Silver Like Dust (9 page)

My grandmother and her fellow prisoners could choose from a variety of jobs: gardening, mowing, serving food, preparing food, cleaning the restrooms and other public areas. There were even postal workers, doctors, police officers, and electricians. Refusing to work, they all understood, might be interpreted as defiance. Obaachan’s father warned them to be careful never to act in a way that might be perceived as rebellion. He believed that if his family followed the rules and complied with all requests, they would be treated better. He did not seem troubled that he’d already complied with every single one of the government’s requests—handing in his radio, following the stipulations of the Five-Mile Curfew back in Los Angeles—yet he’d been forced out of his home anyway.

I take a break from picking, rest my back against a limb, stretch my legs out toward the trunk, and survey the tree. The branches are still bursting with fruit. Despite the box below, now full of heavy yellow spheres, it appears as though we’ve made no progress.

“I didn’t mind working because it helped pass the time,” Obaachan says. “And we were paid—twelve dollars a month, I think—so it was a way for me to earn and save some money. It was technically my first job,” she reminds me.

Plus, it seemed that those who did not work only grew listless. The days at Pomona were long, hot, and dry. Outside, the sun was oppressive, and inside, the apartments were cramped. With no routine or commitments, depression easily set in. Even for those who did work, like my grandmother, there were many hours of free time, much more than she’d ever had back in Los Angeles.

Obaachan’s job was a tedious one. For each meal, she had to arrive early, before the mess hall opened to visitors, and during that hour before prisoners began pouring through the doors, she measured out each person’s serving of sugar: one teaspoon. She placed the sugar on a napkin, then folded up the edges and added it to the stacks on her tray. Later, when the prisoners passed through the cafeteria-style line, she carefully placed the folded napkin on each person’s tray.

Before long more than five thousand people, most of them from the L.A. area, were crammed into the makeshift housing at Pomona, living in the tight quarters of the small rooms, shuffling through the long lines in the mess hall, and hauling their towels and shampoo to the isolated and dirty restrooms. As best they could, they settled in. After a few weeks, some ministers convinced the authorities to allow a piano to be brought into the fairground. On Sundays a number of religious people gathered together in one of two barns to sing hymns, pray, and hear verses read from the Bible. “I worked at the mess hall every day, including Sundays, during all three meals,” Obaachan says as I hand her a final grapefruit. “So I never went to church there.”

The box, now packed with plump yellow fruit, can hold no more. I crawl out of the tree, gripping the trunk, my legs scraping the rough bark of the branches. Obaachan frowns, a little embarrassed, a little bemused. She views this admission—that she did not attend church—as a solemn confession, one that is not told lightly to a young and impressionable granddaughter. “I should’ve gone,” she adds. “I’d always gone to church. Maybe it would’ve been, you know, encouraging to me. At least it would’ve been something familiar. Something from home.”

But she resisted. Each week, as she headed home from her morning shift, she would hear the notes of hymns drifting from the barns, and she’d consider walking toward them. She would remember how the words of the psalms and the sound of the piano had once been so soothing to her—and yet somehow, at Pomona, the music and the words no longer held much meaning. Instead, she picked up her pace as she passed and proceeded toward the apartment. “I see now that I was disillusioned. With everything, I guess, but at the time, I didn’t look at it that way. Maybe I had given up on my faith even. But I just told myself it was because of my schedule that I couldn’t go.”

Hearing my grandmother admit that she was disillusioned is surprising to me because so much of what she has told me has been characterized by a desire to emphasize the positives of each and every event. Her Papa was not picked up in the middle of the night after the curfew was instituted. Their family had been lucky enough to find a tenant and had not been forced to sell their home for a pittance. And Mama had been able to save her Noritake china. In all of these instances, Obaachan’s point seems to be that things could have been much worse.

