41st Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage: A Letter To Obaa-chan

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by Jaymie Takeshita

Dear Grandma,

Every time I talk to you on the phone, I tell you about all the things I do with the UCLA Nikkei Student Union (NSU), right? I have yet another NSU story for you. Yesterday, a bunch of us from UCLA went on the 41st Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage. My friends who have been on the Pilgrimage before told me that it would be a great experience; I didn’t expect it to be as amazing as it actually was.

I don’t think I ever told you this before, but when I was in elementary school, every time you talked about “camp” with your friends, or the other grandmothers, or the strangers at Marukai, I always thought that you were talking about summer camp. You would always tell stories about classes and playing with friends. Once you found out that I learned about Japanese American Internment in my California History class, you and all the other grandparents started passing along your books and pictures of barracks in the desert, mess halls, and lots and lots of Japanese Americans. The black-and-white-photo-filled books were interesting at first, but eventually I stopped looking at them. You gave them to me, and I put them on my bookshelf without ever reading the first chapter. Read more of this post