I’ve spent a career at the margins of politics, learning a lot about how people interact and how the most insignificant seeming interaction can have massive ripple effects and how political discourse flows in certain directions, mainly towards fear. It’s a world of real-politik which can best described with the world-weary quote from Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.” Nowhere is this more evident than in George Takei (Yes, Sulu from Star Trek)’s graphic novel rendition of his childhood in an internment camp during WWII and its impact on his life.
There’s no one person behind the interment camps, simply a series of cowardly moments by those in power and a societal discourse that feared the other. The banality of evil is in full effect here, a million tiny decisions leading to injustice. The blindness of bureaucracy wrecks its unintended consequences on George’s family. His mother renounces her citizenship to a country who decided she was the other and imprisoned her for it. The collapse of mass and systemic empathy is writ large through his childhood and is felt through his teenage years and beyond.
It’s a very personal memoir, in the vein of Satrapi’s Persepolis, Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, and Benini’s La Vite é Bella. As with those works, young George’s memory is the unreliable narrator, remembering some events with the warmth of childhood we all experience. The sacrifices his parents made to create a shield of normalcy is poignant but also sadly still relevant today in a world where migrants are routinely rounded up all over the world.
George’s life has been one of suffering but also one of hope. Like the others on Star Trek, his life has been inevitably tied up with his role, and like Nichelle Nichols, he’s used that platform to challenge racism and demand justice for what he and thousands of Japanese Americans went through. As his father says, “People can do great things . . . but people are also fallible . . . and we know they made a terrible mistake.” and George helped to correct that.
