Walking In Their Footsteps At A Former Japanese Internment Camp

From the car seat, the toddler, almost three years old, asked his parents what we were doing. "We're here to learn our history, your family's history," his father said from the driver's seat.

We were in the parking lot at Manzanar National Historic Site. An American flag fluttered vigorously in front of the pale green visitor center. Beyond it, a few buildings, long and low, dotted the landscape. Once, 10,046 people had been imprisoned here. Known as the Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II, it was one of 10 sites where Japanese Americans were incarcerated for nearly four years.

I sat next to the toddler in the back of the car. His grandparents and great-grandparents on his father's side had been sent to other concentration camps: Poston in Arizona and Tule Lake in California, close to the Oregon border. I am a good friend of the boy's mother, erin Khuê Ninh, a professor of Asian American literature. We met when we both