“And if anyone asks, you're Chinese. The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese."
While the boy was in the camp, he remembered how his mother tried to protect him and his sister from the soldiers who went into every city and asked what nationality the Asians had. Especially after the man was taken away, the mother hoped that by lying, she will be able to keep herself and her children safe. Thus, she denied her nationality, burnt everything that had to do with Japan and told her children to lie and claim that they were Chinese. This however did nothing to stop the military from rounding up the Japanese and sending them to a camp away from their home.
In the evening he often went to bed early, at seven, right after supper - 'Might as well get the day over with'
The person who was affected the most by the injustice done to them was the father. After he returned home, he was a shell of the man he used to be and his children noticed the difference quickly. The father no longer enjoyed doing the same things he did before he went to prison and he was afraid to even step outside. He no longer had a life and all he did was to wait for the day to be over and the next one to start again. But the next day brought nothing different and thus the father was trapped in a tortured existence, living and waiting for the days to pass so he could one day die. Thus shows just how much the time spent in prison affected those who were there and how negatively it affected their lives.
She was ten years old and she knew what she liked. Boys and black licorice and Dorothy Lamour. Her favorite song on the radio was “Don’t Fence Me in.”
When the author describes the two children in the family, she describes them as being children who assimilated completely the American culture. The girl for example, did not identify with the culture of her mother and she liked the things that were American. She did not speak the Japanese language nor did she have any knowledge about the cultural aspects of her mother’s country. For her, Japan was just a distant land and she had nothing to do with it. Because of this, it is ironic and even tragic to see that children born out of Asian immigrants but who were just as American as the blue eyed and blond children the media worshiped were shipped and locked up as criminals for things they didn’t do.
