Silver Like Dust (16 page)

Obaachan explains this system to me as we stand outside her house, in the courtyard, right after her radiation appointment. She pauses to inspect the two tomato plants she bought a few weeks earlier, kneeling and running her fingers along the slender branches and over the soft, furry leaves. A few tomatoes, still green, have grown to the size of golf balls. She pulls the planter a foot farther away from the house, out of the morning shade and into the direct sunlight. She squints, whispering to herself—she does this sometimes, to organize her thoughts, I think, but maybe also because she has lived alone now for over a decade and has learned to fill the silence with her own voice. After a moment she stands up, pulls her keys from her pocket, and walks to the front door.

“So you’d really only known Ojichan for, what, four or five months before you two were married?” I say as we step inside. I slip out of my shoes and place my purse on the floor beside me. My eyes slowly adjust to the dim lighting inside. To minimize the cost of air conditioning, Obaachan keeps the blinds closed, so it’s dark in the house compared to outside in the courtyard.

She removes her red-and-tan Easy Spirit shoes in the foyer, shuffles into the kitchen, and flips on the light. “I’m not sure. Maybe seven months, maybe eight,” she calls to me.

I can imagine how my own parents would have responded if, at twenty-one, I had announced I was going to marry someone I’d only known for a few months. I want to ask Obaachan whether her parents thought it was too soon, or whether they felt they didn’t know my grandfather well enough to grant their blessing, or if they worried that he was too flashy and self-confident, but I realize I must handle this situation with delicacy. I don’t want to offend my grandmother by asking a question she would consider inappropriate. “How did your parents feel about it?” I say carefully. “I mean, did they think it was a good idea?”

Obaachan steps out of the kitchen to look at me and sets her glass on the table in the foyer. She feels the undertones of the question. “Well,” she says, “as I told you before, they liked him well enough. I know in your mind, seven months is not a very long time. And looking back, I suppose the two of us hardly knew each other. But so much had happened to us. So much was happening.” She shrugs her shoulders and runs her finger along the rim of her glass. “Things are different during a war, Kimi. I guess that’s the best way for you to think about it. You have to remember that the whole world was at war.”

During November and December of 1942, as my grandparents followed the customary stages of an engagement as closely as they could, thousands of miles away, the Guadalcanal Campaign thundered on in the Solomons. The fighting would continue until February 9, 1943, when American troops at last took control. One of the most vicious battles of the war, the Naval Battles of Guadalcanal I and II, occurred November 12 through 15, when Japan attempted to send in reinforcements. Around four thousand of the ten thousand Japanese troops made it to the island; the others never set foot on Guadalcanal. The Americans lost nine ships; Japan lost five. Later, the Allies’ victory in the Solomons would be considered the turning point in the war in the Pacific.

As battle after battle unfolded in the Pacific, and in Northern Africa and Europe, the United States continued its efforts on an altogether new and different type of weapon. In late November, the government selected Los Alamos, New Mexico, as the site for a lab that would focus on the construction of the atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, ten days before my grandparents’ wedding, two University of Chicago physicists, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton, achieved the first nuclear chain reaction. A little over three years after this discovery, the United States would drop its first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

My grandparents would have kept up to date on much of the war through the newsreels the authorities showed prior to movies. In these fuzzy clips, an excited male voice narrated while bomber planes flashed across the screen, the wings dipping toward the ocean, the engines bellowing. Soldiers waved triumphantly and stood over rows of kneeling Japanese or German prisoners. And smoke poured from lush green jungles as infantry marched past, sunburned and weary.

But even within the barbed-wire confines of Heart Mountain, far away from the gunfire and sinking ships, where people were cut off, in large part, from the world, the war demanded difficult answers. A few weeks before my grandparents’ wedding, in November, the authorities distributed a questionnaire—to all prisoners, both male and female—called an Application for Leave Clearance. The main purpose of this application was to determine individuals’ loyalty, should any of them choose to volunteer in the war effort. Obaachan frowns as she remembers this process. “They told us to be ‘as truthful as possible,’” she says, “which struck me as a strange way of putting it.”

