April 17, 1918
I was only seven years old when I got on a boat and sailed with my family to a foreign land. My country’s economy wasn’t going so good, so my father decided to move us to America for a better opportunity. In the beginning, it didn’t turn out like we had hoped; we had to go through a lot of hardship.
My family and I had been living in Hawaii for ten years now. Every day it gets harder, and the prejudice grows, but the difficulty of it all just gives us strength to keep moving on. Sometimes it’s hard to keep the faith, but if we succumb to the pressure we’ll never succeed in life. We take pride in our achievements, we worked really hard to accomplish them, but with every new one we make, it gets harder to accomplish another.
I often work with my father on the fields from dawn until nighttime, and when I’m not putting long hours of labor on the fields I help mother with the house chores. Father’s dream is to open a restaurant and fill it with the crops we grow on our small piece of land. He wants for people to know the delicious foods that come from our homeland. He’s so close to achieving his dream that I can almost taste the onigiri filled with pickled ume, salted salmon, and kombu alongside mother’s homemade sushi.
Keeping the faith is what has helped us reached so far in life. Every insulting comment we receive from people who don’t see the value in our culture like we do only gives us strength, for we know how precious it really is. We’ll never give up, no matter the consequences, and we’ll leave our legacy for future generations to come. No amount of weapons or laws will keep us from reaching our goals…
- Tsukiko Mori
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