My dad was 3 years old on December 6th, 1941.
A young kid on a farm in Central California, he was the son of two Japanese immigrants growing grapes to turn them into raisins. Without much to offer them in Japan, they'd followed the trail of laborers immigrating to take up work in America, a country that wanted their countrymen to build its train tracks and mine for coal.
He was still 3 years old on December 7th, 1941, but he wasn't in the same context anymore. In a country where the worth of a person of color has been valued in relation to that of a White person, the bombing of Pearl Harbor flipped that value into a threat. He looked like "the enemy," and so this 3 year old became "the enemy."
He was 63 years old on September 11th, 2001. I was 13. We heard about the planes hitting the World Trade Center in third period and by fourth period I was focusing my energy on hopes that it wasn't a Japanese threat.
It seems absurd in retrospect. I suppose that 13 year olds are afforded a certain level of absurdity. But my father, his siblings, his parents, and my whole mother's side had spent four years in concentration camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and even at 13 I knew that after mourning for the killed comes praying for those left behind.
On the way to an assembly meant to address the attacks, a classmate told me how much he wanted us to all get guns so we could kill Osama Bin Ladin firing squad-style. My father, a full-blooded Japanese American, was yelled at by an anonymous man on the train the next day for what "his people" had done to the World Trade Center. A week later Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man in Texas, was shot dead because of his turban.
These fragments have been in my head the past week as we process the shooting in San Bernadino, as we continue in a time of persistent murders of Black folks by the cops, as we witness the horrifying actions of ISIS and resulting Islamophobia and continued anti-Brown hate crimes, and as we debate just what we mean when we talk about allowing in the world's tired, poor, and persecuted.
I don't have a clean ending for this post. There aren't clean solutions for any of this. But as we step into the 74th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and as we take a collective breath while we think towards 2016, I am thinking about the delicate nuance it will take us to survive and build in these times.
And I am thinking about the 3 year old kids who have found themselves in a different context.
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