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Breaking the silence | page 1, 2
Despite the failure of my Web search, I know that Japanese-Americans will use the National Day of Remembrance this year to remind the country about the internment so that no other group will ever be systematically excluded because of race. They will also speak out about the larger issues of constitutional rights, tolerance, prejudice and race -- all of which are unfortunately all too relevant as thoughtless, hostile racism continues all over the world. But this civil rights agenda is only the beginning. The silence within our families also must be broken. My generation needs to hear -- and feel -- the individual experiences that our parents and grandparents went through, and not only to complete our family histories. The internment is within us; its effect is hereditary. But if we cannot recognize it, if we believe we are immune, we may fail to see the racial boundaries that still exist all around us. This happened to me. The truth is, I didn't suddenly find out about the internment eight years ago. Like my mother, I learned about it in high school. When I was a junior, my grandmother was invited to school to talk about her experiences during the war. She told my class about the evacuation, and how the family was given a week to sell everything they owned. One of their neighbors agreed to buy their brand-new player piano, then did not return until several hours before the family had to leave and gave them some piddling amount for it "to be nice" because he could just as easily have taken it for nothing once they had gone. The story should have haunted me, but I ignored it for almost 15 years. I didn't have the information or the empathy to ask my grandmother what happened next, or any of the questions like "Who am I?" and "Where did I come from?" that I want answered now. Instead, I accepted the minor celebrity her visit brought me, and marveled with all my friends about those poor people and what they went through. The assimilation my family had worked so hard to achieve was complete -- at least at that moment. There was still so much silence in our family that I barely knew then that I was Japanese. The internment was over; there was nothing to remember. They had made me untouchable. It would never happen to me.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Sound off Related Salon stories Why they never told us First novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto talks about the silence surrounding the Japanese internment camps, being "stealth Japanese" and writing herself into two children.
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