We Are Not Free

Gaman. The ability to hold your pain and bitterness inside you and not let them destroy you. To make something beautiful through your anger, or with your anger, and neither erase it nor let it define you. To suffer. And to rage. And to persevere.

We are not free. But we are not alone.

I want to believe in right and wrong. Here is what's right. Here is what isn't. Here is the line. Here is the question: If I got to war for America, if I kill for America, if I support an America that doesn't support me, and I supporting my oppressors? Am I killing their enemies so they can later kill me?

See, we don't got liberty, we don't got property, but you better believe we've got the Great American Right to die for a country that doesn't want us.

We could do everything right, and they’d still think we were dangerous.

...I'm not guilty of anything but being born with this face.

History is not dead. We have not moved on. Like Minnow and many of my other characters, I love this country because it is my home, and my parents’ home, and my grandparents’ home, and because I was raised to believe in the opportunity and equality America promises, but this does not prevent me from seeing its problems, seeing all the ways it has failed its people again and again.

If someone always said, You have to do this for me before I do this for you, then nothing would ever get done

You want and you want and you want, and no amount of wanting will return the moments you have lost and the people you have loved, but you have not lost so many pieces of yourself that you don’t want to give away one more.

Life’s not fair, but she doesn’t need it to be fair, because she can take anything life throws at her, and she won’t break.

Tyranny is locking us up. Tyranny is taking our freedom. Tyranny is right here. Tyranny is American.

Being an American won't protect you when you have faces like ours.

I love this country because it is my home, and my parents’ home, and my grandparents’ home, and because I was raised to believe in the opportunity and equality America promises, but this does not prevent me from seeing its problems, seeing all the ways it has failed its people again and again.

is that what life was like? people coming together and drifting apart, coming together and drifting apart, over and over?

He and I were standing on the curb, talking, as a group of Caucasian guys approached us, walking three abreast, like they were a great white plow rolling down the sidewalk. Without even thinking about it, I stepped aside, Leonard stepped aside, and I wondered at how we’d been trained to do this, to recede, to shrink, so that Caucasians can have more space.

We are still splintered. We are still rough-edged. But we are also knitting together in the places where we were broken; we are finding each other in the darkness; we are holding fast. We eat. We sleep. We breathe at last.

there’s so much wrong with the world that it makes you wanna tear it down to the foundations. if I just rammed my head into them hard enough for long enough, all the backward frameworks and rotten girders of the world would crumble. and maybe then we could build something better

I started writing to you the day after your funeral. I wanted to believe that if I wrote to you, I wouldn’t lose you.

He’s always drawn a lot, but there’s something different about him lately. He used to disappear into the background like he was part of it. Now when he draws, you can’t miss him. He’s there in the middle of things, with this new ferocity, like if he doesn’t capture this moment, he’ll never get the chance. That’s how it is these days. You hesitate, and your neighbors have vanished. You look away, and your friends have been stolen from you. You blink, and you’re gone.

But we never learn what it goes to show, because he never got to finish the letter. He never got to finish a lot of things. We want to say he died like a hero. We want to say he was brave until the end. And maybe he was. Maybe he was. But he was also just a kid. He was a scared kid who died far from home, in a country that wasn't his, a country that took his blood and his weight and is tears and didn't give him back to us.

must look a mess, because the guy who’s supposed to help me with the questionnaire kinda recoils when I sit down across from him, but I just grin. Uncle Yas was right. I can’t stay here. I can’t be locked up with my anger like this. If I stay here, my anger’s gonna eat me up from the inside, like a white-hot fire, and if I don’t get it out somehow, I’m gonna turn on everyone who ever loved me. And I’ll die before I let that happen. “Sign me up,” I say. “I wanna fight.

V Wild Boy Frankie, 19 January–February 1943 Me and Stan Katsumoto are hanging around by 1-9-E, so-called “City Hall,” when the army jeep comes roaring toward camp, and I’m not gonna lie, the sight of the tires kicking up a dust cloud in the cold January morning makes me wanna hit something. The army guys are here to recruit volunteers for Roosevelt’s new combat team. See, we don’t got liberty, we don’t got property, but you better believe we’ve got the Great American Right to die for a country that doesn’t want us.

What’s wrong with that?” “Decent people don’t kick out other decent people, so if we’re decent, they can’t be decent.” He fans out his hands. “You’re going to cause an existential crisis, Ma! If white people aren’t decent, are they anything?

It doesn’t matter how good we are, because they see only what they want to see, and when they look at us, all they see are Japs.

I hope that in writing things will make sense again. They don't

This is the way you hold on. This is the way you dig your fingernails in. If you'd known to do this before, you would've helped your mom wash the dishes. You would've put down the book. You would've told your dad the papers could wait. You would've held Aiko as she cried.

We say nothing. We don't want to believe it either. We hold our breath, waiting for her to understand. Waiting for the news to strike like a lightning bolt. We watch laughter drain from her face. It leaves her eyes first, leaves them startled and black as moonless nights. Then her cheeks, which go pale, and her lips, which go slack. We're not joking. We wish we were.

It isn't raining anymore. The rain has become soft and light and cold. It's snowing. Snowing. I'm thinking of Topaz and the first snow I ever saw, flakes tumbling lazily out of the sky and settling on the barracks and the dusty roads, so quiet. And the guys throwing snowballs.The numbness in your fingers, that wet slap in your side, Shig and Tommy and Minnow and Stan Katsumoto... Everyone running and shrieking with laughter. Mas, Frankie, Bette, Yum-Yum... Keiko laughing. Prettiest girl I ever saw, with snow like stars in her hair. I close my eyes, and I think I can hear us, all of us, running. The Topaz roads are turning into pavement, the barracks are turning into San Francisco, the desert air is turning wet and salty, and we're running, running until we hit the ocean, that roaring blue expanse, and all of us, running into waves. Laughing.

They're sending him to a hospital, then back home, and it's funny because I know he's lying on a cot somewhere with a roof over his head and some nurses checking his bandages or whatever, waiting to get well enough for the ship back to America, but to me it's like he's dead because--home? Thinking of home? It's like thinking of heaven. Someplace you hope you'll end up one day, but good luck, buddy, because you're a soldier, not a saint.

Banzai. The word rushes over me like a river. A memory of what we used to say on the streets of Japantown when we played at war. A memory we inherited from our fathers and their fathers, this word, this history, this giving of ourselves for the nation, for the emperor. Except now it's not for the emperor. I don't think, in this moment, that it's even for our nation. It's for us, our brothers, here, who have died on this hill and in dozens of battles before, for our families back home,in that dream-world of deserts and barbed wire, for our folks who had everything taken from them and still were asked for more: compliance, obedience, money, blood.