My Nest of Silence

Readers of all ages will come away with a deeper appreciation for [Japaneses Americans’] endurance, sacrifices, and resilience.

—Susan H. Kamei, author of When Can We Go Back to America?

My Nest of Silence

Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Winner

Matt Faulkner

Dedicated to the memory

of

Robert Bly and

Malidoma Patrice Somé

And for my wife, Kris

Always

BEFORE we go any further, you should know a few things:

1. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the US government took me away from my home, my school, and my friends and stuck me and my family in a prison camp in the desert just because we’re Japanese American.

2. Now that my brother, Mak, has turned eighteen, he’s signed up for the army, and they’re sending him off to war.

3. I’ve stopped talking for the duration of the war. Or at least until Mak comes home.

4. My father thinks I’m abnormal.

I’m not.

Mama says I have an overdeveloped imagination.

But that just makes me exceptional.

Not abnormal.

1. THAT’LL TEACH THEM

It was a greyhound, my father said, a kind of dog, painted on the side of the bus. It didn’t look like a dog. Not in the least. Trust me. If I were going to draw a dog, it wouldn’t look like that thing. I was trying to figure out what this dog thing actually looked like when the bus pulled away, taking my brother off to the army. I waved to him. The windows were so dirty, I couldn’t tell if he was waving back. So I waved harder. While I was waving, I noticed a suspicious-looking dust cloud rising up behind the bus. It loomed over my parents and me and took on the appearance of a hammer. I was sure it was up to no good. Luckily, a breeze grabbed ahold of it and tossed the dust hammer onto the side of the road.

I wish I hadn’t been so concerned about the dust-cloud hammer, because by the time I’d confirmed that it wasn’t going to clobber us, I realized that the bus was very, very far away. A moment later it and Mak were gone, disappearing behind a distant hill. I kept waving anyway.

If he’d been there, Mak would’ve laughed at me.

Hey, kabocha-head! I could hear him say. Get a load of you worrying about a dust cloud. You and your crazy imagination!

I rubbed my head where I imagined Mak would’ve applied his noogies. Funny thing was, I’d always hollered and squealed in the past when he rubbed my head with his knuckles. But now I actually missed them, Mak and his noogies. I pictured Mak’s face, his eyes and eyebrows and the silly-looking glasses he wore, the way the little scar over his lip would tilt upward when he smiled. I jumped when Mama called my name.

Come along, Mari, said Mama as she and Father started the long walk back to the barracks. (Like all the other grown-ups at the camp, they always spoke in Japanese. They had emigrated from Japan and didn’t learn English when they were growing up, the way Mak and I did. We spoke in Japanese too when we talked with them, though when it was just Mak and me, we spoke English like the other kids. So as you read, just imagine our conversations are all in Japanese.)

Mari! said Father. It’s dinnertime! Come along.

Dinner? Honestly, Father! Mak is going to war on a dirty bus with a stupid dog thing painted on the side of it, and all you care about is dinner. I stood there for a moment, furious, thinking about dust clouds that looked like hammers, about my selfish big brother who’d made a stupid decision to go to war without discussing it with me first, and about my father needing to go eat another piece of boiled SPAM in the mess hall.

It was right then that I decided I wouldn’t talk anymore.

I remember saying to myself, I know what’ll teach them. I’m not going to talk anymore. Later on I added, Or at least until Mak comes home. But I didn’t add that part till I’d spent a few days not talking. Take it from me, not talking is not easy.

Mari! Please, hollered Father.

I spun about, stomped after my parents, and caught up to them. As we passed the guard post by the front gate, the sentry smiled at me. I stuck out my tongue.

That’ll teach him, too.

2. TWO WEEKS IS A LONG, DUSTY TIME IN MANZANAR

Bad news: no mail from Mak! Not a single letter! I’d already written to him three times! And these weren’t your average letters, either. These were four-page letters with long descriptions and drawings. I drew a picture of me and Mama and Father and the sentry by the front gate. And I drew the weird dog thing that was on the side of his bus and the dust cloud that turned into a hammer. The envelopes were stuffed and they needed extra postage to mail. Father made me pay for the extra stamps.

