On that first weekend in December there must have been twenty or twenty-five boats getting to read leave. I had just turned seven.
The opening line isn’t about just any first weekend in December. For a generation of Americans, it is the weekend in December which she is describing; the only opening week of that tumultuous month which most will ever remember. This is the weekend on which a force of Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, sinking multiple ships, killing thousands and drawing America into World War II. Even more so than most Americans, Japanese-American are likely to recall that momentous week in 1941 for it drew them into two different wars: the one against the Japanese and the one shortly to be conducted against them by the United States government.
The house we lived in was nothing more than a shack, a barracks with single plank walls and rough wooden floors, like the cheapest kind of migrant workers’ housing.
Due to suspicion of conflicting loyalties, many Japanese-Americans were uprooted from their homes—their very lives—and forced to live in internment camps. Notably, however, the same was not require of German-Americans even though the country had also declared on that country in the fight against Hitler. What the narrator is describing here are the living conditions that these people—law-abiding citizens or legal residents of the United States who had committed absolutely no crime nor done anything to generate plausible suspicion that they might be agents of Japan working at odds with the American war policies.
"When your mother and your father are having a fight do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?”
Which is not to suggest that those in the internment camps who were the first generation to immigrate to America did not feel a sense of loyalty to their homeland. At one point, the narrator’s father is directly confronted with the question of which side he hopes will emerge victorious when the war ends: Japan or American; his native country or his adopted country. It is, of course, a distinctly unfair question and is more indicative of what the questioner wants to think than anything else. Mr. Wakatsuki differs in his response from many others in his situation who know well enough that the question is being asked to get a specific response. The response the narrator’s father provides is not only more honest, perhaps, but indicative of the betrayal he feels at even being asked.
I see a young, beautifully blond and blue-eyed high school girl moving through a room full of others her own age, much admired by everyone, men and women both, myself included, as I watch through a window. I feel no malice toward this girl. I don’t envy her. Watching, I am simply emptied...
This quote occurs toward the end of the book as the narrator, now grown, reflects upon her experiences in the internment camp and the process of attempting to assimilate back into normalcy after the war. Except, it is not an actual memory itself, this vision of watching the beautiful blond girl. What she is describing here is an image from a recurring dream. The empty feeling—or rather the feeling of being emptied—is expressed in the dream through inaction: she desperately wants to cry out in some way; to express the reasoning behind that emptiness, but even that is denied her. And what is it that she tries, but fails to cry out even in her dream? The realization engendered by her horrific experience that this girl who is a visual representation of her physical opposite is also something much greater: “she is something I can never be, some possibility in my life that can never be fulfilled.”
