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George Takei 'Lost Freedom' some 80 years ago – now he's written that story for kids

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George Takei 'Lost Freedom' some 80 years ago – now he's written that story for kids

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

George Takei was just 4 years old when when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066:

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“I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders… to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded…”

It was Feb. 19, 1942. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor two months earlier; For looking like the enemy, Japanese and Japanese American people in the U.S. were now considered “enemy combatants” and the executive order authorized the government to forcibly remove approximately 125,000 people from their homes and relocate them to prison camps around the country.

Star Trek actor George Takei has written about this time in his life before — once in an autobiography, then in a graphic memoir, and now in his new children’s book, My Lost Freedom.

It’s about the years he and his mom, dad, brother and baby sister spent in a string of prison camps: swampy Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, desolate Tule Lake in northern California. But first, they were taken from their home, driven to the Santa Anita racetrack and forced to live in horse stalls while the camps were being built.

“The horse stalls were pungent,” Takei remembers, “overwhelming with the stench of horse manure. The air was full of flies, buzzing. My mother, I remember, kept mumbling ‘So humiliating. So humiliating.’”

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He says, “Michelle’s drawing really captured the degradation our family was reduced to.”

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

Michelle is Michelle Lee, the illustrator — and researcher — for the book. Lee relied heavily on Takei’s text and his excellent memory, but it was the research that both agree really brought the art to life.

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“I’m telling it from the perspective of a senior citizen,” Takei, 87, laughs. “I really had to wring my brains to try to remember some of the details.”

So Takei took Lee to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the board. They had lunch in Little Tokyo, got to know each other, met with the educational director, and looked at the exhibits. Then Lee started digging into the archives.

“I looked for primary sources that showed what life was like because I feel like that humanizes it a lot more,” Lee explains. She found some color photographs taken by Bill Manbo, who had smuggled his camera into the internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. “While I was painting the book, I tried as much to depict George and his family just going about their lives under these really difficult circumstances.”

Takei says he was impressed with how Lee managed to capture his parents: his father, the reluctant leader and his mother, a fashion icon in her hats and furs. “This has been the first time that I’ve had to depict real people,” Lee adds.

To get a feel for 1940s fashion, Lee says she looked at old Sears catalogues. “What are people wearing? All the men are wearing suits. What kind of colors were clothes back then.”

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My Lost Freedom

Crown Books for Young Readers

My Lost Freedom

Crown Books for Young Readers

But a lot of information has also been lost — Lee wasn’t able to see, for example, where Takei and his family lived in Arkansas because the barracks at Camp Rohwer have been torn down — there’s a museum there now. “I didn’t actually come across too many photos of the interior of the barracks,” says Lee. “The ones I did come across were very staged.”

She did, however, find the original floor plans for the barracks at Jerome Camp, also in Arkansas. “I actually printed the floorplan out and then built up a little model just to see what the space was actually like,” Lee says. “I think it just emphasized how small of a space this is that whole families were crammed into.”

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One illustration in the book shows the work that Takei’s mother put in to make that barrack — no more than tar paper and boards stuck together — a home.

“She gathered rags and tore them up into strips and braided them into rugs so that we would be stepping on something warm,” Takei remembers. She found army surplus fabrics and sewed curtains for the windows. She took plant branches that had fallen off the nearby trees and made decorative sculptures. She asked a friendly neighbor to build a table and chairs.

“You drew the home that my mother made out of that raw space, Takei tells Lee. “That was wonderful.”

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

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Michelle Lee painted the art for My Lost Freedom using watercolor, gouache and colored pencils. Most of the illustrations have a very warm palette, but ever-present are the barbed wire fences and the guard towers. “There’s a lot of fencing and bars,” Lee explains. “That was kind of the motif that I was using throughout the book… A lot of vertical and horizontal patterns to kind of emphasize just how overbearing it was.”

Takei says one of his favorite drawings in the book is a scene of him and his brother, Henry, playing by a culvert.

“Camp Rohwer was a strange and magical place,” Takei writes. “We’d never seen trees rising out of murky waters or such colorful butterflies. Our block was surrounded by a drainage ditch, home to tiny, wiggly black fishies. I scooped them up into a jar.

One morning they had funny bumps. Then they lost their tails and their legs popped out. They turned into frogs!”

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“They’re just two children among many children who were imprisoned at these camps,” says Lee, “and to them, perhaps, aspects of being there were just fun.” The illustration depicts both childlike wonder and — still, always — a sense of foreboding. Butterflies fly around a barbed wire fence. A bright sun shines on large, dark swamp trees. Kids play in the shadow of a guard tower.

“There’s so much that you tell in that one picture,” says Takei. “That’s the art.”

“So many of your memories are of how perceptive you are to things that are going on around you,” adds Lee, “but also still approaching things from a child’s perspective.”

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

My Lost Freedom, written by George Takei and illustrated by Michelle Lee

Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Michelle Lee

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Even though the events in My Lost Freedom took place more than 80 years ago, illustrator Michelle Lee and author George Takei say the story is still very relevant today.

“These themes of displacement and uprooting of communities from one place to another — these are things that are constantly happening,” says Lee. Because of war and because of political decisions … those themes aren’t uncommon. They’re universal.”

Takei agrees. “People need to know the lessons and learn that lesson and apply it to hard times today. And we hope that a lot of people get the book and read it to their children or read it to other children and act on it.”

He’s done his job, he says, now the readers have their job.

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In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping

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In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping

Lee Byung-hun stars in No Other Choice.

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In an old Kids in the Hall comedy sketch called “Crazy Love,” two bros throatily proclaim their “love of all women” and declare their incredulity that anyone could possibly take issue with it:

Bro 1: It is in our very makeup; we cannot change who we are!

Bro 2: No! To change would mean … (beat) … to make an effort.

