5BERITA.COM, Jakarta — Moving house is rarely just about boxes and furniture. It is about deciding what to keep, what to leave behind, and which memories are worth carrying into the future. Susan Nunes’s short story A Moving Day captures this emotional moment through the experience of a Japanese-American family, turning an ordinary relocation into a powerful reflection on memory, identity, and multicultural life.
At the center of the story is a mother who chooses to give away almost everything she owns. To her daughters, this decision feels unsettling. The objects she is ready to discard photographs, books, household items are not merely things. They are fragments of family history, cultural memory, and unspoken stories. Yet for the mother, these belongings are inseparable from a past shaped by displacement, discrimination, and silence.
Memory, Objects, and Cultural Identity
One of the most striking moments in A Moving Day appears when the narrator describes an old photograph of her mother as a young woman, dressed in a floral-print dress with a lace-edged collar. The image captures a version of the mother that feels distant and almost unfamiliar. It reflects a time before adulthood became weighed down by responsibility, trauma, and the pressure to survive as a minority.
This photograph, like many objects in the story, functions as more than a personal keepsake. It represents a life shaped by cultural negotiation. The Western-style clothing suggests adaptation to American culture, while the mother’s background remains deeply tied to Japanese traditions. In this way, the story quietly illustrates how multicultural identity is never pure or fixed, but always formed through layers of change.
Historical Trauma That Lingers
The mother’s attitude toward the past cannot be separated from the collective trauma experienced by Japanese Americans during World War II. The story recalls moments when Japanese-language books, maps, and personal libraries were destroyed following the attack on Pearl Harbor. These acts were not only about censorship or security; they were acts of cultural erasure. When cultural texts and language are burned, what disappears is not just paper, but identity itself. This history explains why the mother chooses distance rather than preservation. Letting go becomes a way to protect herself from reopening wounds that were never fully healed or openly discussed.
A Generational Gap in Remembering
While the mother sees the past as something heavy and painful, her daughters experience it differently. As second-generation Japanese Americans, they did not live through the same discrimination or fear. For them, the objects their mother wants to discard are meaningful connections to a heritage they only partially understand.
This difference creates quiet tension. The mother’s firm statement she does not want any of it clashes with the daughters’ desire to hold on. This gap reflects a common experience in immigrant families, where the first generation often sees memory as survival, while the second generation sees memory as identity.
Living Between Two Cultures
The story also reveals cultural ambiguity in everyday life. The children attend Japanese language school, yet English is the primary language spoken at home. Traditional arts such as music and flower arrangement are taught with discipline, while daily life follows American norms. Culture exists, but not in a complete or comfortable form.
This in-between state defines the family’s experience. They are neither fully rooted in Japanese tradition nor entirely detached from it. Identity becomes something negotiated rather than inherited, shaped by both presence and absence.
Letting Go Without Losing Identity
By the end of A Moving Day, the mother’s choice to leave with almost nothing does not signal a rejection of her cultural identity. Instead, it reveals a coping strategy shaped by history. Letting go becomes a way to move forward without being overwhelmed by the past.
The story reminds readers that memory does not live only in objects. It survives in stories, relationships, and the way identity is passed from one generation to the next. For the daughters, the task is not simply to preserve the past, but to reinterpret it within their own lives.
Through its quiet, reflective tone, A Moving Day shows that multicultural identity exists in a space between remembering and letting go. It is within this space that individuals learn who they are not by choosing one culture over another, but by carrying fragments of both into the future.
Writer: Fairisya Nur Rahmah
