China Dolls (30 page)

Whirlpool Valley

“Who’s going to win the war?” Agent Parker asked in a harsh voice.

“The United States,” I answered.

“Are you pro-Japan?”

“No.”

“Then why did your father and brothers go fishing on a Sunday?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were they sending signals from their boat to the Jap planes as they flew into Pearl Harbor?”

“I’m sure they didn’t,” I answered.

“Are you aware that your mother made her language students sing the Jap national anthem before every class?”

“Yes, but you’re making it sound worse than it was. Her students learned Japanese faster when they had a melody to follow.”

Agent Parker exchanged glances with his partner, Agent Holt. We were in a windowless office somewhere in L.A. I was angry at myself for being caught, livid that my big Hollywood chance had been lost, and more furious at whoever had reported me than I was scared of the men, but I was working overtime not to let them see my emotions.

“This is the first time I’ve heard about my parents since the attack on Pearl Harbor,” I volunteered, flashing Agent Parker my pearly
whites. “Where are they? And what about my brother? His name is Yori Fukutomi—”

“We’re the ones asking the questions, sweetheart,” Agent Holt notified me.

How I would have liked to have biffed him one right then, but I needed to keep my head about me.

“Did your parents take food or oil to Jap ships at sea?” Agent Parker resumed.

“No.”

“Did they hide any Japs in their house?”

“No.”

They grilled me for two days. They asked the exact same questions, and I gave the exact same answers again and again and again—always with my best Princess Tai smile. My inquiries, on the other hand, were met by stony silences, flip ripostes, or threats. When I asked if I could go to the powder room, they pursed their lips and looked away. When I asked who’d turned me in, Agent Holt quipped, “Lies, betrayals, and disappointments. That’s what friendship’s all about, sweetheart,” which narrowed the field down to … who? Ida? Charlie? Eddie? One or all of the Lim Sisters? A band member? Maybe Monroe? One of the many men I’d dated since becoming Princess Tai who’d gotten suspicious about me and made a lucky guess? When Agent Holt got tired of my answers, he warned me: “There are people a lot tougher than us. You want to be in a room with them?” Was the threat real? I didn’t want to find out, so I tried to elaborate a little bit. When Agent Parker pressed me on why my family had always lived near naval facilities, I replied, “No one else wanted to live in those neighborhoods, so the rents were cheap.” He didn’t like that response. “Just how long have you and your family been spying on America?” he bellowed only inches from my face.

At night, I was locked in a cell and given a tray of food. I wasn’t allowed to telephone anyone. I wasn’t given clothes, a toothbrush, or a hairbrush. I didn’t cry, because inside I was boiling. Someone had given me up and robbed me of my opportunity for real fame. I kept
going over and over it in the night. When I got to the end of my loop, I’d repeat something my mother used to say to me.
Sakki naita karasu ga mo warau. The crow that was crying a few minutes ago is already laughing now
. In Japanese, Mom explained, the word for
crying
sounded like
birds making noise
even though the written characters were different. “Crows are smart, stubborn, tough survivors,” she told me. “But also remember, Kimiko, that the
gaijin
—the white foreigners—can’t hear the difference if we are crying or laughing because they don’t see us as human. You will forever trick them. And tomorrow you will fly and laugh your way across the sky again.”

On the morning of the third day, I was brought again to the windowless room. My body—my mouth especially—felt foul. I prepared myself for another day of questions. The agents entered—all business.

“We’re going to lay it out for you straight,” said Agent Parker. “We’ve got a special internment camp in Arizona called Leupp. It’s where we keep Japs we suspect are traitors to the United States. Two of those internees are your mother and father.”

“They’re alive?” I was incredulous and grateful but also wary.

“What do you think we’d do? Take them out and shoot them?” Agent Holt scoffed.

Maybe
.

“The War Relocation Authority has your brother in an internment camp in Utah,” Agent Parker went on. “If it were up to me, we’d keep you here until you told the truth—”

“I’ve told the truth,” I said.

Agent Parker kept going. “But we’ve been ordered to give you a choice. Do you want to be sent to your parents or to your brother?”

Both men leveled their peepers at me to see how I’d answer.

