We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Character Registry

  We Never Look Like Us

  What Stays, What Gives, What Goes

  I Am Not Free

  The Indomitable Bette Nakano

  Wild Boy

  The Infinite Indecisions of a Dewy-Eyed Idiot

  Team Player

  With a Cherry on Top

  Hunky-Dory Whatever

  The Snap

  Twice as Perfect

  This Is the Moment

  Company of Kings

  We Hold Our Breath

  Japanese/American

  Home

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  Image Credits

  More Books from HMH Teen

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Copyright © 2020 by Traci Chee

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Illustrations on pages 46–47 and 367 © 2020 Julia Kuo

  Paper texture © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Interior design by Mary Claire Cruz

  Cover design by Jessica Handelman

  Cover illustration of characters © 2020 by John Lee

  Cover photo-illustration © 2020 by David Field/Caterpillar Media

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chee, Traci, author.

  Title: We are not free / Traci Chee.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Audience: Ages 12 and up. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: For fourteen-year-old budding artist Minoru Ito, her two brothers, her friends, and the other members of the Japanese-American community in southern California, the three months since Pearl Harbor was attacked have become a waking nightmare: attacked, spat on, and abused with no way to retaliate—and now things are about to get worse, their lives forever changed by the mass incarcerations in the relocation camps.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029407 | ISBN 9780358131434 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358330004 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358343165 | ISBN 9780358343561

  Subjects: LCSH: Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945—Juvenile fiction. | Japanese American families—Juvenile fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Concentration camps—United States—Juvenile fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Japanese Americans—Juvenile fiction. | Concentration camps—United States—Juvenile fiction. | Prejudices—Juvenile fiction. | California—History—20th century—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—United States—Fiction. | Prejudices—Fiction. | California—History—20th century—Fiction. | LCGFT: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C497 We 2020 | DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029407

  v1.0820

  For my grandparents,

  Margaret & Peter Kitagawa and Sachiko & Michio Iwata;

  their brothers and sisters,

  Kojiro Kawaguchi, Yuki Okuda, Mary Uchiyama, Midori Goto, Jane Imura, Saburo Kitagawa, Yoshiro Kitagawa, Naomi Ogawa, Mutsuo Kitagawa, Yoshimi Hamada, Emiko Aoki, Katsuko Kuranaga, Teruko Hamada, Hiroshi Hamada, Eiko Mayeda, Shinobu Hamada, Mitsuko Ochoa, Minoru Nakano, Osuye Okano;

  and June Kitagawa and Aiji Uchiyama

  with love and gratitude

  I

  WE NEVER LOOK LIKE US

  MINNOW, 14

  MARCH 1942

  It’s been over three months since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and my oldest brother, Mas, has told me to come straight home from school each day. Take the bus, he says. No loitering around, he says. I mean it, Minnow.

  I used to love walking back to the apartment in the afternoons, seeing all the interesting things going on in the city: bodies being excavated at Calvary Cemetery, buildings going up in empty lots, chattering kids coming out of Kinmon Gakuen, the old Japanese language school.

  But that’s been closed since last December, when it became the Civil Control Station, because Pearl Harbor changed everything for us. We have a new eight-p.m. curfew. People are starting to talk about involuntary evacuation. And Mas has warned me not to get caught out alone. Don’t do anything that’ll make them come down on you, he says. Don’t give them any excuse.

  And I haven’t.

  Until today.

  I don’t know what happened. I was walking out of George Washington High School, headed for the bus stop like always, when I saw the football team practicing on the field, racing back and forth across the grass with the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge rising beyond the school building like a promise, and before I knew it, I was sitting in the bleachers with my sketchbook in my hands and my butt going numb on the concrete.

  Oops.

  I’m so panicked, I gather up my sketchpad and bolt right past the bus stop, hoping to make it home before Mas gets back from work.

  No matter how many times I try to explain it, he never understands. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in a drawing that I get transported onto the paper, and the charcoal suspension cables and pencil players become more real to me than the bleachers or the grass or the school, and when I come back to my body, it’s hours later, everyone’s gone, and I’m walking home alone as fog cascades into the bay.

  I know it’d be faster if I waited for a bus, but I’m afraid if I hang around at one of the stops, someone will chase me off, or call me “Jap!” or worse. So I keep walking, and buses keep passing me while I’m between stops, and I keep thinking I should just wait at the next one, but . . .

  Mas says that’s my problem—there’s always something going on inside my head, but I never think.

  My middle brother, Shig, likes to tell him it’s because my head’s up in the clouds, where it doesn’t do me any good.

  I’m still walking, trying to decide if I should keep going or try waiting, when I catch sight of a flyer for Sutro Baths in a drugstore window, and I stop cold. For a second, all I can think is, Mas was right. I don’t think.

  I should’ve gone straight home. I should’ve waited for a bus. I shouldn’t be out like this. Because it’s dangerous to be hanging around with a face like mine, three months into the war.

  * * *

  It was a Sunday in December, and we were getting ready for lunch when Mas asked Shig to turn on the radio and we all heard the news that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.

  Mom’s face went taut and white as a sheet. If I was going to draw her the way she looked then, I’d draw her with thin lips and frightened eyes, pinned to a clothesline, her body flapping in the wind of a passing Nakajima B5N bomber.

  * * *

  We’ve never been allowed inside Sutro Baths, but I used to draw it from the park at Lands End (the glass ceilings, the rough water, the tide-eaten cliffs), imagining what it was like inside those glinting cupolas: the smell of salt water and wet concrete, every sound in that echoing space a slap.

  Now I kind of wish the whole thing would slide into the Pacific.

