by Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall

“Half-breed. Mongrel. Mutt. Banana. Mulatto. Oreo. Diluted. Hybrid. Mixed blood. Hafu. Us.”

1/16th

I want to share your story. The one of you, Nina, a mixed-race teenaged lesbian locked in a Japanese-American internment camp in the 1940s. But I cannot find you. Not among my stacks of history books, memoirs, ledgers, fictional accounts. I look closely at photographs searching for a longing glance between women. A girl holding hands with another girl. I see none. But I know you were there. And that I would have been too, among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned. Would you have found me, another mixed-race queer kid? Don’t worry, I’ll find you. This is me finding you.

*Figure 1. A White man points to an anti-Japanese sign in his barber shop [1]*

You are ¼ white and ¾ Japanese, and I am hafu. Look at the asshole in this picture with that sign: “We don’t want any Japs back here—EVER!” Do you have compassion for people like him? I’m just glad he’s gone by now. If my mom ever had to see that sign, I would hold that image in my mind for a lifetime. That image of her body tensing, her lips pursed as she says not a word but looks him in the eye—something uncustomary in her home culture—just long enough and then leaves. That feeling of her holding my hand tighter, as I can sense her hoping with all her heart that he says nothing to me about being a half-breed. That image is seared into my brain, even though it didn’t happen. It could happen. It did happen to your mom and so many mothers and fathers. And to you.

Maybe you never knew that anyone who was 1/16th Japanese or more was interned if they were living in the designated at-risk areas, primarily the West Coast. No one told you that a person whose great, great, great grandparent was Japanese would have had to go due to the risk of being disloyal to America. Somewhere between 600 and 800 mixed-race families like ours were incarcerated. [2] I bet you never knew because you didn’t have radios or much trustworthy news beyond the camp’s newspaper the Poston Chronicle.

Were you ever featured there? When I was your age, I was in the local paper for academic accomplishments like winning debate tournaments. I was never sporty like you with your strong running legs. My mom would cut out the tiny sliver in which I was mentioned. But this would not have happened if I were there with you. I would not have traveled around the state debating other kids about prison reform or retirement security. Ironic topics given that we would be in prison, our parents having lost all sense of financial security.

2/16ths

Or 1/8th. My sister’s children’s children will be at least 1/8th Japanese, possibly more. They would have been incarcerated with us. Bound together through the rules of blood quantum. Our blood cut and measured. Dissected. This is my blood. This is your blood. This is our test tube of queer Japanese blood. It is as godly as any other. If spilled on a white cloth, it stains. Stains the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt whose lesbian wife Eleanor tried to convince him that internment was not the answer. A New Deal for us, indeed.

3/16ths

What did your dad’s parents think of him marrying a fully Japanese woman? Is that what they wanted for him? What about your mom’s parents? Did they care that your dad was half white? In my family, we didn’t talk much about it. There was some tension between my mom and my dad’s mom. I knew they didn’t get along, but I figured it was your average mother-in-law strain like my grandma complaining that we didn’t’ visit more often. As an adult, I learned the root of the unease. My white dad’s mom was at first unwilling to even meet my mom, the Japanese woman my dad had chosen to marry. Grandma was not going to go to the airport to pick up my parents upon their arrival from Japan, where my dad was based in the military. As you always say, “that’s a bunch of horseshit if I ever did smell it.” I like the farmer in you from your dad’s side. My mom says she doesn’t blame my grandma for her chilly reception. Even when you were there in Poston, it was still unconstitutional in most states to marry across race. It wasn’t until 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws were determined federally unconstitutional. My parents married a mere three years after this court decision. Maybe my grandma would have one of those signs up about Japs like the guy in the barber shop. She loved me though. She did.

Meanwhile, my mom’s parents who had every reason to be upset that their daughter was marrying a man from America, a country that bombed theirs, were welcoming of my dad. They welcomed him with food and said they could tell how gentle he was, how kind his heart. This even though they could look out their window and see people doubled over from poor bone growth due to radiation contamination. This even though my grandmother sat pregnant with my mom in an underground shelter as the A-bombs fired. And, you, your mother’s family close to Nagasaki.

