Julie Otsuka Quotes

“Women are weak, but mothers are strong.”

— 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

“We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting.”

— Julie Otsuka

“It's all in the way you breathe.”

— Julie Otsuka

“Summer was a long hot dream.”

— 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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

You keep it, he said.

— Julie Otsuka