  The ad says GET IN TRIM FOR FIGHTING HIM! and in the center there’s a drawing of a Japanese soldier with diagonal slits for eyes, nostrils like watermelon seeds, and two big square teeth jutting out over his lower lip.

  I’m not a great artist or anything, but I’m a better artist than that. When I draw the people in my neighborhood, I draw them with eyes like crescent moons and kindness and red bean cakes split dow
n the center. I draw them with real noses and regular-size teeth. If someone is out looking for 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 YMCA. They shoved him around and called him dirty words like “Jap” and “Nip.” They said the only good Jap was a dead Jap. They said they were going to do their country a favor and get rid of him right then.

  It was lucky Mr. Tanaka, who works at the YMCA, came out for a smoke, because he chased off the ketos and sat with Tommy until he stopped shaking.

  That’s why Mas doesn’t want me or Shig to act out at all. We can’t call attention to ourselves in any way.

  Except some of the guys, like Shig’s best buddy, Twitchy Hashimoto, you can’t help but pay attention to. Twitchy’s the best-looking guy in our group, the kind of handsome that makes everybody, even ketos, stop and stare. He’s tall and slim, with straight white teeth that belong in a toothpaste ad. Of all the guys, I like drawing Twitchy best (even though it’s hard because he’s constantly moving, running around or playing with that butterfly knife he stole off a Filipino guy, though he had to turn that in because it was considered contraband) because when he moves, you can see every shadow in his forearms, his shoulders, his back.

  * * *

  I’m almost two blocks from Webster Street, the unofficial border of the neighborhood, when I realize I’ve got four white guys following me.

  I think of running for it, but I’m afraid I’ll look guilty if I run, and I’m not guilty of anything but being born with this face, so I just lengthen my stride and try to act natural, or as natural as I can when I’m being tailed by a bunch of guys I’m sure want to jump me, but I only get another ten yards by the time the ketos catch up to me.

  Think, Minnow. If I’d run for it, maybe I would’ve already made it to Japantown, where there’s always someone hanging around. Maybe I would’ve found Shig and Twitchy or Stan Katsumoto. Maybe they would’ve stopped whatever’s about to happen.

  I swallow, hard. I’m not as small as Tommy Harano, but I’m smaller than Mas and Shig were when they were fourteen, and the ketos outnumber me four to one.

  I look around for help and see some guys on the opposite corner—they have black hair and brown eyes like me, but they’re wearing big round buttons that say I AM CHINESE.

  They catch me staring. I wonder if I should call to them, but my mouth’s so dry, I think if I open it, the only thing that’ll come out is dust.

  While I hesitate, they turn and run the other direction. From behind, they look just like Japanese guys. They could be from my neighborhood. They could be my friends or cousins or brothers.

  But they’re not.

  I back up, clutching my sketchbook, as the ketos surround me.

  “Whatcha got there, Jap?”

  The word is hard, like a wet palm striking me on the cheek.

  I’m so dazed by it, I don’t answer, and the guy grabs my sketchpad. I lunge forward, but he’s taller than me, and he snatches it out of my reach while the other boys laugh.

  The first guy has a gap in his front teeth and a leather jacket that looks brand-new. He riffles through the pages, and I know he’s seeing my friends, my family, my Ocean Beach, my cemeteries, my Japantown chimneys, my many studies of the Golden Gate Bridge, my city, the city that I love.

  Rrrrrip. He tears a drawing from the spine, and I cringe. The sketchbook was a present from Dad, before he died.

  “You spying on us, Jap?” the gap-toothed guy says, shoving the sketch in my face. “You gonna send these back to the emperor?”

  I look at the drawing—it’s of the bridge—and the only thing I can think is that I didn’t get the perspective right. The tower looks flimsy and out of proportion, like it wouldn’t be able to hold up to the weight of all its promises.

  Before I can answer, he pulls the bridge back again and draws a knife on me. The blade’s over four inches—if he were Japanese, it’d be contraband.


  For some reason, I start laughing.

  “You think that’s funny?” he says, advancing on me. “I’ll show you funny.”

  I stop laughing as the other ketos grab me from behind.

  I try to fight them, but the next thing I know, I’m flat on my back and the sidewalk’s cold under me. The first guy’s on top of me, sneering, and I’m struggling to breathe.

  I’m still fighting, or at least I think I am, but suddenly he rears back and then there’s three bright blossoms of pain in the right side of my face. For a second, I see blood-red suns against the white San Francisco sky, feel the thin sliver of a knife against my cheek.

  “Wanna see what real Americans do to Jap spies?” the gap-toothed guy growls.

  I AM AN AMERICAN

  I’m seeing Mr. Katsumoto’s sign again. I want to write it everywhere: on my forehead—I AM AN AMERICAN—on the white sky—I AM AN AMERICAN—on the windows of Sutro Baths—I AM AN AMERICAN.

  But that won’t make them see me. That won’t stop them from killing me, if they can.

  The only good Jap is a dead Jap.

  I start bucking and screaming. I shout for Shig, Mas, Twitchy, Stan, Frankie Fujita—

  Then the first guy punches me again, and my head lolls to the side. In the gutter, my sketchpad lies face-down, pages wrinkled beneath it.

  I can see bits and pieces of my rumpled drawings—a view of the bridge from the Presidio on the north edge of the city, Mas in his football uniform, the Dutch windmills along the shoreline, Twitchy running down Buchanan Street at midnight, going so fast I drew him blurry, like a spirit you see only as you’re turning a corner, and when you look again, he’s gone.

  * * *

  Ten days ago, President Roosevelt established the War Relocation Authority, a federal agency that’s supposed to be in charge of figuring out how to get us out of military zones where the government doesn’t want us. We just don’t know which of us they’ll move. Or how it’s going to happen. Or when.