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I thought about that particular exchange a lot, watching Park Chan-wook’s latest movie, a niftily nasty piece of work called No Other Choice. The film isn’t about the toxic lecherousness of boy-men, the way that KITH sketch is. But it is very much about men, and that last bit: the annoyed astonishment of learning that you’re expected to change something about yourself that you consider essential, and the extreme lengths you’ll go to avoid doing that hard work.

Many critics have noted No Other Choice‘s satirical, up-the-minute universality, given that it involves a faceless company screwing over a hardworking, loyal employee. As the film opens, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been working at a paper factory for 25 years; he’s got the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect family — you see where this is going, right? (If you don’t, even after the end of the first scene, when Man-su calls his family over for a group hug while sighing, “I’ve got it all,” then I envy your blithe disinterest in how movies work. Never change, you beautiful blissful Pollyanna, you.)

He gets canned, and can’t seem to find another job in his beloved paper industry, despite going on a series of dehumanizing interviews. His resourceful wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) proves a hell of a lot more adaptable than he does, making practical changes to the family’s expenses to weather Man-su’s situation. But when foreclosure threatens, he resolves to eliminate the other candidates (Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won) for the job he wants at another paper factory — and, while he’s at it, maybe even the jerk (Park Hee-soon) to whom he’d be reporting.

So yes, No Other Choice is a scathing spoof of corporate culture. But the director’s true satirical eye is trained on the interpersonal — specifically the intractability of the male ego.

Again and again, the women in the film (both Son Ye-jin as Miri and the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran, who plays the wife of one of Man-su’s potential victims) entreat their husbands to think about doing something, anything else with their lives. But these men have come to equate their years of service with a pot-committed core identity as men and breadwinners; they cling to their old lives and seek only to claw their way back into them. Man-su, for example, unthinkingly channels the energy that he could devote to personal and professional growth into planning and executing a series of ludicrously sloppy murders.

It’s all satisfyingly pulpy stuff, loaded with showy, cinematic homages to old-school suspense cinematography and editing — cross-fades, reverse-angles and jump cuts that are deliberately and unapologetically Hitchcockian. That deliberateness turns out to be reassuring and crowd-pleasing; if you’re tired of tidy visual austerity, of films that look like TV, the lushness on display here will have you leaning back in your seat thinking, “This right here is cinema, goddammit.”

Narratively, the film is loaded with winking jokes and callbacks that reward repeat viewing. Count the number of times that various characters attempt to dodge personal responsibility by sprinkling the movie’s title into their dialogue. Wonder why one character invokes the peculiar image of a madwoman screaming in the woods and then, only a few scenes later, finds herself chasing someone through the woods, screaming. Marvel at Man-su’s family home, a beautifully ugly blend of traditional French-style architecture with lumpy Brutalist touches like exposed concrete balconies jutting out from every wall.

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There’s a lot that’s charming about No Other Choice, which might seem an odd thing to note about such a blistering anti-capitalist screed. But the director is careful to remind us at all turns where the responsibility truly lies; say what you will about systemic economic pressure, the blood stays resolutely on Man-su’s hands (and face, and shirt, and pants, and shoes). The film repeatedly offers him the ability to opt out of the system, to abandon his resolve that he must return to the life he once knew, exactly as he knew it.

Man-su could do that, but he won’t, because to change would mean to make an effort — and ultimately men would rather embark upon a bloody murder spree than go to therapy.

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Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade

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Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will nearly double in size over the next decade. 

The airport currently has 34 gates. With the expansion projects, it will increase by another 32 gates. 

What they’re saying:

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Southwest, Delta, United, American, Alaska, FedEx, and UPS have signed 10-year use-and lease agreements, which outline how they operate at the airport, including with the expansion. 

“This provides the financial foundation that will support our day-to-day operations and help us fund the expansion program that will reshape how millions of travelers experience AUS for decades to come,” Ghizlane Badawi, CEO of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, said.

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Concourse B, which is in the design phase, will have 26 gates, estimated to open in the 2030s. Southwest Airlines will be the main tenant with 18 gates, United Airlines will have five gates, and three gates will be for common use. There will be a tunnel that connects to Concourse B.

“If you give us the gates, we will bring the planes,” Adam Decaire, senior VP of Network Planning & Network Operations Control at Southwest Airlines said.

“As part of growing the airport, you see that it’s not just us that’s bragging about the success we’re having. It’s the airlines that want to use this airport, and they see advantage in their business model of being part of this airport, and that’s why they’re growing the number of gates they’re using,” Mayor Kirk Watson said.

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Dig deeper:

The airport will also redevelop the existing Barbara Jordan Terminal, including the ticket counters, security checkpoints, and baggage claim. Concourse A will be home to Delta Air Lines with 15 gates. American Airlines will have nine gates, and Alaska Airlines will have one gate. There will be eight common-use gates.

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“Delta is making a long-term investment in Austin-Bergstrom that will transform travel for years to come,” Holden Shannon, senior VP for Corporate Real Estate at Delta Air Lines said.

The airport will also build Concourse M — six additional gates to increase capacity as early as 2027. There will be a shuttle between that and the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Concourse M will help with capacity during phases of construction. 

There will also be a new Arrivals and Departures Hall, with more concessions and amenities. They’re also working to bring rideshare pickup closer to the terminal.

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City officials say these projects will bring more jobs. 

The expansion is estimated to cost $5 billion — none of which comes from taxpayer dollars. This comes from airport revenue, possible proceeds, and FAA grants.

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“We’re seeing airlines really step up to ensure they are sharing in the infrastructure costs at no cost to Austin taxpayers, and so we’re very excited about that as well,” Council Member Vanessa Fuentes (District 2) said.

The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin’s Angela Shen

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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.

Hear The Original Interview

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