At the Heart Mountain Community Center, Obaachan sat in one of the stiff wooden chairs at a long table, reading through each question of the application carefully. She gripped the yellow pencil in her fingers, squinted at the words, and tapped the eraser lightly on the table. A guard passed by, peering over her shoulder to check on her progress. She watched him out of the corner of her eye but made sure not to turn her head.

The distribution of these questionnaires in the camps created uproar, mostly because of questions 27 and 28. Question 27 asked: “Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States, in combat duty, wherever ordered?” Although thirty-three thousand Japanese Americans did end up serving in the US military during World War II, some people, mostly
Nisei
, or those of the second generation, found Question 27 to be offensive and unfair. Farther down the table from Obaachan, one angry young man hissed: “Why should I go put my life on the line for this country?”

“Yeah, it’s like they’re asking you to trade prison for a death sentence,” muttered another, loudly rustling his papers.

These audacious young men made Obaachan nervous. She leaned forward, pretending to be absorbed in her survey, pressing her elbows into the table and focusing on the paper in front of her. She remembered her father’s advice about following all the rules and attempting to be compliant. In two weeks, she was getting married. She didn’t want to be associated with any rebels in case there was trouble. And a small part of her disapproved of their rebellious behavior—both of her brothers, after all, had jumped at the opportunity to enlist.

Question 28 created more of a stir for the
Issei
, who had been born in Japan but lived in America. Obaachan’s parents were both
Issei
. It asked: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor or any other foreign government, power, or organization?” The question was a thorny one. Its very nature put the
Issei
in an impossible situation. Like Mama and Papa, most felt loyal to the United States and considered it their home. However, despite that loyalty, they were still citizens of Japan. Forbidden by law to become US citizens—they would not, in fact, legally be permitted to become American citizens until 1954—they technically could not call the United States their own country. Thus, the question asked them to renounce their only citizenship, to Japan, while not offering anything in return. Though they realized there might be consequences for refusing to renounce their Japanese citizenship, many also feared that if they did, after the war they would become people without a country.

Obaachan’s family answered “yes” to both questions 27 and 28. In their eyes, America was their home. At the time, her parents’ mind-set aligned with the creed of the Japanese American Citizens League: “to do honor to America at all times and in all places.” They felt it was their duty to be at Heart Mountain—that somehow by being there they could best serve and respect their beloved country. Obaachan’s sister’s role was to be with her husband’s family in the prison camp in Arkansas; both brothers were serving in the US military. Each of them had his or her part to play, and they had to be willing to put themselves at risk in order to do so. After all, Japanese culture emphasized community welfare over individual interests. As Obaachan’s family understood things, it was in the community’s best interest to align with America.

There were others who did not view the situation with this attitude. They believed that their rights had been violated in every sense. They wanted nothing to do with the United States and probably would have returned to Japan if given the option. A group of young men bravely—or foolishly—answered on their questionnaires that they would refuse to fight for the United States but would consider fighting for Japan. They eventually became known as the “No-No Boys” because they answered “No” to question 27 and “No” to question 28 on the loyalty questionnaire. The No-No Boys were sent to the internment camp at Tule Lake, an internment camp located in California, which the War Relocation Authority decided to designate as the place where all “disloyal” interns would stay. My grandmother refers to Tule Lake as “the troublemakers’ camp,” a title, it seems, that would align well with how the U.S. government viewed it. Other prisoners, those who expressed a desire to return to Japan, for example, were also sent to Tule Lake. In the meantime, the “loyal” Japanese Americans who had been sent to Tule Lake when they were first evacuated were dispersed to other camps across the country. In total, around nine hundred Heart Mountain interns were sent to Tule Lake, and the same number of Tule Lake interns were moved to Heart Mountain.

“So how did Ojichan propose?” I ask, shifting subjects and looking at the thin band on my grandmother’s wrinkled left hand. “Did he take you somewhere special?” I pause, realizing the strangeness of my question—is there such a thing as a “special” spot in a prison? “I mean, a place that had meaning for the two of you, there at Heart Mountain? And where did he buy the ring?”

Obaachan takes a deep breath and turns to look out the kitchen window at her grapefruit trees. “He didn’t really propose, I guess.” She watches as an ibis pokes about the base of a tree, submerging its long red beak into the dirt, searching. “I mean, he just kept asking, like I explained before. He tried different ways until I finally said yes.”

