Silver Like Dust (3 page)

Obaachan folds her hands and places them in her lap. “We certainly had our own separate spaces,” she says quietly. On the beach below, a jogger passes and nods to us in greeting. Obaachan slides a finger along the edge of the bench, tracing the grain of the wood. “At the movie theatres, there were two levels: the first floor, and a balcony. Mama used to take us to matinees, before she got sick. I don’t know if it was a law or if the studios just had a policy, but I know that I was always seated in the balcony, with the blacks and Mexicans, and other Japanese and Chinese, and that I never once sat on the first floor. Only the
hakujin
sat down there.”

There were similar rules with other public areas. The roller-skating rink was only open to Japanese on Sunday nights; they could not go any other day of the week. They were only permitted to use public tennis courts on Sundays as well. And they were not allowed to swim in public pools. “I remember that the
Rafu Shimpo
, the Japanese newspaper in LA, would have a large sports section on Mondays,” Obaachan says. “Only one day of the week because all the Japanese sporting events were held on Sundays. It was the only day we were allowed to use public areas for things like tennis.” She pauses, frowning, tapping her index finger on the wooden bench. “And we mostly shopped in Little Tokyo, or at very large department stores. We didn’t go in the smaller
hakujin
stores.”

As I listen to my grandmother talk, I cannot help noticing the contradiction—the odd and complicated problem of
what preceded what
. Japanese immigrants were not legally allowed to become citizens. They were not hired by white employers. They were not permitted to integrate in social spheres. And yet they were criticized by the public and the media for just that: for not fitting in, for keeping to themselves, for not being “bona fide citizens,” for not being
American
.

Perhaps not surprisingly, both the government and the media played a role in developing the notion of “the yellow peril.” In 1901, the United States Industrial Commission released a statement claiming that the Japanese were “… as a class tricky, unreliable, and dishonest.” The San Francisco
Chronicle
, arguably the most influential newspaper on the West Coast at the time, began a lengthy anti-Japanese campaign in February of 1903, seven years before my grandmother’s family had arrived in America. The campaign opened with this front-page streamer: “The Japanese Invasion, The Problem of the Hour.” The paper asserted that Japanese men were a danger to American women, and claimed that “every one of these immigrants … is a Japanese spy.”

Obaachan looks at me, squinting a little as the wind blows more violently. Grains of sand tumble across the boardwalk, hissing against the wood. “But, you see, Mama and Papa worked very hard to instill a positive attitude in us children,” she says. “No matter what happened.” You didn’t complain about unfairness or inequality. You didn’t resent the hurtful or negative things that happened to you. You followed the rules. You didn’t resist. “There’s a word for it,” Obaachan says, “
shikataganai.
”

There are things that cannot be changed, and you don’t try to change them.

Shikataganai
is a new word to me, and I wonder if it’s a word I will ever really understand. It lurches off the tongue in spasms of hard sounds:
k, t, g
. Its very notion feels un-American, that some things are unchanging, or unchangeable. I am too much of an optimist—or maybe just too much a product of the late-twentieth century—to accept this word the way my grandmother does. I consider all of this, frown, and take a sip of coffee.

“It’s a way of thinking,” Obaachan explains, watching me. She leans forward and crosses her legs at the ankles, her Easy Spirit tennis shoes clean and bright in the early morning gray. “It’s a saying that all Japanese told each other when something unfair was happening, like the laws, or the headlines that said everyone was a spy or that we were all sneaks. Even in the concentration camp, people would shrug their shoulders and say, ‘
Shikataganai
.’” She searches my face and senses that I don’t grasp it, that I fail to understand how a group of people could collectively embrace such an attitude. “You don’t get it because you were born so much later,” she says. “You have to remember, this was before the civil rights movement. We didn’t even know about rights. It wasn’t in our vocabulary. Everything was very different.”

Just five years before Obaachan’s father arrived, in 1905, the Asiatic Exclusion League was established, with the primary goal of halting immigration from Japan and even expelling the Japanese already established in California. The league, along with groups like the American Legion, the Native Sons of the Golden West, and the State Federation of Labor, pushed for a 1920 version of the Alien Land Law, which would prohibit the Japanese from accessing farmland altogether, whether by buying it or leasing it, regardless of whether or not they were citizens. Finally, under the provisions of the 1924 Immigration Act, it became illegal for people ineligible for citizenship—which meant, essentially, those of Asian descent—to immigrate at all to the United States. By that time, Obaachan’s parents had already settled on Pico Street and started their family.

