family trials Quotes

“A couple of years after the camps opened, sociologists studying the life noticed what had happened to the families . . . My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit.”

“You might say it would have happened sooner or later anyway, this sliding apart of such a large family, in postwar California. But there is no escaping the fact that our internment accelerated the process, made it happen so suddenly it was almost tangible. Not only did we stop eating at home, there was no longer a home to eat in.”

“Mama had to buy our clothes in shifts, which meant that we each had to wait our turn for new clothes.”

“The boys and I would wear threadbare clothing washed to dishwater color; but always, the taxes and the mortgage would be paid up.”

“The painting ... represented something lost, something I had never had, would never have. ”

“The old silence had broken and left us with the sharp pieces. ”

“And we needed that money so badly at the time, the whole family was elated. But Kota kept almost all the money for himself.”

“Traumatic stress can spread to anyone with whom the sufferers share their lives. Trauma begets trauma.”

“In spite of the visible hostility of the family, Fernanda did not give up her drive to impose the customs of her ancestors. She put an end to the custom of eating in the kitchen and whenever anyone was hungry, and she imposed the obligation of doing it at regular hours at the large table in the dining room, covered with a linen cloth and with silver candlesticks and table service.”

“You’re the kind of girl I should have married. ”

“You don’t want that ... You think you do.”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

“And when he couldn’t sleep, he retired to his study and the laudanum bottle that had become his constant companion. Sometimes I’d find him asleep in his chair, the dogs at his feet, the brown bottle close at hand […] he’d grown thinner, whittled down by grief and opium. And I could only stand by, helpless and mute, the cause of it all.”

“You’re going to have to be flexible, Alexander. Our family is going through a real crisis. In the Chinese language, do you know what the characters for ‘crisis’ are? ‘Danger’ plus ‘opportunity’. Maybe your mother’s illness will offer you an extraordinary opportunity.”

“It’s much more difficult for Lisa than for any of us. Alexander. We have to be strong, the way she is.”