When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park

that; it was just that we'd outgrown our childhood games, and I was spending more
time with Jung-shin. But Tomo and I still sometimes thought of each other when we had time to play.
    He was in the yard when I arrived, but so were three other boys I didn't know. When I saw them, I pretended I was only passing by, but Tomo caught sight of me and ran out to the lane.
    "Keoko, look! See what my father brought me." He displayed his new toy, a beautiful model airplane made of wood and sturdy paper. "It's a Flying Dragon, exactly like the ones flown by the Imperial pilots."
    He ran in a circle holding the plane over his head. "
Ack-ack-ack-ack-ack!
" he shouted. "The Dragon swoops over Pearl Harbor—he finds a target—he fires! It's a direct hit! The enemy plane crashes—smoke and flames everywhere! The nimble Dragon escapes!"
    I felt a little bashful with those other boys around, but I did want to look at the plane. "Can I see it again, Tomo?" I asked.
    He came to a stop before me and held the plane out. "You can hold it," he said generously.
    "Hey!" one of the boys protested. "You wouldn't let any of us even touch it."
    Tomo looked at him with disdain. "You might be too rough with it. Keoko will be careful."
    I was pleased that he trusted me, but his words also made me anxious. I held the plane for only a few moments, admiring the glossy paper of its wings and the propellers that really spun. Then I gave it back to him, thinking how much Tae-yul would like to have a plane like this one. He loved mechanical things.
    "The Imperial forces have huge fleets of these planes,"
Tomo said excitedly. "The Americans don't stand a chance!
Ack-ack-ack-ack-ack
—" and he began running around again with his plane held high.
    "Kill them! Kill the Americans!" another boy shouted.
    "Kill the Americans!" The others took up the chant. "Kill the Americans, kill the Americans!"
    "All of them!" shouted the first boy.
    "Even the babies?" I said. The words slipped out before I could stop them. The boys stopped chanting and stared at me.
    Tomo slowed down and zoomed his plane over to me. "Keoko, don't you remember the movie?" he said.
    We'd been shown a short film in our classrooms a few weeks earlier. Onishi-san had gone from room to room with the movie projector until all the students had seen the film. None of us had ever seen a movie before.
    The teacher helped Onishi-san hang a sheet on the wall, then instructed me, as Class Leader, to choose a few girls to help me cover the windows with heavy pieces of paper. The classroom looked different darkened like that, almost scary.
    Then Onishi-san turned on the projector, and suddenly there was a picture on the sheet! A picture so bright it almost blinded me. When my eyes stopped hurting a few seconds later, I saw that the people in the picture were moving. You could even tell when they were talking, their lips moving quickly. They looked so real it was hard to believe that if I'd touched them I would only have been touching cloth.
    Everyone gasped and murmured in surprise. Then Onishi-san started talking. The film, he said, was to teach us what Americans were like.
    The pictures were of white people, usually riding horses and wearing big white hats, shooting and killing other people. Onishi-san told us that the Americans hated all people with black hair and killed even the women and babies of their enemies just to amuse themselves.
    At the time I barely heard him. It hadn't mattered what the movie was about; the moving pictures themselves were what fascinated me. The rest of that day, and for days afterward, those flickering images kept returning to my mind, almost like a dream.
    Now Onishi-san's words came back to me. It was true that all the people being shot at in the film had long black hair. But I'd heard Uncle and Abuji talk about America. I hadn't understood everything they said, but I knew that America was a very large country. There were things about it that they both admired.