In the palm of my hand, I delicately finger a pair of unfamiliar ID cards printed on worn pieces of coloured paper, yellow and salmon pink. The faded type reveals they were issued in the spring of 1941 with approval from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The yellow marks my great-grandmother as a Japanese National and the pink indicates my great-grandfather was a naturalized Canadian. Between my thumb and index finger, I clasp these rare and coveted discoveries: names, addresses, heights, weights, occupations, and even marks of identification on their bodies. I practise saying my ancestors’ names aloud, slowly, so I do not forget, but I have never learned to speak Japanese and am self-conscious about my pronunciation. I realize there is a third colour of these cards – white – that I am missing. White was only assigned to those who were born in Canada.
Today, I will start building a sculpture out of hundreds of replicated registration cards from the Second World War. The sculpture will represent over 8,000 Japanese-Canadian people, including my oba-chan and her family, who were taken from their homes in coastal B.C. and detained in the stables and exhibition buildings at Hastings Park in East Vancouver. I grew up eating mini-doughnuts at the PNE Fair in Hastings Park during my childhood summers, but nobody in my family spoke about this history. I don’t know if they even knew.
I have made copies of the real ones my oba-chan left behind after she died. These registration cards identified her parents, my great-grandparents, who were 49 and 59 years old, respectively, when the war broke out. I found the cards in an old box of her things in a closet at my parents’ house: tucked in her fake snakeskin wallet, among my grandpa’s funeral papers and an album filled halfway with fading Fujifilm photos from the ’80s. Photos taken when my grandparents returned to British Columbia, after they fled Montreal in the ’70s. They’d lived in Montreal after the war had ended, when they were not allowed to return to the West Coast.
Denne historien er fra March/April 2019-utgaven av Briarpatch.
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Denne historien er fra March/April 2019-utgaven av Briarpatch.
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