My uncle helped build the bomb.

My uncle helped build the atomic bomb. 

I have it right here, a photocopy of a certificate from the United States War Department:

 “This is to Certify that Warren Lowe, University of California, has participated in work essential to the production of the Atomic Bomb, thereby contributing to the successful conclusion of World War II.” It is signed by Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, 6 August 1945.

 Beneath the text is a seal the size of a hockey puck: “Manhattan Project,” it reads. “A Bomb.”

 My uncle, a chemical engineer, sent me this inside a Thanksgiving card when I was a junior in college. He also included two photos of himself, one a grainy photocopy of him in a graduation mortarboard, and a second clipped from a Chevron employee magazine.

I was self-absorbed with upcoming finals and more than vaguely creeped out—both by the contents and the fact that he referred to himself in the third person, as if talking about someone else. “Eventually you will appreciate your education later (sic),” he wrote. “Although Uncle Warren received scholarship, he worked 8 hours daily throughout college in order to help support his family.” The letter was dated Saturday, November 22, 1986.

Nine days later, Uncle Warren was dead. He was 64 and had just ordered a bright white Cadillac, which my Aunt Caroline drove until her death this summer.

I filed all this away, both physically and mentally. It was disturbing to consider that my uncle was prescient enough to post these testimonies before dropping dead a week later; it was too much to dwell on the reality that a family member had helped create the atomic bomb.

My uncle was born in 1922. He was a research assistant in the Manhattan Project Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley from 1943-45; perhaps it was thrilling to work on a top secret project as a young man. Obviously, he was proud of his contribution.

But he was proud of his work even as 110,000 of his fellow Asian Americans were imprisoned at internment camps throughout the West Coast and Hawaii, labeled a security risk. He was proud even though some of his Chinese American neighbors in the Bay Area wore buttons proclaiming, “I am Chinese,” to differentiate themselves.

He was proud even after he knew that hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He was still proud to have done his part in the war effort—forty-one years after the Allies accepted the Japanese surrender—to mail his niece proof of his role in that bloody victory.

It was not a conscious act of expiation that I, a writer, ended up becoming communications manager at a non-profit called Religions for Peace, the world’s largest and most representative multi-religious coalition for peace. It was not because of my uncle that I’d co-edited an anthology called Topography of War: Asian American Essays, which tells stories of how conflict can last long after the bombings have ceased.

In fact, I’d really managed to thoroughly not remember my uncle’s work until last month, when my family learned that Aunt Caroline, Warren’s widow, had died. Paranoid and reclusive, Aunt Caroline lived alone in a house engulfed by trees; inside, there was paper strewn around the house up to her knees. Authorities were finally able to contact my father because they found a letter from him, postmarked 1997.

Only in looking into Aunt Caroline’s death did I come across the mention of the Manhattan Project, which led to tearing through a closet late one recent humid night. There, in those treacherous bundles—letters from high school suitors, notes from a classmate who later committed suicide—was a card with “best wishes” from Uncle Warren.

“Help us to remember that the key to life and living,” the card’s inscription read, “is to make each prayer a prayer of thanks, and every day Thanksgiving.”

I last saw Aunt Caroline three years ago, when my parents and I visited the Bay Area. We took Caroline to lunch; for decades, she had dressed completely in white, with wide white sun hats and large tinted eyeglasses.

Afterwards, when she found out I wanted to visit a See’s Chocolate shop for some souvenirs, she exclaimed, “Wait! I have a gift certificate!” Quite astonishingly, she quickly located a voucher for a one-pound box; it was in the trunk of the by-then faded white Cadillac, which had yard-long scrape on the passenger side from an ill-gauged defensive driving maneuver.

“Uncle Warren knew I loved chocolates, so he bought me twenty” coupons! she beamed. She took my arm as we went into the store to pick out the chocolates; the cashier, even more amazingly, accepted the voucher without a blink, even though it had to be more than twenty-five years old. As I took the box from the cashier, Caroline giggled, “It’s from Uncle Warren!”

 Nothing is black and white in war—or love. We can only try to love with honesty, even if our minds and hearts are conflicted.