Dust of Eden, by Mariko Nagai
Through poetry and letters, Mina Tagawa tells her family’s story.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, her father, a newspaper reporter, is arrested under suspicion of sedition. Every day, Mina and her brother endure verbal and physical attacks at school. Mina wants to scream every time she hears, “Jap.” She doesn’t feel Japanese. She’s an American!
In the spring, the Tagawas are relocated the Puyallup Assembly Center in Washington State. They leave behind a boarded-up house and all of the possessions that don’t fit into eight suitcases- two each. Grandfather, a rose gardener, carries a rose in a can. At Pulyallup, soldiers with guns search their suitcases and examine them for lice and tuberculosis. They take the letters her father wrote, the flower scrapbook her grandfather cherishes, and her mother’s Bible. Their new home consists of the horse stalls at a former country fair site with hay-stuffed sacks for beds. The U. S. Government enclosed the grounds in barbed wire fencing and placed guards with rifles to keep the Japanese-Americans inside. There is no privacy. The food is almost inedible. Mina worries about her brother, Nick, who leaves their room early in the morning and stays away until late. Her family is disintegrating before her eyes. Mina wonders, “Why are we here, what did we do that they had to send us to a place fit for horses?”
Five months later, everyone at Puyallup is herded on to a cattle train and transported a day and a half to Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho. At first, conditions are not any better than they were at Puyallup. The sand blows through all the cracks and permeates everything. Slowly, the camp becomes home with a school, fruit trees, and vegetables gardens, but will Mina’s family ever return to normal? Will her father be released from prison? Will her angry brother Nick survive the internment’s humiliation?
(Additional Information: On February 19, 1942, just two months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans. )
