16.5: Chapter 5

4.5.1. Listening Comprehension

00:12 I'm a veteran of the starship Enterprise.

00:16 I soared through the galaxy

00:19 driving a huge starship

00:22 with a crew made up of people

00:24 from all over this world,

00:26 many different races, many different cultures,

00:30 many different heritages,

00:32 all working together,

00:34 and our mission was to explore strange new worlds,

00:37 to seek out new life and new civilizations,

00:41 to boldly go where no one has gone before.

00:46 Well —

00:48 (Applause) —

00:54 I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan

00:59 who went to America,

01:01 boldly going to a strange new world,

01:05 seeking new opportunities.

01:08 My mother was born in Sacramento, California.

01:11 My father was a San Franciscan.

01:13 They met and married in Los Angeles,

01:16 and I was born there.

01:20 I was four years old

01:22 when Pearl Harbor was bombed

01:24 on December 7, 1941 by Japan,

01:29 and overnight, the world was plunged

01:33 into a world war.

01:36 America suddenly was swept up

01:39 by hysteria.

01:43 Japanese-Americans,

01:45 American citizens of Japanese ancestry,

01:48 were looked on

01:49 with suspicion and fear

01:53 and with outright hatred

01:56 simply because we happened to look like

01:59 the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.

02:01 And the hysteria grew and grew

02:05 until in February 1942,

02:08 the president of the United States,

02:11 Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

02:13 ordered all Japanese-Americans

02:15 on the West Coast of America

02:18 to be summarily rounded up

02:20 with no charges, with no trial,

02:24 with no due process.

02:26 Due process, this is a core pillar

02:29 of our justice system.

02:30 That all disappeared.

02:33 We were to be rounded up

02:35 and imprisoned in 10 barbed-wire prison camps

02:39 in some of the most desolate places in America:

02:43 the blistering hot desert of Arizona,

02:47 the sultry swamps of Arkansas,

02:50 the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado,

02:54 and two of the most desolate places in California.

02:59 On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday,

03:04 and just a few weeks after my birthday,

03:08 my parents got my younger brother,

03:10 my baby sister and me

03:12 up very early one morning,

03:15 and they dressed us hurriedly.

03:18 My brother and I were in the living room

03:20 looking out the front window,

03:23 and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway.

03:27 They carried bayonets on their rifles.

03:31 They stomped up the front porch

03:34 and banged on the door.

03:36 My father answered it,

03:39 and the soldiers ordered us out of our home.

03:43 My father gave my brother and me

03:46 small luggages to carry,

03:47 and we walked out and stood on the driveway

03:51 waiting for our mother to come out,

03:54 and when my mother finally came out,

03:57 she had our baby sister in one arm,

04:00 a huge duffel bag in the other,

04:04 and tears were streaming down both her cheeks.

04:09 I will never be able to forget that scene.

04:13 It is burned into my memory.

04:17 We were taken from our home

04:20 and loaded on to train cars

04:22 with other Japanese-American families.

04:25 There were guards stationed

04:27 at both ends of each car,

04:30 as if we were criminals.

04:33 We were taken two thirds of the way across the country,

04:37 rocking on that train for four days and three nights,

04:41 to the swamps of Arkansas.

04:45 I still remember the barbed wire fence

04:47 that confined me.

04:50 I remember the tall sentry tower

04:52 with the machine guns pointed at us.

04:56 I remember the searchlight that followed me

04:59 when I made the night runs

05:01 from my barrack to the latrine.

05:04 But to five-year-old me,

05:06 I thought it was kind of nice that they'd lit the way

05:08 for me to pee.

05:12 I was a child,

05:13 too young to understand the circumstances

05:16 of my being there.

05:19 Children are amazingly adaptable.

05:23 What would be grotesquely abnormal

05:27 became my normality

05:30 in the prisoner of war camps.

05:33 It became routine for me to line up three times a day

05:37 to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall.

05:42 It became normal for me to go with my father

05:44 to bathe in a mass shower.

