Silver Like Dust (28 page)

Obaachan has photographs of her mother’s funeral at Heart Mountain: a large group of mourners dressed in black, lined up around a large casket adorned with two wreaths. My grandmother stands in the front row of the photograph, her head hung so low that her face is completely invisible. If she had not pointed herself out to me, I would not have known it was her.

Within three months of my great-grandmother’s funeral, by November 10, 1945, every prisoner at Heart Mountain was gone. In fact, all the camps closed shortly after V-J Day. The prisoners were given $25 cash and told to make arrangements for themselves. Obaachan’s sister, my great-aunt, who’d spent the war in a camp in Arkansas, returned to California with her husband and child. My great uncles, Obaachan’s brothers, who’d served in the military and had never been interned, eventually went back to California as well. Papa, with all of his children grown and with his wife gone, moved to New York City with his brother Kisho, the one who’d owned the successful Chinese restaurant back in Los Angeles. Together, the two of them opened and ran a small hotel near Columbia University. Though he and my grandparents did not live all that far away from each other—he in New York and they in New Jersey—after the war ended, they didn’t see one another very frequently. Papa passed away in the 1960s. He never remarried. He never gardened again either.

When our tour of the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center has ended, the director takes a picture of my mother and me, and informs us that he’ll add it to the bulletin board of other visitors. He leans on his cane and thanks us for coming, points us to a rack of books and other knickknacks for sale. My mother buys four matching purple T-shirts that say Seabrook, one for herself and one for each of her siblings.

“I’d like to drive around,” she says as we exit the building, buttoning her jacket against the cool afternoon, “past my old house and the elementary school. I’d like you to take some pictures.”

We climb into the car and drive out of the parking lot, and I follow my mother’s directions: turn left here, pull in right there. I photograph her standing in front of her old school, near the tall steps that stretch all the way up to the front door. Next, we head to the street where she grew up. Even though a new family now lives in their old house, she insists on a photograph of herself in front of it. Reluctantly, I turn off the ignition and crawl out of the car again.

“People live here,” I say quietly, as if the new owners might hear me from inside. There are cars parked in the driveway. “You can’t just stand in someone’s yard.” Having grown up in central Pennsylvania, where landowners post their acreage with black-and-orange signs and take the crime of trespassing seriously, I’ve always been mindful of encroaching on other people’s property.

“If they come out, I’ll just tell them this is where I grew up,” my mother says. In this moment, her sense that any misunderstanding could be easily handled with a conversation reminds me of my grandfather. Like him, she’s not at all shy, and she is always happy to talk to anyone. She jogs over to the mailbox and stands in the lawn, grinning, thrilled. I feel guilty for tainting the experience with my warnings and embarrassment.

The house, a small yellow ranch, has fallen into mild disrepair, with the windows old, the screens dirty, and the siding dull and discolored. The lawn is overgrown, and weeds grow from the cracks in the sidewalk. This is where my grandparents moved after they lived in the concrete-block apartment. My mother, the third child and born in 1948, never lived at that first place.

“Did you get it?” she asks, still smiling for the camera. I tell her I took two pictures and show her the images on the small camera screen. “Good,” she says. We drive around Seabrook and the neighboring towns, stopping twice for subs, once at a small one-story building that looks like it might have been a gas station fifty years ago, and also at a quaint shop with wide wooden-plank flooring. My mother says the subs in South Jersey are the best in the world, and she intends to get her fill since she hasn’t been here for so long. She sits in the passenger seat, her fingers wet with olive oil, watching out the window and eating. At her age, my mother can still outeat me, and yet she manages to stay thin. (I’m convinced this is because she rarely sits in one place for more than ten minutes.)

For the reunion, held at a local country club, my mother has borrowed from a friend a black dress, knee length and with a few discreet gemstones near the neck. She curls her hair and slips on a pair of heels. “Everyone will be jealous,” I tell her as she prepares to leave the hotel.

The rest of our weekend in New Jersey consists of taking a few more snapshots of favorite places, and after we’ve made all the stops on my mother’s itinerary, we head back, across the wide Chesapeake again, through the midsection of Pennsylvania, home.

