much importance, affairs such as Tome's cause would cause tremendous distress in any Japanese family. Distraught, Tome resolved to kill herself if her sister in America could not help her (2171). Her sister arranged for her to marry a man recently arrived from Japan; he was "a young man of simple mind, it was said, but of kindly heart" (2171). Rosie's mother does not exhibit any signs of love or hate when she tells the story; she remains calm and impassive as though rehearsed: "It was as though her mother had memorized it by heart, reciting it to herself so many times over that its nagging vileness had long since gone" (2171). However, her passion appears when she warns her child to learn from her mistakes: she demands Rosie, "'promise me you will never marry'" (2172). Arrange marriages, as seen with Tome's lover, were common in Japanese culture. Although Rosie's mother does not act completely miserable about her arranged marriage, she uses haiku as an escape. Her actions and her warning to Rosie reveal her unhappiness with marriage, despite having a kind man for a husband. Rosie promises, but she hesitates because she recalls her developing feeling for Jesus, a boy she knows: "for an instant she turned away, and her mother, hearing the familiar glib agreement, released her. Oh, you, you, you, her eyes and twisted mouth said, you fool" (2172). Her mother sees that Rosie is falling in love; after her own negative experiences with love, she cannot be anything except cynical. After Rosie begins to cry, "the embrace and consoling hand came much later than she had expected" (2172) because Tome must first overcome her personal displeasure caused by seeing her daughter fall into the trap of love. Her indiscretion early in life and her displeasure with marriage ultimately separate Tome Hayashi from Japan's culture.

Being adopted, Jen did not have a normal Asian upbringing. Her parents did not pressure her to be the best, and she did not have the same undying sense of honor I have seen in some of my non-adopted Asian friends. She was not disrespectful, but she was not a champion, either. It was a given that every year at Solo and Ensemble Festival, there would be at least one Asian kid in the piano section several years younger than us who played so well that we felt completely unprepared and unaccomplished. I think Jen wanted to be that kid, but I received higher ratings than her every year. In our band class, she only sat second chair flute, not first. Originally, she aimed to be a valedictorian, but she gave up on straight As after a tough biology class. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but I am certain that things would have been different if she had come from an entirely Asian household. I think she still feels like an outsider; she has different issues to overcome than her white friends, but her white upbringing still separates her from other Asian kids who grew up with their birth parents.

Rosie's mother may enjoy her haiku, but she is too independent to be a traditional Japanese wife. Her lover in Japan married another girl, and Tome cannot be happy in a loveless arranged marriage. By trying to escape, even though her course of action draws her into the world of Japanese poetry, she departs even further from her mother country. At the heart of her being, her actions with men and within marriage show that she is too independent to be happy as a traditional Japanese woman. While achieving for one's self is not shameful in America, the family and family honor comes first in Japan. Rosie's mother seeks honor for herself, and she cannot be happy solely by achieving with and for her family. Tome Hayashi could have included her family in her success, but instead she chose to isolate herself and use poetry as way out of her marriage; she deeply resented marriage, and nothing could change her mind or her heart.

Like leaves on the wind

She drifts from place to new place

Searching for herself.