Writing from Researched Experience

 

I’m about as WASP as you can get, but the protagonist of my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels, is not. Here’s the blurb.

Twelve-year-old Emi Katayama is half Japanese, but she is all American. Then Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and she suddenly becomes the enemy.

So why did I write this book? The Japanese-American incarceration is a part of our history that often gets ignored, and I wanted to change that. All American children should learn the bad parts of their country’s history as well as the good ones. If our children understand the past, they are less likely to repeat it.

I could have used a white protagonist who lives outside the camp, as Kirby Larson did very effectively in the Dear America book The Fences Between Us, but I wanted to get closer than that. I did, however, give my protagonist a Swedish-American mother and placed Emi in a “white” neighborhood in Berkeley rather than in San Francisco’s Japantown. That allowed Emi to share some of my culture.

It also gave the book a different perspective than most. Even 1/16 Japanese blood was enough to send a child to the camps, and, while it was rare, there were a handful of Caucasian woman in each camp who had chosen to join their children or husbands there. None of the books I read dealt with this experience.

Still, Emi is half Japanese and I have no Japanese blood. I have also never experienced life in an internment camp. So what qualified me to write the story?

Research is key. Since I didn’t live through the experience, my research relied significantly on the voices of those Japanese Americans who had. Autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and “as told to” accounts are better than history books for learning what people actually experienced and how they reacted emotionally.

I was fortunate to have good materials available when writing Desert Jewels. Emi follows in the footsteps of Yoshiko Uchida, who lived in Berkeley, was initially incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center, and was then sent to Topaz (officially known as the Central Utah Relocation Center). Hers was one of several memoirs by people who traveled that same path. In addition, the camp newspapers from Tanforan and Topaz are available online. So I had a wealth of information to use when trying to create an authentic experience for the reader.

Next week I’ll talk about Creating Esther and my thought process in choosing a Native American protagonist to tell that story.

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Desert Jewels is available in paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon and in paperback from Barnes & Noble.