Silver Like Dust (21 page)

Certain people remain in my grandmother’s memory as well. In my grandparents’ barrack, there was a curious family of four. The daughter was probably close to Obaachan in age, and she was polite, but always quiet, the type of person whose shyness seemed to inhibit her from even looking at people she didn’t know. Her brother was a giant. He towered over everyone in camp, and his huge frame moved clumsily through the lines and crowds. His eyes had a sort of vacancy, and his mother was with him at all times, nudging him forward, holding on to his elbow, protecting him. He rarely spoke, but occasionally, he would smile, and when he did, his face would brighten like a warm spring day. This bulky, intimidating young man was really as harmless as an infant.

“And then there was Cowboy Joe,” Obaachan says with a giggle, leaning back in her chair. Long before blue jeans were fashionable, this young man wore them every day. Along with his jeans, he sported a tan cowboy hat with a wide brim, and a pair of worn brown-leather cowboy boots. He seemed to rotate his flannel shirts, wearing the red one, then the blue one, every other day. “The only cowboys I’d seen were in movies,” Obaachan says. “You know, Westerns. And of course I’d thought there was no such thing as a Japanese cowboy.” She wondered where he had lived before the war. Had he been a ranch hand? Had he ridden horses for days, driving cattle across thousands of acres? Or did he simply like the cowboy style of clothing? My grandmother never learned the answers to these questions—she didn’t actually ever speak to the young man—but Cowboy Joe was a source of interest and curiosity among the women Obaachan knew, particularly during long and tedious hours on the job.

Another memorable character from camp lived in Obaachan’s barrack, just a few doors down. He was very flamboyant and effeminate, powdering his face each morning so that he looked almost like a
geisha
, and always walking with a notable sway in his hips. Before the war, he had been an actor or director in a theatre, and he continued his theatrical work at Heart Mountain. One year, for the big New Year’s celebration, he dressed as a woman. He stuffed his dress so that it appeared as though he had enormous breasts, and he wore lots of blush and eye makeup in addition to his usual face powder. Around and around he danced at that party, spinning and laughing as though he was having the time of his life. At the time it was one of the most bizarre events my grandmother had ever seen. She still recalls the experience with a fit of shy laughter.

But of all the interesting and unusual people my grandmother came into contact with at Heart Mountain, perhaps most memorable of all would be the one
hakujin
who had willingly come there as a prisoner. The woman was tall and had shoulder-length blonde hair, and in the sea of shorter, black-haired inmates, she was always easily spotted. Her name was Estelle Ishigo, and after the evacuation from the West Coast was announced, she had decided to go with her Japanese husband.

This woman’s choice to marry a Japanese man was in and of itself an act of rebellion and courage. Not only was it taboo to marry outside of your race at the time, it was actually illegal for a
hakujin
woman to marry a Japanese man in California. Their marriage was legally legitimate, so they must have traveled out of state for the ceremony. When Estelle had learned of the evacuation from the West Coast, she had written and asked for permission from the U.S. government to join her husband at the camp, and they allowed her to do so. The stipulation, however, was that she herself would be treated as every other evacuee. She was not to expect any preferential treatment whatsoever, the government informed her.

My grandmother did not know Estelle Ishigo personally, but she would say hello to her when their paths crossed. When I imagine Estelle, I think of her as the type of person my grandmother would have looked up to—despite their very obvious differences—and I think Obaachan respected this incredible woman, who drew and painted and played the violin in the Heart Mountain mandolin band, and whose convictions and devotion to her husband forced her away from her own family and into years of imprisonment.

Of course, during her imprisonment, my grandmother never would have imagined that all four of her children would end up marrying
hakujin
, that almost three decades later, long after every prisoner had left Heart Mountain, long after the rickety wooden barracks had begun to decay, long after my grandparents had moved to the East Coast to start a new life and raise a family, my
hakujin
father, a young man who’d recently returned from a tour in Vietnam, would marry their daughter. His father, my Pap-Pap, a quiet man with steady green eyes who had fought in the Pacific during the war, never expressed any disapproval of the union, at least not that I know of. At Heart Mountain Obaachan would not have imagined that her oldest grandchild would have light brown hair; that all of us would end up not with the dark eyes of our Japanese parent, but with varying shades of hazel and green; that the Japanese in us would, generation by generation, be growing less distinct.

