Silver Like Dust (13 page)

After all, the summer of 1942 had been especially bloody in the Pacific. Throughout the slow, sweltering month of August, the United States and Japan struggled in battle after battle. On the night of August 8, the Allies suffered an agonizing defeat: Japan sank three American heavy cruisers, an Australian cruiser, and a US destroyer, killing over fifteen hundred Allied crewmen. On August 17, the Americans attacked Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands, and on August 21, they repulsed the first major Japanese ground attack on Guadalcanal. In another Allied victory on August 24, they defeated the Japanese in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. On August 29, the Red Cross announced that Japan was refusing to grant safe passage of ships containing supplies for American POWs.

Knowing these details about the war, especially that final one, that Japan had prevented supplies from being shipped to American prisoners, I can imagine the unease that Wyoming residents would have felt as thousands of Japanese prisoners poured into their state. I remember something Ojichan told my brother and me as children, and I wonder if he’d adopted the mind-set during the war. In his serious, emphatic way, he urged us, as though his message held grave importance, to remember that we were always representatives of our race when we interacted with others.

“You might be the only Japanese a person ever meets,” he insisted, “and that person will judge the entire race based on how
you
act. It might not seem fair, but it’s true.”

As a child, I found this concept alarming. On the one hand, I didn’t fully believe my grandfather—certainly people were not so foolish as to make assumptions about an entire race of people based on one person’s behavior, let alone a child’s—and yet on the other hand, my mother, brother, and I probably
were
the only Japanese people most of the residents in our tiny Pennsylvania town ever met. Located in the Alleghenies, just south of the middle of the state, our county was predominantly comprised of white folks whose families had lived in Pennsylvania for decades or even centuries. (My father’s
hakujin
family fell into the latter category; his Irish ancestors had arrived in the eighteenth century.) A handful of minorities lived in the area, and as far as I knew, my mom, brother, and I were the only Japanese people. So I think it was with a blend of resistance and resignation that I accepted my grandfather’s advice, and tried my best to be on good behavior, at least some of the time.

The teapot my mother put on the stove begins to sputter and hiss, and Obaachan stands up, takes a cup from the cupboard, and gingerly pours the steaming water. “This part of my memory—the whole arrival—is not good, Kimi. I just can’t remember much of it.” She dips the teabag into the mug, bobs it up and down, studies the way the color slowly bleeds into the water. “I don’t remember getting off the train, the weather, or anything. I only remember that I was with my parents.”

She knows, however, that the arrival was hectic and stressful. After four days on that train, everyone was anxious to get off and to be assigned their new room. Some people, like my grandmother, would have been searching the crowd for a familiar face, hoping to see a person they’d said goodbye to weeks earlier. Others would have been focused solely on the task of gathering their luggage and getting into the registration line as quickly as possible. Remembering that those who’d been last to register at Pomona had been given straw mattresses, no one wanted to waste time. Obaachan huddled with her mother, holding onto Mama’s arm, next to a nearby barrack while her father searched the heap of suitcases that had been dumped beside the train. He grabbed the tags and checked the numbers. Slowly, piece by piece, he gathered up their bags and suitcases.

“At this point, Papa and Uncle Kisho had decided that our two families could live in separate quarters. We knew this was the permanent camp. There was no need for the seven of us to go on living in a single room,” Obaachan explains, taking a sip of tea and returning to the kitchen table. “I mean, we all got along, but by that point, we were looking forward to not being so crammed.”

I ask her if she remembers when my grandfather found her, or where, and she frowns and shakes her head.

“Did he meet you at the gate? Or did he come to your family’s room?” I press, hoping to remind her. But the questions aren’t helpful. Obaachan’s still squinting, trying to recall the details. She shakes her head. “Maybe because he’d been there for awhile, he knew how to find out if a family had been registered, and where they were living. Maybe we just ran into each other. Like I said, this part is a blur.”

