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Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.
The week before they had still smelled of his father but tonight the smell of his father was gone.
“Same moon,” he whispered to himself, “same moon.”
He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.
“From now on,” she said, “we’re counting on our fingers.”
“In my dreams,” said the girl, “I’m the King.”
“Chink or Jap?” and the boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout, “Jap! Jap! I’m a Jap!” Just to set the record straight. But by then the man was already gone.
Be patient. And remember, it’s better to bend than to break. Not once did he mention the war.
He had put them into an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there—no peeking, was his rule—his father would be all right.
Shows his childishness somewhat - 2
He worried that his father would be bald.
“And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?” “You always turned off the stove.” “Did I?” “Every time.” “Did we even have a stove?” “Of course we had a stove.”
Fading mundanity - 2
She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.
“I’m digging a hole to China,”
Pattern: she lies to protect him - 3
Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul.
Pattern with him: needless shame - 3
“We’ll resurrect him.”
Jesus imagery - 1
He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw.
Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach, or—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with all of the other men.
He wants to believe in fairness - 2
in the First World War,
Irony: this would be the epitome of loyalty - 2
“Or maybe,” she said, “it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. That’s just how it is.”
Shatters his fairness illusion - 2/3
“I had no business wearing those earrings in the first place,” she said after a while. “No business at all.”
Earwigs are a symbol - 2
“Moths,” he said. “Try bullets,” said the girl.
Represents their two different perspectives - 2/3
He turned the mirror around so it faced the wall.
THREE IN THE MORNING. The dead time. Empty of dreams. He lay awake in the darkness worrying about the bicycle he’d left behind, chained to the trunk of the persimmon tree. Had the tires gone flat yet? Were the spokes rusted and clogged with weeds? Was the key to the lock still hidden in the shed?
Just like his mom and he stove, this is his was of using the mundane to process what has happened - 3
“You never did,” whispered the boy.
At dinner she set the table for four,
Optimism
That night she had set the table for three.
Symbolizes his absence - 2
His pockets were filled with good things.
She ate all her meals with her friends. Never with the boy or his mother. She smoked cigarettes. He could smell them in her hair. One day he saw her standing in line at the mess hall in her Panama hat and she hardly seemed to recognize him at all.
This is technically normal teenage behavior, but it's a terrible situation for her to grow up in - 2/5
WHO WAS WINNING the war? Who was losing? His mother no longer wanted to know. She had stopped keeping track of the days. She no longer read the paper or listened to the bulletins on the radio. “Tell me when it’s over,” she said.
In her mind there were always men at the door. We just need to ask your husband a few questions. She would stare down at her hands in her lap, as though surprised to find them still there. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep.”
PTSD symptoms
Chinese characters
“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We’d just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. ‘Next time I will,’ he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, Now he’ll always be thirsty.”
Survivor's guilt; it's also a cruel irony that the boy has to hear all of this - 2/5
“You didn’t know.” “Even now, in my dreams, he’s still searching for water.”
“Good. You’re a good jumper.” “I’m terrible. I don’t even deserve to hold the rope.”
The man next door answered no and was sent away along with his wife and his wife’s mother to join the other disloyals at Tule Lake.
It's not a question, it's a test - 1/2
Loyalty. Disloyalty. Allegiance. Obedience. “Words,” she said, “it’s all just words.”
Secretly, the boy blamed himself. I shouldn’t have plucked that leaf. . . .
Pattern: self-blame - 3
And somewhere out there in the desert a lone tortoise was wandering slowly, steadily, toward the thin blue edge of the horizon.
Years later the boy would recall standing beside his mother at the service, wondering just what kind of flower it was the man had seen. A rose? A tulip? A daffodil?
Symbolic - 2
Several days later, the street signs appeared. Suddenly there was an Elm Street, a Willow Street, a Cottonwood Way. Alexandria Avenue ran from east to west past the administration offices. Greasewood Way led straight to the sewer pump. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be leaving here any time soon,” said the boy’s mother.
Signifies permanence - 1
Now he’ll know where to find us, thought the boy.
What if he stopped biting his nails and remembered to do everything the first time he was told? And said his prayers every night before bed? And ate all of his coleslaw even when it was touching the other food on his plate? “That might just do the trick.”
He traced out an SOS in huge letters across the firebreak but before anyone could read what he had written he wiped the letters away.
as though he were Jesus,
“Now tell me what I missed,” he’d say. “Tell me everything.”
He was not the same man who had lived in that house before the war.
she had reached for the key as soon as she woke, just to make sure it was still there.
Metaphor for hope - 2
The key had become a part of her. It was always there, a small, dark shape, dangling—visibly and sometimes invisibly, depending on the light, and what she was wearing, and even, at times, it seemed, on her mood—just beneath the surface of her clothes.
If she took it off, surely terrible things would happen. Our house—that faraway speck on the map—would fall down, or go up in flames, or simply disappear. The war would last forever. Our mother would cease to be.
It's the only thing sustaining her hope/will to live, and represents the house - 3
We heard a click and then the door swung open and she took off her hat and stepped into the foyer and after three years and five months we were suddenly, finally, home.
