A Place to Belong

This was the secret thing Hanako felt about old people: she really didn’t understand them. It seemed like they just sat there and didn’t do much. Sometimes they were rude to you, and yet you had to be extremely, extremely polite to them. And then when they were nice to you, they asked you lots and lots of questions. Lots!
Her mother’s parents were both dead-Grandpa from being run over by a tractor while he was drunk, and Grandma from drowning in a giant wave off the coast of Hawaii. They had already passed away when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. But when Hanako had worked in her family’s restaurant, she’d encountered many old people with their families for dinner. Mostly, as said, they just sat there.
And now her family was on this gigantic ship, going across the ocean to live with her father’s elderly parents in Japan.
This was the thing about Japan: she had never been there. Her parents had told her for her entire life that it was important to be American. It was important to talk just a little more loudly than some of the girls who were being raised to be more Japanese. It was important to make eye contact and not cover your mouth when you laughed, like some of the more Japanese girls did. Basically, the way to be Japanese in America was to be more American than the Americans. And now she was being told she would need to learn to be more Japanese.
Her family had been imprisoned for almost four years since she was eight and now that she was kind of free, she did not know what was out there in the world for her, in the future. She had no idea. All she could hope was that from now on, and maybe forever, she would never be in jail and nobody would ever point a gun at her again.
“Hanako, do you have any candy left?” Hanako turned to look at her brother, who was standing in his underwear, his pajamas in his hands. He had pale eyebrows and a ton of black hair, with a big wine stain covering the skin around his right eye and beyond, like a pirate’s patch. She kissed his stain the way she liked to do, because it was so beautiful. It was shaped like Australia, except sideways.