When the Emperor Was Divine

At the beginning of this chapter, which constitutes most of the remainder of the book, the family arrives in the camp, where it was “Utah. Late summer. A city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert. The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him” (49). The boy mistakes all the men for his father: “[He] thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against the barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch” (49).

The boy, the girl, and the mother are assigned a room in a barrack, close to the fence. The conditions are rough: there “was no running water and the toilets were a half block away” (50). The camp rules are designed to restrict the bodies and the minds of the people in the camp: “The rules about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it.