by Chen Ruilin
My father used to tell me stories.
I remembered, when the moon hung from the heavens and bathed the world with a gentle glow, when the city slept and fireflies flickered like candles, he would sit by my bed. I would listen, with a child’s unique wonder, to his extraordinary stories of fire-breathing dragons and holy temples of deities and journeys to the furthest corners of the world.
But the stories I loved more than anything else were the stories of his life. He told those of his daring voyage across the seas from Japan to America almost three decades ago. I would plead with him to repeat them almost every night. And he would, tirelessly recounting again and again and never once losing his magic to entrance me, about how the small rickety boat he had been on rocked in the churning waves.
“Up and down, and up and down,” he would say, mimicking a swaying boat with his hand. “I felt like I was on a trampoline, except I was surrounded by angry waves that could swallow me up any instant! Boom! Boom! Lightning crashed and thunder rumbled like the footsteps of a giant! I was so scared, I did not want to die! Everyone was screaming, while I just clung to the side of the boat for dear life. My whole body was weak and drenched and shivering, and I couldn’t do anything else except pray I don’t get swept away. Occasionally we would come across one of those huge waves and for a moment we would all think that that was it, we would all die, but then we would go on a wild roller-coaster ride and survive! And then there would be another, and another, and all this while the rain blasted our faces, the wind was enough to toss us off our feet and there was no sign of land in sight.”
When he made the journey to this strange, unfamiliar, bustling city of San Francisco, he had nothing, knew no one, and had nowhere to start. But he persevered, toiling and living and thriving in America.
“When I got off the boat, I was all alone in this huge city!” he told me. “I was even more scared than I had ever been on the boat, battling the seas! I had no money, I couldn’t speak English, and just looking at the endless stretch of concrete made me dizzy – everything was so overwhelming! I started off living in Japantown, everyone there was so nice, they even let me stay and eat for free! Without all the kind people, I would not have been able to survive at all. With their help, I was able to get a small plot of land and grow sugarcane. I had to learn everything from scratch, it was so tiring at the start and I wanted to give up, but I persevered. Then, I met an acquaintance who suggested that I open a small stall to sell my sugarcane. I went through with the idea and the shop flourished. I was so happy and could even rent my own little apartment! The stall soon became a small grocery, and I have been managing it ever since.”
He eventually settled in as one of the thousands of Issei immigrants, Japanese by descent but Americans by heart. He recalled the pride he had felt when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, declaring his unwavering loyalty to the new land he called home, America.
“As we were called to start reciting, I was so nervous, I felt as if I was being suffocated! But then, as I placed my hand firmly over my heart, as I started to recite the pledge” 一 he straightened up, raised his right hand, and set it in the position of how he had done it thirty years ago 一 “‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America…’, a pulse of energy seemed to course through my body, I felt so patriotic and so, so proud to be an American! And you should be too!” He ruffled my hair affectionately.
Those stories were my childhood. They taught me to be proud and patriotic as an American. But they were from a better time, one now long gone, slipping between our pleading grasps like a wisp of smoke disappearing into the winds.
The poison storm brewed, infinitely more devastating than what my father had endured on his journey. Anti-Japanese sentiment grew like a parasite day by day due to Japan’s involvement in the War, and everyone who did not have white skin was deemed to be enemies. Even we, members of the Japanese-American community, who were more than willing to fight to the death for our country, who did everything we could to prove ourselves, who had nothing to do with the war, were demonised, labelled as enemies, traitors. We were scapegoats for the unspeakable public hysteria. Scapegoats for the war that inevitably had to be unleashed on someone. And just because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbour, we were looked on with suspicion and fear and outright hatred.
But we were Americans. We always had been, and always would be.
Snapping out of my reverie, I yawned and gazed wistfully at my deserted store. What used to be a bustling grocery with people choosing fruit, talking and laughing with each other, is now completely silent apart from the feeble whirring of the fan. My heart sank as I stared blankly at the full and untouched shelves, the freezers groaning under the bulk of week-old milk, and the cash register which lay empty apart from a few lonely pennies. My miserable face was reflected on the singular penny in the cash register.
Then, I spotted a man marching directly towards my store. I instantly straightened up and my heart leapt. I waited for the ornamental bells on the glass door to jingle happily. But they never did.
Instead came a deafening crash. Before I realised what was going on, shards of glass sliced my face like knives. “Die, Japanese spies!” the man screeched maniacally before turning back and marching away, casting a dark shadow behind him that twisted into vague, demonic shapes under the setting sun.
I scrambled up and stared at the palm-sized rock that lay beside the cracked door.
It was then I decided I was tired.
Exhausted by the discrimination by my own people. Drained by all those unfounded paranoia of sabotage. I was sick of trying to hold my shattered life together, all because I was Japanese.
I closed the shop and hobbled home.
Pushing open the door, I stumbled in. “I’m back,” I announced, hastily blocking the cut on my face from view with my hand.
“Why so early today? What happened?” my mother, Hinata, asked concernedly. I espied her on the couch rubbing medicinal oil over her temple.
I stopped and my hand remained firmly covering up the wound. Did I really need to add to her ever-expansive buffet of worries?
“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing at all.”
I decided to take a nap to try to erase the unpleasantness of the day. Yet, before I could even shut my eyes in peace, I was unceremoniously shaken awake by my father, Toshio. Rubbing my desiccated eyes, I asked, confused, “What’s the problem?”
He said nothing, just gestured at the television in the living room. The solemn frown on his normally smiling face worried me.
President Roosevelt’s voice rumbled. “My fellow Americans.”
Is this what we had been praying would never come?
