When actor George Takei was 4 years old, he was labeled an 'enemy' by the U.S. government and sent to a string of incarceration camps. His new children's book about that time is My Lost Freedom.
George Takei was just 4 years old when when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066:
"The horse stalls were pungent," Takei remembers,"overwhelming with the stench of horse manure. The air was full of flies, buzzing. My mother, I remember, kept mumbling 'So humiliating. So humiliating.'"Michelle is Michelle Lee, the illustrator — and researcher — for the book. Lee relied heavily on Takei's text and his excellent memory, but it was the research that both agree really brought the art to life.
Takei says he was impressed with how Lee managed to capture his parents: his father, the reluctant leader and his mother, a fashion icon in her hats and furs."This has been the first time that I've had to depict real people," Lee adds. She did, however, find the original floor plans for the barracks at Jerome Camp, also in Arkansas."I actually printed the floorplan out and then built up a little model just to see what the space was actually like," Lee says."I think it just emphasized how small of a space this is that whole families were crammed into."
Takei says one of his favorite drawings in the book is a scene of him and his brother, Henry, playing by a culvert."We'd never seen trees rising out of murky waters or such colorful butterflies. Our block was surrounded by a drainage ditch, home to tiny, wiggly black fishies. I scooped them up into a jar.
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