lb_lee

Quick info! Speculative fiction story about rescuing a mind-entity. Featuring a cast of PoC, mixed-race, non-binary, plural and singlet characters.

Also in this story: Scrappy espionage attempts, slice-of-life humor, criticisms of systemic inequalities, and many gently surreal moments.
 

Opening scene:

“Kei. Darrell’s in trouble.” The voice of Rinth, from the Meadows System, came through my cellphone.

I lowered my glass of shiso juice, ice cubes clinking, taking this in. Darrell… in trouble? Was Darrell lost on his way to a book convention? Was Darrell attempting to watch an acclaimed psychological thriller and having to take a breather? Did a too-trendy cafe overwhelm Darrell and was he now mournfully standing outside and wishing he could somehow get a cup of tea?

I clunked my glass down on the table, as more serious scenarios ran through my mind. “Wait, Rinth – did some white people do something? Or – Rinth, is Darrell okay?”

“Darrell’s…? Maybe okay?” said Rinth. It was a rather weak assurance. “But he sent an odd text. Asking us, Casa Meadows, for help. For plurality help, specifically.”

“What?” Neither Darrell nor I are plural. What’s a singlet like Darrell asking the Meadows system for help with?

“Yeah, all of us here are confused about it,” agreed Rinth. “Kei, you work in the same company as Darrell, right? I think we need your help getting to where Darrell is, right now.”

“You mean, at work? At Lamerie Support?”

“No, he’s somewhere else I think. ‘Contract work at Synapsens’… Does this sound familiar?”

I sat up. “Wait. Maybe.” I pushed my shiso drink away.

After a few more questions and exchanges, we hung up. I knew I needed to get ready to meet the Meadows Crew. But I took a moment to look around my kitchen, one last time.

My day off. White morning light streaming in, reflecting off the pale walls, hitting the leaves of my herbs and making them glow bright yellow-green. The air still smelled of the shiso leaves I had been boiling. The counter cluttered with a packet of citric acid, silverware and chopsticks. My half-washed glass, pink with juice, sitting in the sink.

Something told me I should savor and remember this peaceful moment, because things were going to become strange.

The title or passage may change.

One time, I turned to Darrell, looked him in the eye, and said something like: “I lost my gender in Ohio.”

Darrell looked back at me askance, because I was saying random things again. Nevertheless, he asked, “...When were you in Ohio?”

 “I’ve flown over the state at least once,” I noted. “That’s when I misplaced my gender. It must have slipped out of the airplane, though the escape hatch.”

Darrell thought about this. He finally followed up with, “I lost my gender at the bottom of the sea, in a conch shell that never existed.”

Darrell and I have a lot of differences. Our tastes in movies, for instance, have little overlap. It wasn’t until we watched our 6th movie together that this finally dawned on me. However, the fact that we can chatter freely and flippantly about gender things is a comfort and one of the facets in our friendship.

"Day of Remembrance, Day of Action” in Tacoma draws multigenerational, multiethnic crowd

By

 Tamiko Nimura

The barbed wire on the fences near the crowd was razor-sharp. The rain and wind whipped around the “No More Concentration Camp” banners and the taiko drums, trying to dislodge the strings of carefully wrapped origami cranes attached to a chain link fence. Over two hours, volunteers took turns holding the tent poles over the Japanese American and Puyallup elders, bringing them extra blankets. Linda Ando’s handmade wooden signs for the remembrance ceremony marked each of the 10 major concentration camp sites, other WWII camps, Crystal City, and a new addition—the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma.

Titled “Day of Remembrance, Day of Action”, the February 23 protest at the NWDC gathered a multigenerational, multiethnic crowd of about 400 supporters. Organizers included Densho, Seattle Japanese American Citizens League, Tsuru for Solidarity and La Resistencia – a group which has been protesting the NWDC since 2014. This Day of Remembrance drew lines of solidarity across communities, geographies and chronologies.

Puyallup Tribal Elder Connie McLeod offered an invocation, blessing, but also recounted the story of an elder from her tribe whose family had been evicted from their land on Vashon Island to Yakima. Organizer Maru Mora from La Resistencia urged the crowd to make noise to make sure that the prisoners inside could hear the support.

“Today we’re making history but the kind of history we want,” she said, “for our liberation, for our people.”

Mora spoke of the partnership with the event organizers as an “honor,” saying that “[this] is the way partnerships should happen.” Mora translated for Carlos Venegas, a former NWDC detainee who spoke about the conditions inside: subpar food, insufficient medical care and lack of access to legal assistance. “There’s no compassion inside,” he said.

