Displacement

Kiku gathers herself and walks back into her house where her mother is still watching news about Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential elections. On the news, a reporter and spokesperson talk about Trump’s proposal to “reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries” (228). The spokesperson for Trump claims that the proposal is legal, and he believes it will pass “constitutional muster” (228). He claims that there is precedent for such a registry and lists the examples of Iran and the Japanese during World War Two, at which point Kiku’s mother mutters: “oh my god.” Kiku asks her mother if she thinks something like the incarceration camps will happen again. Her mother admits she has been worried about it, in the 1970s, during the Bush administration, and now.

Kiku decides to tell her mother about her displacements. To Kiku’s surprise, when she explains that she has been back in time to the camps, her mother says: “it’s happened to me, too” (232). Kiku’s mother explains that, in the 1970s, her mother (Ernestina) was afraid because “there was talk of reopening the camps for political dissidents, communists, Black Panthers” (232), and during this time she traveled in a “displacement” to the camp three times. Unlike Kiku, she never told her mother of her experiences. She wishes now that she had, and she is glad that Kiku has decided to say something. Kiku wonders what causes them both to keep traveling back to the same time and place, and her mother says she thinks they are traveling through memory. She says that: “sometimes a community’s experience is so traumatic, it stays rooted in us even generations later. And the later generations continue to rediscover that experience, since it’s still shaping us in ways we might not realize” (234). She cites as an example that many have lost their ability to speak Japanese and given up connections to Japanese culture over time. Perhaps in traveling to wherever Ernestina is; they are traveling through her memories of that time, to engage with what they have lost.

Kiku wonders if they could travel on purpose. She would like to know what happened to her friends at the camp, and what happened to Ernestina when she left for Juilliard. In answer, Kiku’s mother talks about Ernestina’s life in New York City. She and her family lived with a woman named Florence, who sponsored Ernestina for Juilliard. As she speaks, the fog rises to surround them both.

Kiku and her mother find themselves in a theater, watching with the audience as Ernestina performs on stage, echoing back to Kiku’s first displacement in Part 1. When the performance ends, they exit the theater with the crowd and follow Ernestina as Kiku’s mother continues to talk. She says that, despite being one of the best violinists at Juilliard, Ernestina decided not to perform professionally. Instead, she got a teaching degree from City College. She taught kindergarteners and taught violin lessons on the side. However, she did not teach any of her children to play violin, nor the Japanese language.

As they follow Ernestina onto the subway, Kiku’s mother talks about growing up. Ernestina was a single mother with three children. They lived “at the very top of Manhattan, almost to the Bronx” (245). While they travel on the subway, a white man harasses them, calling out: “where are you from?” and “Hey, do you speak English?” (247). Kiku and her mother ignore him and get off the subway to follow Ernestina.

As they walk down the street, Kiku sees a headline claiming that the Japanese Americans became successful and affluent in the years after the war. Her mother says that is merely part of the “model minority” propaganda that started in the 1960s, made up to pit Asian-Americans against the Black civil rights movement. She explains that the media would point at successful Japanese Americans and claim: “look, we locked them up and they never complained, and now they’re all rich” (251). They would then claim that Black Americans were “just making trouble” (251). Kiku’s mother says this was not true: Japanese Americans did protest incarceration, and many did not become rich and successful after the war. Unfortunately, some Japanese Americans were so caught up in upholding this “good minority” myth that they were “willing to participate in anti-Black racism” (251).

Kiku is sad that she never knew any of this and asks her mother to tell her more. They watch Ernestina from the window of her apartment as they talk. Her mother explains that Ernestina married in 1966 and the family moved to New Jersey. She was diagnosed with leukemia a few years later and died at 48, when Kiku’s mother was a freshman in college. Kiku’s mother speculates that her time at Topaz might have contributed to her cancer. Though there are no studies to prove a link, an unusually high number of Nisei died of cancer over the years.

The fog appears again and suddenly they are watching the day that Kiku’s mother left home. After her mother died, she dropped out of school. She never felt like she belonged in New York, or New Jersey. She and her sister packed up and drove west, debating whether to go to Seattle, or to San Francisco where Ernestina was born. A coin flip decided them for Seattle. Kiku says she wants to go home and the fog surrounds them again.