My Thoughts:
When I taught American literature in the high school classroom, I was pretty proud of the resources I was able to gather for the book Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. This was an account of the author's time at Manzanar as a young teen, but I was even more interested in the stories of her older siblings in high school. There is a famous picture of a young girl sitting on one of these brown suitcases that are on the cover. This kind of primary documents provided by my social studies counterpart helped me to get my hands on the actual yearbook from Manzanar. However, since this is a personal accounting, as the years went on, the book just did not grab my students. The characters seemed too old fashioned.
Much later in 2019, Star Trek actor, activist and survivor wrote They Called Us Enemy, a graphic novel accounting of he and his family's internment at one of the Japanese centers. I really liked that it was a graphic novel. It could sit on the bookshelf with John Lewis' March series on the civil rights movement. The problem, though, was that Takei writes from his child perspective since he was even younger than Wakatsuki Houston.
Traci Chee finally came out with a high school version of the Japanese American experience. This is much needed and long awaited. I really liked the voices of the different characters. The teens felt both time bound because of their circumstances, but also very contemporary. I liked this story so much that I also borrowed the audiobook from the public library. The audiobook is even better than reading it alone! With a full cast of readers, the story comes alive. The pain is more painful, the humor, more funny, and the fear more palpable. This one deserved to be the National Book Award winner.
For the classroom teachers, I don't believe in using this as a class novel where each section has an assessment and the reading is as slow as the slowest reader, however, take advantage of the teacher's guide below. Use it to tweak for your own intentions and then definitely check out the online site for the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center or the Japanese American National Museum.
From the Publisher:
From New York Times best-selling and acclaimed author Traci Chee comes We Are Not Free, the collective account of a tight-knit group of young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II.
Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco.
Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted.
Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.
In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.
Publication Information:
Author: Traci Chee
Publisher: Clarion Books (March 1, 2022)
Paperback: 400 pages
ISBN 13: 978-0358668107
Grade level: 6-9
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