05:47 Being in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp,

05:51 became my normality.

05:55 When the war ended,

05:56 we were released,

05:58 and given a one-way ticket

06:00 to anywhere in the United States.

06:04 My parents decided to go back home

06:06 to Los Angeles,

06:09 but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place.

06:13 We were penniless.

06:14 Everything had been taken from us,

06:17 and the hostility was intense.

06:19 Our first home was on Skid Row

06:22 in the lowest part of our city,

06:27 living with derelicts, drunkards

06:30 and crazy people,

06:32 the stench of urine all over,

06:34 on the street, in the alley,

06:37 in the hallway.

06:40 It was a horrible experience,

06:42 and for us kids, it was terrorizing.

06:46 I remember once

06:48 a drunkard came staggering down,

06:51 fell down right in front of us,

06:54 and threw up.

06:55 My baby sister said, "Mama, let's go back home,"

07:01 because behind barbed wires

07:03 was for us

07:06 home.

07:08 My parents worked hard

07:10 to get back on their feet.

07:12 We had lost everything.

07:13 They were at the middle of their lives

07:16 and starting all over.

07:17 They worked their fingers to the bone,

07:20 and ultimately they were able

07:23 to get the capital together to buy

07:26 a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood.

07:29 And I was a teenager,

07:30 and I became very curious

07:32 about my childhood imprisonment.

07:35 I had read civics books that told me about

07:38 the ideals of American democracy.

07:42 All men are created equal,

07:45 we have an inalienable right

07:48 to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,

07:53 and I couldn't quite make that fit

07:55 with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment.

07:58 I read history books,

08:00 and I couldn't find anything about it.

08:03 And so I engaged my father after dinner

08:07 in long, sometimes heated conversations.

08:12 We had many, many conversations like that,

08:15 and what I got from them

08:17 was my father's wisdom.

08:19 He was the one that suffered the most

08:22 under those conditions of imprisonment,

08:25 and yet he understood American democracy.

08:29 He told me that our democracy

08:32 is a people's democracy,

08:34 and it can be as great as the people can be,

08:37 but it is also as fallible as people are.

08:42 He told me that American democracy

08:45 is vitally dependent on good people

08:49 who cherish the ideals of our system

08:53 and actively engage in the process

08:56 of making our democracy work.

08:59 And he took me to a campaign headquarters —

09:03 the governor of Illinois was running for the presidency —

09:07 and introduced me to American electoral politics.

09:11 And he also told me about

09:14 young Japanese-Americans

09:15 during the Second World War.

09:19 When Pearl Harbor was bombed,

09:21 young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans,

09:24 rushed to their draft board

09:27 to volunteer to fight for our country.

09:30 That act of patriotism

09:33 was answered with a slap in the face.

09:37 We were denied service,

09:40 and categorized as enemy non-alien.

09:46 It was outrageous to be called an enemy

09:49 when you're volunteering to fight for your country,

09:52 but that was compounded with the word "non-alien,"

09:56 which is a word that means

10:00 "citizen" in the negative.

10:04 They even took the word "citizen" away from us,

10:07 and imprisoned them for a whole year.

10:12 And then the government realized

10:14 that there's a wartime manpower shortage,

10:18 and as suddenly as they'd rounded us up,

10:23 they opened up the military for service

10:25 by young Japanese-Americans.

10:28 It was totally irrational,

10:30 but the amazing thing,

10:33 the astounding thing,

10:35 is that thousands of young

10:37 Japanese-American men and women

10:40 again went from behind those barbed-wire fences,

10:44 put on the same uniform as that of our guards,

10:47 leaving their families in imprisonment,

10:51 to fight for this country.

10:53 They said that they were going to fight

10:55 not only to get their families out

10:58 from behind those barbed-wire fences,

11:01 but because they cherished the very ideal

11:04 of what our government stands for,

11:06 should stand for,

11:08 and that was being abrogated

11:11 by what was being done.

