Ernie Wang resides in Las Vegas. He grew up in Japan, and he is ethnically Japanese and Chinese. He holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his fiction and nonfiction appear in McSweeney's Quarterly, The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, and others.
Hiroshi's Light
They finally send for me in early 1945. By then, we had come to believe they chose to overlook us, those of us living insignificantly in rural eastern Utah. Also by then, we know it’s over for Japan, rendering all internment camps unnecessary, to the extent they were necessary at all. But I get the letter anyway. I’m to leave for Topaz in two days. I get to pack one bag. Refusal to cooperate will be considered an act against the country, the letter says, but they underestimate how compliant our people are.
Mom is livid. She has not received such a letter.
“Why no me? Why only you sent away?” she screams, as though this is my doing. She looks at me, which makes her angrier. “You skinny useless Japanese boy. You no threat to anybody,” she says, and she raises her arm, as though to prove her point. After a moment, she lowers her arm, but she continues to seethe.
“Okay, Mom,” I say. “I’ll be in my room, packing.” And I fill my allotted bag with underwear and books as she stomps and throws things across the living room. But then it gets quiet, so I peek down the hallway and see her crumpled on the floor, her back heaving. I take a step toward her before I change my mind and turn around. She must have heard, because she lifts her head off the ground and calls out to me.
“Pack raincoat, Hiroshi,” she says, quietly. “You catch the cold.”
I get Mom’s first letter a week after I arrive in Topaz, which I read over breakfast in the mess hall. She’s resumed dancing, she writes. She was once a professional ballet dancer. She stopped when I was born, which she reminds me of often, whenever she’s unhappy with me. But she’s now resumed. My adagios are very excellent, she writes, and I imagine her stomping across the living room floor, and that makes me laugh. And then I feel bad. I’m all she has, and yet here I am.
Two months later, I fall in love with Reyna Suzuki from Idaho Falls. I meet her at church. We Japanese, we’re not really the praying type. But we are efficient at learning what pleases the people who demand to be pleased. And so every Sunday, we bow our heads and ask for forgiveness and hide our despair and our exhaustion and our ambivalence toward unleavened bread.
Like me, Reyna was sent here alone. One Sunday, I feel a tap on my shoulder in the middle of my false prayers. I open my eyes and turn. Reyna, in the pew behind me, motions for me to follow. She leads me to the storage room at the back. We strip, and when the pastor reaches the apex of his sermon—God shall strike down the Japs, we hear him decree through the thin wall—when the song of the choir swells righteously, we culminate our love, quietly, desperately, with the gentlest of cries. We clutch each other long after the church has returned to silence. The world has forsaken us, but in this abandonment, Reyna has saved me, and I her, and in this way, life sometimes has a way of balancing out.
“Come home with me when this is over,” she whispers into my ear.
We are young and terrified, and we refuse to let go of hope.
On the other end of the world, Japan prepares to send her pilots to slaughter.
Mom’s letters brighten as she regains her old ballet form. My pirouettes are very wonderful, she declares, and I imagine her spinning like a tornado with such force that she propels into the air and above the ceiling of our home, to disappear beyond the mountain caps in the horizon, and then I have to remind myself to behave.
I have not told her about Reyna. I have not once written her back. I am in love. Nothing else matters.
Reyna and I are drying dishes in the mess hall when a soldier bursts in and, making a beeline toward a small Japanese boy on his knees scrubbing the floor, thrusts a sheet with the Japanese imperial army flag crudely painted on it in front of the boy.
“They said you did this,” the young, powerfully built soldier says. The boy wildly shakes his head and squeaks his denial. The soldier shoves the boy’s shoulders. The boy flies backwards and lands on his back. Panicking, he crawls away, toward the exit, his palms and knees pawing the floor as though he had regressed to being three years old.
The soldier, his face ashen with rage and scorn, strides toward the boy, easily catching up, and grabbing him by the shoulders, strikes his small face. There is a collective gasp in the room, followed by a stunned silence. I look at Reyna. Her face is frozen in disbelief, her hands still clutching a pot and dish rag, suspended in mid-air.
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