My mother and I visited Manzanar in the summer. We raised our cameras to everything we saw. Our first stop was the sign, a wooden board hanging between two posts like a stretched hide tanning in the sun. Manzanar War Relocation Center, it proclaimed. My mother was a gust of desert wind. She kicked up dust as she circled a nearby guardhouse with her camera. Occasionally, she would stop to look at me, her eyes widening. I watched her and felt heavy with our family history. Here, sixty-five years later, the daughter and granddaughter of a former internee had returned to continue the story. That afternoon, my mother’s fervor was so large it was almost unbearable. When I looked to the mountains, I could not tell which was bigger.
Some days I wake up and the internment is at the foot of my bed, prowling. I look at it, a hair-balled thing, and want to shoot an arrow straight through its heart. On these days, it follows me wherever I go. It is always at my heels, nipping. Sometimes, I wait until it isn’t looking and try to kick it in the side. I hate it because so often it feels like it is trying to define me. It’s as if my whole life gains meaning solely from it, a detail so rich I could hold it in my hands and mistake it for gold.
It defines my mother, also. She bends to it, has been bending to it her entire life. It encompasses her world like a giant cloud. She breathes it in. When confronted with it, she goes into a frenzy.
The histories we are born from, so often become us. We arrive into this world already carrying stories, and even though all we can do is take milk and stare into our mother’s eyes, they are busy forming us. In the hands of our histories, we are clay.
In my house there is an unframed poster of Executive Order 9066. Until recently, it was rolled up and placed in a corner of my childhood bedroom. Now it is rolled up and sitting on my writing desk. The sticker on the back says I paid $10.00 for it at the Manzanar gift shop. It has remained unframed all these years because a part of me feels shame for owning it. We open our wallets for many things, but when is enough enough?
I have a lot of souvenirs from Manzanar. There is a magnet set, a sticker, a patch for sewing onto a jacket, a baseball shirt with the team name Manzaknight written across the front. On a tiny scrap of paper, I have a national park passport stamp from the camp. Inked in green, I keep it next to a picture of the Manzanar cemetery monument that I have wedged between the wood and the mirror of my dresser. On a pinboard I keep a tiny lapel pin with an image of a guard tower against the mountains. If I were to place all of this in a pile in the middle of my floor, it might look excessive, an overabundance. Some might even call it tacky. But what is a life if not to fill it with things? We shovel our bags full of dirt.
After our trip, we visited my grandmother and gave her a tiny glass jar filled with Manzanar sand. She had been interned at Heart Mountain, but we thought she might appreciate a piece of her late husband’s history. We sat at her bedside and told her about the trip. We showed her our pictures. When we were finished, all she said was, What about Heart Mountain? Did you go there, too?
Once, during a playground date, all of my friends and I ran off over a hill. They ran into the woods like fairytale children; they followed dark paths and ate berries from bushes. Their curiosity overpowered their reserve. When our mothers realized we were missing, they went into a frenzy. They scattered through the park calling our names. When they found us, I was the only one standing at the edge of the forest, unwilling. My face was not stained with juice from the poisonous fruit. My mother praised me for choosing not to follow, and we left the park just as the ambulance arrived.
I stayed put on the edge of those woods not because I knew better, but because I knew doing so would please my mother.
I am Yonsei, fourth generation Japanese American—decades removed from those desert barracks—so sometimes, when I think of the internment, I’m not sure if my interest in it is simply out of obligation. Growing up, my mother talked about the internment constantly. I learned many of my facts from her: the No-No Boys, the 442nd, the dust storms, and the horse stables. The only time my grandparents spoke about it was when asked. My grandmother would always say, It wasn’t that bad. Two generations telling me different stories. The ones who lived it saying, We’ve moved on, and the one born from it saying, We must never forget. I am fourth generation Japanese American, and I am third generation internee. If I have an obligation to it, it was learned.
When my grandmother asked us if we visited Heart Mountain, my mother reassured her that we would go there next. And perhaps someday we will. If I think that we did not visit Manzanar out of any obligation, I am missing the point. If I think we will visit Heart Mountain purely for personal interest and not to fulfill a promise, I am a liar.
What I am trying to say is there is no escaping your obligations. My Japanese American mother was unable to escape the Japanese tradition of filial piety. It is in her blood and the blood of her brother and sister. I saw it as I watched them care for their ailing parents over the years with a combination of stubbornness and grace. This same devotion has been passed on to me. I am my mother’s only child. The obligation I have to her and to our family’s history is indisputable.
In one of my photographs from Manzanar, my reflection in a pane of glass overlaps my mother’s body peering through an opposite window. She is looking down at something on the floor of the tiny guardhouse, about ready to raise her camera. I am looking straight ahead, focusing my lens on her. Our bodies overlap in the glass of her father’s past. Three generations captured within a single frame.
Towards the end of my grandmother’s life, she started collecting pinecones. On a workbench in her garage, she would lay them out in rows. When my mother discovered this, she started taking pictures. Recently, I learned that there are male and female pinecones. The ones my grandmother was collecting were female. Having done their reproductive job of opening and sending their seeds off into the wind, they fell to the ground for my grandmother to find. In one of my mother’s photographs, the pinecones atop their workbench are in the foreground, and through the garage window in the background, you can see my grandmother seated in her garden looking at the flowers. Her image is hazy, almost ghostlike through the glass, but the pinecones are sharp and resonant, as if speaking for her.
