Traci Chee

"A beautiful, painful, and necessary work of historical fiction." --Veera Hiranandani, Newbery Honor winning author of The Night Diary

We Are Not Free

Inferno

He's there in the middle of things, with this new ferocity, like if he doesn't capture this moment, he'll never get the chance

The ability to hold you pain and bitterness inside you and not let them destroy you. To make something beautiful through your anger, or with your anger, and neither erase it nor let it define you. To suffer. And to rage. And to persevere.

That's five days. Five days to pack up our entire lives.

Mas stops. His face kind of cracks, and I see that underneath the layers of anger. He's scared. Really scared.

Why should we have to, when we're Americans like anyone else? 

I know the answer, and I hate the answer: because we're Japs, enemy aliens.

It builds and builds, getting darker and darker, when all of a sudden it speeds up, and the notes are sparks, they're catching things on fire, the whole street is filled with them. They're explosions. All of the buildings collapse, crashing into the road in heaps of luggage-shaped rubble.

THINGS THAT DON'T TAKE UP ANY SPACE AT ALL

"I was scared too. I'm scared a lot." I'm scared that Dad will never come back. I'm scared that Mom will die in this hospital. I'm scared we'll be deported. I'm scared we'll be shot. I'm scared of failing. I'm scared of being trapped.

Outside is the camp, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the city, the country that hates us. But in here, we are together.

The army guys are here to recruit volunteer for Roosevelt's new combat team. See, we dont got liberty, we don't got property, but you better believe we've got the Great American Right to die for a county that doesn't want us.

We Are Not Free quotes

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