Karen Tei Yamashita is one of the preeminent voices of Asian American literature, a writer known for her ambitious novels surveying the intricacies of the immigrant experience. Her work, marked by dark humor, is a blend of different genres— historical fiction, magical realism, and playwriting. She has written about Black, Asian, and Latinx immigrant communities straddling the US-Mexico border and Japanese émigrés in Brazil, all with an eye on how the driving forces of the 20th century—migration, war, and globalization—have influenced the construction of national and cultural identities.

Yamashita was born to Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, who were imprisoned in detention camps during World War II, under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which called for the removal of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to one of 10 internment sites operated by the War Relocation Authority. The sites were officially referred to as “relocation centers,” but by modern definitions they were concentration camps.

Her latest novel, Questions 27 & 28, is an exploration of that period, taking its title from Selective Service Form 304A, or “Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry,” which became informally known as “ the loyalty questionnaire” by internees who were forced to answer its contentious final two questions as a condition of their release.

The novel is told through a polyvocal collage of narrators whose material realities help flesh out the personal consequences of social ruptures like internment—from a sculptor who dreams of building an art school in a desert barracks to Japanese and American children engaged in simulated naval battle with paper ships in a pond. Yamashita brought these histories to the surface from a variety of sources, including letters, telegrams, and archival oral-history projects, with certain novelistic liberties. In a section written as a play, real people are rendered dramatis personae and hold an imagined discussion about the real discussion preceding the issuance of the fateful executive order. In the shadow of World War II, many of these characters are, in other narratives, treated as historical footnotes. But as one character reflects in the book, “footnotes are like small diamonds scattered at the bottom of pages.” In Yamashita’s hands, these diamonds are gathered together to deepen the story’s color, clarity, and weight.

The Nation spoke with the author about being inspired by and becoming responsible for telling those stories, and about her new book’s regretful relevance amidst escalatingly violent ICE detainments.

—Naomi Elias

NE: The book takes its title from Questions 27 and 28 of the loyalty questionnaire, even as it spans eras long before and long after the period of wartime internment. What stood out for you about those two questions?

KTY: It’s not that they stood out; they stand out. If you answered “no” to either of those questions, you could not leave the concentration camp. (This dilemma was also the subject of No-No Boy by John Okada.) By the time it put out this “loyalty questionnaire,” the government realized that it had made a mistake and that most of the people, citizens especially, should be able to leave camp and continue their lives, although they could not return to the West Coast during the war. But the government didn’t know how to figure out who could leave and who couldn’t. There’s a long set of questions and the last two were critical.

One question was whether the person who signed it would be willing to serve in the United States military. And the other was whether they would reject any allegiance to the Japanese emperor. These were very confusing questions because they were asked of everyone—the children, the elderly, men and women—and everyone had to answer. Many people felt, “Well, I will serve in the military if you let my family out of camp.” And for the issei, the first generation, they could not be American citizens—so if they said they would have no association or allegiance to Japan, they would become stateless. And the men who said no to the military question were considered draft evaders, and they used that as a way to protest their imprisonment, and they spent the rest of their time during the war in jail. The young men who did volunteer for the military saw their friends killed, went and sacrificed their lives and their limbs for that, and when they came home, they were very upset at the draft resistors and felt that they had betrayed them, which was not true. Those draft resistors were ostracized by the community.

Within the camps, there were people who felt that they should protest. They were so fed up because they had lost everything. Some people, like my parents, felt, “We’ve got to get out of here, and we’re going to continue our lives…but if we don’t say yes to these questions, we can’t leave.” So there were many arguments within the community in all the camps, and those questions divided loyalties.

NE: You explored your family’s stories of incarceration in your previous book, Letters to Memory, and Questions 27 & 28 is partially dedicated to your late mother who was incarcerated at Utah’s Topaz facility. Did working on Letters to Memory help you write Questions 27 & 28?