11:15 All men are created equal.

11:17 And they went to fight for this country.

11:21 They were put into a segregated

11:22 all Japanese-American unit

11:25 and sent to the battlefields of Europe,

11:27 and they threw themselves into it.

11:30 They fought with amazing,

11:33 incredible courage and valor.

11:37 They were sent out on the most dangerous missions

11:40 and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate

11:43 of any unit proportionally.

11:47 There is one battle that illustrates that.

11:50 It was a battle for the Gothic Line.

11:53 The Germans were embedded

11:56 in this mountain hillside,

11:58 rocky hillside,

12:00 in impregnable caves,

12:02 and three allied battalions

12:06 had been pounding away at it

12:07 for six months,

12:09 and they were stalemated.

12:11 The 442nd was called in

12:14 to add to the fight,

12:18 but the men of the 442nd

12:20 came up with a unique

12:23 but dangerous idea:

12:25 The backside of the mountain

12:27 was a sheer rock cliff.

12:30 The Germans thought an attack from the backside

12:33 would be impossible.

12:36 The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible.

12:40 On a dark, moonless night,

12:44 they began scaling that rock wall,

12:48 a drop of more than 1,000 feet,

12:52 in full combat gear.

12:54 They climbed all night long

12:57 on that sheer cliff.

13:02 In the darkness,

13:04 some lost their handhold

13:06 or their footing

13:07 and they fell to their deaths

13:10 in the ravine below.

13:12 They all fell silently.

13:16 Not a single one cried out,

13:19 so as not to give their position away.

13:22 The men climbed for eight hours straight,

13:26 and those who made it to the top

13:29 stayed there until the first break of light,

13:33 and as soon as light broke,

13:36 they attacked.

13:38 The Germans were surprised,

13:40 and they took the hill

13:41 and broke the Gothic Line.

13:44 A six-month stalemate

13:47 was broken by the 442nd

13:49 in 32 minutes.

13:52 It was an amazing act,

13:56 and when the war ended,

13:58 the 442nd returned to the United States

14:02 as the most decorated unit

14:04 of the entire Second World War.

14:07 They were greeted back on the White House Lawn

14:10 by President Truman, who said to them,

14:12 "You fought not only the enemy

14:16 but prejudice, and you won."

14:20 They are my heroes.

14:24 They clung to their belief

14:27 in the shining ideals of this country,

14:30 and they proved that being an American

14:34 is not just for some people,

14:37 that race is not how we define being an American.

14:43 They expanded what it means to be an American,

14:46 including Japanese-Americans

14:49 that were feared and suspected and hated.

14:53 They were change agents,

14:56 and they left for me

14:59 a legacy.

15:01 They are my heroes

15:03 and my father is my hero,

15:05 who understood democracy

15:07 and guided me through it.

15:11 They gave me a legacy,

15:13 and with that legacy comes a responsibility,

15:17 and I am dedicated

15:19 to making my country

15:21 an even better America,

15:24 to making our government

15:27 an even truer democracy,

15:30 and because of the heroes that I have

15:34 and the struggles that we've gone through,

15:37 I can stand before you

15:39 as a gay Japanese-American,

15:42 but even more than that,

15:45 I am a proud American.

15:49 Thank you very much.

15:51 (Applause)

“Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me” by George Takei is licensed by TED under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

4.5.2. Exercise-Listening Practice-Passive Voice

Listen to the new years traditions from around the world. Complete the sentences using passive voice.

1. Twelve grapes are eaten to bring good luck. The grapes symbolize the 12 months in the year.
2. Negative energy is removed when every corner of the home is brushed with a broom.
3. Purple and gold decorations are hung in the house to bring prosperity and health.
4. New clothes especially red ones are worn to attract prosperity and passion.
5. Donations are given to those in need to make room for what the new year will bring.
6. Money is placed in shoes to show economic stability.
7. Water is thrown out the window or door to let go of suffering, tears, or sorrow.