There are many ways to collect things. You can collect things in jars like beach sand and seashells. You can collect whole time periods through photographs and video. You can collect things by pinning them to boards: blister beetles and butterflies and nearly microscopic ants. Boxes can be used to collect pebbles and pearl buttons. Stamps can be stuck in a book. Memories, it seems, can only be collected in a sieve in your mind.
My mother is Sansei, third-generation Japanese American. She was born over a decade after the camps, when her parents finally met and fell in love in Chicago. For many years, her father worked as a chicken sexer. Each day, he would go to the farms and separate the males and the females from each other by hand. For my mother, what she remembers most about that time is his fingernail. She tells me: He always had one that was slightly longer than all of the others. I don’t know exactly what he used it for, but I suspect it had to do with sexing chickens. I never asked.
At my mother’s house in the family room above the television, there is a painting of her father, imagined in soft strokes of acrylic, head bent over his hands staring at the feathered bottom of a baby chicken. He wears a dirtied, blue apron over a white T-shirt and black pants. In boxes along the table in front of him are groups of white chicks separated from each other by cardboard. She painted it in graduate school from an old photograph.
On another wall, hangs a portrait of her grandfather. Of the Issei generation, the first to come over from Hiroshima, he is dressed in a long flowing silk kimono, the pattern reminiscent of sand dollars and pine needles. His hands clasp a small teacup, which looks more like a pearlescent shell pinched between his fingers. Behind him, the background is a deep, chalky red. On top of this, a pattern of yellow-green half-moon slivers fall behind his head like fingernail clippings. Her most vivid memory of him, she told me, is one in which he offered her, a little girl, a half-smoked cigarette at a family gathering.
When I was in fifth grade, I entered a speech contest at my school. My mother helped me write it. It was about my grandfather, and for hours she and I would sit at the computer, her telling me stories about her father, and me writing them down. When I gave the speech, I worried people would think it was too good for a fifth grader, but I gave it anyway for fear of disappointing her. I placed second in the speech contest, but I did not feel like I deserved to. Rather, I felt more like a vessel, filled with my mother’s words. I was so full to bursting with them. I confused them with my own.
When I think of my grandfather sexing chickens, I imagine his fingernails. Did he push them into the soft vent of every baby bird so as to get a better look? If so, was the nail dirty after a long day of work, the underside caked with excrement, sawdust clippings, and blood? Did he wash it underneath hot water at the kitchen sink when he got home, careful to scrape out its underside like the rind of a melon until its edge became translucent again?
In college I made an installation piece about the camps. I printed dozens of Dorothea Lange’s photos of crowds of Japanese Americans and hung them in repeating rows on a white wall. Interspersed between her images were pictures of baby chickens clustered in boxes. I was trying to make a statement about history. When my grandfather was taken away, there was no long fingernail used to look for that defining detail. No reason for it. All anyone had to do was look at his face and they would know: a Jap. And so he was sorted, separated; and when he was eventually released, his job doing the sorting was what kept his family alive. I want to say he did the sorting out of an obligation. An obligation to his family, to himself. But maybe I am getting it mixed up with habit. We stick with what we know, and what he knew was barracks and barbed wire and being penned in by a great, white hand calling all of the shots.
It is my mother who presented me with the scab. She offered it, a tiny piece of flesh on a platter, and said, Pick at this. Her mother offered it to her in a different way. There was no serving dish. Instead, she was the scab, a woman fresh from a desert prison and healing over. I imagine my mother saw her mother, the scab, on the day a realtor told her parents they could not sell the house to them anymore. The neighbors had found out they were Japanese, and they did not want them in their community. Hearing this, my grandmother must have stood there, a bloody crust, and felt the internment still inside her body. When she told the kids, it must have shown on her face. For my mother, what she saw was an obligation. She removed the scab, and she ran with it.
Why do we have nails if not to pick at things?
In the Manzanar museum there are long strips of cloth that hang from the ceiling in rows. The names of all the individuals interned there are printed down their fronts. Of course, the first thing I did when I saw it was look for my grandfather’s name, which I found, nestled between the names of his brothers and sisters. When my mother saw it, she photographed his name from many angles. She got as close to the fabric as she could, raised her camera above her head and pressed the shutter button. I have a picture of her doing this. A daughter photographing the ghost of her father.
My grandparents were interned like poultry. Some days I think it might be best to just move on from it. Even still, there are days when I wake up and it is at the foot of my bed, purring. It wants to be loved. It wants its bowl of milk. But that is the trouble. My mother feeds hers every morning. She spoons food into a bowl for it to eat. I want to care for it like she does, and yet how do you love a thing for its horror? How do you keep it alive?
Miyako Pleines is a Japanese-German American writer living in the suburbs of Chicago. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, Bitter Melon, and Hapa Mag. Her piece “These Orbits, Crossing” was chosen as a notable essay for the 2015 edition of Best American Essays. You can find the beginnings of her blog at Miyakowrites.com.