refugees – Women Who Submit

By Noriko Nakada

Read and bear witness. Retweet the tweets. Repost the images. Fold a crane. Fold another. And another.

Remember Sadako, the first story I heard, or read, about folding cranes. A girl who loved to run and play, an innocent victim of nuclear war who got leukemia years after the bombs were dropped. She folded cranes. One thousand and you get your wish. She didn’t make it to a thousand. The cranes she folded didn’t save her.

Fold cranes and attempt to make clean creases, to give energy and thoughts and wishes to children. Innocent victims again. This time they are in cages. This time they are separated from their families. Treated like animals. Criminals.

My sister-in-law folded 1000 cranes for her wedding. I contributed 200 to the cause. She had all 1000 of those gold folded origami cranes and assembled in a beautiful framed tsuri in the shape of the Nakada Kanji. In the rice field.

I once folded cranes at a table at the Deschutes County Fair in Oregon. I think we were protesting death squads in El Salvador, or the murder of a priest in Nicaragua, or the disappeared in Guatemala. Maybe it was later, and we were protesting nuclear weapons testing, or the first Iraq war, or acknowledging the anniversaries of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I taught nice white folks in Central Oregon who had never met anyone Japanese, who couldn’t believe my dad had been incarcerated as a child during World War II. “Well, that sure doesn’t sound very ‘Merican.”

It was. It is. America is all the truths we hold to be self-evident: the good and the bad. The ugly. We are a country built by people taken by force, built by people brought by force and forced to build this nation. This history is in the bones of the body of our nation.

We are a country who takes Native children from their families. We exclude immigrants from certain countries and embrace immigrants from another. We incarcerate whole families during times of war and turn refugees away and sentence them to death. We drop nuclear weapons on entire cities, take sides in civil wars, go to battle in the name of democracy, fight against communism, ensure our people have access to oil and resources and markets all for America and the pursuit of happiness.

We elect men who enslave, who father enslaved children, who rape, who murder, who who who.

So, today I fold. I teach friends to fold. I teach my daughter to fold and while we fold we think about the ways we can push back against all that is wrong. Push, y’all, and keep pushing.

Check out Tsuru for Solidarity on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find ways you can help push back.

Noriko Nakada is a public school teacher and the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

This week in my eighth grade classroom, five different holocaust survivors shared their stories with my English classes.

diverse groups of young people with a survivor

Two of the five survivors made it out of the death camps as young people. The other three were babies, hidden during the war. It took years of research for them to learn their own stories of survival so they could share them with us.

Those three babies were separated from their families. One, became an orphan, and was then adopted by family who had survived by fleeing Europe. Another had been hidden, along with her mother, by an entire village. The third hid with her mother until the end of the war, and then, because of American immigration laws, she was separated from her mother. Her mother immigrated to the United States, and the family this small child was left with kidnapped her. It took over several months for her mother to locate her daughter and reunite with her in America.

Leaving my classroom that day, my heart was burdened by these stories, but I was also buoyed by hope and perspective. Each of these survivors carried endless gratitude for those who helped them: for their rescuers, or the upstanders. They spoke of kindnesses, large and small, and they helped provide much needed perspective about how we treat one another today.

Maybe it was because I had read this editorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Ripping children from parents will shatter America’s soul” the night before, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the survivors’ stories and of the babies and children and their families being torn apart at our borders. I couldn’t stop thinking about the most vulnerable among us. What could I do about the unforgivable lack of humanity our country is showing them?

And then we hear about lost children. Nearly 1,500. This number is unfathomable.

We lose keys.
We lose nickles.
We lose pens.
We do not lose children.

These unconscionable losses, children with mothers who are mourning, siblings still searching, families with so many questions. What do we do?

The president refers to immigrants as animals, and people go crazy.

Nearly 1,500 children are lost. These are not puppies or kittens. These are children. These are daughter and sons, brothers and sisters. What stories will they tell as adults? What will these survivors tell our children of this America?

And the rest of us?
Are we rescuers?
Are we upstanders?
Or have we become the animals?

For opportunities to help immigrant and refugee families, here are seven ways you can help.

Noriko Nakada headshot in black and white Noriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Lady Liberty Lit, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Linden Avenue.

Tag: refugees

Tsuru for Solidarity

Breathe and Push: When Survivors Speak, Who Will Listen?