r3reiko.com/excerpts

"I am looking for war, trying to understand my family, I am interviewing
the enemy, and they tell me: It was dark; I was blown back ten
meters; everything was flat; they were walking like ghosts, their hands
in front of them; their skin hung like rags; they were crying for water.
They were crying "help me," "itai," "it hurts." The whole city was
silent, a city of ashes and not a single sound. It was black; it was red;
everything was gray and hot, so hot; it was beautiful. A young woman
tells me how white the bones at her feet were, the ones in what used
to be in her living room, and how they gleamed in the sun. I am telling
you how she described them.

Her mothers bones."

- from Skin, Topography of War: Asian American Essays, 2006

"I am the one who left. The calculus is not quite that clear, but it is
true, a fact, and it serves for the moment. When I give my son a small
medallion and explain to him that the figure on it is his guardian angel,
who will always be with him and who can see into his heart, I am the
one who cannot breathe when he hugs me and asks sadly: Can she
see that I miss my Mommy?

- from Fight Club, Because I Said So, HarperCollins, 2005

"After an hour of watching my hands twist while
searching for my own painkilling sound, my water
broke and I discovered just how slowly I could form
the thought, What in the hell was that? Let me
illustrate: First, something shuddered inside me
and I heard the far-off sound of, say, a potato
exploding in a microwave oven, and I thought, What
in- . Then I felt my underwear bulge and I got as far
as the hell-. Then the baby's no-longer-pillowed
head came crashing down on the bundle of nerve
endings in my tailbone and I thought was that? just
as the amniotic fluid turned into a small lake around
Craig's feet and he said, "What in the hell was that?"

- from What My Mother Never Told Me, Mothers
Who Think, Villard Books, 1999

"I think of all the soldiers in my family
when I think of Pearl Harbor....But I also
mourn the wounds in my family, made by
all the things we do not talk about. Like
the bitter ending for the young man at
the Schofield Barracks: my great uncle,
the war hero, who was buried without his
Japanese American family around him
because the U.S. government, which he
fought and died for, would not let them
fly from Denver to Hawaii to attend his
funeral."

- The Silence That Won't Go Away, The
Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1999