And still no mail from Mak. Do people forget how to write when they join the army? Maybe he didn’t even get there. Maybe he jumped off of that dirty bus and joined the circus and he was too busy cleaning up after the elephants to write to me. Anyway, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t written to me yet.

And just so you know, being silent hadn’t been easy. Not long after I’d made my vow, I started wishing I’d thought of some less difficult manner of teaching everyone a lesson. It was about then that I came up with a good reason for keeping silent: maybe by staying quiet I was somehow helping Mak come home safe. I know, it’s kind of crazy and I’m not sure about the logic of that, but it felt like a better reason for keeping my vow than just to irritate Father.

For as long as I could remember, I was the one who’d done most of the talking in my family. Singing, too. And while Father was not a fan of my talking, he very much disliked my singing. He would put up with it, though, in that grumpy way he puts up with things he doesn’t like. As far as my more recent decision not to talk was concerned, well, I was fairly certain he hated it. You’d think he would’ve appreciated my silence, seeing as he disliked my jabbering as much as he did. But not so. Mama, on the other hand, took my silence much better than Father. That was understandable. In the best of times, Father was a surly grump and Mama was, well, Mama. She could make sweet things out of sour.

I remember after Pearl Harbor when the FBI came and took our radio. Mama waited till they’d driven out of sight and then put a record on the phonograph, turned it up loud, and went right back to doing whatever she’d been doing before they arrived. Father? He stomped outside and slammed the front door, something he never did. And when we learned that the government was sending us to live in this dusty, frying-pan prison camp, Mama simply got busy: busy selling the farm and busy packing. Father? He fumed and snorted, staring at our fields and mumbling to himself about how little money we’d received for the farm and that we were being punished for a crime we didn’t commit.

I remember waking one night to the sound of him smashing stuff in the kitchen. This scared me. But it didn’t last. Father may come to a boil pretty quick, but he cools down even quicker.

Okay, back to my decision to stop talking; as I said, it was something that Father simply couldn’t accept. Not only was it not acceptable, it was, to him, abnormal. And for Father, abnormal is the worst thing a person can be. One night during our walk home from the mess hall, Father knelt down and took my hands in his and looked me in the eye.

Mari, this willful silence of yours must end. It is abnormal, he said.

Ichiro, please, said Mama. She’s just upset over Mak leaving.

Father stood, frowning, his arms folded.

Aki, we cannot simply ignore Mari’s abnormal behavior.

Abnormal. There it was again. That word came out of Father’s mouth like it tasted bad.

She is becoming the object of scorn!

Mama took my hand and started walking us back to our barracks.

Mari is fine, Mama said over her shoulder. Please relax, Ichiro. You’re going to have a fit.

I do not feel like I will have a fit, Father grumbled as he fell in behind us. (I made a mental note to myself: Draw Father having a fit when we get home.)

3. THE CLUCKING SISTERS

Still no mail came from Mak. What was wrong with him? How could he do this to me? He made me so angry! If he had been there right then, Mak would’ve been the person I wouldn’t talk to the most! Ha! But honestly, three weeks was a long time to wait for a letter in a sweaty, nowhere place like Manzanar with nothing to do.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. There were things to do. Such as chores. There were always lots of those. Giving me chores to do was Father’s way of paying me back for being abnormal. I hated chores. And doing laundry was the worst one of all. Oh, I just hated folding the laundry. Why fold it when you’re only going to wear it again anyway?

But let’s not dwell on laundry. On the bright side, I’d gotten pretty good at being silent. And I was quite proud of myself, because it hadn’t been easy. A lot of grown-ups seemed to take my silence as a personal insult. They’d ask me a question and I’d just smile at them and wouldn’t answer. Most grown-ups hate when kids do that kind of thing. But others thought my being silent was just a silly thing, something to laugh at and forget.

Being silent did, however, bring some pleasant surprises. For instance, I was happy to notice the irritation my silence caused our gossiping neighbors, the Chiba sisters. They lived next door to our barracks. Father called them the Clucking Sisters because they were always gossiping. They couldn’t stand my silence. I couldn’t stand their clucking. I spent many happy hours drawing the Chiba sisters. I really enjoyed turning them into chickens.

There was a big open space where everyone in our barracks hung their laundry. On Tuesday mornings it was my job