Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (21 page)

T
he ride home was more quiet than usual. Henry stared out the passenger window, watching the sun set one last time. Watching the farmland give way to the landscape of Boeing Field, its enormous buildings draped in camouflage netting – a feeble attempt to keep entire factories hidden from enemy bombers. Henry didn’t say a word, and Mrs Beatty, perhaps out of sympathy, didn’t either. She just left him to his thoughts. All of which were about Keiko.

With the last of the prisoners taken to camps farther inland, Camp Harmony would revert back to being the site of the Washington State Fair just in time for the fall harvest season. Henry wondered if anyone going to the fair this year would feel different walking through the trophy barn, admiring prized heads of cattle. He wondered if anyone would even remember that, two months earlier, entire families had been sleeping there. Hundreds of them.

But what now? Keiko would be on her way to Minidoka, Idaho, in a few days. A smaller work camp somewhere in the mountains near the Oregon border, he presumed. It was closer than Crystal City, Texas, but still seemed like a world away.

Their goodbye had been a formal one. After he’d decided to let her go (for her own good, he reminded himself), he’d kept a polite distance, not wanting to make it any harder on either of them. She was his best friend. More than a friend, really. Much more. The thought of her leaving was killing him, but the thought of telling her how he really felt and
then
watching her go, that was more than his small heart could manage.

Instead, he said goodbye with a wave and a smile. Not even a hug. She looked away, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. He’d done the best thing, right? His father had said once that the hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best. The best thing was to let her go. And Henry had done just that.

But his mind had filled with doubts.

To his surprise, no one had even noticed he was gone. Or if they had, they hadn’t cared enough to say anything. The truth was, the residents of Camp Harmony would be leaving, and the camp workers, the soldiers, all just wanted to go back to their lives. They had done their duty and were ready to wash their hands of the whole ugly matter once and for all.

Mrs Beatty was thoughtful enough to drop Henry off in Chinatown, a block from the apartment he shared with his family. She had never done that before.

‘I guess that’s that,’ she said. ‘Stay out of trouble this summer – and don’t go changing schools on me now. I still expect to see you in the kitchen this fall, got it?’ Mrs Beatty let the engine idle as she stubbed out a cigarette in a beanbag ashtray she kept on the dashboard for when the truck’s ashtray got too full.

‘I’ll be careful. I hope you hear some news about your father. I’m sure he’s doing OK,’ Henry said, thinking about Mrs Beatty’s father and the crew of the SS
City of Flint
– merchant marines imprisoned somewhere in Germany, like Keiko and her family.

Mrs Beatty smiled slightly, nodding. ‘Thank you, Henry. Mighty thoughtful of you. I’m sure he’ll get by. You will too.’ She struggled to put the truck in gear, then regarded Henry once more. ‘And so will Keiko.’

He watched her drive off, bumping along the potholed streets, her arm waving out the window. Then she rounded the corner and was gone. The streets were peaceful. Henry listened for Sheldon playing over on Jackson but heard only the rumble of trucks, the squeal of brakes, and a dog barking in the distance.

He walked up the steps and down the hall to his apartment, the steamy smell of rice in the air. When he reached his home, the door was partially open and light spilt out. A shadow moved, the silhouette of an older man, but not that of his father.

Henry stepped inside. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, sniffling into a handkerchief, her eyes red and her nose puffy from crying. Henry recognized the man immediately by the stethoscope that hung around his neck.
Dr Luke, one of the few Chinese doctors who had a practice on South King – and still made house calls. He’d once come by when Henry had ‘fallen off the swing’ at school (a beating actually, courtesy of Chaz Preston) and had a concussion. Henry had thrown up and passed out, and his mother had immediately called the local doctor. But Henry had been fine, and his mother, despite the tears, looked reasonably well. This time, she looked scared, her body shaking. That’s when Henry knew.

‘Henry – your mother was just talking about you. You look like you’ve grown since my last visit.’ Dr Luke was being polite, speaking in Chinese, but nervous too. What
isn’t
he telling me? Henry thought.

Henry’s mother left her chair and fell to her knees, hugging him so hard it hurt.

‘What’s the matter? Where’s Father?’ Henry asked, guessing the answer.

She propped herself up, wiping the tears from her eyes, and spoke in a positive tone that somehow didn’t fit the news she was about to share. ‘Henry, your father’s had a stroke. Do you know what that is?’

He shook his head no. Though he had some vague recollection of Old Man Wee in the fish market, who always talked funny and used only his right arm to weigh the day’s catch.

‘Henry, it’s a very bad stroke,’ Dr Luke said, putting his hands on Henry’s small shoulders. ‘Your father is tough, and stubborn. I think he’s going to pull through, but he’s going to need rest – for at least a month. And he can barely talk. He might gain some of that back, but for right now, it’s going to be difficult for all of us. Especially him.’

The only words Henry heard were ‘he can barely talk.’ Father had barely said anything when he could, and in the last two months hadn’t said a single word to Henry. Not even a good night. Not a hello, or a goodbye.

‘Is he going to die?’ was all Henry could think of to ask, his voice cracking.

Dr Luke shook his head, but Henry saw through to the truth. He looked at his mother, and she looked terrified, not saying a thing. What could she say?

‘Why did this happen? … How?’ Henry asked his mother as well as Dr Luke.

‘These things just happen, Henry,’ Dr Luke answered. ‘Your father gets worked up about so many things, and he’s not a young man inside. He lived such a hard life back in China. It ages a body. And now so much worry, with the war …’

A wave of guilt crashed over Henry. He was sinking beneath it. His mother took his hand. ‘Not your fault. Don’t think this. Not your fault – his fault, understand?’

