Sachi's Letter to Nobu

I've come to understand that my characters are like children. They want my undivided attention, and will only agree to "talk" to me if they get just that -- undivided attention. So, when I finally sit myself down, open my mind and let my fingers fly over the keyboard, they tiptoe in, sit beside me and begin to tell me what's on their minds.

It happened this morning.

In my book, Broken Dolls, Sachi, my eleven-year old Japanese-American girl is still an internee at the Rohwer, Arkansas Internment Camp. Her eighteen-year old brother, Nobu, has been sent to a Justice Department camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because he answered "No-No" on Questions 27 & 28 of the loyalty questionnaire given to all Japanese-Americans over the age of eighteen. Sachi misses him terribly, and sits down to write a letter. But rather than tell him about the black hole in her life since he's been gone--that would make him more homesick--she decides to tell him about what she and her friend, Jubie, a local black girl, have been up to.

Here is a segment of that letter:

. . . When we moved one big rock, a couple of weird-looking, lobster-like creatures skittered away. Jubie called them crawdads. She said you could eat them, and that she’d ask her Auntie Bess to cook up a pot. But first, she said we’d have to catch a bunch of them. I don’t know. They look a little creepy. How am I supposed to help catch them if I don’t want to touch them? And eating them? Yuck.


People around here eat some strange foods, Nobu. Of course, Jubie probably thinks what we eat is strange, too.

I told her once that sometimes we eat our rice with seaweed wrapped around it. She crinkled her nose and asked what seaweed was. I had to remind myself that she’s never even seen the ocean, so she’s probably never heard of seaweed. When I explained that it was like thick, long blades of grass that grew in the ocean, she crinkled her nose even more, then stuck out her tongue!

That’s okay, because that’s how I felt about eating crawdads . . .


For me, there's no greater pleasure in writing than when my characters talk to me so openly that my fingers fly on the keyboard just to keep up with their words.

Itchy Wah-wah

I hate to itch. Maybe that's why I've always remembered a word one of my cousins created when he hated itching. Itchy wah-wah.

I'm not sure what he meant by it. I even thought it was the Japanese word for "itch" when I was a little girl. All I know is when my mother made me wear wool sweaters without an undershirt, that funny little word described my feelings exactly. "I'm itchy and if you don't let me take this sweater off, I'm going to cry!"

Well, these days, if I have to wear a wool sweater, I can choose to wear a shirt under it, so wool is no longer an instigator of itch.

Now, what makes me itchy wah-wah are the creepy-crawly bugs and plants of Arkansas: chiggers, ticks and poison ivy. And, here at the farm, this axis-of-evil thrives three of the four seasons. Not as easy to escape as a wool sweater.

So, I find myself pondering: Which is the MOST evil of the three--chiggers, ticks or poison ivy?


I'll start with the least wicked - poison ivy. Though the blistering, oozing rash it brings is perhaps the itchiest of all, at least you can SEE poison ivy. You have to see something to avoid it. So, when gardening, I avoid anything with three leaves at all costs.


Next least evil? Ticks. Though seed ticks are very small, I can still feel one crawling on me, (sometimes, even when they're not!) and I can pick it off and smash it to smithereens with a sharp-edged rock before it bores its blood-sucking head into my skin. But, I have missed a few, and I have to say, there aren't many things more gross than having to pull a tick off yourself - except maybe having to ask my husband to do it for me.


And last, and MOST loathsome are the chiggers. You can't see them. You can't feel them crawling on you. The first sign you've been attacked by chiggers is the horrible itch, accompanied by a bright red rash, that on me, eventually turns purple. It is these repugnant chiggers that cause me to slather myself with bug spray before I work in the garden. What a choice - cover myself with poison or be chewed up by chiggers.

I'll never complain about a wool sweater again.

Rohwer Whispers

When I first started writing Broken Dolls, I wasn’t aware there had been two relocation centers in southeast Arkansas. This discovery added new layers to my story which follows the lives of a Japanese-American family from 1941 to 1968.

In November 2009, I decided to visit the site of one of the relocation centers, Rohwer. I began with an interview with the former mayor of McGehee, Arkansas, Rosalie Gould, an authority on the history of the Rohwer and Jerome Relocation Centers. She holds an extensive collection of artifacts from the camps and has maintained relationships with many former internees. She told me fascinating stories that were told to her by internees, and she shared her collection of photographs, artwork and essays. Her interview started my passage into the past and helped me to better understand what it meant to be a Japanese-American in the 1940’s.