There’s certainly something to be said for this unending optimism—this buoyancy—characterizing this side of my family. My grandmother and her children tend to take things in stride. When a hardship arises—a job loss or a health problem—they don’t dwell on their difficulties, but face them with resolve, head on. And yet, in this focusing primarily on the good, there’s also a suspending of emotion, maybe even a denying. I remember once, when I was having a difficult time with my boyfriend Chris, right at the end of a semester, my aunt Charlotte sent me a note in the mail. “Be like the Japanese,” she wrote. “Learn to compartmentalize.” What she meant was that I should focus on what was most important: school. I could sort out my personal life later.

I tried to do what she said, tried to push my boyfriend and our argument to the back of my mind until I’d handed in my term papers and taken my final exams. I only half succeeded. I finished the semester, turned everything in on time. But I was miserable through every minute of it. As my
hakujin
father’s daughter, I was hopelessly sensitive and could make myself sick with anxiety when things weren’t settled. Even though I desperately wanted to, I couldn’t summon that Japanese ability to rearrange my emotions and deal with them when it best suited my schedule—or not deal with them at all. I was, as this experience reminded me, only half Japanese.

At Pomona, in addition to the morning church services, another aspect to Sundays was, ironically, baseball, the American pastime. On every other day of the week, the boys and young men were only permitted to play in the evenings, after the final meal, but on Sundays, they were allowed to play all day long. After lunch, despite the tyrannical heat of midday, crowds of young and old gathered at the baseball field. Obaachan did not watch many of these games, but even from far away she could hear the crack of the wooden bat hitting the ball, and the cheer that swelled up right after it. The crowds grew especially loud when a baseball soared way out to the barbed-wire fence.

Even the guards seemed interested in the game. From their towers they would watch, their machine guns resting on their laps. When an especially good play was made, they would clap and holler their support. In these moments of excitement, when a man dashed around the bases, when a young boy sprawled into the dirt to make an impressive catch, when the crowds cried out in excitement, it was possible to forget that the world was at war, and that they were its prisoners.

For the women, the authorities arranged classes: sewing, crocheting, embroidering, and singing were just a few. Obaachan had learned basic embroidery as a child and had always enjoyed it. She and her sister would go to Woolworth’s and buy white runners with patterns stamped on them, then embroider over the patterns. When she learned an embroidery class was being offered, she decided to sign up for it. To her surprise, she arrived for class on the first day and discovered that her instructor was a thin, wizened old Japanese man with fluffy gray hair. In contrast, his assistant was an attractive young girl.

“Can you believe it, Kimi? A
man
. I had never known a man who could embroider. This was 1942—men didn’t do things like that!” The image of her own father—not to mention her two brothers—spending an afternoon in a quiet embroidering circle was comical. “That guy knew what he was doing, though,” Obaachan says. “I don’t know where he would’ve learned such a thing back then, but he was very good.”

Most of the students in her class were better than she was, but they’d probably had more time to practice when they were young. Because Obaachan had taken over most of the cooking, cleaning, and caretaking when her mother became an invalid, her teenage years left little time for pursuing hobbies. “I made a picture of a colorful bird. A pheasant. It wasn’t the best in the class by any means, but it was an accomplishment for me.” Obaachan smiles and looks up at the grapefruit tree, wrapping her hands around a low branch. “I put it in a frame eventually. Your mother has it. Somewhere.”

I lean over, pick up the heavy box, and carry it through the garage and into the courtyard. Obaachan goes into the house and gets the digital scale from her bedroom, the one she weighs herself on every morning. Although I know the box is not over the seventy-pound limit—I could not lift it if it were—I place it on the scale to appease her. Like her father, Obaachan is meticulous about details and scrupulous about following the rules. If the airline asks that its passengers verify that their luggage is not over a specified weight, an estimation is not good enough. She makes sure to check it.

We place the lid on the box, reinforce the corners with extra pieces of cardboard, and wrap it in yards of packaging tape. I write my name and address on it with a permanent marker, and we carry it to the car. I go into the house and haul out my one other piece of luggage, a suitcase, and its cranky wheels roll loudly against the concrete. In a few hours, I will be heading back to Pennsylvania, with only part of the story, with more questions than answers, but also with an affection for my grandmother that I didn’t have two years ago, on my initial visit. For the first time in my life, I am sad to leave her.

