Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

What Life Once Was: The American Dream is something that millions of people from every country try their whole lives to obtain. Although they all work very hard, plenty of them still are not able to acquire such a life. The struggles that the family is going through are never ending. In Julie Otsuka’s “ When the Emperor was Divine”, the family faces continual hardships. They start with living the American Dream, then they are sent into the internment camps which creates much of their problems through their overall bad living environment. Once they get out of the camps, they still experience more problems when they get home. The struggles just don’t seem to ever stop. The main characters in the story, the family, are trying to obtain the American …show more content…
A lot of the time people just think about themselves when going through hardships, not realizing that everybody has their own struggles. Although the family was removed from their American Dream into the internment camps, they still had stuff to look at. Even though the internment camp living conditions aren’t the best, they still have a place to sleep, food to consume, and even a free education, which some countries do not provide. “A dust storm would blow for hours”, “then a baby would begin to cry, or a dog would start barking” (Otsuka 77). But the thing is, everyone that is in the camp all have to go through the same struggles. When they finally arrive back home after the war, they realize it’s trash and that it smells bad. The house did not look anything like it did when they left, they even had new neighbors after all the time they’d been gone. They returned home to “Broken bottles were scattered across the yard”, “where our mother’s rosebush once stood there was only a clump of dead weeds” (Otsuka 106). The whole time they were gone, everything seemed to

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