KTY: There’s no sequence. Letters to Memory came about because my father and all of his siblings had died and my cousins were collecting their belongings. They kept a lot of documents and letters stored in boxes in basements and all over the houses. What was interesting to me were the letters. I had already found a cache of letters that my aunt had kept because she was a typist. She would type in duplicate on carbon paper and send out copies on these little onion skins to all her siblings. The most interesting letters were the ones during the war years. My nephews and nieces helped me collate them; we gathered them together in notebooks and began to see the sequences of letter-writing. My grandmother, uncles, and aunts were all writing to each other in this period, trying to figure out what was going to happen. While interned at Topaz, they would answer the loyalty question, and then they were able to find work outside of camp in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. They wrote back and forth to say, “Okay, we’ve got an apartment here, what should we do? What’s the next step?” Or they would send money back and forth, and be in contact with each other about what was happening to them. My grandmother and her oldest son and daughter-in-law stayed at camp almost to the end. And then they were wondering, “How are we going to get you out? Could we find housing for you? Could we help with jobs and placement?” Those letters were really interesting to me. I began to think about what kind of project I could do with them, and that’s how that book came about. So, they’re two separate projects, but they are connected.

NE: There are some diary excerpts in Questions 27 & 28 that were reproduced verbatim, and others that are fictionalized. How did you go about deciding which to include as is and which to kind of fabulate?

KTY: The diary excerpts are from Charles Kikuchi and a man named John Modell. Modell gathered together the diaries of Charles Kikuchi and published a very small segment of them. Kikuchi wrote them for the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, which was under the auspices of UC Berkeley. Dorothy Swaine Thomas, [who] was heading up that project, asked him to keep a diary to participate in the project and center those excerpts.

The first part of the excerpts that were published were of his time in Tanforan, one of the assembly centers. He went there with his family and began to write that night. When I was reading those diaries, I thought that’s some amazing recollection—not just a recollection but a description of what went on in the camp in those years. He continued to write his diary excerpts until he died. I took a segment of a small period that I thought was interesting, some of his other work which had to do with oral histories, and then what I could discover about his own history, and moved it into this storytelling, where you get his voice in the diary and then this counter voice, which is also his story.

NE: In I Hotel, you used a unique architectural format to construct the linked novellas. This is another polyvocal novel that spans a large historical period. Did you approach its construction similarly?

KTY: Yeah, absolutely. It works for me because the subject is so broad and if I could create a structure for the work, I knew what to leave out and what to bring in. Also, I liked the sense of seeing the contrast as you move through the story. It’s not an easy way to write something, I have to admit, but also it keeps me on track.

For I Hotel, I had to create a structure because there was so much material and so many people I had engaged in conversations with, and so many stories I had to tell, I needed to find a way to organize them. For this book, I wanted to think about the structure that was self-imposed by the Japanese of being first generation, second generation, and third. And then, also the chronology and time and what was happening for each of those generations.

For the first generation, the Issei, [that was] the restoration of the Japanese emperor and the Meiji era, and their vision of the future and what they should be doing in terms of their migration out of Japan and their responsibilities to their families who are left in Japan and then what they decide and think about in terms of settlement in the United States. They made some decisions about how they should do this in relation to other migrations of Asians to the Americas. So I wanted to see what that was all about, and it has very much to do with the hostilities that come about between the two countries and up to the war.

And then the center is the Nisei generation, who were the most affected by the incarceration, because they lost their freedom, and they were brought up to think that they had rights as American citizens. And then after the war, my generation in the ’50s and ’60s, who inherited that legacy, didn’t know what that legacy was when we were kids, and then came into the ’60s, ’70s, that period where there was student protest and Third World [Liberation Front] strikes. That linked me back to the work and the research that I did for I Hotel about the Asian American movement and the birth of that new phase of what happened in our community. And with that, the activism that was involved in the universities that spilled into activism for reparations, and the revelation for my generation of what had happened during the war, and the way in which my generation also forced the Nisei generation to remember and to reconcile that history with another. Then, of course, the creation of ethnic studies, and the participation of Japanese Americans and that history, and that link to what eventually becomes Asian American studies, and how it moves through this history. And then the memorialization of the experience with the camps, but also with the museums and interpretive centers, and books and research, and archival projects, and oral history projects, all of that came about in that third section.

NE: Do you see your books as part of that memorialization?

KTY: I think of it more as… I needed to understand for myself. I lived through this, and I was part of it. At the same time, I wanted to know the particulars and what had happened. The book for me was more, let me take a look at this. I found it was not necessarily the narrative that I had assumed. It’s been really interesting to think through it by having to write about it, but also to research it pretty deeply.

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NE: Do you think of archives as inherently political—meaning that the act of preserving documents can become a source of political power?