“Tonight we welcome an important change. Justice for Pearl Harbour. Executive Order 9066.” The television displayed the horrible bombardment just the day before.
My heart ached as I mourned not only for the departed American heroes, but also for my community. We were merely sacrifices for Pearl Harbour. My blood pulsed with blue-white-red, yet I was apparently still not American “enough”. I was expected to dye my skin white, change my accent, abandon my own identity.
“All Japanese must surrender themselves. The Justice Department has set up relocation camps, to protect our brave American sons from Japanese sabotage.”
My father nodded gravely.
“The time has come,” he said.
The government assured everyone that their actions were justified to wipe out the leadership of potential anti-war resistance and prevent Americans from being ‘radicalised’. My father was a rather prominent figure in the Japanese-American community, the people that the government targeted viciously.
The FBI was detaining them without trial, I had heard. Many families had already been torn apart. I really, really did not want mine to be next.
But it was all inevitable. I knew that our time had indeed come when two soldiers marched in tandem up our front porch a day later, rifles with bayonets slung carelessly on their shoulders. They were dressed in full combat gear, gear that should have been used on a battlefield, not to detain innocent people who offered no resistance.
It was Father who answered the door.
Rifles that had been slung across shoulders just moments ago were suddenly aimed straight at his chest, the tips of their bayonets centimetres away. The soldiers were poised to shoot and kill.
“Hands up, enemy alien!” A curt command; years of being picked out on the streets as a “spy” led to this. They even stripped the title ‘citizen’ from us, just like how they stripped us of our rights, freedom and justice. These were the very things we Americans held so proud.
Shame burned through my soul as I helplessly watched my parents get handcuffed roughly, and herded like animals in a pen. We were forced to march to the train station.
We boarded a train eastwards, towards a place so desolate no one knew the name of, to ‘protect true Americans’ in the cities. We would have to start from scratch in the hot Arizonian desert while being treated as terrorists.
The question that I had wanted to cry out millions of times chattered in my skull. Are we not Americans?
Thousands of families were crammed into a train meant for half that number. Children begged for water, for food, for their mothers. Meanwhile, several women frantically called out for their beloved children, not knowing that they had been left behind thousands of miles away.
The camp was not any better. It was a mere euphemism for a jail cell.
Barbed wires sealed the perimeter, and tall sentry towers aimed machine guns at us, who had no weapons nor offered any resistance. Searchlights followed our every movement, and soldiers patrolled with orders to shoot at the slightest disturbances, all out of unfounded fears that we were saboteurs. The whole complex was nothing but poorly-converted stables, a place not meant for humans to live in. It became the norm for thousands of us to queue up for hours for lousy food at the overcrowded mess hall. It became the norm for our privacy to be regularly violated, to bathe in a mass shower, to have our items searched on command. It was hard to believe that we were imprisoned just because we were demonised as saboteurs, just because we looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbour. But we did not need to look far to see the root of this whole nightmare. It was just a by-product of paranoia.
We were treated like animals. The camps were overcrowded and unsanitary. The reality was unavoidable: we were in prison for our skin colour.
It was when I saw, with my own two eyes, American soldiers mercilessly hammering a Japanese woman with the butt of their rifles in broad daylight, that my resolve hardened. I wanted change, and I wanted it immediately.
Others resigned to their fate; the phrase “shikata ga naiI”, or “It cannot be helped” was popular. But I could not simply swallow it. What made us so different from the rest, apart from our skin colour? So, I started campaigning. I fought not just for my freedom but for my community too.
It started simple. I gathered a small group of like-minded Issei and organised demonstrations. We held up makeshift signs and protested for better living conditions. Then we struggled for our freedom, against this unjustified incarceration, for the racism and discrimination to be addressed and for the alienation to stop. We were sick and tired. We needed to get people to understand that alienation in any form was unacceptable, especially here motivated by utter racism.
After the war ended and we were shoved away, I founded a civil rights group and kept up the fight. Slowly but surely, things changed. Discriminatory policies were scrapped, but they should not have been implemented in the first place. People stopped viewing us as “dirty”, as “spies”, or as “aliens”. Instead, we were Americans just like everyone else.
It was 34 years later when the change I wanted finally happened. It took America 3 months to declare war, but 34 years to admit that they were wrong.
“We now know what we should have known then – not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans.” The apology did not erase the horrors and failures of the government, but it did provide some closure and truth.
After everything that had happened, my father told one more story – this time to the entire hall filled with important people. To the President. To politicians. To everyone.
“When the war started, thousands of Japanese-Americans rushed to their draft board to fight for their country. They fought not only to serve their nation but to prove themselves. They fought with incredible courage, they were sent out on the most dangerous missions, and they sustained the highest casualty rate.
I remember, there was this battle for the Gothic line. The Germans were embedded in this mountain hillside, and three allied battalions had been pounding away at it for six months, to no avail. A battalion of Japanese-Americans was called in and they came up with a unique but dangerous idea: The rear of the mountain was a sheer rock cliff. The Germans thought an attack from the rear would be impossible.
The men of the battalion decided to do the impossible.
On a dark, moonless night, they began scaling that rock wall, a drop of more than 1,000 feet, in full combat gear. They climbed all night long on that sheer cliff. In the darkness, some lost their handhold or their footing and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below. They all fell silently. Not a single one cried out. The men climbed for eight hours straight, and those who made it to the top attacked. The Germans were surprised, and they took the hill and broke the Gothic Line.”
When he finished, the room was entirely silent. It was almost as if the souls of those long-departed Japanese-American heroes were there in the audience, listening to their story being told for the first time in front of a nation that had once betrayed them.
Featured image credit: archives.gov