4/16ths

I have kids, Nina. They are ¼ Asian. They do not have Japanese ancestry like us; my white wife (Yes, wife!) birthed them, and our sperm donor is half white and half Filipine. If I had to be interned, I don’t know what she and I would’ve done. I asked Jen what she thought one night. It had been a long workday for both of us, and she was generous enough to sit and methodically untangle a multilayered necklace that had been sitting in my jewelry box for months. She said, it isn’t fair to speculate because it might sound as if we were passing judgment on the actual families who faced these harrowing decisions. She gently pulled a silver strand around a silver bead. She thought we would probably first think about our kids’ needs. Would they be more traumatized by being separated from me or by witnessing the camps themselves and perhaps not fitting in with the Japanese kids. We stopped the conversation because it was making her sick to her stomach. I speculate I would leave my children with my wife and go alone, our only chance to keep our kids out of the camps and our home from getting ransacked. And that is exactly what some mixed families did during the war. They split up. I clasped the untangled necklace around my neck, went to the kitchen, and cried. I wore the necklace to bed.

5/16ths

One mixed-race woman, Virginia (Ginny) Matsuoka’s parents, remembers how quickly her neighborhood was cleared: “I was in school on a Friday; Sunday morning, I was in camp.”[3] In Ginny’s case, her Japanese father taught martial arts and moved to Colorado before the call to evacuate. So, he was outside of the military zone. Her white mother stayed behind to keep the family farm afloat. And Ginny and two of her brothers were sent alone to Tanforan Assembly Center, where the other kids wouldn’t play with her because she looked different. It was that way for you as well. The other kids keeping you at arm’s length because your hair a dark brown rather than black. And then, your queerness.

6/16ths

Did anyone know about you and your girlfriend? How did you ever steal a kiss, an embrace, when the cell walls didn’t even reach the ceiling, and the swarms of people always aware, the ever-present guards watching, watching, watching? But maybe you couldn’t kiss for fear of being deemed mentally ill, a pervert with possible consequences as severe as lobotomy. Perhaps you did find a way. The two of you kissing underwater in a pond with darkness above. You were able to feel the softness of her lips.

7/16ths

Isn’t it odd how in the camps our race is obvious, but outside the camp, governments across the West went to great lengths to help soldiers and non-Japanese citizens distinguish between Japanese and Chinese people—the two largest groups of Asian in the U.S. at the time? One racist military pamphlet offers the following advice for spotting a Japanese person:

I imagine us sitting together under a mesquite tree laughing at the images, getting mad about them. “Right now, I do expec[t] to be shot. . . and [am] very unhappy about the whole thing,” you’d say. I would lament not having a pronounced waistline, neither of us does. We giggle that we must be Japs through and through. I touch your shoulder. “I know you have a g-string hidden somewhere.” You protest. “Nah, but you know I’m trying to grow this beard, but my yellowness just won’t.” We inspect our toes for the tell-tale gap between the first and second. None. I put my arm around you. Your skin is pulsing warm.

“You know,” I insist, “we really can’t be JAPS.”

You laugh. “Because of our dads?”

“Because there is not a single woman in any of these pamphlets and posters.”

8/16ths

Half-breed. Mongrel. Mutt. Banana. Mulatto. Oreo. Diluted. Hybrid. Mixed blood. Hafu. Us.

How brave you are to live at a time when Asians and Asian-Americans were not legally allowed to marry Caucasians in most states due to anti-miscegenation laws. California had some of the most stringent laws in place. The hundreds of revolutionary, interracial Japanese and White couples in the camps traveled to Washington, New York, or other states that did not have such laws in order to marry. Those marriage licenses were honored in other states. Remind me to tell you about how LGBTQ people bucked the system in a similar way before gay marriage was legal on the federal level. Ironically, a marriage license was required if a Caucasian spouse of a Japanese-American internee wanted to give up their white privilege and enter or stay at one of the internment locations with their Japanese family. That means my dad, if he had gone to the camps with his family, would have had to show a marriage license. I don’t know if your dad would have had to do so.

9/16ths

I contacted my parents to see if my dad would have gone to the internment camps with me and the rest of us. Would he have stayed back and tried to keep our home and the family’s livelihood? Would my parents have tried to somehow petition to have my sister and me remain home even though we would likely face even more anti-Japanese taunting? These are not easy questions to ask in a family where painful topics are only whispered about, if ever spoken of.

