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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

He loves me, he loves me not
Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love.
By Eleanor Stacy Parker
[02/17/00]

Love strands
My daughters are part me and part their father. The evidence is in their springy, curly, ready-to-dread hair.
By Susan Straight
[02/17/00]

Torn to pieces
Brothers and sisters in foster care, rarely adopted together, are routinely split and scattered, never to see each other again.
By Nell Bernstein
[02/16/00]

Beware of "women's culture"
Francine Prose issues a stern warning in the New York Times about market-driven pablum for women -- who are as silly, powerless and narcissistic as a gender can get.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
[02/15/00]

War of the dust-busters
Cheryl Mendelson may have written "Home Comforts," but my grandmothers could out-scrub her any day.
By Pamela Gordon
[02/15/00]

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I am hoping this year's National Day of Remembrance will fill some of the silences that stand between me and the internment. I have been trying to find out what happened for the past eight years of my life.

My mother was interned as a child. And, although she has no memory of it, I imagine her there: a 4-year-old Japanese-American Shirley Temple with glossy black curls and a spray of freckles beneath her wide, brown eyes. She is a danger to no one, and yet she is posed on a swing made from scrap wood and borrowed rope, living in a 12-by-20-foot room with her family somewhere in the Colorado prairie. She is singing a song about a little red bird, "Akai tori kotori," in the language she shares with her watchful grandmother. A language she has tried, and failed, to relearn.

Why can't my mother speak Japanese? Why were there no pictures of the barracks on the walls of her childhood home? None of snowball fights in front of a barbed-wire fence, or Christmas dinners served in shifts in the crowded mess hall? We didn't talk about the internment in our family. When my mother eventually found out about it in high school, she was shocked, but felt no need to pass this information along to me.

This silence about internment is not unusual in the Japanese-American community. In fact, the reluctance to talk about it has become something to be remarked on, a well-documented curiosity. If you ask someone what happened -- what it was really like to be swept from home and put in a camp for years -- you might be told a funny story. One woman I have heard of said, "If it weren't for the internment, we never would have had a vacation." My uncle told me that the internment was "the best thing that ever happened" because it allowed the Japanese-Americans to prove their loyalty. These disclaimers are incredible and so at odds with the racial hysteria, the stigma and upheaval of the time.

In my search for the genesis of this silence, I have been told it is cultural: The Japanese don't complain; the Japanese respect authority; the Japanese are indirect, and do not say what they mean. In other words, they are silent because they are Japanese, just as they were untrustworthy because they were Japanese. Inscrutable, inexplicable -- and internable -- because they were Japanese. By tracing everything back to race, we don't have to concern ourselves with it. But, given the choice between feeling pain and deflecting it, who among us would endlessly relive such a terrible betrayal?

I learned a valuable lesson about deflecting this pain from two sisters who shared their memories of the internment with me. The younger one spoke about the terrible hardships her family went through after Pearl Harbor was bombed -- stories, she admitted, that she had never been able to share with her children, despite their repeated requests. She cried as she told me how her father and her older sister's husband were taken in the FBI sweeps because they were leaders in the community; how her sister, who had a small child, was separated from the rest of the family by travel restrictions.

It took years for the family to be reunited, and when her father was finally returned to them, the dust and dirt in the incessant wind that blew through the camp left permanent scars on his lungs.

Her older sister didn't say a word to me about her family. Instead, she spoke very passionately about the community in camp, the socials they held to raise people's spirits, the crafts. When she laughed, which she did often, she held her hand casually over her mouth so her teeth wouldn't show, and whenever I tried to steer her gently back to her own experiences, she replied with, "Well, I think maybe most of us ..." "Most of us." I could not get her to say the words, "to me."

Next page | Silence to ensure that we will never again be sent "on vacation"