“And the ring?”

“I got my own ring,” Obaachan says, her voice very matter-of-fact. She doesn’t seem troubled by the lack of romance. “He never offered to buy one.”

“He didn’t have money, I guess.”

“It wasn’t so much that. It was more just the type of person he was.”

I ask her what she means.

She shrugs. “Well, he wasn’t someone who would say to himself, ‘I would like to get married now, but I don’t have the money to buy a ring. It’ll take me some time to save up for one, so we’ll have to wait a few months …’ He was impatient about most things.” Obaachan looks at me then, as though trying to read my expression. “Maybe you remember that about him. Patience was not his strong suit, I guess would be a good way to put it. So saving money to order a ring and making himself wait was not an option. It probably never crossed his mind.”

After all, wearing a wedding band was an American tradition that gained popularity during World War II. It was not, however, a Japanese one. Obaachan’s parents didn’t wear them, and my grandfather, having grown up in Japan, never wanted one. Obaachan felt differently, though. She wanted that reminder, that symbol of commitment and unity. “Plus,” she adds, “in America, married women wore wedding rings. What was I going to do when I had a baby? People would see me and assume I had no husband. Back then, people were not as forgiving toward women who had children out of wedlock, you know. I would have been ashamed to walk around with my stomach out to here”—she motions, holding her arms out from her abdomen—“or later, toting children on a hip, and no ring.” She shakes her head, smacking her lips. “But men don’t understand these things.”

My grandmother realized then that if she wanted a wedding ring, she would need to order it and pay for it herself. She remembered a popular, respected jeweler back in Los Angeles, a place right on Broadway called Slavicks, and decided to contact them from Heart Mountain. She wrote a letter detailing her situation, explaining that she needed a wedding band, and requesting that they select one in her size. To pay for it, she enclosed a $50 money order.

“It was risky,” Obaachan admits, leaning against the smooth white countertop in the kitchen. “They easily could have pocketed the money and not sent anything.” She straightens her white cardigan and plunges her hands into the pockets. “Especially because they would have known from my name and address that I was Japanese, and a prisoner. But they were good, honest people. And after a couple of weeks, I had a package in the mail.”

She insists the ring’s appearance did not matter to her and says she tried not to expect anything in particular. At the same time, Obaachan admits, she was anxious about that first look at her wedding ring. When it arrived on that cold, windy day at Heart Mountain, wrapped tidily in brown paper, she rushed back to her room to open it. Nervously, she peeled off the packaging to reveal a tiny square box. The jewelers at Slavicks had chosen a plain gold ring with a thin groove along the front that had five very small diamonds set in it. At the time, these simple rings were waning in popularity. With the luxury taxes during the war, bolder, clunkier rings with large rectangular-cut semiprecious and synthetic stones were becoming more fashionable. For Obaachan, however, the ring was perfect: simple and elegant. She tried it on, admired it, then gave it to my grandfather so he could slide it on her finger on their wedding day.

Obaachan holds out her left hand and shows me the ring. “I still like it, even today,” she says, looking at the thin gold band she has now worn for over sixty years. “They did a good job picking it.”

I can’t help wondering how my grandfather felt about this series of events. Did he feel just a tiny bit selfish for refusing to buy my grandmother a wedding band? And knowing that she was the one who’d paid for it, did he give that ring to my grandmother with just a twinge of embarrassment on their wedding day? Did he feel cheap? And from Obaachan’s perspective, I wonder whether my grandfather’s lack of participation in selecting and purchasing the ring made it less meaningful. If my grandfather himself had saved his monthly earnings—and by my estimates, at Obaachan’s salary of twelve dollars a month, fifty bucks was a significant sacrifice—if he had chosen the jeweler, and put forth the effort to write a letter explaining the situation, might that ring hold more significance? In addition to serving as a symbol of commitment, wouldn’t it also be a sign of something my grandfather had forfeited on my grandmother’s behalf? I can’t ask. By the tranquil look on Obaachan’s face, I can see that my grandfather’s insensitivity about the wedding band is something she has long forgotten, or at least accepted.