"When the Emperor Was Divine" - Quotation Collection - The Boy

[Robin Nourie]

     "'It's so hot in here, " [the boy] said.

     'Take off your hat then,' said the woman, but the boy refused. The hat was a present from his father. It was big on him, but the boy wore it every day." (14)

This is one of the first indications of the boy's strong attachment to his father, and perhaps too, of just how much he must miss him.

[diabeti...@yahoo.com]

Page 100: "Secretly the boy blamed himself. I shouldn't have plucked that leaf..."

This is one example of the boy's "odd" thoughts. He blames a willow tree dying on the fact that he picked a leaf from it even though thats not the reason it died. 

Page 83: "Now whenever he thought of his father he saw him at sundown, leaning against a fence post in Lordsburg, in the camp for dangerous enemy aliens. 'My daddy's an outlaw,' he whispered. He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw. He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big beautiful horse named White Frost.

This shows not only the boy reminiscing about his father and what he's going through at the moment but also the boy picturing his father almost as an American, a cowboy of sorts, riding through the wild west, robbing banks, doing very cowboy-ish things. The boy pretends that is what his father got locked up for, holding up a stage coach or robbing a bank, not for being Japanese American.

[jschwartz]

"He had not given the tortoise a name but had scratched his families idenification number onto its shell" (61)

[Evan McClelland]

"All night long he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. He saw the ancient salt lake floating above the floor of the desert. Its surface was calm and blue. Smooth as glass. He was drifting down through the reeds and fish were swimming through his fingers and when he looked up through the water the sun was nothing but a pale wobbly speck a hundred million miles above his head."

"The shoes were black Oxford's, size eight and a half, extra narrow. He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father's toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers. 

Tonight they smelled like nothing. 

The week before they had still smelled of his father, but tonight the smell of his father was gone."

"One evening, before he went to bed he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls. 

By morning his name was gone."

"He closed his eyes and imagined himself fighting with Hank and the Raiders down in the Solomon Islands. Or flying reconnaissance over Mindanao. Maybe he'd take a direct hit over Leyte and he'd have to eject. He'd float slowly down to earth beneath a flaming silk parachute and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. "You did your best, son," he'd say, and then they'd shake hands."

[jschwartz]

"But sometimes it slipped out anyway. 

Hirohito. Hirohito. Hirohito.

He said it quietly, quickly. He whispered it.

[jschwartz]

"His father used to call him Little Guy. He called him gumdrop and peanut and plum. 'You are my absolute numero uno' he used to say."

[diabeti...@yahoo.com]

Page 53: "He roamed through the barracks with the other boys in his block, playing cops and robbers and war. Kill the Nazis! Kill the Japs!"

Page 57: "But when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be, it would not come to him. It could be anything. Something he'd done yesterday - chewing the eraser off of his sister's pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar - or something he had done a long time ago that was know catching up with him. Breaking a chain letter from Juneau, Alaska. Flushing his dying pet goldfish down the toilet before it was completely dead. Forgetting to touch the hat rack three times when the iceman drove by. Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, and he was sure that when he woke up his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling 'Begin the Beguine' through his teeth as he fired up breakfast in the skillet."

[eo...@gfsnet.org]

75, 76

In china there were people so poor they had to feed their newborn babies to the dogs. In china they ate grass for breakfast and for lunch they ate cats. Not only does is this quote demonstrate racism, it also demonstrates how many false stereotypes he has about another country, but these are the same false beliefs that landed him in the internment camps.

[qmck...@gfsnet.org]

He imagined exploding ships, clouds of black smoke hundreds of B-29s falling down in flames from the sky. One fake moves pal and you’re dead

 

All night long he dreamed of water endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. He saw the ancient salt lakes floating above the floor of the desert. Its surfaces were calm and blue.  Smooth as glass. He was drifting down through the reeds and fish were swimming thought his fingers and when he looked up thought the water the sun was nothing but a pale wobbly speck a hundred millions miles above his head

[jschwartz]

"Or maybe the boy would be lying in bed one night and he would hear a soft knock, a tap." (104)

"You forgot to put on your shoes"