The Fervor

by Alma Katsu

They want your women, your businesses, your homes, your livelihoods. Everything you’ve worked hard for. There’ll be nothing left for your children. This won’t be a white country anymore.

Only a hard-core racist would believe otherwise.

30 AUG 1944

The fact that Bly, a little piece of the American heartland, was literally crawling with men and women as bigoted as any Nazi made her nauseous.

After all, America was her country, too.

We want you to come with us to Washington, D.C. We’d like for you to talk to our director, and to our leaders in the Senate about what happened at Minidoka. We think it all points to an important threat to the nation, one we can’t afford not to address.”

And you’re the widow of a war hero—those congressmen would have to be monsters not to listen to you.”

This scourge won’t go away on its own. It’ll plague America for a long time.”

America is experiencing a wave of senseless violence against Asian Americans that can’t help but remind one of the internment of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor, when policy makers moved to deny tens of thousands of American citizens their rights and caused massive loss of freedom and property. Countless lives were wrecked because those in charge caved to a popular pressure without basis in fact, that was driven purely by emotion. Because policy makers and civic leaders didn’t do what they knew in their hearts and heads was right. I know the story of the internment well because it’s part of my history. My mother is Japanese, and my in-laws’ entire family were interned during the war. I grew up listening to stories of how my mother was ill-treated when she came to live in America with my father. She had been a child during the war and could hardly be blamed for decisions made by the men in charge, but that didn’t make any difference to the people who called her names, mistreated and threatened her. The ugly brutality she suffered at their hands scarred her for life.

As for the internment camps, not only did I hear many stories from my husband’s family but, like many Japanese Americans not far removed from that period in history, we watched documentaries and read books, and generally learned everything we could. It is a fascinating, many-sided, and emotional episode in America’s history and one that should be studied in more depth in civics classes across the country. There’s a long history of violence against Asians in America. If you’re unaware of this, it’s not surprising: it doesn’t make the history books; it’s not taught in classrooms in America. But lest you think I’m being histrionic with the white nationalism depicted in The Fervor, here’s an abbreviated list of violent attacks on Asians on U.S. soil:

In 1871, in one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history, a mob in Los Angeles attacked and killed nineteen Chinese residents, part of a growing wave of sentiment against Asians, who were seen as taking jobs that belonged to white laborers. This led to passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. • In the U.S. in the 1940s, 120,000 people of Japanese heritage were forced to relocate to internment camps due to fears of espionage, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Over 60 percent of internees were U.S. citizens. No spies were ever found. • In 1979, the Ku Klux Klan arrived in Seadrift, Texas, to intimidate Vietnamese crab fishermen, following an incident between local white and Vietnamese fishermen in which a white fisherman was killed. The Vietnamese involved in the shooting were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, but the acquittal prompted the Ku Klux Klan to descend on Seadrift and maintain a long campaign of violence and intimidation against the Asian community there. • Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death in 1982 by two

American autoworkers who had mistakenly believed he was Japanese. The incident took place during a recession that was blamed, in part, on the increased share of Japanese auto imports in U.S. markets. • In 1989, Patrick Purdy, a drifter with a criminal record, fired on a school in Stockton, California, predominantly attended by Southeast Asian refugee children, killing five and wounding thirty-two others. This event marked the largest number of school-age victims in the U.S. until the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999. • Violent crime against

Asians in America rose by nearly 200 percent from 2019 to 2020, after political factions implied that China was responsible for the deliberate release of coronavirus. There was a swift upsurge in attacks on Asians across the country, with twice as many of these crimes directed against women than men, possibly because they were seen as easier targets. One reason the current wave of hate against Asian Americans strikes a deep chord with me is because for many years during my career as an analyst for the federal government, ...

propaganda, generally campaigns run by authoritarian thugs who sought to undermine a society by generating an irrational fear of a scapegoat, an “other.” The playbook is the same, again and again. Lies, lies, and the willingness of a large part of a population to channel their fear into senseless hatred. While studying what was happening in other countries—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Liberia, and Rwanda, to name a few familiar in the annals of infamy—I was almost smug in my belief that this systematic dissolution of a country’s common sense may have been...

also safeguards built into our governing laws and principles. It went against our very nature as Americans. We were raised to believe in truth, justice, and opportunity for all. We all kn...

The Fervor is based on two real historical incidents, one being the internment, as already mentioned. The second is the fire balloons, or Fu-Go, which did manage to make it to the American West Coast during the last months of the war. The actual story of the Fu-Go is barely scratched here, and for those who are interested in learning more, I recommend Fu-go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack o...

This book was written to hold the mirror of history up to the reality of today, to show that the self-deception we were guilty of in the past is back with a sickening vengeance.