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That was his mother: formidable and ferocious when her child was in need.
Being a PAO, the authorities reminded everyone, was not itself a crime. PACT is not about race, the president was always saying, it is about patriotism and mindset.
The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. In kindergarten they called it a promise: We promise to protect American values. We promise to watch over each other.
Each year they learn the same thing, just in bigger words.
The Three Pillars of PACT. Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. And there, beneath Sadie’s finger: Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.
They were kind people who thought they meant well.
If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.
sometimes the same bank on both sides of the street, one across from the other. He had not known it was possible to be so rich you would not cross the street.
Older buildings that wore their age gracefully, looking staid, not shabby.
A safe and desirable foreignness. Shops labeled gourmet and luxury and vintage.
PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions. A solemn promise to root out any anti-American elements undermining the nation.
Spirare, Bird hears his father say. To breathe. Con: together. So conspiracy literally means breathing together.
Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.
Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?
None of them are sure how this will work, where they will go, how they will find their way, but it is not impossible, and right now that feels like enough.
Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject, but Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror gives an invaluable overview.
If you’re new to this subject and want to learn more, I hope you’ll look at The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee; Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats; Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves; and From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement, by Paula Yoo, as a few starting points.
Poems of Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, gives a wonderful introduction to her work and life story.
Writings on McCarthyism, including Naming Names, by Victor S. Navasky, and The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, by Ellen Schrecker and Phillip Deery,
Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, by Geoffrey R. Stone, cataloged dozens of historical examples with eerie resonances to our current times; and books such as Ronald C. Rosbottom’s When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944 helped me consider the blurry overlaps between resisting, tolerating, and colluding.
Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was a powerful reminder about how quickly authoritarianism can rise (as well as what can be done about it), and Václav Havel’s classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” changed my thinking about the impact a single individual could have in dismantling a long-established system.