Chapter 15

I
TEM BY ITEM
, O
BAACHAN IS PACKING UP HER HOUSE IN
Florida. My family has decided that it makes most sense for her to move to Pennsylvania, to live near my mother, who the siblings agree is the best caregiver of the four of them. Relocating my grandmother to Pennsylvania means that she’ll live closer to me as well, so I suppose I should be happy about it. In a few weeks, she will drive up the coast in a U-Haul with my uncle Jay, with what’s left of her belongings on board.

When I arrive for what we both know will be my final visit to her place in Florida, I’m struck immediately by the sparseness inside. The painting of a swamp that used to hang above the couch in the living room, with its tans, yellows, and grays, is gone. The collection of family photographs on the spare-room bookshelf—weddings, school pictures from grandchildren, family vacations—has been packed up. The Japanese doll, posed in a long navy
kimono
, that used to sit on the glass table near the entryway, has been removed. About half of Obaachan’s furniture isn’t there either.

“The Salvation Army has already been here once,” she tells me as we walk into the living room. “They took the one bed, and later, I’ll give them the glass table where I do my Sudoku puzzles and one of the couches. But the other has a tear in the back, so they won’t take it.” The Salvation Army refuses any furniture that’s damaged, she explains, then looks at me with a grin. “Maybe I can sell it on craigslist.” My uncle, who has gotten rid of lots of unwanted items through this website, including a free artificial Christmas tree that thirty people wanted, has told her about the wonders of craigslist. Obaachan insists she has no interest in using the Internet, but she still likes to “know what’s going on” in the world of cyberspace.

“All of this packing, it’s kind of like at Heart Mountain,” Obaachan says, gesturing toward the walls and empty space of her kitchen. Just as she would have done sixty years earlier, my grandmother must evaluate, piece by piece, what she truly wishes to take with her. Obaachan looks at me, searches my face for a brief moment. “I packed up everything except for two plates, two bowls, two sets of silverware, two glasses. Plus one pot and one frying pan.” She shrugs. “You’d be surprised at how little you really need. You learn to be resourceful.”

She uses the stainless-steel pot to cook her oatmeal in the mornings and to steam brown rice. She can simmer soups and make popcorn in that pot as well. In the frying pan, she can cook an egg for
sukiyaki
or sauté some fresh vegetables for stir-fry. Determined to use up the items in her pantry rather than throw them away or haul them to Pennsylvania, she has grown creative in her cooking.

“Your uncle wants to have the grapefruit trees cut down,” Obaachan tells me as she peers out the kitchen window, frowning. “He’s thinking about resale, you know. He says they’re ugly.” The grapefruit trees are not as graceful as they once were, a few years ago, when I’d climb the trunk and shimmy across the limbs, plucking fruit and dropping it into a cardboard box. With each of the more violent storms that have begun hitting central Florida, the trees have grown a little more worn, a little less green. But they still bear fruit. Plus, my grandparents planted them together when they first moved here, two small plants, and in twenty-one years, they have grown full-size. Ojichan, I feel sure, would have disapproved of this plan to remove the trees and would have put up a fight about it. But Obaachan won’t say a word. I suspect that in her mind, she feels she should be grateful for the twenty plus years of rent-free living she enjoyed here. Besides, it’s not in her nature to argue about these types of things.

“I found something of Ojichan’s,” she tells me later that evening. She shuffles into the spare room where I am reading, hands me a worn leather-bound rectangular photo album, about six-by-twelve inches, and sits down at her wicker-and-glass table set. “It’s some pictures and some things that he wrote. Back when I first found it, a number of years ago, I had to get my sister to translate it because it’s in Japanese. So all the notes in English, they’re hers.” Although Obaachan grew up speaking Japanese with her friends and family in Los Angeles, she and my grandfather never spoke the language at home and chose not to teach their children. After the war, they no doubt thought it best to avoid practices that might lead neighbors to believe they weren’t “American.” Today, after decades of not speaking Japanese, my grandmother barely remembers the language of her youth.