A significant turning point in the movement to exclude the Japanese occurred on October 11, 1906, when the San Francisco School Board ordered all Japanese children to attend the segregated Oriental School, where Chinese children were required to go. Although this action went largely unnoticed in the United States, the Japanese press—and Japan—was outraged. The act violated a clause from the 1894 Commerce and Navigation treaty the two countries had signed, and the Japanese knew it. So did Theodore Roosevelt. He called the action “intemperate” and deemed Californians “idiots” for instigating an international conflict that reached far beyond the city limits of San Francisco. In an attempt to resolve the problem, Roosevelt, in what became known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” eventually did the following: he convinced the school board to reinstate the Japanese students into their original schools; put an end to Japanese immigration to Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii; and persuaded the Japanese government to stop issuing passports to laborers. The Gentlemen’s Agreement, then, achieved precisely what the exclusionists had been pushing for: it slowed down the tide of immigration.

“I know you have trouble understanding,” Obaachan says slowly, “but it never occurred to me to feel upset about the way the
hakujin
thought of us, or to complain about how we were treated.” She pauses, fiddling with a button on her sweater. “We understood that we were not part of their world.”

Obaachan turns toward the ocean and watches the water froth and sputter as it crashes below. Far away, where the water meets the sky, a boat passes. “Besides,” she says softly, “we had our own family struggles to worry about. Things that seemed more pressing. My spinal meningitis. I was just a small girl when I got it. Seven, maybe eight years old.”

She was quarantined at the hospital, unable to see her parents or siblings, and she vividly remembers the morning when the doctor and nurses came in to draw spinal fluid with a long needle. “They thought I might die,” she whispers. But, after a few days, she was sent home and told to stay in bed for a week. Everything seemed fine until one afternoon, when she picked up the telephone, held it to her left ear, and couldn’t hear the voice on the other end. Because the hearing loss was only in one ear, she hadn’t even realized what had happened.

“It’s not a big deal, being deaf in one ear,” she says with a shrug. “I just can’t hear as well in a group of people, like when the whole family gets together, or when someone talks very quietly. If they’re sitting on the wrong side, it’s hard for me to hear what they’re saying.”

I can’t help but wonder if my grandmother’s quietness all these years might stem, at least in part, from this hearing issue. Combined with her shyness and my grandfather’s spirited and garrulous nature, it’s no wonder Obaachan rarely joined a conversation.

“More than my own sickness, though,” she continues, “was my mother’s illness. That was much more, well, much more of an upset to our family life.”

Obaachan had just turned thirteen when her mother learned she had an irregular heartbeat. With the diagnosis, Mama essentially became an invalid and was confined to her bed. Up to that point, she had been an active mother, playing with the children, taking them to matinees and the city library, cooking, cleaning, and attending to all the household duties. When she was warned by her doctors that she needed to limit her activities to avoid straining her weak heart, however, all of this came to an end. There were no more family outings on Sunday afternoons or after school, and the daughters had to take over Mama’s chores at the house.

For Obaachan’s sister, the transition was not that momentous. Sachiko was five years older, and, at eighteen, had finished high school. She’d already negotiated those difficult years when the body stretches and swells, when new colors drop from it, when new aches weigh it down. Sachiko spent her days working as a cashier at a nearby Japanese grocery store and devoted her evenings to sewing. Bent over at the kitchen table, straining and concentrating beneath the tepid glow of the overhead light, she measured and cut, pinned and then stitched together the fabrics. She was making herself a new wardrobe. She had a life, an existence that was about to extend itself beyond the small world of her parents.

For Obaachan, though, the changes brought on by Mama’s illness were much more challenging. She was younger and more in need of maternal support. Every afternoon, right after school, she headed straight to her parents’ bedroom, knocked on the door, and then entered when Mama called her in. She seated herself on the edge of the bed and talked about her day. Funny stories from math class. That a girl got in trouble for passing a note. How the social studies teacher, the one with lovely blonde hair, had married a World War I flying ace over the weekend, and how she had pasted his photograph on the bulletin board and told the class her last name was different now.

