is the one that has no voice: the reverse shadow that was burned into the stone step when the person sitting there was incinerated.
It is shadows I am thinking of. The past should cast a shadow on who we are now. If there is a puzzle, then here’s another piece of it: my mother, who forgot that she was interned long before she began truly forgetting; my family, who never mentioned it, who hid the photographs, for whom to heal was to forget. I am the descendant of a group of people who built a wall down the center of their lives, between the internment and their future, and thrived on the disconnect. That silence came partly from embarrassment. They were interned, and released, and the experience wasn’t terrible enough to complain about, especially in contrast to the other atrocities of the war. But there was something else too: they were asked to prove their American-ness. And so my cousins are all only half Japanese, like I am. All of us English-speaking, all of us pizza-eating, melting pot Americans.
If the internment wasn’t terrible “enough,” it was still shot with shame and difference. The only way to escape, to be safe, was to be what someone else wanted you to be. In the case of Hiroshima, this need to scour the face that we show the outside world, to clean up the city so that healing, not keloids, walks among us, has become a municipal obsession. I’m reminded of the Maiden I spoke with: even if the hibakusha are being eaten by cancer, they—we, none of us—
don’t have to play the victim. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, of strength or of vision. It is identity. Choice. If we don’t want to appear wounded, then all we need to do is to present ourselves as untouched.
Now that I am in Japan, I’m beginning to sense this mechanism in myself: there is a distance, a small gap, between the neat labels I present on the outside, and the more turbulent urges I’m finding inside. This is nothing special, not the consequence of some hidden trauma, it’s simply easy: the external persona quiets the questions. It’s polite.
How are you? I am fine.
But in this sea of black umbrellas, there is something in me, a possibility teasing the edges of my thoughts, that wonders if this adaptation—this ability to reshape one’s persona—isn’t both a blessing and a curse? My own Japanese American family is proof that you can transform yourself so thoroughly you become the thing you appear to be. If you choose the wrong persona, though, who are you, and what are you left with then? If Brian’s vision of me is not quite my own vision, is that just a simple misunderstanding born of the fact that we’re apart? Am I changing, or was I never that person in the first place?
LILY
“I AM SORRY they are dead,” the director of the Peace Museum tells me, as if he himself killed the women I’m looking for. “But have you heard of a woman named Lily Onofrio? She was also in the internment camps and she’s a hibakusha . We have some relics from her family in the museum.”
Lily Onofrio. Tule Lake.
Yes.
“Lily Onofrio is in Hiroshima?”
“Her family used to live here. Her address is in California. But she comes back to Japan sometimes for treatment.”
A box of ashes tied to an old man’s chest.
Lily didn’t want to go to Japan, isn’t that what the story was? Or she changed her mind at the last minute. Lily’s mother-in-law died in the camps, I remember. Her mother-in-law in the box.
I remember the anthology where I first read Lily’s story, how her chapter was bisected by photographs. Lily was a young mother—her infant was sickly, almost died. She was separated from her husband and then sent, after the war, to Japan against her will. Lily’s story was very much the story of Tule Lake, the camp for “traitors,” and the internees who were labeled dissidents and moved there. It was about the tortures and the stockades and the shootings—the worst of the internment. My first book was
It is shadows I am thinking of. The past should cast a shadow on who we are now. If there is a puzzle, then here’s another piece of it: my mother, who forgot that she was interned long before she began truly forgetting; my family, who never mentioned it, who hid the photographs, for whom to heal was to forget. I am the descendant of a group of people who built a wall down the center of their lives, between the internment and their future, and thrived on the disconnect. That silence came partly from embarrassment. They were interned, and released, and the experience wasn’t terrible enough to complain about, especially in contrast to the other atrocities of the war. But there was something else too: they were asked to prove their American-ness. And so my cousins are all only half Japanese, like I am. All of us English-speaking, all of us pizza-eating, melting pot Americans.
If the internment wasn’t terrible “enough,” it was still shot with shame and difference. The only way to escape, to be safe, was to be what someone else wanted you to be. In the case of Hiroshima, this need to scour the face that we show the outside world, to clean up the city so that healing, not keloids, walks among us, has become a municipal obsession. I’m reminded of the Maiden I spoke with: even if the hibakusha are being eaten by cancer, they—we, none of us—
don’t have to play the victim. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, of strength or of vision. It is identity. Choice. If we don’t want to appear wounded, then all we need to do is to present ourselves as untouched.
Now that I am in Japan, I’m beginning to sense this mechanism in myself: there is a distance, a small gap, between the neat labels I present on the outside, and the more turbulent urges I’m finding inside. This is nothing special, not the consequence of some hidden trauma, it’s simply easy: the external persona quiets the questions. It’s polite.
How are you? I am fine.
But in this sea of black umbrellas, there is something in me, a possibility teasing the edges of my thoughts, that wonders if this adaptation—this ability to reshape one’s persona—isn’t both a blessing and a curse? My own Japanese American family is proof that you can transform yourself so thoroughly you become the thing you appear to be. If you choose the wrong persona, though, who are you, and what are you left with then? If Brian’s vision of me is not quite my own vision, is that just a simple misunderstanding born of the fact that we’re apart? Am I changing, or was I never that person in the first place?
LILY
“I AM SORRY they are dead,” the director of the Peace Museum tells me, as if he himself killed the women I’m looking for. “But have you heard of a woman named Lily Onofrio? She was also in the internment camps and she’s a hibakusha . We have some relics from her family in the museum.”
Lily Onofrio. Tule Lake.
Yes.
“Lily Onofrio is in Hiroshima?”
“Her family used to live here. Her address is in California. But she comes back to Japan sometimes for treatment.”
A box of ashes tied to an old man’s chest.
Lily didn’t want to go to Japan, isn’t that what the story was? Or she changed her mind at the last minute. Lily’s mother-in-law died in the camps, I remember. Her mother-in-law in the box.
I remember the anthology where I first read Lily’s story, how her chapter was bisected by photographs. Lily was a young mother—her infant was sickly, almost died. She was separated from her husband and then sent, after the war, to Japan against her will. Lily’s story was very much the story of Tule Lake, the camp for “traitors,” and the internees who were labeled dissidents and moved there. It was about the tortures and the stockades and the shootings—the worst of the internment. My first book was
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