Thursday, December 09, 2021

My uncle's sixth birthday: Swedes and Japanese and Kingsburg, California

 

More on Kingsburg and Swedes and Japanese: Last month I made a trip to Fresno for my mother's brother's 90th birthday. I talked to him a bit about my mom and her Japanese classmates. A bit later someone asked him, do you remember any memorable birthdays from when you were growing up? 

He said, we were on the farm, there were 8 kids, dad (Bertil) was really busy, so birthdays weren't usually a big deal. But for my sixth birthday (in 1937) dad said, you can do anything you want for your birthday. So -- and then he looked at me and said, Ted, you'd be interested in this -- I invited three friends over to the farm. He named the three, all Japanese names. (He still remembers their names, he is still as sharp as a tack.) We fooled around on the farm all day. 
 
That's his memory of his best birthday as a kid, the day he got to play all day with his three Japanese-American pals.
 
Imagine: when he's 10, four and a half years later, his three pals are all sent off to be interned, as enemy aliens.
 
Today, Kingsburg is for the most part remembered as a Swedish town. So you see cute stuff like this downtown. Which, as a Swede, I love, but I am haunted by the ethnic cleansing that produced this singular memory of the town.

No comments: