Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

Leigh thinks about this for a minute.

“I think you’re right,” she says. “The one thing that they can’t take from you unless you let them is your conscience.”

Leigh is a slight woman who is often mistaken for younger than her age; if you didn’t know her you might think that she was weak and tractable.

“It’s so stupid,” she says. “You were ready to go before they sent us here.”

This is true. During the months before evacuation, they had many conversations about Karl joining up. He’d wanted to do the right thing, to fight against the Fascists. He would probably be in the army now, except that he was sent here, to this camp, instead.

He reaches over to take Leigh’s hand and they sit for a minute like this, looking at each other in the growing gloom.

Then, from behind the bed sheet curtain that divides the room comes the sound of footsteps. Karl looks over and sees, in the gap beneath the curtain, a pair of feet.

Mrs. Shineda has been on her side of the room the whole time they were talking. She has heard everything they said.

Mrs. Shineda’s feet go over to the door and wiggle out of their house slippers. At the door, where the sheet ends and there’s a gap, she looks toward them, bows slightly and smiles. Itte kimasu , she says. I go and I return. Then she steps out into the dusk.

“Oh, well,” Leigh says. “People were bound to find out soon enough.”

But Karl does not like it.

A Japanese expression comes into his head, one that he dislikes for being fatalistic: shikata ga nai . There’s nothing to be done. It was what his mother said when they were ordered from their home. It was what his father said when he had to close his store and lay off his employees.

And now Karl will have to sit here while the news of his decision goes out into the world. Shikata ga nai.

The next morning, Karl is with his work detail.

Their group has been assigned to construct more sleeping cabins so each family in the camp can eventually have its own. In December there were riots over the crowding and the bad food and since then the administrators have embarked on an improvement plan. They employ internees for wages to make the camp more habitable.

Like Karl, who was a schoolteacher, the other men did different things before. One was a plumber, one worked in a cannery, one used to be a fisherman. Although it is against camp rules, they speak to one another in Japanese. In the cold air, their breath plumes. They talk about the questionnaire.

“I’m just going to answer the way they want,” the ex-plumber says. He hammers down tarpaper at one corner of a roof, while the ex-fisherman holds his ladder steady. “ Yes and yes . What else can we do?”

The others murmur in assent. Then the ex-plumber looks over to where Karl and the ex — cannery worker are kneeling on a tarpaulin, attaching hinges to a door. “Hey, Takagawa,” he says. “I heard that you are going to say no and no . Is that true?”

“That’s right,” Karl says. He doesn’t look up from the work he’s doing, just keeps screwing in the hinges.

“Why?” the ex-plumber asks.

“Because I don’t think it is right to force us to say we are loyal, or to make us go into the army when our families are here.”

“You aren’t loyal?” the ex-plumber asks.

“The point isn’t whether I’m loyal or not,” Karl says. “The point is they don’t have the right to ask me. They are treating us like criminals when we’ve done nothing wrong.”

The ex-plumber opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something else, but then he shuts it again and just rolls his eyes.

The ex-fisherman shakes his head. He says: “I heard that if you say no to either question, they send you away. To a camp in Washington State.”

“We’re already in a camp,” Karl says.

“That place is worse. Like a real prison. I mean, no hot water, prison rations. No movies, no sports teams. And no families allowed, just men.”

“How do you know so much about it?” the ex — cannery worker asks.

“One of my cousins from Seattle got sent to that place for running away to go home and see his girl. I heard about it from my uncle. It’s called Tule Lake.”

Karl feels like he should say something, but what? It doesn’t matter what the consequences are, he’s made his choice. But he thinks that he won’t mention this conversation to Leigh. No reason to worry her any more than he already has.

Near the end of their work shift, when the other two men are out of earshot, the ex — cannery worker, whose name is Fred Nakamura, turns to Karl and says quietly: “I wish I had the guts to do what you are doing,” and Karl feels a surge of unexpected pride.

When Karl comes back from work that afternoon, he finds his father sitting at the table in Building No. 147.

“I don’t know,” he says when Karl enters. Karl sees the questionnaire forms spread out in front of him. “If I forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan, aren’t I saying that I used to have allegiance to him? Is it some kind of trick question?”

Hisao Takagawa has a shock of white hair on the top of his narrow head. For twenty years he owned and ran a clothing store on Fillmore Street. Now the store is shuttered and the inventory sold to competitors for a fraction of its value.

“For you,” Hisao goes on, “this is not so bad. You are a citizen, not even married to a Japanese. There’s no chance they’ll deport you.”

“ Ot san ,” Karl says, “they aren’t going to deport you.”

Karl has always been impatient with his parents’ nervous self-defensiveness, their reluctance to trust non-Japanese. Karl was born in California. His childhood memories are filled with San Francisco’s bright and shifting light, its banks of silver fog and rows of pastel-colored houses. Their neighborhood was full of Issei and Nissei , speaking Japanese, eating the foods— mikan at new year, sunamono, manju —and playing the music of their old homeland. But he also remembers white people and black people and Chinese living only streets away.

Once or twice when he was a teenager, he was called chink by white men in the street, older men with heavy faces and clothes more worn than his. He ignored them. Already he was interested in Communism, in the Party and its promise of a future where race and class and countries would be swept away. And where would this great change take place if not in America?

Hisao shrugs: who knows? He clears his throat. “I have heard,” he says, “a rumor.”

“That I am going to answer no to questions 27 and 28.”

“Is it true?”

Karl nods and Hisao sits back and folds his hands over his knees. “Well,” he says. “Please think about your mother and me before you make your answers. That is all I ask.”

“ Ot san , my decision doesn’t have anything to do with you. You won’t be punished for what I do. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Is that right? How does it work if you know so much about it? Would you have thought that you could find yourself where you are today?”

Later that evening Karl is eating dinner in the mess hall, when out of the corner of his eye he sees someone enter the room and come toward him. He looks over and sees it is Keo Sasaki, followed by a couple of other men whose names he does not know.

Mr. Sasaki owned a big dry-goods store in his old life. There is talk that he ran a bookmaking operation, too, but no one knows for sure if this is true. Since evacuation, he has become the self-appointed spokesman for the internees, and a delegate to the Japanese American Citizens League from the camp. The administrators talk to Keo Sasaki if they want to know what people in the camp are thinking. Karl has heard him say that the American Japanese are fortunate that the government brought them to the relocation centers for their own protection, that it has provided them with work and schools and housing at a time of national crisis.