Silver Like Dust (10 page)

I think my grandfather understood that his coming to America was a unique story: it was one that would interest us, but more importantly, it could be used to convey an important moral to his impressionable (and rambunctious) grandchildren. All the stories he told—and there were many, both from his life and imagination—involved some sort of lesson. Even though we children couldn’t understand why vandalism was viewed with such disdain in Japan, or why my grandfather had been treated so harshly both by his community and by his own father, we grasped the lesson he wanted us to learn. The tale of his flinging that stone into the nose of the statue, and being chastised and sent away to another country as the outcome, was the one he used to demonstrate to us the heaviness of consequences, and the high prices we pay for poor decisions.

Obaachan flies in from Florida on a blustery November afternoon, after a series of short flights: Orlando to Atlanta, Atlanta to Dulles, Dulles to State College.

“This may be my last trip,” she announces to my mother, father, brother, and me shortly after she has arrived. We are sitting around the table in my parents’ kitchen. Obaachan’s announcement isn’t a threat or a manipulation; it’s more an attempt to prepare us for the day when she will no longer be able to make the long journey north. “I’m eighty-one now, you know,” she adds. When my grandmother turned eighty, she developed, almost overnight, an affection for announcing her age. She tells the clerk who gives her a senior citizen’s discount at a department store, and I’ve even heard her introduce herself by saying, “Hello, it’s nice to meet you. I’m eighty-one years old.”

Obaachan has come to Pennsylvania for a two-week visit with one small carry-on suitcase. Wrapped in a wool cardigan of my mother’s, she sits in the rocking chair by the woodstove, resting from the trip and looking out the window. A thin layer of snow covers the tops of things: the picnic table, the porch, the bird feeder. Black-capped chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches leap around the ledge of the feeder, pecking furiously, preparing for the long winter ahead.

“Do you think we’ll see any bears?” Obaachan asks my father.

He looks up from the pot of beef stew he is stirring and smiles. Their property borders three thousand acres of state forest, so their woods are crawling with all sorts of creatures: wild turkey, whitetail deer, grouse, and, yes, black bears. My father has an ongoing battle with these black bears, mostly in the spring and fall. They steal his bird feeders and stalk around his raspberry patch. Once, he turned on the porch light late at night and discovered a bear sorting through a stash of apples on his deck. Obaachan, through nightly phone calls with my mother, has heard of these encounters, and is intrigued.

“I doubt it,” my father says. “They’re hibernating now. Or at least they should be.” He walks over to where she is sitting and looks out. “You may see some turkeys, though. They come around sometimes. Are you comfortable there? Warm enough?”

Obaachan nods. “Oh, yes. Very comfortable.”

She likes sitting by the woodstove and observing the wildlife. When my brother and I were children, she and my grandfather would watch at their window for the tall gray and red sandhill cranes. My grandparents would huddle at the bay window in their kitchen, or watch through the blinds in the living room, snapping photos and watching the cranes’ careful path across the lawn. In his typical fashion, Ojichan decided to educate himself fully about the sandhill cranes, so that when we arrived one Christmas, he could teach us all about them. As children, we caught on to my grandparents’ excitement, and we really believed that these beautiful birds, though fairly common in central Florida, were rare, and that our sightings of them were extraordinary. On her refrigerator at home, Obaachan still has a photograph that my grandfather took of these cranes.

In Florida, my grandmother walks every single morning, almost two miles, but here the days are too cold for her, and the threat of slipping on an icy patch is too much of a risk. She seems content, though, to exchange her morning walks for afternoons of reading, watching for wildlife, and dozing off with a book in her lap.

I bring her a cup of steaming hot green tea, and she takes it and wraps her hands around the cup’s warm sides. Although the two of us talk on the phone sometimes since I began visiting, it has been over six months since we’ve seen each other, and I worry that during that time she has reverted to that reticent grandmother I knew as a child—the one who sat with hands folded in the corner, only speaking in response to questions.