I remember my grandfather explaining to me as a child that because I was not one hundred percent Japanese, it was possible that I would be looked down upon in Japan—I wasn’t “pure.” I don’t believe he said this to upset me, or to express his regret over my parentage. He did, after all, like my father very much. Instead, I think Ojichan wished to compliment my country of birth, a country he loved and believed in. Despite what he had experienced here, America was, for the most part, more tolerant than the Japan of his youth. I’m supposing Ojichan had made that determination about racial “purity” based upon his own experiences in Japan, back in the 1920s, when the country remained suspicious of Western influence. He knew with my green eyes and my hair that was not quite dark enough, I’d immediately be marked as a
hapa
, or person of half-Japanese descent.

Today, this prejudice has changed significantly, and Japan is known for its great interest in American culture, with its brand names and styles. Young people dye their hair lighter; they wear colored contacts to conceal their dark brown eyes, and, alarmingly, they even have surgeries to make the crease in their eyelids more pronounced. In their magazines, it’s common to see biracial models, precisely because they exhibit
hakujin
characteristics. In the 1940s, however, in the depressing and segregated corner that was their existence, my grandparents would not have dreamed that such a world could exist.

At her desk, Obaachan takes a sip of water from one of the sepia Honda glasses she and my grandfather have had for decades and wipes her mouth with a napkin.

“With that snake in my courtyard, though, the one I killed, well, at my age, Kimi, I have to just go ahead and do things,” Obaachan says, changing the subject after there has been a pause. It becomes clear to me that the killing of the snake is a milestone of sorts, a major accomplishment for her—as I suppose it should be. “You see, I couldn’t let my fear keep me from doing what I needed to do. I don’t climb up on ladders anymore, and I don’t mind asking for help when someone’s here visiting, but I can’t be calling people, the neighbor or your aunt and uncle, and asking them for help any time something’s a little difficult. I need to take care of myself.”

This sense of needing to handle things on her own is not a characteristic Obaachan has grown into in old age—it’s something gathered over a lifetime, I think—but when did it begin for her? Was it in her teenage years, when, as she herself has told me, the duties of taking care of her mother and the rest of the household chores simply fell upon her shoulders? Was it in her first few months of marriage, when she realized, too late, that my grandfather was so demanding, and that he would not be the source of comfort and support that she’d hoped? Was it when she had children of her own? Or maybe it’s something else, one of those events she has chosen not to tell me about.

Chapter 11

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
, O
BAACHAN STANDS IN HER
kitchen, leaning against the white countertop, the Florida heat growing dangerously warm outside, the air conditioning humming softly. In her left hand she holds the periwinkle dish towel I bought her in Stratford and sent from England the spring I studied abroad there. (I think she gets it out each time I visit, maybe the morning I’m to arrive, because each March it’s clipped with a clothespin to the handle of her stove, for drying dishes, as though that’s where she keeps it, always, in plain view.) The towel is composed of squares with sketches of Shakespeare characters in famous scenes, each from one of his plays: Iago whispering to Othello, Hamlet holding a human skull, three witches hovering over a cauldron, and others.

It’s noon. Obaachan has already exercised—an abbreviated walk around the neighborhood, not the two-mile loop she used to do, when I first began visiting her. Around Christmastime, she fell in her bedroom, and since then, she is not as sure on her feet. She now limits her walks to a mile. By this point in the day she has already aired out the house and closed it back up, and watered the plants in her courtyard as well. If I weren’t visiting she would spend the afternoon reading at the desk in the corner of her large bedroom, where the window overlooks the golf course, or maybe watching a movie from the library on the portable DVD player my uncle Jay recently bought her. She just bought
Girl with a Pearl Earring
for $5.50 at Walmart, she tells me, which she read and loved as a novel. “In the movie, Colin Firth is the painter,” she says with a grin. “You know Colin Firth. ‘Mr. Darcy,’” she adds in a British accent, referring to the BBC version of
Pride and Prejudice
.