As I place the suitcase in the trunk, Obaachan stands to the side and watches.

“Did I tell you that it was at Pomona that I met your grandfather?” she asks suddenly.

I slide the suitcase toward the back of the trunk, shake my head, and turn to look at her. “No,” I say. She hasn’t said a word about my Ojichan.

She grins a little then, shrugs her shoulders, impishly almost, and shuffles out of the garage. “I guess you’ll have to come back,” she calls over her shoulder, “for your next installment. It’s like a Victorian novel. You’ll get more of the story next time.” She steps out of the sunlight and into the house, her granddaughter a few steps behind.

Chapter 5

M
Y GRANDFATHER CAME TO LIVE IN
A
MERICA AS
the result of one bizarre act of recklessness. He was a
Kibei
, which means that he had been born in America but raised and educated in Japan. When he was still an infant, his parents had left the United States and returned to their small fishing village on the Inland Sea, a town called Iwakuni. As a child, then, what my grandfather knew of America came from his parents’ handful of stories and from what he read in newspapers. Although he was an American citizen, he planned to spend his life in Japan, a place he loved deeply. Iwakuni was an old castle town, founded in 1603, and it was and still is famous for its Kintai Bridge, with its series of five graceful arches. It stretches over the Nishiki River, which my grandfather crossed regularly. I remember him talking mostly about the cherry trees that grew along the banks of that river.

But in 1936, my grandfather’s peaceful life in Yamaguchi Ken prefecture veered in an unexpected direction. He was sixteen at the time. It was spring, and my grandfather’s beloved cherry trees, with their tangled dark branches and wispy pink and white flowers, were in full bloom. One afternoon, Ojichan was hanging around the schoolyard with a bunch of friends. Near the school’s entrance, a large statue of a town dignitary stood, sternly watching over the proceedings of the students. Ojichan’s friends were tossing stones over the fence of the schoolyard, seeing who could throw the farthest. And then one boy said to my grandfather, “I bet you can’t hit the statue. I bet you can’t hit him in the face.” The rest of the boys joined in, taunting him, testing to see how far they could push him. For a few minutes, my grandfather tried to brush them off, ignoring their dares. But they persisted, and my grandfather—as my Obaachan would one day learn—was not one to shy away from risk. He threw the rock.

That ill-fated stone hit the statue square in its face, and with such a force that the tip of the nose flew off. For a brief moment, the boys stared in disbelief, not sure if that sharp noise of stone hitting stone had been what they’d thought it had been, but then they quickly scattered, terrified. In Japan, vandalism was no petty offense—and they knew it. Within a few days, my grandfather admitted his guilt to school officials. He must have known the consequences for such a confession. The community viewed his deed as an act of utter disregard for someone else’s property, a willful show of disrespect. My grandfather was suspended from school for weeks, and his family was shunned.

Ojichan’s father was ashamed to go to work; his mother was ashamed to walk down the street to the market. When my grandfather was finally permitted to return to school, he and his family realized that he was hopelessly behind. Because of the rigorous pace of Japanese schools, he would not be able to catch up and would have to accept failing grades. His father was angry with his son for his careless behavior, but also perhaps understood that Ojichan would always have the reputation of a vandal and a failure in Iwakuni, and that his life there was no longer promising. He encouraged Ojichan to leave the country. “You have no future here,” he insisted. “You’re an American citizen. You should go there. It’s your only chance for a happy life.”

Within a few months, my grandfather was headed for California on a great ship, alone, with his one rectangular leather suitcase, and the equivalent of a few dollars in his pocket. In his suitcase, he had a small stack of photographs from his life in Japan: portraits of his mother and father, a few pictures of friends, and the long bridge with its series of arches that he had crossed each day on his way to school. He was not yet seventeen years old.

As children, my brother and I heard this account many times. My grandfather would sit on the floor with us, his knees folded, his dark eyes grave yet still dancing, his hands flapping about for emphasis. Sometimes my brother, restless and lively, would sprawl across his lap as he spoke. “
Batu, batu
,” Ojichan would say. Settle down, settle down.