But my real empathic journey began the following day, when I drove to the site of Rohwer Relocation Center. When I was a child, I’d visited Tule Lake, a relocation center in California where my mother spent three years of her childhood. As a little girl, I couldn’t grasp the concept of being “relocated.” In fact, I thought it would be an adventure to live in a desert camp. But I saw my mother crying as she recollected her days in camp, and it made me queasy, but I didn’t understand why.

So, on that very warm day in November 2009, I hoped that as an adult, I might feel something deeper and come to a better understanding at the Arkansas site.

I left my hotel, and my gas gauge indicated I had approximately 1/8 tank of gas. I approached a gas station at the crossroad of US-65 and AR-1, where I would turn off the highway to get to Rohwer. I debated whether or not to stop. I pulled in and found the pumps were not auto-pay. Lazy and in a hurry, I didn’t want to take the time to go inside. So, convincing myself the site couldn’t be that far off US-65, I turned onto AR-1 and headed in the direction of Rohwer.

I drove and drove. And drove. Through acres and acres of cotton fields, still dotted with puffs of white. Through marshy patches of tall trees. All the while the gas gauge snuck toward “empty.” Surely I’d pass through a small town that would have a gas station. But what if I didn’t find one before I ran out of gas? There was hardly a house in sight. I really was out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere.

As my heart beat nervously, I wondered when I would finally arrive at Rohwer. And would it be before I ran out of gas? Then, in the middle of my frustration and fear, an epiphany hit me. I realized my anxiety might be similar to what the Japanese-Americans felt as they were being relocated from California to Rohwer, Arkansas.

Such a strange-looking land. So hot and humid. In-the-middle-of-nowhere.

The “low gas” warning light flashed on, feeding my fear of the fast-approaching empty tank. But I immersed myself in that fear and apprehension and imagined being on the train that brought the internees from California almost seventy years before.

When will we be there? What will Rohwer look like? Will there be armed guards and barbed wire, like at the last camp?
In the distance, I saw a couple of buildings, perhaps a town?

Please have a gas station.

My heart pounded.

How much farther to Rohwer? Why aren’t there any mileage markers? What if I’m not going the right direction? Please have a gas station.
There it was. A tiny station in a tiny town. Though it was not an automatic pump, I counted my blessings and proceeded inside to pay. I interrupted the conversation of two young girls behind the counter and an awkward silence followed. One girl glared at me while the other took my credit card, and I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I wondered why. Was it because I wasn’t from “around these parts?” Still engaged in imagining the feelings of an internee, I even wondered if it was because I am half-Japanese, so close to Rohwer. I finally decided it was probably because I’d cut short the gossip of two teenage girls.



Finally, a couple of miles farther down the road, I saw the sign for Rohwer. I turned right onto a gravel road and crossed the railroad tracks on which the internees would have arrived. I got out of the car and stared down the long, lonely track. I turned 360°. A small swamp. Cotton fields. Tall, shrubby trees. Arkansas Highway 1, Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial monuments.

The tarpaper barracks that housed almost 12,000 Japanese-Americans from September 18, 1942 to November 30, 1945 were gone. All that was left was a group of monuments that stood in a grove of trees in the middle of a cotton field, and a tiny cemetery of internees who had died while in camp. I felt lonely and sad, but at the same time grateful, to be the only visitor at the small site.

Swatting mosquitoes away from my face, I closed my eyes, and imagined getting off the train after a four-day ride from California. Being half-Japanese, if I had been alive during that time, I too would have been sent to a relocation center.

The wind whispered in my ear as I walked around the site looking for any memento that might tell me a secret of the camp. A lost trinket. A carving in a tree. A name I might recognize on a headstone.


At last, Sachi, the young girl in my book, whispered a secret to me that changed my story in Broken Dolls. Sachi has become a part of me, and every page I write is a visit with her. One day, when my book is finished, I’ll miss her.

As I prepared to leave Rohwer, I wanted to leave my own monument to the internees. I searched for something special, but the area was barren. Gravel crackled with every step I took in my search. Rocks! That would be my monument. I stacked several and left them as my personal monument to the Japanese-Americans who were taken from their homes in California and brought to Rohwer, Arkansas.

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Then, I drove away with the secrets I’d learned.