I
WAS LOADED
onto a train with a handful of other straggler Japanese: some single men and a couple of families, who had, like me, managed to avoid being detected and caught until now. One family had suitcases and packages around them—all the worldly belongings they could carry. The father wore a business suit. The mother had a
hand-knit cardigan draped over her shoulders. Their teenage daughter wept into a handkerchief, while her younger siblings jostled and wiggled on their shared bench.

I was still in the dress I’d worn to the studio. No bed linens, no toiletries, no clothes. I had my purse with me and about fifty bucks, which wouldn’t get me far. Everything else I owned, including all my savings, was in my apartment. (What I hadn’t spent on clothes and other extravagances was in a box under my bed. Neither Grace nor I trusted banks.) I was alone and unprotected. The others regarded me wordlessly. Armed guards at either end of the car kept watch over us. I heard a little girl ask her mother almost the same question I’d wondered about my own parents: “Are they going to shoot us?” “If they were going kill us,” her mother answered, “they would have done it already.” When we passed through train stations, we were commanded to pull down the blinds, because the guards couldn’t guarantee what would happen if locals saw us.

Hours later, we stepped off the train and into a nighttime dust storm. I couldn’t breathe. I stretched my arms in front of me, but the dust was so thick I couldn’t see my hands. Me, in that! And it was freezing. I didn’t have a coat, and neither did the others. We were herded into trucks covered with canvas and driven over bumpy roads. Dust and sand continued to swirl around us. I covered my nose and mouth with a sleeve, and closed my eyes.

The truck bumped to a stop. Below the howl of the wind, I heard men yapping at each other, then the driver put the truck into gear. We crept along until we once again jerked to a stop. Rough hands yanked us out of the truck. The dust and sand created a stinging, pitting, merciless tempest in the midnight darkness. My traveling companions—who had previously kept to themselves—and I now clung to each other, moving as a mass up some stairs toward a dim yellow light and through a door. As soon as it closed behind us, I gulped my first full breath since disembarking from the train. We tried to brush the grit from our faces and clothes. Eyeballing us, I saw that we looked filthy, exhausted, and strained.

We were in some kind of administration building. A sign read:
TOPAZ WAR RELOCATION CENTER
. One of the little boys grabbed the front of his dungarees and announced he had to go pee-pee. That set up a chorus from the other tykes. And to tell the truth, I also had to go so bad my back teeth were floating. A couple of guards escorted a group of us back into the dust storm. We followed the beams from the flashlights to a communal latrine. The stalls had sides but no doors. The mother wearing the cardigan started to cry. It wasn’t a big deal for me after so many years sharing a dressing room with a bunch of girls, but how could the people who ran this place expect a proper Japanese woman to do her business in front of everyone? But she—and we—had no choice. Then it was back into the storm to return to the administration building.

One by one we were fingerprinted and processed. I tried flirting with the officer, attempting to keep things light and breezy. Didn’t go over well. I was assigned to a barracks: 24 3-D. An older Japanese man—clearly
Issei
—approached me. He bowed, and I automatically bowed back more deeply. He spoke to me in Japanese. “I am your block manager.”

I thanked him in Japanese, using the proper honorific for his age and station, although I didn’t know what a “block manager” was.

At the sound of my voice, the creases in his face furrowed even deeper.

“You talk white,” he noted, and I couldn’t deny it. I inquired about my brother. He said, “You can look for him tomorrow.” Then he gave me a kerchief to cover my face, turned on a battery-powered lantern, and took me back into the horrors of the night. I saw nothing in the lantern light except dust, dust, dust. I had no sense of where I was or where I was going. After walking for ten minutes or so, he dragged me up some stairs, through a door, and into a minuscule foyer.

“Welcome to your new home,” he whispered in his heavy accent. He studied my clothes disdainfully. “We’ll get you something useful to wear tomorrow. We have a lot of families here, so be quiet as I show you to your area.”

