Audiobook: Sisters Matsumoto

From the Publishers:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US government sent thousands of Japanese American citizens to detention camps. In 1945, three Japanese-American sisters return to their farm in Stockton, California, after years in an internment camp, but the once prosperous family finds it’s not easy to pick up the pieces of their former lives. As the details of their deceased father’s final arrangements emerge, the sisters must work together to keep their dreams alive.  

This recording is sponsored in part by California Civil Liberties Program from the California State Library.  

Includes a conversation with actor George Takei, playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, and director Tim Dang.  

Directed by Tim Dang.  

My Thoughts:

Although I am a yonsei on both of my parents's sides (4th generation Japanese American), internment is not in our history because my ancestors landed in Hawaii to work on the sugarcane plantation rather than on the mainland. I do not come from a family of priests, Japanese school teachers or scholars. What that means is that the American internment story of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII is not my family story. But this school year has brought these personal stories back into my consciousness through my teacher candidates who are teaching their high school students about internment, to reading George Takei's graphic novel They Called Us Enemy on his own experience as a very young child, to the PBS series on Asian Americans that was broadcast while we were under stay at home orders that felt similar to the stay at home orders during WWII. What we found was that we still had things to learn through these different lenses and although we know a lot, we still do not know a lot too. It is probably so with every history of marginalized peoples in the world. Their stories and their lenses are just not taught in schools. It is up to us to learn more. 

This story/play takes the listeners on a journey with a group of Japanese Americans that return from the internment camps to find that although they are now free, they are not free. It is the story of coming back to nothing that is not often talked about. It is about family secrets, about shame, and ultimately resilience.