Article contributed by Laura Glassman
We Are Not Free tells the story of a group of 14 Japanese-American teenaged friends who grew up in Japantown, San Francisco. When racist sentiments begin to brew in the US about Japanese American citizens following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government begins to send them to internment camps. Some teenagers are separated from family members, and all must live in squalid conditions within the camps. However, they remain close knit as they live through their time there.
The novel tells the individual stories of each of the teenagers, all the while intertwining each story with those of their friends and families. The stories also cover time before and within the camp in chronological order, beginning with one teen just at the time they are being put into the camps. We learn of the heart, drive, pain, sadness, and, ultimately, strength and vitality of many of the characters. Later, we also learn of some of their stories following the time that they spent living in the camps.
Traci Chee captures the voices of each of her many different characters beautifully. Each teenager has a different experience of the camps (and the before and after), though they share some experiences, too. For instance, seventeen-year-old Bette sees her world with rose coloured glasses and finds hope and beauty in the most challenging and painful of experiences, even when others around her cannot understand her perspective. We hear from her story the difficulties of the camp as well as the excitement of a typical teenager looking for love. Frankie’s story is a very different one, as he is furious at the United States for treating Japanese-Americans this way and putting them in the camps. As a result, he gets into fights with other teenagers in his camp.
This is a book that both captures the gritty toughness of the characters’ experiences with the relative innocence and spiritedness of teenagers who are in some ways like any other teenagers, and in some ways not at all like typical teenagers. They worry about romance and dances and friends just as they also grapple with intense feelings about racism and politics and their identity as Japanese American teenagers. They must find a way to live within the confines of internment camps, which they do at times with anger and fear, and at times while finding joy and hope.
We learn a great deal about the intense racism in the US at the time that the internment camps were created. The racism was a consequence of the attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, many non-Japanese Americans had become extremely biased against Japanese citizens, considering them to be un-American and spewing hatred towards them.
We Are Not Free does not follow any particular character in great depth; rather, it tells the shorter stories of many teenagers and their families and interconnects them. It is a moving tale of these 14 lives. However, it reads more like interconnected short stories than a typical YA novel which might follow one or a few characters in greater depth.
This is a book that will teach you, if you were not already aware, about the history of Japanese Americans through the eyes of some wonderful, spirited teenaged characters who must endure a tremendous amount. Though those teenagers experience things that no one should ever have to, we see their resilience, heart and vitality in the midst of hardship and sadness all at once.
We Are Not Free is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
“All around me, my friends are talking, joking, laughing. Outside is the camp, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the city, the country that hates us.
We are not free.
But we are not alone.”
From New York Times best-selling and acclaimed author Traci Chee comes We Are Not Free, the collective account of a tight-knit group of young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II.
Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco.
Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted.
Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.
In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.
