My Beautiful Man and Sadako Sasaki
I had to pause My Beautiful Man -eternal- because Captain Duck has a little paper crane friend at a crucial moment and I completely and entirely lost it. Full on ugly sobbing.
I live in Seattle. We have one and only one statue that commemorates a female historical figure, and it is of Sadako Sasaki who survived Hiroshima at age 2 and passed away from leukemia when she was 12 in Hiroshima in 1955.
Sadako Sasaki tried to fold 1,000 origami cranes before her death and made it to 644. The people of Seattle and Hiroshima finished the work for her, placing them on her memorial statues in both cities.
The project was taken on as an atonement project because our city was guilty of standing by and allowing the internment of our Japanese American neighbors (19 February 1942 - 20 March 1946) and this was one of many efforts we've since made to repair what our city and the US government did.
It will never be enough but I'm also grateful we maintain it in our municipal collective conscience and you can see it in the way we fought for our neighbors who were impacted by Trump's brief blatantly Islamaphobic executive order (27 January 2017.) Not only did Washingtonians flood SeaTac to protect a Seattle baker who was impacted by the executive order and stuck in customs, but our state's attorney general at that time, Bob Ferguson, was the first by state to file a lawsuit to stay and invalidate Executive Order 13769.
I know the crane was Kiyoi's wish for Hira, but symbols hold so many stories, and in that moment, for me, it held Kiyoi and Hira's fictional story that I have big feelings about while also holding the story of little Sadako Sasaki who, like many children impacted by war worldwide, have the chance to be beautiful messy adults taken away from them.
