Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
When I was 5 years old, I didn’t understand what a scapegoat was. All I understood was that, because of Japan’s aggression that pulled the United States into the war, my family and I had to leave our Los Angeles home at gunpoint, taking with us only what we could carry.
My mother, tears in her eyes, managed to stash an entire new portable sewing machine in her bag. She knew that where we were going, we might need to make our own clothes. She was right.
We were put on buses and sent to a racetrack in Santa Anita, California, where I lived with my parents and two siblings in a single horse stable for months. Then, it was a thousand-mile journey by train eastward, the blinds pulled down, supposedly for our own safety. No telling what locals might do if they knew a train full of “Japs” was passing through.