Samantha Balaban is a producer at Weekend Edition.
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"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.
"I looked for primary sources that showed what life was like because I feel like that humanizes it a lot more," Lee explains. She found some color photographs taken by Bill Manbo, who had smuggled his camera into the internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming."While I was painting the book, I tried as much to depict George and his family just going about their lives under these really difficult circumstances.
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.
"These themes of displacement and uprooting of communities from one place to another — these are things that are constantly happening," says Lee. Because of war and because of political decisions ... those themes aren't uncommon. They're universal."
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