She turns toward me and smiles. Her glasses are large and round. Although her hair is gray, my grandmother has very few wrinkles. (
Hakujin
are more prone to wrinkles than Japanese, she and my mother have explained. I shallowly hope that I have inherited their resistance to age.) “I know what you’re after, Kimi,” she says. “You want to know about Ojichan. Isn’t that right? I remember that last time, when we were picking grapefruit, I promised to tell you about him.”

She takes a sip of tea, slurping it a little bit in the Japanese way, and I recall that my grandfather used to sip
miso
soup just like that. The steam rolls off the tea.

“The first time I spoke to your grandfather,” Obaachan begins, “I was working at the mess hall. He walked right up to me and asked if I would meet him after my shift ‘to talk.’” He was finely dressed, she remembers, in clothes that seemed too fashionable and too clean for the dusty confines of the camp. He wore starched khakis and a collared white shirt, and his thick, curly hair was combed off to the side, in the style many American movie stars wore in those days. He was tall for a Japanese man, and broad shouldered.

“I had noticed him before, but I’d never talked to him,” Obaachan adds. She smiles. “The truth is, he was one of those people you couldn’t overlook.”

When Obaachan met my grandfather, he was gregarious and confident, much like the man I remember from my childhood. At Pomona, he seemed to know everyone, young and old, male and female. This sociable nature, and his tidy, stylish appearance, made my grandfather stick out. Plus, he had wavy hair, a rare characteristic for Japanese people. (This was a characteristic that he took to his grave—he died with a full head of thick, curly hair.)

Obaachan shakes her head, still impressed by these recollections. “He was the type of person who could talk to
anyone
,” she says, and then she adds softly, rubbing a finger along the mug’s rim, “and I was always so much the opposite.”

When my grandfather first approached Obaachan at the mess hall and asked her “to talk” after work, she was mortified. Her two cousins, Uncle Kisho’s stepdaughters, who lived in the same room with her family at Pomona, also worked with her. Whispering in Japanese, they giggled in the background. Obaachan’s cheeks reddened, and she seemed to have lost her voice. She has admitted once that she didn’t feel especially close to these cousins, and she resented their presence in this awkward moment. At last, she shook her head no, and went on with her work.

“I couldn’t even manage a ‘No, thank you,’” she tells me, laughing and leaning back in the rocking chair. “It was impolite of me, and you know, politeness is very important to Japanese. But I was so embarrassed I couldn’t help myself.”

My grandfather, however, was not easily deterred. He continued, day after day, to ask my grandmother to meet him after work. When most of the prisoners had cleared out of the mess hall, and only the workers remained, Ojichan would saunter over, lean against the counter, and make the same request, smiling and sure of himself, and without the slightest sign that he had been refused several times before.

“He kept on coming back and asking,” Obaachan says, shrugging her shoulders. She herself was—and still is—perplexed by his determination. “Deep down, I was flattered and impressed. Of course, I didn’t want him to know that, but finally, I said yes.”

By the time my grandfather met Obaachan at the Pomona Assembly Center, he’d been living in the United States for over five years, and during those five years he had become that self-assured and outgoing man my grandmother met on a sultry afternoon in the mess hall.

Before Ojichan had left Japan, his father had made arrangements with a family friend who had moved to the United States years earlier. According to their arrangement, the friend would be waiting for my grandfather at the San Francisco docks when his ship arrived. He would then help Ojichan through the immigration process, and provide him with a home until he could find a job and support himself.

However, the family friend was not there when my grandfather’s ship landed. As my grandfather stood there, searching the crowd, he pulled the letter from his shirt pocket and reread the instructions the friend had mailed his father. After two weeks of living below deck in the stuffy close quarters of third class, he was ready for fresh air, and he was also looking forward to seeing a friendly face. But no one was there. In a great horde of people, he was shuffled off the boat, and soon he found himself waiting in a long line. Even though he had studied English at his school in Japan, he did not understand a word the immigration officers spoke. He could only offer them a look of dismay and confusion. They spoke loudly and slowly, pointing to a sheet of paper, trying to signal with their hands, but my grandfather did not grasp a thing.

