A Place to Belong

I think all things in life start for me with my parents. When I was a young child, we lived in Georgia and Arkansas towns where there were very few Nikkei—people of Japanese ancestry. All of them were always involved with the hard work of sexing chickens—separating male from female chickens shortly after they hatch. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. We were part of a small, self-contained community, where my family was my everything. I loved this protected, insulated existence. I loved chasing butterflies with my siblings, I loved going to the library with my mom, and I even loved burning garbage in our incinerator on Friday nights. I loved doing nothing.

It was very different from the way my mom and dad grew up. My mom grew up in Hawaii, with seventeen people living in three small rooms. My dad began work at nine, picking celery at his parents’ tenant farm. Work was his life from then until he retired in his seventies. He and his second wife lived very modestly, but he ended up having to work extra-long because he was swindled out of their life savings. He was in fact a very naive, believing person. My parents were good people, who did everything they did for no other reason than to empower their children in building better lives.

In between all this working, my dad was incarcerated at the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona. I wrote about this place in Weedflower. He was drafted out of that camp and served as an interpreter in Japan.

But I knew there was another story of the camps, of the men who refused to be drafted, of the men and women who objected—oftentimes strenuously—to their treatment. After Weedflower came out, I felt inside myself a yearning to know more about these others. They too had worked since they were very young. They too were concerned about the future empowerment of their children.

I knew there was a stigma attached to these families who took a different path into the future, who renounced their citizenship, who were deported. This stigma seemed wrong to me. To me, people with very similar self-interests were put under a lot of pressure and ended up on different sides, in different camps, and ultimately in different countries. I’m proud of all of them, both “sides,” of their strength and decency under extreme pressure, and of the different, difficult choices they made. Both Weedflower and A Place to Belong are my love letters to all of them, and to all of us as well, in making the difficult choices we face—soon, now, always.