I realize I’d been hoping for some romantic memory of their meeting up again, something Hollywood. I wanted to hear that my grandfather had been waiting for her, that he was by the gate, waving, smiling, trying to get her attention. Or maybe that the morning after they’d arrived, he’d shown up on the front porch, looking sharp in his khaki slacks and starched shirt, and maybe with some sort of small gift. A flower he’d picked, perhaps, or an extra treat from the mess hall. But whatever the turn of events might have been, my grandmother can’t remember a thing. Or doesn’t want to.

“Sorry,” Obaachan says.

I can’t tell if she is apologizing for not being able to remember, or if she’s sorry she’s not ready to relive this part of the experience yet, or if she feels that the story itself is disappointing me. And I don’t know how to respond to this apology. I glance at my mother, who is smoothing out a large folded piece of flannel for my quilt, trying to line up the edges. She has been listening quietly to this conversation, taking in each and every detail. Hearing her mother talk about the camp is a rare experience for her—it is something her parents never spoke of in their house in New Jersey, and something she never asked about.

Obaachan runs her hand over a piece of fabric and then stands up. “I need to rest now,” she says. “I’m going to sit on the rocker and watch the birds. I’m eighty-two and I don’t have the stamina that I used to.” She says the word “stamina” carefully, spitting out each syllable, as she often does when she uses longer words. Even though my grandmother has spoken only English for decades now, she still has an accent, more because of her intonation than her pronunciation, and noticeable only at times. She shuffles over to the window by the woodstove.

As I watch her settle into the rocking chair and begin to ease back and forth, her head high, her eyes focused on the bird feeder, her slippers tapping lightly on the carpet, I sense that in her mind she is elsewhere right now, far away, in some cold and snowy place.

Chapter 7

M
ONTHS AFTER
O
BAACHAN’S VISIT, A FEW DAYS BEFORE
Christmas, my mother calls me at my apartment in State College, Pennsylvania. Her voice is labored and anxious. I sense bad news. She breathes deeply into the phone and says it: Obaachan has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. “The right side,” my mother continues. She pauses, sorting through the words. “They say it’s not very big. That she probably won’t need chemo because they might be able to get rid of it with surgery and targeted radiation. She’s scheduled for early next month. You should call her.”

I agonize over making that phone call to my grandmother. I’ve never been good at sensing how such conversations should go. Is it better to begin the exchange with an apology—I’m sorry to hear your bad news—or is it best to talk about other things and then, after a few moments of small talk, shift with caution to the topic of the diagnosis? I decide to take the latter route, thinking I might help my grandmother feel “normal” by not making her cancer the first thing I mention. The plan fails. As I fumble through questions about the weather in Florida and what she plans on cooking for New Year’s, she interrupts and says, in that matter-of-fact way of hers, “I’m sure by now your mother has told you about my cancer.” She doesn’t even struggle with that last word when she says it, doesn’t pause anywhere in the sentence.

Like all cancer diagnoses, my grandmother’s is a shock. Even though I understand that attention to one’s health doesn’t entirely protect a person from getting cancer, I think of Obaachan’s scrupulous attention to her health. She exercises daily on her walks around the neighborhood; she eats a balanced, varied diet (she actually counts out the number of peanuts in the suggested serving size) and grows her own fruit; and she has enjoyed good health her whole life.

Despite the shock, Obaachan faces the diagnosis with resolve and her characteristic Japanese mentality of
shikataganai
. Whatever happens, happens. You cannot change your fate, so don’t bother feeling sorry for yourself. Obaachan schedules the surgery and preop appointments, makes travel arrangements with my aunt to spend two days in Tampa for the lumpectomy, and eventually begins a regimen with a physical therapist to strengthen the chest and shoulder tissues. By March, when I’m to make my annual visit to Florida, she has recovered from the surgery, and her oncologist clears her to begin radiation.

I’m near the end of my first year of teaching high school English, and I’m drained from the long evening hours of lesson plans and worksheets. Obaachan and I have not seen each other since the previous May, when she came to Pennsylvania for my college graduation, and I look forward to a visit, where we can have some uninterrupted time to ourselves. On my first trip to Florida, three years earlier, I’d been nervous about spending a whole week with this woman I hardly knew. Since she’d always been so quiet during my childhood visits with her, I’d assumed she was antisocial. I’m ashamed to admit that, as a teenager, I’d also wondered if she didn’t like me. Now, we talk on the phone sometimes, about every other week, so I am not as nervous as I was in our early meetings.