Mama was a good listener, but talking to her as she lay solemn and corpselike on her bed was not the same as it had once been. Before, Mama would listen to these stories from school, nodding and smiling, but also bustling about the kitchen, chopping a
daikon
, and then interrupting to ask for some fresh bamboo shoots from Papa’s garden. The new Mama, the one who called out cooking instructions from her bed in a weak and raspy voice as the girls moved obediently about the kitchen, was different. Obaachan felt as though she were on the verge of losing something. The way it feels when you’re caught between childhood and adulthood. When you wish for what is past but know you must move on.

Obaachan shakes her head sheepishly and then tells me that it was around this time that she decided to change her name.

“Not change it legally or anything,” she adds, brushing her hands on her white cotton capris. “I made up a nickname. Or—what’s the word?—a pseudonym of sorts.”

I give her a confused look.

She smiles, a little mysterious, a little embarrassed. “Let me explain.”

One of her hobbies was filling out forms for free samples. In magazines, or in line at the grocery store, there were forms for these from various companies that could be filled out and mailed in. “Cold cream, or a new shade of lipstick, or rouge. You just wrote your name and address on the little card, sent it in, and then, maybe nine or ten weeks later, you’d have a free sample in the mail.” She didn’t have money to spend on lipsticks or lotions. Nobody did. It was, she reminds me, the Great Depression.

“It was my friend Aiko who gave me the idea,” Obaachan says. “She always entered contests to come up with jingles or taglines, and she told me that whenever she did that, she changed her name to sound Polish. And so one day, I just decided that I didn’t want to use my real name when I requested the samples. So I filled in the same mailing address but listed my name as Grace Komak.”

I ask her why she decided to do this, and it takes her a moment to answer. She picks up her mug, holds it out over the edge of the deck, and flicks her wrist to empty the remaining drops of coffee into the sand. She wraps a napkin around our plastic forks, which she will take home and reuse, and places them in the bag.

“My name sounded too Japanese,” she says with a shrug, turning away from me, brushing off the question. But I sense from her guarded response that this decision was more momentous than she lets on, that somehow, though she won’t admit it, there was
haji
in this act.

Chapter 2

E
VERY NIGHT
, O
BAACHAN CHECKS THE LOCAL NEWS TO
learn what time the sun will rise the next morning and then sets her alarm clock accordingly so that she can see it on her morning walk. The following day, my fourth in Florida, I hear her stirring, and I squint at the clock: 6:43 a.m. She calls to me from outside the closed bedroom door, and I tell her I’m up. I’d rather sleep for a few more hours, but there’s something shameful about rolling out of bed after my octogenarian grandmother has already walked two miles, seen the sunrise, swept the courtyard, made breakfast, and read an editorial in
Time
magazine. Besides, if I want to get to know her better—and get her to tell more of her story—I’ve got to meet her on her terms. I force myself out of bed and get dressed.

Outside, the pavement is steaming from an overnight rain. Though it’s barely seven o’clock, Obaachan’s neighbors, mostly retirees, are up, walking for exercise, stooping at trees in their front yards and tugging at weeds, wheeling their trash down their driveways in giant beige garbage cans. I imagine some of them have been up for hours, sipping black coffee at their kitchen tables, waiting for dawn.

“Good morning, Elsa,” Obaachan calls to the statuesque woman watering a hibiscus with giant red blossoms. The woman waves and saunters to the end of her driveway, her watering can resting against her hip. She says hello in a thick, throaty accent, then frowns, reaching out and squeezing my grandmother’s hand. “I haven’t seen you for a few days. I was worried. I’m glad you’re all right.” Elsa knows Obaachan lives alone at the end of the street, and that none of her children are nearby, and like a good neighbor, she keeps an eye on her. Elsa lets go of Obaachan and shifts to another subject. “Well, I saw on the news it’s going to be hot today. That’s why I’m out here early. I can’t take the heat.” She shakes her head and smiles. Elsa is tall and slender, and her hair is still a little bit blonde. I can tell that she was, in her younger years, quite attractive.