Alternative Spring Break

For Spring Break this year I did a service project instead of going on vacation, to a place where my family had been imprisoned for 4 years during World War II. The project required a lot of physical labor, outside in the sun, and I took this time to do a lot of personal reflecting and to get to know my groupmates a little better. What struck me was that even though we were working in spaces often smaller than 10 X 10, some of them whipped out their iPods and plugged themselves in as we were working. At first I was slightly irked by it, but then I realized that these kids have never known life without some sort of iPod-like device. After four years of music school, I still don't have an iPod, but this device is completely impacting generations of kids and how they interact socially.

Instead of plugging in, I took some time to think and wrote this after the trip:

When I felt the sun burning into my skin, the dryness of the air squeezing the moisture out of me, and the wind and sand whipping into my body I sort of began to understand what happened to my family. There's this weight around your heart and your soul when there's nothing but desolate stretches of wasteland and emptiness as far as you can see. It feels like hopelessness and desperation and an intense loneliness - like your neighbors and your state and your country have turned their backs and abandoned you in this horribly Godforsaken place. That your freedom, something so sacred to Americans, could be taken away for an interminable amount of time. I wanted to cry but everything was so dry that I couldn't.

I wanted for nothing more in the world than for my Grandma to still be alive so I could call her and tell her what I was doing. I wanted to ask her so badly where my family's barracks were, if she had visited the gardens that I shoveled out from under many feet of overgrowth and windblown sand, where the fire station where my grandpa volunteered was, and where my aunts and uncle had gone to school. Who the man was in the story she told me years ago, that was playing catch with his grandson and wandered too close to the perimeter to retrieve a ball and was shot by the military police because he only spoke Japanese and didn't understand when they told him to move away. But mostly I wanted to tell her that people were coming to Manzanar every day, and looking at the museum and that there were park rangers here from all over the U.S. who cared so deeply about protecting the site and its history. That I was doing
something small but important - helping other people to remember what had happened here and the things that are so much more important than differences and fear and hysteria. When I saw my grandparents in the roster of prisoners, and saw a photograph of my aunt going to
Pilgrimage in the museum there, I knew that what I was doing was important, and I want my kids to do this too. Learn the history of our people but not the anger and hate that I felt for so long.