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George Takei is only five years old when the U.S. enters World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Mere months after the country’s entry into the war, the government incarcerates just over 120,000 Japanese Americans in 10 internment camps around the country. For George’s parents, Mama and Daddy, their goal as they face internment is simple: to keep their young family of five together, safe, and as happy as possible. But as the children grow, Mama and Daddy’s responsibility to them changes—rather than continuing to preserve their children’s innocence, they feel a duty to educate them about the truth of what happened and instill a sense of pride and civic responsibility. By walking through Mama and Daddy’s evolving parenting style, the memoir gestures towards the importance of community, the value of family, and the role of speaking honestly about shared experiences.
Though the Takei family stays together throughout their internment, They Called Us Enemy also suggests that this was lucky—many families were separated. At Camp Rohwer, Daddy meets two women whose husbands were both arrested and imprisoned when the families were relocated out of the military exclusion zones. The men’s only crime, George Takei explains, was holding a job that made them highly visible in the Japanese American community. Because these men were arrested and their families were then interned, their wives have no way of knowing where their husbands were—or indeed, how they were. And the memoir never revisits these two women’s fate, leaving it unclear whether their families were ever reunited after internment ended. Internment, this shows, fractured families and communities.
All internees, regardless of whether their families were separated, were ripped from their communities when they were forcibly relocated. This meant that they had to form a community among strangers and find ways to keep their lives as normal and bearable as possible. Mama, for instance, throws herself into beautifying the Takeis’ cabin at Rohwer, while Daddy dedicates himself to becoming a community organizer and, eventually, the block manager. Daddy is vocal in his belief that it’s necessary for people to come together and form a new community in the camps. Only by working together and standing together, he suggests, will they ever be able to successfully advocate for better treatment from the government that imprisons them. A bigger community, Daddy shows, is a stronger one.
The memoir’s depiction of family life also creates a tension between the value of innocence and the importance of truth. When their children are younger, Mama and Daddy go out of their way to preserve their innocence, not telling them important details of their situation so that they don’t experience debilitating terror in their day to day life. This has many positive consequences—George has almost nothing but fond memories of his childhood in internment camps, even though his family was being unjustly imprisoned. In a way, this is a form of resistance—by preserving George and his siblings’ innocence, Mama and Daddy give them a semblance of a normal American childhood, despite the government’s attempts to dehumanize and demoralize them.
However, They Called Us Enemy suggests that as children grow, it’s important they learn difficult truths. For George, this happens during a number of after-dinner talks with Daddy where Daddy speaks openly and frankly with him about the horrors of the internment camps, adding important context to George’s happy childhood memories. Mama and Daddy also impress upon George the importance of the Japanese American community, and how the end of internment came about in part because interned Japanese Americans worked together to protest and mount legal battles challenging the legality of the camps. Most importantly, though, these after-dinner talks with Daddy help George to realize that what motivated his parents throughout their internment was love for their family. Mama and Daddy protected their young children from as much as they could. While it may be impossible to totally protect a child from trauma or harm, the memoir nevertheless shows that by forming robust communities and doing everything possible to preserve a child’s innocence, parents can mitigate some of the worst effects of traumatic events.
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Family, Community, and Trauma ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Family, Community, and Trauma appears in each book of They Called Us Enemy. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Family, Community, and Trauma Quotes in They Called Us Enemy
Below you will find the important quotes in They Called Us Enemy related to the theme of Family, Community, and Trauma.
They Called Us Enemy
Quotes
Each family was assigned a horse stall still pungent with the stink of manure. As a kid, I couldn’t grasp the injustice of the situation.
But for my parents, it was a devastating blow. They had worked so hard to buy a two-bedroom house and raise a family in Los Angeles... now we were crammed into a single, smelly horse stall. It was a degrading, humiliating, painful experience.
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Memory is a wily keeper of the past... usually dependable, but at times, deceptive.
Childhood memories are especially slippery.
Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth.
For a child, that sweetness... out of context and intensely subjective... remains forever real.
I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.
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Mama began the impossible work of making a home for us out of the rough-hewn single room.
She ran up curtains made from government surplus fabrics.
Using strips of discarded rags, she braided together colorful floor mats.
About the only thing Mama didn’t have to do was cook.
But to her it was no relief. The kitchen was just one more aspect of caring for her family that she was denied.
One more loss. I realize that besides comforting us... perhaps everything she did was also her own statement of defiance.
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There were fishermen and farmers, shopkeepers and professionals. We were so diverse, all so different. And yet, we were the same. We were all Japanese Americans and we were all in Block 6 at Camp Rohwer. That was our common denominator. Daddy felt keenly that we needed to forge a community together.
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“Die, you Japanese cowards! Bang bang bang!”
“He got me! I’m dead!”
“Gotcha again! America wins the war!”
“Let’s play again, but this time I’ll be American.”
The older boys would play “war.”
“Nuh-uh, you be Japanese. I’m American.”
“No fair! You’re always American!”
It was like cowboys and Indians, but with Japanese and Americans instead.
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Childhood memories come rich with sensations...
... Fragrances, sounds, colors, and especially temperatures. That golden afternoon when Daddy took the family on that wonderful jeep ride...
... Is a fond memory that glows radiantly with warmth.
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Though they responded in different ways—caring for their families...
Fighting on the battlefield...
Or serving time for their principles—all these Japanese Americans showed incredible courage and heroism.
They proved that being American is not just for some people. They all made difficult choices to demonstrate their patriotism to this country even when it rejected them.
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During out after-dinner discussions, Daddy would reveal more details about that time in our lives... filling in some of the gaps that escaped me.
“It was a demonstration in protest of the arrest of a man accused of being a radical.”
“Was he?”
“No! But regardless of whether he was or not... it was important to exercise our right to assemble. Send a message that we were united as a group and opposed to their actions.”
It dawned on me in that moment... I had been participating in democracy as far back as I can remember. That is the strength of our system. Good people organized, speaking loudly and clearly. Engaged in the democratic process.
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“We’re free! We can finally go home!”
“Don’t be a fool! You think our homes are still there? You think white people will welcome us with open arms?”
The irony was that the barbed-wire fenced that incarcerated us also protected us.
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Our childhoods continued to be made up of grotesquely abnormal circumstances...which would eventually become our “normal.”
It had become routine to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall...but the routines of incarceration had all been thrown out. Now we found ourselves in constantly noisy surroundings with a perpetual stench.
But children are amazingly adaptable. We would survive this experience too.
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I had an unsettling feeling...
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America...”
That her calling me “Jap boy” had something to do with our time in camp.
“...and to the republic for which it stands...”
I was old enough by then to understand that camp was something like jail...but could not fully grasp what we had done to be sent there.
The guilt which surrounded our internment made me feel like I deserved to be called that nasty epithet.
“One nation, indivisible...
“with liberty and justice for all.”
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