Paper Wishes

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

“Her voice is shaky. ‘This is not your fault. Remember, this is not your fault.”

Mrs. Brown’s comments and her shaky voice convey how upset many Americans are about the imprisonment of their friends and neighbors. As an elementary-school teacher who speaks kindly to her charges, Mrs. Brown is a sympathetic figure, and her opposition to the removal helps lay a foundation for the book’s messages about The Problem of Unjust Persecution.

“The pieces do not fit.”

After offering a long list of the disparate items Mother is trying to fit inside a single suitcase, Manami sums up the problem. Her brief pronouncement that “The pieces do not fit” occupies its own line, emphasizing the sentence’s importance. Manami means more than that the family’s belongings do not physically fit into the suitcase. Figuratively, she means that the situation makes no sense, like a puzzle with pieces that do not fit. The disparate parts of a human life cannot be condensed into one small space—each family member is complex and fully human, not simply a “Japanese American” to be packed off to a concentration camp based on their ethnic background.