The center where Obaachan goes for radiation is twenty minutes north of her home, a bit far for a daily drive, but better than heading all the way back to Tampa, where she had her surgery. Each morning of my week in Florida, the two of us leave the house by eight thirty to make sure she gets there for her nine o’clock appointment. The first time, as we drive out of her neighborhood and make our way to I-95, she explains that the radiation doesn’t take long, that I can sit in the waiting room while she changes and heads back to her appointment. She has been going for two weeks now, alone. So far, she has few side effects: she seems a little more tired, a little weaker, but that’s it.

“Did you know that men can get breast cancer?” Obaachan asks as we pull onto the highway. She is seated beside me, on the passenger side. Whenever she has the opportunity to ride, rather than drive, she takes it. In her quiet neighborhood, most people obey the twenty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit, and the roads are wide and open. Once you leave the immediate area, though, the traffic is heavy, the drivers are aggressive, and the various turn lanes can be overwhelming. Plus, my grandmother explained yesterday, people in Florida don’t like to see old folks driving, and she doesn’t like to make anyone angry. (She has been reading editorials and letters to the editor about this subject in her local paper recently.)

Obaachan continues talking about men and breast cancer. “I met a man at the breast-care center in Tampa, and when I asked him if he was waiting for his wife, he told me that he was a
patient
.” She chuckles, shaking her head in disbelief. “At first I thought he was making a joke.” I picture my grandmother trying to humor this man in the waiting room of a hospital as he attempted an awkward joke. A breast-cancer patient herself, she certainly wouldn’t have found him amusing, but she wouldn’t be rude, either. “Then he went on to explain to me the whole procedure of how they found the lump, and what he had to do. And then I realized he was serious. I had no idea it could happen to a man.”

We drive in silence for a few minutes, and I struggle with what to say. I want to tell my grandmother that I’m sorry she has to deal with such a thing. And I want to say that it seems unfair, somehow, that she was diagnosed with this disease, after all the setbacks—the displacements and illnesses and loss—she has already faced. I wonder if she finds herself thinking of Ojichan, who passed away eight years earlier, of pulmonary fibrosis. Or if she remembers her mother’s long struggle of living with an irregular heartbeat, the ups and downs of having a debilitating illness in the internment camp. I sense, however, that Obaachan doesn’t want my sympathy, nor does she want me to think too much about the parallels between her cancer and anyone else’s problems. In her mind, cancer is just another card life has dealt her, and my desire to overanalyze it is just another sign that I fail to handle things with the ease and tenacity that a Japanese person should.

Obaachan turns down the radio so that we can talk. Conversations tend to be difficult in the car, especially when she is in the passenger seat, with her good ear to the window. “I know you want to know more,” she begins. “About Heart Mountain, I mean. That’s where Ojichan and I were for most of the war. We were there for …” Her voice trails off. She is trying to remember. “We got there in August of 1942, and we left in the summer of 1945, right before Victory in Japan Day. So just under three years.”

By the time she arrived in Wyoming, my grandmother had technically been a prisoner of the US government for five months, but she recognized that this new phase was different. “I think before, when we were at Pomona, it didn’t hit me that this was a long-term situation,” Obaachan says, adjusting the air vents on the passenger side of the car. “We were so close to LA. We were still in California, our home state, plus we knew all along it was only temporary. And then when I got to Heart Mountain, I think I realized we were going to be there for a long time. Maybe for years, maybe forever.” The WRA made no promises regarding the future of the Japanese who’d been evacuated from the West Coast. My grandmother and her family only hoped that they would be freed when the war ended.

That August evening when Obaachan arrived at Heart Mountain, she and her family gathered their belongings and registered with the officials, then made their way through the dirt streets and rows of barracks. It was easy to get turned around in that collection of identical buildings: all of them had low roofs and black tar paper covering the walls. In all, there were thirty blocks, each of which consisted of somewhere between twelve and fourteen housing barracks. My grandmother and her parents were in Block 17.