In the wake of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, described by some as “our new Pearl Harbor,” we saw an unfortunate readiness, on the part of many, to assume that all Americans of Middle Eastern background were suddenly suspect and should somehow be held accountable for these crimes. It was a hauntingly familiar rush to judgment. In the early months of 1942, this is what preceded the unlawful evacuation and internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry.

From that day on, pay of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I could not have defined it at the Tom me, I felt if attention were drawn to me, people would see what this girl had first responded to. They wouldn’t see me, the would see the slanted – eye face, the Oriental.

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals.

The reason I want to remember this is because I know we’ll never be able to do it again.

From that day on, pay of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I could not have defined it at the Tom me, I felt if attention were drawn to me, people would see what this girl had first responded to. They wouldn't see me, the would see the slanted - eye face, the Oriental.

I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted

That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.

Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them tostop fighting?