My mom, dad, and I are on speaker phone. I’m already sweating with worry that I’ll be shut down or that one parent or the other will say something accidentally racist. My mom, who still carries her Japanese accent, teases that she would go back to Japan by herself. “Goodbye to you guys,” she laughs. She used to joke about going back to Japan a lot when my sister and I were naughty. More seriously, she said she would likely go to camp by herself, but my dad then jumped in for the first time to insist we would all go together and left it at that. “Don’t ask me a crazy question,” my mom added. I was happy she answered my question at all.

A month later, I read these words by writer and scholar Matthew Salesses: “The lesson here is that silencing a story makes the story impossible to change—and that all you need to do to silence a story is to pretend that it is over. The story of incarceration, and what it revealed about American desire, is a story that continues to haunt Japanese Americans, and the nation, generations later. This is racial and national melancholy.”[5] And I am haunted and asking “crazy” questions. I want to unsilence the stories.

10/16ths

We might’ve had the chance to get out of Poston early!

About three months after evacuation orders were declared, the government announced a Mixed Marriage Policy in memorandum form that allowed for some mixed-heritage couples and individuals to leave the camps and either move to the Midwest or East coast or possibly go back to their homes, depending on the assessment results. Original exemptions included the following:

1. Mixed marriage families composed of a Japanese husband, Caucasian wife and mixed blood children may be released from the Center and directed to leave the Western Defense Command area. [later revoked]

2. Families composed of a Caucasian husband who is a citizen of the United States, a Japanese wife and mixed blood children may be released from the Center and allowed to remain within the Western Defense Command area providing the environment of the family has been Caucasian. Otherwise the family must leave the Western Defense Command area.

3. Adult individuals of mixed blood who are citizens of the United States may leave the Center and stay within the Western Defense Command area if their environment has been Caucasian. Otherwise they must leave the Western Defense Command area. [6]

11/16ths

Modifications were made to the policy over time such as specifying that adults (and usually children) of mixed-blood needed to be ½ or less Japanese to go home. Also, the leave allowance of a family with a Japanese husband and non-Japanese wife was revoked. The head of household had to be a U.S. citizen or citizen of a “friendly nation.” [7]

Nina, these legal changes mean you would have had to stay. You, being more than half Japanese and having a hapa dad, would have had to stay, and I, being only half Japanese with a white father, would likely have been able to leave. Neither of us poses a threat to national security, yet I would get to leave because whiter and supposedly more culturally Caucasian. Will you hate me for leaving? Is this why it is so hard to find you?

12/16ths

You were never told that applicants had to demonstrate they had lived in a “Caucasian environment” prior to internment. Let me show you an application filled out by the staff based on an interview with an interned family:

Environment:

Acquaintances – 70% Caucasian – 30% Japanese

Diet – 100% Caucasian

Customs – 90% Caucasian – 10% Japanese [8]

I guess this family couldn’t indicate knowing any Latine (Spanish in your day) or black (Negro in your day) people. But we both know mixed Latin American/Japanese families were there. I laugh with you about the staff trying to document how a family who was friends with us would ever calculate the race of their acquaintances. We couldn’t quite do the math on the fly.

As a kid, my chart would have looked something like this:

Environment:

Acquaintances: 70% Caucasian--2% Japanese--28% F!@# the rest of y’all

Diet: 65% amazing Japanese food--30% Depression-era white people food (via my paternal grandmother)--5% unchartable in this schema

Customs: 60% Caucasian--40% Japanese with a dash of crazy

But ask me again even two weeks from now, I might give different percentages. My sister also would likely answer wildly differently from me given her access to Japanese culture near her California home. Plus, it seems that only the proudest Japanese patriot would say their environment was fully Japanese knowing that doing so would eliminate their chances of leaving the camp early. Then again, you likely didn’t know the rules of this roulette.