Mora also broadcast a phone call from an anonymous detainee inside the NWDC, who echoed Venegas’s description. Marcela Hernández, an organizer with Detention Watch Network, spoke about campaigns to shut down detention centers in California and Illinois, citing a successful farmworker campaign in McFarland, California.

Speakers from the Japanese American community were also included. Tsuru for Solidarity co-chair Satsuki Ina drew parallels between her father’s dissidence at Tule Lake and the hunger strikes at the NWDC.  She described the psychology of strikers, praising their “courage”: “They are willing to sacrifice their own bodies to protest their incarceration and their indignities that they’ve been suffering.”

Ina’s granddaughter Skylar Tomine reminded the crowd that her generation is “furious…We will be voting soon and we want change.” Musician Kishi Bashi had reached out to Densho and offered his help with the event. “This is my first time performing at a protest,” the violinist said before the program. “All the research I’ve been doing into Japanese American incarceration led me to understand that you need to take action.”

For Tsuru for Solidarity co-chair Mike Ishii, coming to the Seattle area was a homecoming; he arrived just hours after a Day of Remembrance organized in New York with Ina. He performed a spoken word piece (accompanied by Kishi Bashi) and linked Tsuru for Solidarity with organizations like the Detention Watch Network.

“You know, growing up in the community,” he said before the program, “[some of the Nisei and older Sansei] would say, ‘well, the young ones that were born there [in camp], they were too young to remember anything’…And I always thought that was not exactly accurate. That generation of the survivors…they’re leading the charge here…And they are giving permission to every other generation to actually have the conversation about what it was, to talk about it with their families, the trauma and the shame.”

Camp Harmony and Minidoka survivor Paul Tomita is one of those survivors. “It hits home. And we as JA, we do have the moral authority, because you know, I was there. I can actually say, I was there, and I didn’t like it, by the way. They took us [when I was] 3 and 4, so I personally don’t remember Puyallup, but I do remember Minidoka.” He pointed fiercely at the Detention Center, just yards behind the chain link fence around the crowd. “You would think that America would learn in these 78 years not to do this again.”

Reverend Karen Yokota Love brought a multiethnic group of 25 attendees from her congregation in Seattle. Love said that she represented her family members who were incarcerated, but also the Japanese American United Methodist Caucus.

Tacoma artists Anida Yoeu Ali and Masahiro Sugano attended the protest ”[as] a family who’s both Japanese and Khmer,” said Ali.  “We need to stand up for each other, because the Khmer community are currently facing extreme deportations.”

“When we were living in Cambodia,” added Sugano,  “we met quite a few of them who were detained here, prior to their deportation. We know how this kind of facility separates families, and it’s not necessary.”

Yonsei artist Kayla Isomura, known for her powerful artwork, the “Suitcase Project,” brought a group of friends from the Vancouver area of Canada. She called the protest “eye-opening.”

Seattle JACL President Stan Shikuma, who emcee’d the program, concluded with a call to action. “It takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of stamina to come out and stand out here all this time. And I also want to say that while I admire and appreciate and love all of you [here] for that – it’s not enough,” he said. “I’m asking you to do more.” He drew connections between slavery for African Americans, Native American “boarding schools” and immigrant detention. He also reminded the crowd of La Resistencia’s ongoing actions, about the nationwide work of the Detention Watch Network, about the ongoing legislative advocacy needed to ban all private prisons like the NWDC in Washington State.

“The goal is to end all incarceration,” Shikuma said. He and other organizers tried to deliver a letter inside the NWDC, listing demands for “decent, humane care” for all imprisoned there. He and other organizers were asked to leave. “It was confirmed later,” event volunteer Vince Schleitwiler said, “that the taiko drums could be heard from inside the facility.”

Overall, it was a Day of Remembrance like few others – except, perhaps, the first one at Camp Harmony in 1978. Densho director Tom Ikeda noted that the NWDC crowd stood not only within a few miles of the Puyallup Fairgrounds, but also within sight line of Union Station, where the Tacoma Japanese Americans were evicted in 1942.  “[But] Day of Remembrance was always political,” said Frank Abe, one of the main 1978 organizers. “We called it ‘Remembrance’ but that was to create a safe space for the Nisei to feel comfortable coming out. [It was] always about redress…But this has the same feel… it was about taking action.”