ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some aspects of the physical dereliction of the wartime nation through the targeted ruin of minority spaces and livelihoods. It discusses the more generalised understanding of ruin as it feeds the hegemonic cultural imagination with the affective materialities of minority perception an outsider to these ontological relationships. The characterless, low-ceilinged slices of neighbourhood apartments embody the pressures of wartime migration into and out of the area, and the resultant constriction and suppression of spaces and activities. The houses occupied by the family are variations on the modern California houses adopted by Asian middle-class suburbanites after World War II. The struggle of the respondents to regain their properties calls on other forms of capital, of their families’ social standing, of professionalisation and generational investments that have withstood physical destruction and persecution through their individual tenacity.
