Due to loud construction noises in my home, I had to have this conversation with Tamiko Nimura, author of the new memoir A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake, in my bathroom with the door closed. The effect was a very private and personal conversation with a writer unafraid of earnestness.
As an activist as well as a poet and essayist, Nimura explores, in this inventive memoir, how rejection from academia helped launch her into ancestral research, and ultimately a visit to Tule Lake, the site of one of the worst Japanese American internment camps at the time, where her father, who died when she was 10, was imprisoned. She pulls pieces of his unpublished memoir—which recounts his four years living as a child in what Nimura more accurately calls concentration camps—to illuminate her own story.
A Place for What We Lose explores history, both personal and cultural, showing how inextricably woven they are, not just for her family, but for all of us.
I wondered about the recurring echoes of major historical events with your familial ones, like your father’s presence at the most notorious camp at Tule Lake for example. What does it feel like to have such a strong lineage behind you?
Over the 15 years I’ve been writing [this book], so much has felt so powerfully resonant and relevant. For example, when Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia grad student, was arrested—taken away from his family and whisked away for exercising free speech—I was looking at my grandfather’s file, [and] this is pretty much what happened to him. Then there are the [present-day] impacts of child detention, family separation, and the attacks on birthright citizenship. Someone asked me recently about how it felt to have this book be so relevant to the news, and I said, devastating. Our community elders went to their graves vowing that this would not happen again. They broke the silence of decades to share their stories [for that very purpose], and it is so painful to have it echoing so powerfully right now.
You grew up in California, but also have a long history in the Pacific Northwest. What is your relationship now to Seattle, the West Coast in general, and to the Pacific Northwest, given your family’s roots and painful experiences here?
I’ve lived in California and Washington, and I feel like both are part of me. I moved to Seattle in the late ’90s, and I’ve always felt a bit like an outsider in Seattle, but I’ve written my way into the community through journalism and relationships. Now I feel allegiance to Washington, too, especially Tacoma.
In this particular historical moment, it’s really easy to feel disillusionment, and even surprise, a certain kind of anger about the historical amnesia that we seem to be experiencing right now. People are coming new and fresh to incarceration history, or there are people who maybe got the paragraph summary of incarceration history in high school or college and just glossed it over. I’ve been so inspired and moved by activists in my community who have been trying to resist and connect the dots for people more powerfully. A group that I talk about in the book, called Tsuru for Solidarity, works regularly on trying to shut down detention centers. There’s one here in Tacoma. A lot of us have been telling the camp story for a while now, and have been committed to this not happening again. Feeling the enormity and the awfulness of, oh no, it is happening again, with multiple groups targeted, the work is to gather our energies for a broader solidarity, and that’s really inspiring.
Can you speak to the structure of the book a bit?
I tend to work backwards, so the book started when I was on community pilgrimage at Tule Lake, where my family was incarcerated. I had been through these couple of days of really intense experiences, processing and connecting. I’d been trying so hard not to feel for so long that it all just kind of bubbled up and burst out into this ridiculously ugly cry. I had to write this book to understand where that came from. I broke it down into several strands: the loss of my academic career, which really upended my life; the loss of my dad; and the collective losses that my community had experienced.
During the editing process, a friend asked me, “How does your book want to be structured?” and I realized: It wants to be a library. I imagined walking through reference, archives, travel, history—and my dad working in circulation. This became the organizing structure for the book.
What’s your relationship to grief now, and to Japanese and Filipino cultural elements in your life?
My grief about my dad feels different now. I avoided his memory for a long time because it was tied to pain, but writing the book—and therapy—helped me reframe it. I realized as a storyteller I needed to write the relationship first so the loss would land. That turned into a gift: I can now talk about him with love and memory,
not just pain.
With Japanese elements, I have a Daruma doll that I filled in one eye [of] when I started as a professor. I didn’t get tenure, so I didn’t fill in the second eye, but I think I will when my book comes out. That will feel meaningful.
I had associated my Filipino side with difficult family history, but I’m reconnecting with it. My kid is engaging with it in college, and I cowrite weekly with a Filipina American writer who’s been exploring Tagalog in pottery. She gave me a bowl she made with kapwa, a term which means interconnectedness and care, carved into its center.
I also have a little altar with my father’s manuscript, a photo of him, and a book locket made by a friend that holds images of me with my parents. There’s been a whole village of people supporting this book. It isn’t solitary work.
Tamiko Nimura discusses A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake at the SPL’s Central Library May 5, 7 pm.