I took off my shoes and followed him down a dark hall past what looked like separate rooms for the family groups he’d mentioned. He opened one of the doors and motioned for me to enter. Sheets and blankets hung from clotheslines to divide the space. Heat came from a potbellied stove. He pulled open a sheet and motioned for me to enter. There was a cot, a pillow, and two folded Army blankets. When I turned to thank him, he was already gone. I peeled off my dress and draped it over the end of the cot. Then I lay down in my slip and panties. The curtains around me shivered like ghosts. On the other side of the curtain, I heard breathing. Other people—total strangers—were sleeping just inches from me without any barrier or protection beyond the sheets. Someone snored softly. Nearby, one of my roommates rolled over, and her—his?—cot’s springs groaned. I should have been scared out of my wits, but I was madder than mad. I was bone-tired too, but I had a hard time falling asleep.

Early the next morning, I was dimly aware of a bell ringing, people talking in hushed voices, kids running through the hall, and the stomp of boots. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the ceiling was covered in tar paper and a single bare lightbulb hung from a cord.
Jesus, what a pit
. Dust and sand had come into the building while I slept and were all over my blanket, my face, and my arms. I reached for my dress and wrestled myself into it under the covers as quickly as I could to keep the chill out. When I stood, the floor creaked. I could see through the cracks between the floorboards to the ground. I needed to find my brother, but I had to do other things first. A woman hurried purposefully down the hallway. I asked where to find the bathrooms, and she told me in perfect English that individual barracks didn’t have toilets.

“Our block has a special building for that and for washing up,” she explained. “You’ve missed breakfast, but I can give you directions to our block’s mess hall too, if you’d like. The bell will announce lunch.”

Outside, the wind had fortunately settled. I walked down the dirt street to the corner of my barracks, where I stopped to get my bearings. Row after row of barracks stretched in every direction. This
place was like a small city, and the men—some dressed as though they had business to attend to, while others wore casual slacks and sweaters—all seemed to have somewhere to go. I found my way to the latrine, where a line extended onto the road and around the corner. I saw grandmothers draped in big Army coats that hung down to the ground and young women with their hair tied up in kerchiefs. Mothers held infants in their arms and scolded their little ones for not staying in the line. I waited my turn. After I used the toilet, I entered the washroom. Showers lined one wall. The center of the room was filled with big tubs to do laundry by hand. A few mothers had commandeered the tubs and were dropping their kids in one after the other for quick baths. I washed my face and hands and went back outside. Now I felt a tiny bit presentable.

I asked for directions to the administration building. I walked about a half mile, passing barracks lined up in groups or “blocks” like anchovies in a tin. Topaz was so big that there were street names and addresses, but there wasn’t a plant in sight. The desert had been scraped clean to create the camp. In ten minutes, I saw more Japanese than I’d probably seen in my entire life. I wanted to shout at them, “How could you let them do this to you?” Suddenly before me was a barbed-wire fence. Clearly I’d missed the turn to the administration building. I saw a guard tower to my left and one to my right. Armed guards patrolled with trained German shepherds. Outside—flat, flat, flat, to a distant mountain range with one especially high peak. Dust devils swirled in the distance and not a sign of civilization in sight.

“How ya doin’ up there, soldier?” I called to the young man in the guard tower.

He lifted his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and shouted, “Step away from the fence!”

All right, then. I walked back the way I’d come. I found my correct turn and in minutes arrived at the administration building, which in the light of day I could see was just another hastily built structure with plywood walls and a tar paper roof. I was given a khaki shirt, some green trousers, and an old Army coat—like the ones I’d seen the
grandmothers wearing—and mine, too, came down to my ankles. When I asked for my brother, a woman flipped through some files, found Yori’s folder, and told me he was the coach for the Rams baseball team. She gave me directions to the “high school.” For the first time in days, my smile was sincere. Yori was truly here!

I found the baseball field and spotted my brother huddling with a group of kids. The last time I’d seen him was on the wharf when I left Honolulu for San Francisco. He’d had an island-boy quality back then—with a loose gait that carried him from the beach where he surfed with guys from his school to my dad’s sampan to the temple where we worshiped. In the last four years, Yori had grown up. He had broad shoulders, high cheekbones, and the authoritative but friendly manner that seemed just right for a coach. When the boys took their spots on the field and started playing, I approached. Yori’s eyes lit up in stunned surprise when he saw me.