I open the album, run my fingers gently over the black pages. My grandfather has written in white ink in the margins. The translated notes, all on different scraps of paper, are in the handwriting of the great-aunt I’ve never met. I leaf through the album. A black-and-white photograph of the long bridge with its series of arches, stretching over a wide river. A beautiful picture of a grove of cherry trees, in full blossom, with two groups of people seated beneath them, dated 1934. My grandfather’s Japanese characters—the language he tried to teach me at the kitchen table when I was young—stretch vertically beside the photograph. Ojichan would have crossed this bridge each morning on his way to school.

A piece of paper from my great-aunt slides out. I squint at her translation. Most of Ojichan’s notes are done in a sort of poetry, she writes, so the translating is difficult:

“I think about each tree and have deep memories. Think about singing that song—
o-te te tsunaide
—in my kindergarten days … I think about the village of Iwakuni with buds and blossoms appearing in the early spring. The natural sounds of the mountain and the river remind me of dreams of my home country that I left behind.”

There are other photographs, too, and more notes. In one picture, a group of men are leaning over, working the earth. San Francisco, August 16, 1938, it says, and in the margin Ojichan has written this: “No matter where you go in the world, people are close to nature and like to mix with the earth. Here they are hoeing, and it reminds me of home, and I feel sad.”

Then there are a series of three photographs of my grandfather in America. He is leaning against a car, ankles crossed, hand on hip. The caption reads: “Taken near Star Florist Shop. Feeling very homesick.” And beneath that, a lengthier note: “Living alone in a foreign country without parents, siblings, or friends, trying to keep pace with society here, was painful and sad. Without education and personality, being ‘driven’ in a foreign culture was difficult and painful. It’s a wonder that with a constant feeling of agony in my heart, that this little body was able to withstand all the difficulties I faced.”

As I read the words of my grandfather in this album, at last I am able to better understand his tragedy. How intense his struggle must have been here in America, a teenager alone in a country of strangers, in the 1930s. Who was there to listen to him? How would he have known whom to trust? His words in the album are marked by a loneliness and lostness that I never saw in him, so many decades later—that he grew out of, or hid, perhaps, even from his wife. Although he never fully lost that tendency toward wildness that brought about his coming to America in the first place, he never mentioned just how deeply he missed his homeland either. He never used the word “regret” when he talked about that dreadful decision to throw a stone at the statue’s face, at least not when he spoke to us children about it, but he must have felt some remorse for that action, especially in his early years in this country.

I ask Obaachan if he ever considered returning.

“No, never. My husband never wanted to go back to Japan,” Obaachan says, shaking her head for emphasis, “even when he received the telegram from his family saying that his father had
gan
, or cancer, and insisting that he come home right away. When his father got sick, it was not that long after he came to America, but he knew already he would never go back.” Later on, after my grandparents were married, they tried to bring Ojichan’s mother, by that time a widow, to the United States, but there was a long waiting list for people from Japan—families who’d been separated, for instance—who wanted to come to America after the war. She died before her name was reached.

“Ojichan always said, ‘I would be dead by now,’” Obaachan says. She pauses. “That’s the way he looked at it. He meant the war.”

With over two million combat casualties and an estimated 580,000 civilian deaths, Japan lost nearly four percent of its population during World War II. Many of those combat casualties would have been young men, around my grandfather’s age. Ironically, my grandfather’s foolish behavior as a teenager—throwing that rock at the statue—and his parents’ severe response—sending him to America, alone—may have saved his life.

It would be a stretch, I think, some weak but treacherous attempt to find the enormous ripples of that single action, to unite too many events—my grandparents’ marriage, the birth of their children, my own life and my brother’s—to the throwing of that stone back in 1938. Doing so would somehow trivialize everything about my own existence. But the idea does flicker through my mind, tempting me, daring me to make that link.

The next morning, in the courtyard of Obaachan’s house, the two of us sit at the glass table, finishing our bowls of chicken salsa soup. A light breeze lifts the spindly branches of Obaachan’s two tomato plants, which we just planted the day before. Before my grandfather passed away, he made a wheeled platform for potted plants so that he and Obaachan could easily maneuver them around the courtyard. If there’s a thunderstorm with high winds, for instance, Obaachan can easily wheel all of her plants closer to the house, where they’re protected by the roof’s overhang.