I Had No Idea

When I was at dinner during my senior prom night in High School, something very embarrassing happened. I was enjoying my pasta meal with a large group of my close friends when my chair BREAKS from underneath me! I fell straight to the ground in one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. Luckily I was able to brush it off, but once I got to the dance everybody knew what had happened. Did I want to talk about it? Of course not. I still don't like to bring it up...

While listening to some stories about the Japanese incarceration at the onset of WWII as part of my homework for Sociology, I immediately thought of one of my co-workers who is a Japanese American. I had talked with her briefly about her family and where she comes from and we connected on the fact that we both grew up in southern California. When I asked her this week about this she was fairly open about her families experience during this time. While she was not yet born, her parents spent time in the camps shortly after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. I was shocked to hear this, something I believe she could have shared with me at some point over the past three years of working together.

She told me that it is a more private event for her parents than I would expect. Nothing much interesting has happened to my parents throughout their lives, but I wonder if something similar were to have happened, if I would tell people about it. I wondered, would my parents talk about it to me? According to one families story posted on the educational website densho.org, Japanese children will live their whole lives without hearing about the fact that their ancestors were put in these concentration camps.

I understand wanting to keep a level of privacy, but from your own family? It seems to me like the hurt of the past needs to be addressed in order for some sort of healing process to start. Ethnic discrimination of this sort needs to be addressed and brought out into the light to make sure nothing of the sort will ever happen again.