Julie Otsuka Quotes & Sayings

Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty? Did it fail to please in some way? Worse yet, did it offend? IN — Julie Otsuka

Women are weak, but mothers are strong. — Julie Otsuka

Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do. I'm your florist. I'm your grocer. I'm your porter. I'm your waiter. I'm the owner of the dry-goods store on the corner of Elm. I'm the shoeshine boy. I'm the judo teacher. I'm the Buddhist priest. I'm the Shinto priest. I'm the Right Reverend Yoshimoto. So prease to meet you. ( ... ) I'm the one you call Jap. I'm the one you call Nip. I'm the one you call Slits. I'm the one you call Slopes. I'm the one you call Yellowbelly. I'm the one you call Gook. I'm the one you don't see at all - we all look alike. I'm the one you see everywhere - we're taking over the neighborhood. I'm the one you look for under your bed every night before you go to sleep. ( ... ) I'm your nightmare ... — Julie Otsuka

We loved them. We hated them. We wanted to be them. How tall they were, how lovely, how fair. Their long, graceful limbs. Their bright white teeth. Their pale, luminous skin, which disguised all seven blemishes of the face. Their odd but endearing ways, which ceased to amuse - their love for A.I. sauce and high, pointy-toed shoes, their funny, turned-out walk, their tendency to gather in each other's parlors in large, noisy groups and stand around talking, all at once, for hours. Why, we wondered, did it never occur to them to sit down? They seemed so at home in the world. So at ease. They had a confidence that we lacked. And much better hair. So many colors. And we regretted that we could not be more like them. — Julie Otsuka

They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan. STILL — Julie Otsuka

Every few days the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, From Papa, With Love. — Julie Otsuka

MOSTLY, they were ashamed of us. — Julie Otsuka

The ads in the papers all said 'help wanted, will train,' but wherever she went she was turned down. "The position's just been filled," she was told again and again. Or, "We wouldn't want to upset the other employees." At the department store where she had once bought all her hats and silk stockings they would not hire her as a cashier because they were afraid of offending the customers. Instead they offered her work adding up sales slips in a small dark room in the back where no one could see her but she politely declined.
"I was afraid I'd ruin my eyes back there," she told us. "I was afraid I might accidentally remember who I was and ... offend myself. — Julie Otsuka

In early autumn the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some came back wearing the same shoes they'd left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they'd been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: 'No Japs Allowed.' Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence. — Julie Otsuka

Or was their guilt written plainly, and for all the world to see, across their face? Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty? — Julie Otsuka

Not once did we ever have the money to buy them a single toy. AND — Julie Otsuka

Summer was a long hot dream. — Julie Otsuka

Don't touch me," said the girl. "I want to be sick by myself."
"That's impossible," said her mother. She continued to rub her back and the girl did not push her away — Julie Otsuka

They learned that they should always call the restaurant first. Do you serve Japanese? — Julie Otsuka

But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger's backyard, our mother's rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light. — Julie Otsuka

A girl on North Fremont is discouraged by the postman, who tells her that only a traitor would dare exchange letters with the Japanese. NEW — Julie Otsuka

Nothing's changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates. "Where were you?" they'd ask, or maybe they would just nod and say, "Hey." We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again! — Julie Otsuka

One must not get too attached to the things of this world. AS — Julie Otsuka

BEYOND THE FARM, they'd heard, there were strange pale children who grew up entirely indoors and knew nothing of the fields and streams. Some of these children, they'd heard, had never even seen a tree. — Julie Otsuka

Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. "It's his mother's name," she explained. To which we replied, "So is yours. — Julie Otsuka

SOME SAID that the men had been put on trains and sent far away, over the mountains, to the coldest part of the country. Some said they were enemy collaborators and would be deported within days. Some said they had been shot. Many of us dismissed the rumors as rumors but found ourselves spreading them - wildly, recklessly, and seemingly against our own will - nonetheless. Others of us refused to speak of the missing men by day but at night they came to us in our dreams. — Julie Otsuka

Surely there must be something they had said, or done, surely there must be some mistake they had made, surely they must be guilty of something, some obscure crime, perhaps, of which they were not even aware. — Julie Otsuka

We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting. — Julie Otsuka

A fortune begins with a penny. — Julie Otsuka

And if anyone asks, you're Chinese. The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese." "And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain." "In your dreams," said the boy. "In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King. — Julie Otsuka

Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin. — Julie Otsuka

The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We'd just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. 'Next time I will,' he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, 'Now he'll always be thirsty.' Even now, in my dreams, he's still searching for water. — Julie Otsuka

A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. — Julie Otsuka

It's all in the way you breathe. — Julie Otsuka

It would be autumn, and our fathers would be out threshing in the fields. We would walk through the mulberry groves, past the big loquat tree and the old lotus pond, where we used to catch tadpoles in the spring. Our dogs would come running up to us. Our neighbours would wave. Our mothers would be sitting by the well with their sleeves tied up, washing the evening's rice. And when they saw us they would just stand up and stare. "Little girl," they would say to us, "where in the world have you been? — Julie Otsuka

A memory from before: his sister arriving home from school with her new jump rope trailing behind her on the sidewalk. "They let me turn the handle," she said, "but they wouldn't let me jump." She had cut the rope up into tiny pieces and tossed them into the ivy and sworn she would never jump rope again. — Julie Otsuka

There was a man of the cloth - Reverend Shibata of the First Baptist Church - who left urging everyone to forgive and forget. There was a man in a shiny brown suit - fry cook Kanda of Yabu Noodle - who left urging Reverend Shibata to give it a rest. — Julie Otsuka

Many of us had lost everything and left saying nothing at all. All of us left wearing white numbered identification tags tied to our collars and lapels. — Julie Otsuka

Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs. — Julie Otsuka

We praised them when they were kind to others but told them not to expect to be rewarded for their good deeds. We scolded them whenever they tried to talk back. We taught them never to accept a handout. We taught them never to brag. We taught them everything we knew. — Julie Otsuka

They ate at the table like grown-ups. They never cried. They never complained. They never left their chopsticks standing upright in their rice. They played by themselves all day long without making a sound while we worked nearby in the fields. They drew pictures in the dirt for hours. And whenever we tried to pick them up and carry them home they shook their heads and said, "I'm too heavy" or "Mama, rest." They worried about us when we were tired. They worried about us when we were sad. They knew, without our telling them, when our knees were bothering us or it was our time of the month. — Julie Otsuka

Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us ... "Did you ... she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms ... — Julie Otsuka

You keep it, he said. — Julie Otsuka