An old Japanese man stood nearby, arms folded, quietly observing the situation. Soon, he tossed the cigarette he was smoking to the ground, smashed it beneath his shiny shoes, and walked over to my grandfather. He placed a paternal hand on his shoulder, smiled, and asked him in Japanese if he might be of assistance. Relieved to see a welcoming face and hear his own language, my grandfather accepted the offer. The old man, fluent in both Japanese and English, helped Ojichan with the immigration procedures, translating the questions and answers. At the end, he reached out his hand and introduced himself.

“What are your plans, young man? Do you have work lined up? Family to meet?”

My grandfather scanned the crowds once more, hoping to catch sight of his father’s friend. Maybe the friend had been delayed by an emergency, or perhaps he had written the wrong date on his calendar.

The old man watched my grandfather’s eyes as they darted about the docks. “You are waiting for someone?” he asked.

Then again, maybe his father’s friend had changed his mind.

“My father had arranged for me to meet an acquaintance of his,” Ojichan told the old man at last, still looking around. “But it appears he is not here.”

“Ah,” the old man said, nodding his head. “It is a delicate situation,” he said. He rubbed the gray bristles on his chin, surveying the crowd, and then he shrugged. “But everyone in San Francisco knows when the ships arrive,” he said after a pause. “Your father’s friend would be here by now if he were coming. It’s a difficult time for many families right now. He has probably changed his mind and sent word to your father. You must have left before his letter arrived.”

Ojichan knew that mail traveled slowly across the Pacific.

“I don’t believe that we met by mere chance,” the man continued. “I own a hotel right here in San Francisco, and I’m always in need of help. You will come and work for me.”

Of course, in light of Ojichan’s situation, this option sounded appealing, but it was really not so simple. His mind toiled through the possibilities, imagining the outcome of each scenario. If he went with the old man and his father’s friend showed up, it would seem as though he had chosen to disregard the friend’s generous help. It would appear disrespectful and insolent, and above all, my grandfather did not wish to further disgrace his family. He had already brought enough
haji
upon them. Yet, here he was, completely alone, unable to communicate with people, jobless, and without a friend in the entire country. He could take his chances and wait for the family acquaintance, hoping he might show up soon, or he could follow the one person who had been kind enough to assist him.

The old man picked up my grandfather’s suitcase, making the decision for him. “Come along. Follow me. It’s not far.”

He set off on his short legs, swiftly carrying Ojichan’s suitcase through the bustling, noisy streets of San Francisco. The walk to the hotel was a long one. He maneuvered his way through the multitudes of people with the grace of a dancer, while my grandfather, trying to keep up, found the noises and sights overwhelming. The honking horns of sleek Fords. The imposing businessmen in their tweed suits and fedora hats. The buttery pierogies and sweet kielbasa sizzling in the stands of street vendors.

I remember my grandfather talking about these early days in America, and how he described being on a streetcar, and seeing for the first time someone with blonde hair.

“I was sitting behind this young woman with yellow hair,” he told us children. “I wanted so badly to touch it!” He wondered if it felt different from his own. In Japan, there was only one color of hair, black, so he wasn’t sure the woman’s yellow locks were real. Because I had grown up in Pennsylvania, and had seen people with all sorts of hair colors, this story used to strike me as strange. My father had light hair, and so did my best friend. But now, as I imagine my grandfather in those initial moments in America, I think I can understand that sensation of astonishment that he must have experienced in his first days here, and that impression that the only way to know a thing was real was to reach out and grab it.

Obaachan stands up, says that she is a little hungry, and heads to the refrigerator, where she finds one of her favorite treats:
mochi
, a sweet Japanese pastry. She places it in the toaster oven, turns the knob, shuffles over to the kitchen island, and slides herself onto one of the tall barstools. Because she is so short, her feet do not reach the floor. She settles them on the lowest rung.

“After I agreed to go on that first walk with your grandfather,” she says, kicking her legs out a little and examining the pair of furry slippers my mother has bought her for the visit, “he and I started meeting more often. He would wait for me after my shifts, and we would find somewhere to talk.”