13/16ths

In addition to noting the internees’ pre-war environment, many camp managers commented on the appearance of mixed-race families to help determine exemption or incarceration. A few of the descriptions from the applications as reported by camp staff:

Definitely of Caucasian appearance
Definitely Caucasian in appearance
Italian
Spanish in appearance
Appearance: All Mexican [9]

My sister would, I think, have been labeled as “definitely Caucasian in appearance.” She’s 5’10”, for example, which would have been unusual for a Japanese woman of the time. I might have passed as well, though my eyes appear more Asian to many, and my skin is browner than hers. Officials might have worried that placing my sister and I--half white--into the Japanese environment of the camps would taint our paternal Caucasian upbringing. We might become indoctrinated by Japanese ways and loyalties, by families like yours. The original intent of the MMP was, in fact, to protect mixed-race kids from being in a fully Japanese space. The goal was assimilation to white American, Christian norms. “Oh, Nina.” We laugh as I pack my bags. We cry as I pack my bags.

What strikes me about the details and debates around the Mixed Marriage Policy is the government’s desperation to be able to identify and define Japaneseness, but always and only in relation to whiteness. Defending and protecting whiteness seems to have been the primary objective of these policies, with possibly freeing some Japanese-Americans as an incidental subplot in the larger narrative. It is no mistake, for example, that the modified policy allowed only mixed-race families with Caucasian male heads of household to return home, while households including a Japanese man and Caucasian woman as a couple were denied release. It’s no mistake that an adult had to be half Japanese or less in order to leave, unless they were married to a white man. It’s no mistake that the Executive Order did not incarcerate swaths of white Germans or Italians.

14/16ths

14/16ths or 7/8ths. Sacatra was the term for a person who was 7/8ths black and 1/8th white. Well before either of us was born, Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson who was asked to sit in a separate train car due to being 1/8th black, was 7/8ths white. The one drop rule in action. An American concept that influenced the creators of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which allowed only people with “German or related blood” to become citizens.

While the consequences of racial discrimination are devastating, “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” [10] A Japanese person may have more in common DNA-wise with a Norwegian than they do with a fellow Japanese person. You might have more genetically in common with a Caucasian guard at the camp than you do with the Japanese person sitting across from you in the mess hall. The same goes for Germans and Jewish people.

15/16ths

Toni Morrison explains that history cannot always be trusted, as much of it remains untold; some accounts go “memoryless.” The history told by government records on the internment are facts, but not, as Morrison would say, “truths.” Writers are left to imaginatively “fill in the blanks” to give voice to the truths of the interior lives of those whose accounts have been lost, or nearly so. [11] Morrison speaks here in “The Site of Memory” about neo-slave narratives, however, her ideas shine light on a similar process of the lost personal accounts of Japanese-American internment.

16/16ths

This is my invention of a past that might otherwise disappear. This is my speculative account of you as your family interviewed for early release.

“I’m a girl,” Nina tried not to roll her eyes as she stood in her fitted white t-shirt and denim overalls. She could see the guy trying to decide. Can’t this idiot see my boobs?

Nina’s mother glared at Nina as the interviewer looked down at his clipboard.

“Sorry, manager Smith. We didn’t realize you were coming. My daughter would have dressed more appropriately.”

“Alright, ma’am. Where is the head of household?”

Nina jumped in, “Oh, my mom is. She does the finances and everything.” While Nina and her mother didn’t get along, she had always been proud of her mother’s independence. She liked that her family held to the Japanese practice of the wife handling expenses.

“Oh goodness, sir. No, my husband handles most of the expenses. I just handle the food and clothing costs. He is using the facilities at the moment and should return shortly.”

Nina turned to look out of the small window in their 20 x 20 unit, the morning sun catching the copper highlights in her brown hair. Rows and rows of rectangular barracks. She couldn’t see her friend Carol’s from this side. She could barely concentrate on anything other than the fact that they had kissed. They had kissed. She smiled. She couldn’t wait to tell Carol all about her mom’s pandering. How she wore a stupid flowing robe and high heels in the desert. And not just a low chunky heel. A narrow one. She turned back around when she heard Officer Smith’s voice. She stood up tall, hoping the officer could not detect what happened between she and Carol.

“Ma’am,” Smith regarded Mrs. Mori. “I just need to ask you a few questions. Are you full-blooded Japanese?”

“Please sit down,” her mother motioned to one of two chairs in the room. “Well, I am an American through and through, sir. I almost became a Hollywood actress.”

Nina held back a sneer. Her mom was an extra in one movie one time.

