Fiction · Digital book

Enemy Alien

By Sikho

In 1940, twelve-year-old Aiko Higa watches a mob burn her father's grocery to the ground in Lima, Peru, while the police stand by. It is only the beginning. When Pearl Harbor is bombed, Peru — under pressure from Washington — begins handing its Japanese community leaders to the United States for deportation. Aiko's father, Kensei, a meticulous shopkeeper who has spent twenty years building an honest life on foreign soil, is taken from his own counter and shipped north on a real 1942 U.S. transport, fingerprinted and processed as an 'enemy alien' in the same country that kidnapped him. A year later, Aiko, her mother, and her younger brother 'volunteer' to follow him — the government's word for a choice that was never really theirs — and are reunited behind the barbed wire of Crystal City, Texas, America's only family internment camp. What follows is a story almost no one has told: when the war ends, Peru refuses to take them back, and the United States prepares to deport them — the family it dragged across an ocean in the first place — to a Japan neither Aiko nor her brother has ever seen, a country just leveled by two atomic bombs. A last-minute legal filing spares them from that ship, but not from decades of statelessness, a fragile new life in a New Jersey company town, and a government apology, when it finally comes in 1998, worth a quarter of what other survivors received. Grounded in the real, extensively documented history of the roughly 2,200 Japanese Latin Americans abducted by the United States during WWII — and the real 1945 legal battle that saved hundreds of the

300 minutes estimated reading

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