We Are Not Free: Chapters 1–3

Mom’s face went taut and white as a sheet. If I was going to draw her the way she looked then, I’d draw her with thin lips and frightened eyes, pinned to a clothesline, her body flapping in the wind of a passing Nakajima B5N bomber.

We’ve never been allowed inside Sutro Baths, but I used to draw it from the park at Lands End (the glass ceilings, the rough water, the tide-eaten cliffs), imagining what it was like inside those glinting cupolas: the smell of salt water and wet concrete, every sound in that echoing space a slap.

We call them Issei. They’re the first generation of Japanese immigrants to come to the United States, but they’ve never been allowed to become naturalized citizens.

Of all the guys, I like drawing Twitchy best (even though it’s hard because he’s constantly moving, running around or playing with that butterfly knife he stole off a Filipino guy, though he had to turn that in because it was considered contraband) because when he moves, you can see every shadow in his forearms, his shoulders, his back.

Then the first guy punches me again, and my head lolls to the side.

Their house is like a lot of the others in Japantown, with decorative cornices and bay windows from the Victorian era.

I wish I had my sketchpad right now so I could draw that bright rift of fear that’s running through his core like a vein of silver.

Before Mas can reply, the rest of the guys come sauntering back across Webster Street.

Gingerly, I touch the side of my face, where the skin is warm and swollen.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” he intones, “we thank you for this day, all the blessings you have given us, and Chinese guys.”

Pursuant to the provisions of Public Proclamations Nos. 1 and 2, this Headquarters, dated March 2, 1942, and March 16, 1942, respectively, it is hereby ordered that from and after 12 o'clock noon, P. W. T., of Friday, May 1, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, be excluded from that portion of Military Area No. 1 described as follows...

Pursuant to the provisions of Public Proclamations Nos. 1 and 2, this Headquarters, dated March 2, 1942, and March 16, 1942, respectively, it is hereby ordered that from and after 12 o'clock noon, P. W. T., of Friday, May 1, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, be excluded from that portion of Military Area No. 1 described as follows...

Any person subject to this order who fails to comply with any of its provisions or with the provisions of published instructions pertaining hereto or who is found in the above area after 12 o’clock noon, P. W. T., of Friday, May 1, 1942, will be liable to the criminal penalties provided by Public Law No. 503, 77th Congress...

You’d think the JACL would’ve put up a fight or something, but they’ve been doing all sorts of wacky stuff to help Roosevelt and his cronies.

I shake my head, and the humming subsides—you can’t fight the federal government, not unless you want to end up in prison—and I glance back at Twitchy with a lopsided grin.

It’s a message to their customers, thanking them for twenty years of patronage.

“Decent people don’t kick out other decent people, so if we're decent, they can't be decent.” He fans out his hands. “You’re going to cause an existential crisis, Ma! If white people aren’t decent, are they anything?”

They line up in front of the Civil Control Station in their Sunday best—the men in suits, the women in veiled hats and gloves—like they’re going to church instead of an internment camp.

She’s wrapping a set of red-and-black lacquerware, placing tissue paper between each dish to protect it, and she just starts crying. It was her grandmother’s lacquer set, you know?

The food is pretty bad. Yesterday we had potatoes, meat innards, and bread.

I’m sorry for writing in pencil, but I’m trying to economize on ink.

The Greyhound becomes a menagerie on wheels, a circus, a traveling zoo of paper animals, filled with the kids’ delighted shrieking and the imagined sounds of elephants and zebras and monkeys.

Then the grandstand, the muddy racetrack, the tarpaper barracks, and now no one’s speaking.

Between Mom and me, my younger brother, Fred, fidgets and tugs at our hands. At nine years old, he’s small for his age, with a cowlick at the back of his head that won’t stay flat, no matter how much you comb it.

But then I remember how docilely he went with the FBI agents that night: the hollow clop-clop-clop of his heels on the sidewalk, the stoop of his shoulders, the moonlight on the back of his bowed head.

For a second, her gaze flicks over me, almost carelessly, and she grins, mouthing something I cannot hear even in the stifled quiet.

If he had been with us, I think, he would have tried to find hope in the cobwebs and the dirty floors. He would have looked around and said, Adversity is the crucible of the spirit.

If he had been with us, I think, he would have tried to find hope in the cobwebs and the dirty floors. He would have looked around and said, Adversity is the crucible of the spirit.

I cajole Fred into sweeping while I fetch straw for our mattresses.

We’re finally settling in, learning the new addresses of our old friends and neighbors, when we get a letter from our father, who tells us he’s taking a carpentry class from another of the Missoula inmates. Self-edification is important, he reminds us, especially in these uncertain times.

I brush my teeth in a horse trough and tell myself I’m “roughing it” like we did on our vacation to Yosemite last year.

From an old textbook, we learn how wonderful we are, how lucky, how endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

He watches my finger intently, like it’s really traveling the mountain roads, the high, flat desert, to our father.

Sometimes, when Keiko and I walk by, I imagine I’m sitting on the velvet cushions of a luxury car, with the plaintive sounds of a string quartet playing in the background.

Out here, darkness shrouds the fences and the sentries with their rifles, watching the perimeter, and if you don’t look closely, you can pretend you’re somewhere else.

But if I was who I was tonight, uninhibited, jubilant, free?

Amy Oishi would never think such scandalous thoughts.
But I don’t want to be Amy Oishi anymore.
Amy Oishi is compliant.

After we defeat the Japanese at the Battle of Midway, Twitchy steals us a cask of sake, and we celebrate on the infield once the rest of the camp has gone to bed, toasting the brave men of the U.S. Navy.

In Dad’s letters, he continues exhorting us to be good and take care of your mother.

They’re going to burst through the door, brandishing their rifles.