“Mom, you have to answer the question.”

“And I’ve sewn dresses for a few in the industry.”

Smith nodded.

“Write that down,” Mrs. Mori urged. Smith looked a little startled, but appeased her.

“Alright, Mrs. Mori, it seems that your family has been at Poston for about two years.”

“Yes, but we really don’t belong here. My husband is half Caucasian and doesn’t look a drop Oriental.” Now Nina rolled her eyes. No wonder the kids made fun of her if her own mom was denying their Japanese origins. Nina hadn’t heard about mixed families possibly getting out of the camp early.

Nina’s dad walked in the door and reached out to shake hands with the officer.

“How can I help you, officer?” Her dad remained standing.

“I just have a few questions here for you. It looks like you are about 5’9” and 145 pounds? And what is your racial ancestry?”

“Yes, give or take five pounds. I’m half Japanese and half Caucasian. My wife is full-blooded Japanese, and Nina is, of course, mixed blood.”

Mrs. Mori folded her arms across her body and scowled for the briefest of moments.

“Officer,” said Mrs. Mori, “We are very Americanized.”

The officer gestures toward Nina, “So, she is ¾ Japanese blood.” Nina’s hazel eyes went icy at this impersonal description of her. She sat on the cot made of old military body bags. Mrs. Mori gestured for her to stand back up. Nina felt like yelling, “Yeah, I’ve got ¾ Jap blood, and I kissed a girl. Take that, you pig!” Instead, her eyes glossed with tears and then she sneezed.

“Outside of the camp, before the evacuation, what percentage of your acquaintances were Japanese?” Smith asked Mr. Mori.

“Nina,” Mrs. Mori interrupted, “Where is your handkerchief? Ladies use handkerchiefs.”

Mrs. Mori passed a fresh cloth to Mr. Mori who passed it to Nina who grabbed the cloth as undaintily as she could and proceeded to blow her nose loudly. If she’s going to embarrass me, I’ll kick back.

Her dad seemed not to notice the jab, but her mother’s mouth fell open.

Her dad responded, “Well, we mostly kept to ourselves. I worked as a copyeditor at the newspaper where there were no other Japanese. My wife had her own business as a seamstress in Japantown.”

Mrs. Mori stepped forward. “We had planned to move. We were working on moving.” This is the first Nina was hearing of any real plans of moving. She wasn’t surprised that her mom was actively lying. She almost expected that her mom would try to claim a Caucasian great, great-grandmother. She wasn’t sure which person she was madder at, her mom or Smith.

As the officer left, Nina didn’t really want to shake his hand. She thought about bowing just to piss off her mom. But she did shake Smith’s hand because she wanted to see his notes.

17/16th

A Meditation in Honor of Two Poston Girls in Love

Carol shoved her head under the pillow in the night and wished for Nina, blocks away. But the sound kept coming. Her brother’s soft snores. The newlyweds fighting and then the rhythmic sounds of a man and woman fucking. The cries of an infant. All resting on old military body bags. She didn’t know what to think, feeling a little motherly, a little aroused, a little embarrassed. A little morbid. “We are sleeping on death,” she noted to herself to write in her notebook in the morning. Our beds await our dead bodies.

II.

The moment she tried to speak, she tasted and chewed stray sand that blew into her mouth, the wind pushing both her dress against her body and the sand into her open jaw. She tried to spat, but the spit wouldn’t form. The heat had stolen the liquid from her tissue, leaving her skin deflated and early old. She had never tasted sand before now, before Poston, not like this. Before, in California, she could sense the dankness of seaweed in the beach sand. But here it was Earthly powder like the taste of her girlfriend’s brown skin. She opened her mouth wider.

III.

Sunday morning chores. Every week, Carol and Nina met in the pink light to wash their family’s garments. Carol carried a bucket of her little brother’s soiled underwear to the wash area. The runny stench of sick intestine stuck to the fabric. She held her nose with one hand and carried the bucket with the other. She made it the laundry room and began to rub out the stain and awaited Nina. Nina arrived and didn’t say a word. She wrapped her arms around the washing girl.

“We can’t afford more for him.” The washing girl looked down.

“I know. I know.” Nina dunked her hands in and started scrubbing.

IV.