KTY: Inherently political? I have to think about that. Certainly, the decision to save this material [could be considered so]. For example, the National Archives saved every piece of paper so that anybody who was interned during the war can go to the National Archives and if they have their birthdate and name and some other identification, they can get into that archive. Many people have not done this. It was a shock to my family to go to the National Archives and find out what our parents… For example, all those loyalty questionnaires, they’re in the National Archives. And is that inherently political? I don’t know. Why? If you knew that this was wrong, but you saved all this stuff, I mean, the government did, and all of this material was saved for whatever reason when they closed down the war. When you look at the archives that [political activist] Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga went through to figure out the truth and the lies that were perpetrated… The Supreme Court never knew about [them], so they could never weigh in and [overturn the conviction of] Fred Korematsu [who resisted being relocated to a camp] until how many years later. So, I think some of it is just saving a record of what they did during the war. If they were really smart, they would have burned it all, and we would never see it again.

NE: You once said you were interested in the “reinvention of ethnic voice.” What necessitates that reinvention to you, and what is the goal of a new ethnic voice?

KTY: I was teaching Asian American literature at the university and in the beginning, it was hard to find books. Some of the first folks who started writing in my community were Nisei and couldn’t publish. For instance, Toshio Mori couldn’t publish his books. [These authors] were unknown, so the next generation of writers “discovered” them and then anthologized their work. Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, Toshio Mori, John Okada. We didn’t know that these writers existed. They were published in local Japanese newspapers, and had maybe one book that no one paid any attention to. They were the small beginnings of literary voices—not to mention Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston and other writers—and that really excited another group of younger writers and was influential and inspiring. And so the goal was to keep going. Certainly we have had other waves of Asian American writers who have arrived. When I was teaching all of this, there would be a week on Chinese American writers, and then a week on Filipino American writers, and another week on Vietnamese [American writers]. And I realized that they all write in English, right? But there’s something textually and in the cadence and also the thinking and then the storytelling that shifted in accordance with their own backgrounds and the stories in their own childhood, and also the stories they brought with them from each of these places, and the histories, and the backgrounds, and how they struggled to make it here, and what they did. I guess, what I’m also saying is that it opens up spaces for all of these voices, and it’s not just Asian Americans; there are so many immigrant groups here. Immigration in this country and that storytelling has changed our literature in ways that we couldn’t have predicted. The imaginations and the storytelling from all of these groups are quite different.

NE: You wrote in your story collection Sansei and Sensibility, “I’m always insinuating to my students that they need to be responsible for their writing, even though they can always plead fiction.” Why is that important to you?

KTY: It means to do my homework. And I think that’s what has made it so difficult, and that’s why I’ve spent so much time in the archives. I’ve had to read more than I actually write. I spend a lot of time reading histories and dissertations, and a lot of time in the archives reading material and trying to figure out what happened and being true to that history. You can take fiction lightly and just make it up, but for what I’ve been doing, it’s been really important to me to have the integrity of the research and to be true to it. I’m asking my students to do the hard work before they launch into speaking for anyone else, or even speaking for their own group. They have to take responsibility for it. You can’t say, “It’s just fiction.” It is just fiction—it is fiction, but it has consequences, and I’m very aware of that. When you start a project, you think, “OK, I think this will close the door on it, but it will also ask some other questions and let me think about what my question is about this.” It was a question and a project for which I thought the history was hopefully over. And this year we know it’s not over. And it happens that my book comes out this year and its relevance is potent.

NE: You’re referring to the ICE detention facilities?

KTY: Yes. I was looking at a map the other day to figure out how I’m going to present my work and show people where all these camps were. There were ten, but they were not just camps. There were Department of Justice facilities, which were prisons, and they’re all over the map in the United States. But then I pulled up a map of all the ICE facilities, where people are being held, and the country is black with this stuff. It’s horrifying. And so I know that we’re repeating history; it hasn’t ended.

My parents are dead. Much of the community who were actually incarcerated [in the camps] are dying off. When Trump was first elected,my mother had just died, and all my sister and I could say was, “I’m glad my mom is dead.” She would be horrified, because she spent her whole life trying to be active in a community in which she thought that it would not happen again. And in my community, people would say, “OK, we’re going to get reparations and we’re going to write this book or we’re going to have this event and we’re going to support the Muslims against the Muslim ban, because we don’t think this should happen ever again to another group of people.” And it’s just happened again. We’ve repeated history.

I feel like we failed. It’s so upsetting to me that [the book’s] even relevant. I thought that maybe we could take it to another place—we could understand in a different way and we could think about something else. But now we can’t even begin to think about that something else because it’s happening again.