The Evacuation Order of 1942 A majority of people all around the world have experienced the reality of bullying at least once in their lives. Discrimination against one's race is a major reason why this occurs. When bullied, people are stuck with the idea that in order to fit in, they have to change themselves to be like everyone else. They start losing themselves and their originality. In When the Emperor was Divine: A Novel, Julie Otsuka writes about a Japanese-American family facing racism after the attack on Pearl Harbor and how their lives were changed in the process. The family, along with many others of the same race, was forced to relocate to an internment camp during the time of World War II in suspicions of being spies for Japan.
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She tries to regain her innocence by riding the gloves with the dog, but her life will never be the same as it was before. The gloves were stained because the woman was following a rule set by the internment camp, showing that the camp was the reason why her innocence, represented by the gloves, was “dirtied.” She had already faced hardships before she had to leave for the camp. A child’s imagination serves as an innocent mirage of what they want to be shown versus the reality of what is revealed to them. In the novel, when the Japanese family was on the train headed to their camp, the boy asked his sister if they would see horses. She replied by saying “I don’t know” and shortly after, she recalled something she had read in National Geographic about mustangs. The girl had learned that thousands of horses were able to roam around freely and wildly, and created an image for herself of “a cowboy snapping his fingers and a horse, a wild white stallion, galloping up to him in a cloud of hot swirling dust” (Otsuka 29). The wild white stallion was a figment of the girls’ imagination used to show her innocence. She thinks of them as free and everywhere, able to do anything they want whenever they
She tries to regain her innocence by riding the gloves with the dog, but her life will never be the same as it was before. The gloves were stained because the woman was following a rule set by the internment camp, showing that the camp was the reason why her innocence, represented by the gloves, was “dirtied.” She had already faced hardships before she had to leave for the camp. A child’s imagination serves as an innocent mirage of what they want to be shown versus the reality of what is revealed to them. In the novel, when the Japanese family was on the train headed to their camp, the boy asked his sister if they would see horses. She replied by saying “I don’t know” and shortly after, she recalled something she had read in National Geographic about mustangs. The girl had learned that thousands of horses were able to roam around freely and wildly, and created an image for herself of “a cowboy snapping his fingers and a horse, a wild white stallion, galloping up to him in a cloud of hot swirling dust” (Otsuka 29). The wild white stallion was a figment of the girls’ imagination used to show her innocence. She thinks of them as free and everywhere, able to do anything they want whenever they