“Green,” she says. Green. Have I seen a green thing for real? Or just envy, growth, newness inside. Have I seen green in these two years in this place of deep sand? Sand in my nose, in my hair, between my toes. There is tan. For miles. And white barracks with sand blown walls. Floor holding its grit. But where is the green? It is in this dress. This dress that I wear as I turn 17 in this dry desolate space. Green is outside the fence. Pine needles, dollar bills, thick wheatgrass, bamboo even. My little brother says we are the green monsters of this place. Nina says, “You are the green of this land. You are the lush, the new, the fecund.”

Carol and Nina jumped fully clothed into the night pond. Carol waited for weeks to kiss her again. Her want was so strong now that she didn’t care if anyone saw. The feeling of her girlfriend’s lips on her neck, the water lapping at her waist. They sank deeper. She could feel her lover slowly lifting her slim dress up her legs, the fabric softer now. Fully soaked. She pushed her hips against her lover’s thigh. The rhythm of the water matching the rhythm of their desire.

Works Cited

[1] Yam, Kimberly. “These Anti-Japanese Signs Are a Warning Against Bigotry Today.” HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/pearl-harbor-japanese-americans_n_5a283fb8e4b02d3bfc37b9f6. Kwon 2011, 160.
[2] 2 Kwon, Eunhye. “Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954.” Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954, University of Florida, University of Florida, 2011, pp. 1–257.
[3] Laughlin, Alex. “Transcript: 'I'm Not a Jap, I'm a Half-Jap'.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 5 May 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/05/transcript-im-not-a-jap-im-a-half-jap/.
[4] Both figures from Burns, Iain. “Shocking WWII Propaganda Pamphlet on Spotting 'a Jap'.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 26 Oct. 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5020743/Shocking-WWII-propaganda-pamphlet-spotting-Jap.html.
[5] Salesses, Matthew. “Fate and Desire in Asian America.” Catapult, Catapult, 23 Nov. 2021, https://catapult.co/stories/matthew-salesses-love-and-silence-column-fate-desire-agency-free-will.
[6] Deu Pree, Ashlynn. “White by Association: The Mixed Marriage Policy of Japanese American Internees.” UC Santa Barbara, Department of History, Undergraduate Research and Creative activies, nd, pgs. 6-7. https://www.duels.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/sitefiles/Deu%20Pree%2C%20Ashlynn.%20White%20by%20Association%20FINAL.pdf. Original: Memorandum from Herman P. Goebel, Jr. to A. H. Cheney on the release of mixed marriage families, July 12, 1943, MMP.
[7] More than 2/3 of those interned were U. S. Citizens. “About the Incarceration.” About the Incarceration | Densho Encyclopedia, Densho, encyclopedia.densho.org/history/.
[8] Deu Pree nd, 8.
[9] Qtd. in Kwon 2011. From Mixed Marriage Policy Files 291.1, Box 28, Record Group 499, Central Correspondence, 1942–1946, Wartime Civil Control Administration and Civil Affairs Division, Western Defense Command and the Fourth Army, Records of U.S. Army Defense Commands (WWII), National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

Kwon, Eunhye. “Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954.”
[10] Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Skin Deep. (Cover Story).” National Geographic, April 2, 2018, 28–41. http://search.ebscohost.com.mctproxy.mnpals.net/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=128265709&site=ehost-live.
[11] Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.mctproxy.mnpals.net/lib/mspcc/detail.action?docID=6062471.

This piece began with my search to illuminate the lives of mixed-race, LGBTQ+ teens who came of age in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. My research was thwarted by undocumented histories. Thus, as Toni Morrison explains, the writers must do the remembering, “as in recollecting,” “as in assembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.” In a way, similar to Morrison’s words about Beloved, “The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text.” Dear Nina is my attempt to remember in the face of not knowing.

Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall (she.they) has won several literary awards including a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and was a CNF Fellow through the Loft Mentor Series in 2018-2019. Her essays have been published in HIPPOCAMPUS, CATAPULT, AND MUTHA magazine, among others. Her recent essay "There Are Girls Like You in Japan" was nominated a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Mimi also enjoys writing children’s picture books and is a member of SCBWI. She is a queer, mixed-race, Asian-American, mom of twins. Website: mimiiimurovanausdall.com.