Certain Japanese-American

Usage examples of issei.

To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings.

The so-called political rights were generally agreed to be “self-evident”—things citizens were free to do, things governments were forbidden to do—habeus corpus, freedom of movement, of speech, of association, of religion, a ban on weapons—all these were approved by a vast majority of Martian natives, though there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand, China, and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis on individual liberty.

Many issei delegates with actual experience in Terran government were quite worried about these, pointing out that it was dangerous to enshrine such things in the constitution.

It was the first and only time in the congress that one of the issei had stood up and trounced one of the nisei in public debate.

The issei had of course brought all languages with them, but English had been their lingua franca.

Mikhail Yangel was one of the earliest issei to follow the First Hundred to Mars, and had worked with Arkady from very early on.

So many of the natives had been interested in autonomy, and the various issei parties, based on the thoughts of one early settler or another, did not appeal to them.

It made him understand a little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them that never went away.

A Mars vet, an issei immigrant from the early years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked like leather.

A lot of the issei had gotten here and gone off somehow, into the back country for good, so that when they came into a city they slept in the parks.

One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor.

Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase ofHyperionl Really, you issei are so horrible.

Free Mars had always been the young natives’ party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of new issei, then Free Mars’s status would be endangered, not only its superma-jority but its simple majority as well.

And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful assimilation into the areophany—a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut or tied.

The ancient issei, come back to haunt the present moment, come back to take the stage and say what they thought.