Letters

The segment of letters we read told the life of Amy, a Japanese-American woman who lived during WWII. Our letters began with a request for books for her friend’s library. They described her travel to an internment camp in Gila, Arizona. The camp was unfinished when they arrived, so they were crammed into barracks too small for the number of people there. Although the situation was unjust and difficult, they made the best of their situation. They crafted furniture from lumber and planted gardens outside of the barracks. Amy’s sister, Martha, told of the beauty of the desert where the camp was located, and how she had never seen more beautiful stars. Takaki describes this on page 139: “Their little gardens provided relief in a world of military-like routine.”

After the camp, Amy got married. She and her husband shared an apartment in New York with a social worker. They also lived in Chicago. She wrote of how people muttered at her on the street, and how she was called a “Jap” by many. This is analogous to the poem “Cincinnati” by Mitsuye Yamamda (Bold Words 81). In this poem, the speaker writes of the “hissing voice that said/dirty jap” and “warm spittle on my right cheek.” Much like Amy, the speaker was discriminated against and seen as dirty and inferior on the streets of a large city. “Everyone knew me,” the speaker writes, not as a human being but as a “dirty Jap”.

Chicago did not agree with Amy, and she wrote of the suffocating air, which was exacerbated by her pregnancy. Amy and her husband moved to Nebraska, where they worked as chicken sexers. The letters conveyed an interesting and precious view into the experiences of a Japanese-American person during WWII.