We Are Not Free - Traci Chee Page 0,1

a Japanese spy and they think a Japanese spy looks like the guy from the Sutro’s ad, they’ll never find him.

* * *

After the attack, the chimneys in Japantown bloomed with smoke. In the living room, Mom dug into her trunks and began feeding heirlooms into the fireplace, starting with the Japanese flag. I remember her kneeling by the hearth, plump hands folded in her lap, watching the flames obliterate the white sky, the red sun. Next, she burned letters from relatives I’d never met; Jii-chan’s Imperial Army uniform, smelling of mothballs; and a woodblock print of ancestral warriors I used to study for hours (the armor, the ferocious eyes, the wild, battle-blown hair). They looked nothing like me, in my denim and button-downs.

Mas tried to stop her (some of the things she was burning belonged to Dad), but she didn’t stop.

“I’m not a citizen,” she told him. “If they think I’m disloyal, they’ll take me away like Oishi-san.”

Mr. Oishi, Shig’s girl Yum-yum’s dad, is a businessman with contacts in Japan. The FBI whisked him away the night of the bombing like a piece of litter.

He and Mom are what the government calls “enemy aliens.”

We call them Issei. They’re the first generation of Japanese immigrants to come to the United States, but they’ve never been allowed to become naturalized citizens.

That night, I sat on our stoop and drew the Japantown skyline with storm-colored flowers rising from the rooftops, dispersing ash like seeds on the wind.

* * *

Studying my reflection in the drugstore window, I put my fingers to the corners of my eyes, pulling upward to see if I can make myself look like the guy from the flyer. (I can’t.) Behind me, there’s the sound of heels clicking on the sidewalk, and two white women in polo coats, hats, and little suede gloves pass, staring with round blue eyes like binocular lenses, and I remember to keep walking.

As I pass beneath the Spanish tile roofs and honeycomb windows of the Jewish Community Center, I almost kick myself for forgetting again. I should’ve waited at the bus stop. In my head, I hear Mas’s voice again—Think, Minnow—deep and gruff like if he was forced to say a kind word, he’d choke on it.

Mas—that’s short for Masaru—is big and handsome and a lot more serious than he should be at twenty years old. If I was going to draw him, I’d draw him as a rectangle of granite with a chisel-cut mouth and stony black eyes. Sometimes I think Mas looks at me with those eyes and sees nothing but the A’s I could be getting on my report card if only I “applied myself.” He doesn’t see me (Minoru Ito, solid B student), doesn’t see that I’d rather be filling my sketchpad with stick figures than throwing touchdowns or doing geometry proofs.

If he finds out I didn’t take the bus directly after school, he’ll yell at me for sure.

I’m on the outskirts of Japantown when I pass a store I know almost as well as any place in the neighborhood, a grocery owned by Stan Katsumoto’s family. They get fruits and vegetables from their cousins in Sacramento, and if we aren’t forced to evacuate, in a couple of months they’ll have the best peaches in the city: soft, sweet as candy, with juices that run down your chin. Once, when we were younger, all of us stuffed ourselves on the bruised fruit Mr. Katsumoto couldn’t sell. Shig ate so much, he threw it all up again and smiled the whole time, saying it tasted as good coming up as it did going down.

Looking at it now, I kind of feel sick. In addition to the words GROCERY and FRUITS & VEGETABLES, there’s a new sign. Over the door on a big white board are the words I AM AN AMERICAN. One of the windows is busted and covered up with plywood.

* * *

After Pearl Harbor, it seemed like ketos—white people—were jumping everyone with black hair and brown eyes. It got so out of hand that Chinese guys started pinning badges to their lapels declaring I AM CHINESE, just so the ketos would leave them alone.

Before Christmas, Life magazine published an article called “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.” I guess it was supposed to tell ketos which of us to attack, but if you ask me, it wasn’t very helpful, because American citizens are still getting jumped all the time, like when the ketos cornered Tommy Harano behind the