by Ruth Sasaki
Then there were the other stories, the ones that people didn’t talk about: the pretty fourteen-year-old who was lured into the barrack apartment of an older family friend who said he had something to show her. When he locked the door and started to draw the shades, she knew something wasn’t right and had the spirit to escape and tell her mother. That’s the story she finally told, decades later. I hope it ended that way, unlike nightmares I sometimes have, where I wake up and force myself to go back to sleep and dream a different, better ending.
There was the lost baby: its mother died in camp, and the grieving father enlisted and was killed in Europe; but what happened to the baby? A friend of the mother’s, who had resettled in the Midwest, heard about the father’s enlistment and death and asked acquaintances about the baby, offering to take it to raise if someone was coming from camp and could bring it; but no one knew what had happened to it. Everyone was struggling with their own problems, their own family’s survival. A baby fell through the cracks, and the mystery of its fate haunts the mother’s friend to this day.
Those are stories of shame and guilt, and we Japanese feel a lot of shame and guilt but don’t like to advertise it. So we smiled for War Relocation Authority photos that supported the government’s narrative about how good life was in the camps. Meanwhile, those untold stories, like Dorothea Lange’s censored photos, were filed away, obscuring the vileness and tragedy of mass incarceration—until the day the photos were shown, and the stories told. By that time, the government figured, no one would care anymore. But we care… don’t you?
About the contributor: Ruth Sasaki was born and raised in San Francisco after the War. The Takahashis, her mother’s family, were incarcerated in Tanforan and Topaz. A graduate of UC Berkeley (BA) and SF State (MA), she has lived in England and Japan. Her short story “The Loom” won the American Japanese National Literary Award, and her collection, The Loom and Other Stories, was published in 1991 by Graywolf Press. She shares her more recent writing via her website: www.rasasaki.com.
Copyright 2019, R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.