Weedflower

The first half of weedflower flew by for me. The story was so easy to glide into. Sumiko is a great character. She is such a typical little girl and then she has this whole other side to her of being Japanese and living in a family that stands out in a war time society. I love her innocence. She does not assume that her differences will cause people to treat her differently. It breaks my heart when she goes to the birthday party and learns what prejudice involves at the human level. She is just a classmate of another girl, in a pretty dress, ready for a birthday party and she has to learn the hard and hurtful lesson of being treated unfairly because of her ethnicity. I really like that this story is set in the eyes of a child. Sumiko is old enough to understand some of what is going on, but not old enough to get the full grasp of things. One scene in particular really hit me. It was the scene when the kids are on top of the roof of the barracks and she comments about everyday life going on outside of the racetrack. “It was something amazing: normal life. Cars drove, people walked, trees swayed in the wind.” It really put it into perspective for me that there was not combat going on around these camps that the Japanese were put into. There was normal, everyday American life, it was just that this group of people were being left out of it. The ridiculousness of this act was illustrated here. I understand that the government is probably going to step on some people’s toes when they are scared and trying to protect our nation. But this story makes me see the complete injustice of sectioning off and quarantining an entire ethnicity of Americans. They truly were Americans, many born in America. Background checks to see that Japanese Americans are legitimately here to lead a better life is one thing. But grouping all of them together as a threat to society is something totally different and unacceptable. I’m interested to see how the story ends.