A Welcoming

March 28, 1942

Interestingly enough, we awoke this morning to find ourselves caked in a fine layer of sand and dust. I do not believe Mama found this at all amusing, for she confronted the issue with a look of sheer repulsion.

It is strange to find myself now four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and yet I have not gleaned a greater understanding of this particular topic. Of course, we soon constituted the attack to a naval base situated in Hawaii, a series of islands straying a few thousand miles from the Californian coastline. But it has proved difficult to delineate the occurrence in only numbers – the dead, the wounded, and the living – for the stories beneath the well-disguised façade illuminate with a more revealing light.

Soon after Papa eluded our grasp, Mama proposed to move our family to Terminal Island, where we expected more Japanese that we could associate with culturally, though not in the way we expected. Like Liesel’s entrance into the Hubermann household, I found myself in a new setting of a book, where even a species of your own kind can result as being a creature increasingly gruesome.

Although Terminal Island promised our family a niche amongst Orientals after the racial isolation we encountered in Ocean Park, I harnessed a secret fear for the proud and vulgar natives, especially the children that eventually became my classmates at the local school. Unlike the sweet innocence expected from peers of such a young age, they proved to be the direct opposite; and day after day my older brother Kiyo and I would gauge a new and unexpected route home from school, desperate to detain an ambush from the foreigners we became so unaccustomed to.  

To my relief, we soon gathered our belongings and relocated to Boyle Heights after the navy arrived upon our white-washed shorelines, for they believed the island’s intimate closeness with the Long Beach Naval Station would somehow establish into a growing threat. Yet again, I was confronted by a new tension existing between Americans and Japanese, a sudden turning point veering from the incisive trauma of Pearl Harbor. In my opinion, however, I see a futility in their aimless fumbling; you cannot lead man on a righteous path, for he will always, at heart, elude you.

Boyle Heights welcomed us as a minority ghetto harbored in downtown Los Angeles, and there, my brothers colluded every possible minute on how we could possibly stay intact when Executive Order 9066 swaggered into law. In an attempt to regain the life we had once lived, Mama and Woody began to package celery at a local produce dealer, and Kiyo, my sister May, and I enrolled in the local school.

The memories I obtained in the vicinity of Boyle Heights reveal a great transition in our relationship with the United States, a change in the state of mind. Where tolerance once resided, fear corroded the remaining trust and friendship, until we became aliens to the country we once called home.

In spite of the lassitude that hovered above our family at this time, soon the government informed us that we would be shipped out of our temporary confinements. Although it brings a visualization of an invitation to an unspoken prison, my family took this as a chance to relive our  own traditions and an escape from the desperate turmoil now contaminating old tranquility.

As the bus carried us into the heart of the Owens Valley, I watched the flurries of sand against our window pirouette in their versatile dance, and I observed the way they twirled above us with only the moan of the breeze as a faded melody. In the distance, fate almost came as a tangible substance, only it eluded my palm as the upturned gale flew away.

When we arrived, I only perceived the limitless rows of barracks crossing the open desert, like hovels filed in a desolate prairie. People milled about the tires of our bus, their eyes wayward as they trekked a boundless silence. I closed my one window to the world and crossed the threshold into a stranger realm.

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Now, as I watch the rise of the sun with dust saturated throughout my hair, I linger in another dream. There is a chance it will never be fulfilled, and yet I pursue it anyway; for in the distance, whether near or far, a beginning sleeps with the hope that it will someday be awaken.

 The sign that welcomed Manzanar internees.