I sometimes wonder whether my grandmother gets lonely living by herself in Florida. Her days vary little here, and her life is characterized by precision. She goes to few places: the Publix grocery store nearby, the Suntree Public Library down the street, and, on occasion, the Bealls outlet, a discount warehouse with thousands of items that did not sell at the main Bealls store. On Sunday mornings, Obaachan watches a Charles Stanley sermon on television, leaning forward and squinting at the lean, tall figure on the screen, but on most other days, she takes her morning walk and then spends the afternoon at home. Between noon and twelve thirty, she makes lunch, a bowl of
miso
soup with a sliced apple for dessert, or something else light and healthy. In the afternoons, she’ll read an article from
Time
, clip a recipe or two from
Real Simple
, do a Sudoku puzzle. And at five thirty, she begins cooking dinner. She watches the evening news on the small, old television set in her dining room while she eats. But she insists she isn’t lonely, likes that Emily Brontë line from
Wuthering Heights
: “A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

Once, when I encouraged her to have some more local contacts in case of an emergency, she shrugged and said, “I have a friend, a Japanese lady, who lives in the next neighborhood over. We both walk in the mornings, so sometimes I see her. She has my number, and I have hers.” Her Colombian neighbor, “the gentleman,” could also be called upon for help when absolutely necessary. She didn’t need any more acquaintances, I inferred from her furrowed brow and pursed lips—or advice from meddling grandchildren.

Obaachan has fostered this same sense of independence in her four children. Even though my grandfather was the one who made all the decisions in the house, the one who controlled the atmosphere and timetable of every day, it was my grandmother, I believe, who possessed the strength to keep the family together through so many transitions and hardships. It was Ojichan who relied on my grandmother to make things happen for him.

At Heart Mountain, one such thing was to have children. The pressure began shortly after their wedding in December of 1942. Obaachan wanted children, she assures me, and in fact, she quickly became obsessed with getting pregnant. Lots of young people got married at Heart Mountain—Obaachan was not the only one to feel the strain of the war when it came to securing a partner—and lots of them were having babies. With so many infants and toddlers coming through the line at the mess hall, Obaachan began to feel ready to have a child of her own, but she felt it took her awhile to get pregnant. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that my grandfather was desperate to start a family; he undoubtedly would have been vocal about this desire. Each month Obaachan hoped and prayed that the small red stain would not make its regular appearance, but each month, it showed up. “Not this month,” she would have to tell my Ojichan, her eyes lowered, her mouth twisted to the side in disappointment. “I’m sorry.”

When my grandmother at last missed a period, two months before their one-year anniversary, she didn’t mention it to my grandfather right away. She couldn’t bear to get his hopes up and then disappoint him. She studied the calendar posted at the community center, counted out the weeks, and calculated that the baby would probably be born somewhere around her birthday, in July. She felt relieved that she would not have to be concerned about caring for a newborn in the cruel winter months. The drafty room and bitter-cold days would have been difficult: keeping the child warm enough, bathing, cleaning the cloth diapers, and scheduling trips to the restroom whenever someone else could watch the baby would be only a few of the challenges. In July, the weather would be hot and dry, and she would have until September until the snow began—just enough time to get used to motherhood, she thought.

When he heard the news about Obaachan’s pregnancy, my grandfather was elated. After spending four years completely alone, with his loved ones on the other side of the Pacific, family had become very important to him. Having a child of his own was something he’d been dreaming about for years. “I’m going to be a father,” Ojichan would say, repeating the words over and over when they were in their room or sitting on the small wooden porch at the entryway. He talked about the baby constantly—whether it would be a boy or a girl; good names for a child and whether to choose a Japanese name or an American one; how he hoped his children might one day meet his mother. Although Ojichan’s father had passed away by the time the United States entered the war, he always hoped he might see his mother again one day, and now, he would have a grandchild in tow.