Henry nodded to make his mother feel better, but he was torn inside. He had so little in common with his father. He had never understood him. But still, he was the only father he had, the only one he would ever have.

‘Can I see him?’ Henry asked.

Henry watched his mother’s eyes meet Dr Luke’s; the doctor paused, then nodded. At the door of his parents’ room, Henry could smell Buddhist incense burning, along with some kind of cleaning solution. His mother turned on a small lamp in the corner. As Henry’s eyes adjusted, he beheld his father, looking small and frail. He lay like a prisoner of his bed – the covers pulled up tight around his
chest, which seemed to move in a jerky, uneven rhythm. His skin was pale, and one side of his face looked bloated, like it had been in a fight while the other side watched and did nothing. His arm lay at his side, palm up; a long tube connected at his wrist led to a bottle of clear fluid that hung from the bedpost.

‘Go on, Henry; he can hear you,’ Dr Luke said, prodding him forward.

Henry walked to the side of the bed, afraid that touching his father would injure him or push him closer to his ancestors.

‘It’s OK, Henry, I think he’d want to know you’re here.’ His mother gently caressed his nervous shoulder, taking his hand and putting it in his father’s frail, limp fingers. ‘Say something, let him know you’re here.’

Say something? What can I possibly say now? And in what language? Henry took the ‘I am Chinese’ button off his shirt and set it on the nightstand near what he assumed to be his father’s medicine. There were assorted brown glass bottles, some with labels in English while others, herbal concoctions, were labeled in Chinese.

Henry watched his father open his eyes, blinking twice. Henry couldn’t tell what lurked behind that stricken, expressionless face. Still, he knew what he had to say. ‘
Deui mh jyuh
.’ It meant, ‘I am unable to face,’ a formal apology when you’re admitting guilt or fault. Henry felt his mother’s hand on his face for a moment, a caress of comfort.

His father looked up at him, his mind straining to force his disobedient body into activity. Each movement of his mouth
took incredible effort. Just breathing in and out enough to generate sound appeared nearly impossible. Still, his fingers gripped Henry’s so slightly it was almost imperceptible. And a single phrase slipped out. ‘
Saang jan
.’

It meant ‘stranger.’ As in ‘You are a stranger to me.’

O
ne month later Henry grew up, or so it felt. He turned thirteen, the age that many laborers had left China two generations earlier in search of Chinshan – the Gold Mountain, seeking their fortunes in America. It was the same age his father had been when he took a job as a laborer, the age Henry’s father considered a boy to be a man. Or a girl to be a woman, for that matter, since arranged marriages often happened as early as thirteen – the age a girl’s education typically ended – and only for those who could afford such arrangements.

Henry’s birthday came and went with little fanfare. His mother made gau, a favorite dessert cake of glutinous sticky rice she normally reserved for special holidays like the lunar new year. His extended family of aunties and cousins came over for a dinner of black bean chicken and choy sum with oyster sauce – also favorites of Henry’s. His rich auntie King
gave him a
lai see
envelope, filled with ten crisp one-dollar bills, more money than he’d ever received at one time. She gave Henry’s mother one too; his mother gushed her appreciation but didn’t open it. That was when Henry realized that Auntie King and her husband, Herb, were probably helping support Henry’s family now that his father was bedridden.

Henry’s father was confined to his bed or a wheelchair that his mother pushed around the apartment, positioning him next to the radio, or the window so he could get some fresh air once in a while. He said nothing to Henry but would whisper words to Henry’s mother, who doted on him as best she could.

Occasionally, Henry would catch his father watching him, but when he’d make eye contact, his father would look away. He wanted to say something, feeling guilty for having disobeyed, for having caused his father’s weakened condition. But in a way, he was his father’s son, and he could be equally stubborn.

Keiko had been gone more than a month. She’d left on August 11
^th
with the last of the prisoners of Camp Harmony, bound for Minidoka. And she’d never once written. Of course, no one could be sure what that
really
meant. Maybe there wasn’t mail service up there. Or maybe Henry had been too clear with his goodbye and she was moving on without him. Forgetting him once and for all. Either way, he missed her so much it hurt.

Especially at school, when the fall semester started. Henry had two more years before he’d go to Garfield High, which he’d heard was far more integrated, and where most of the Chinese and black kids ended up going. A mixed-race class would be such a change from Rainier, where he was, once again, the only
nonwhite student. He still worked in the kitchen at lunchtime with Mrs Beatty, who never spoke of Keiko.

Henry rarely saw Chaz anymore. Since getting caught vandalising homes in Nihonmachi, he had been kicked out of Rainier. Rumor had it he was now bullying kids at Bailey Gatzert, where all the blue-collar kids went. Occasionally Henry would see him shadowing his father around town, but that was it. He’d grin at Henry, but Henry wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Chaz looked the way he’d look for the rest of his life, Henry thought, bitter and defeated. Henry, on the other hand still felt like he hadn’t learnt his best trick yet.

Still, Henry’s work duties after school felt empty, and his walk home was a lonely affair. All he could do was think of Keiko, how happy he’d felt when she was around. And how numb and sad he’d felt watching her wipe the tears from her eyes when he’d said goodbye. He didn’t regret watching her go as much as he regretted not telling her how much he cared. How much she meant. His father was a horrible communicator. After all the time he’d rebelled against his father’s wishes and his father’s ways, Henry hated the fact that he wasn’t that different from him at all – not where it mattered, anyway.

Henry walked back to the black iron arches of Chinatown, alone again, following the unmistakable sound of Sheldon’s sax and the roar of applause that always seemed to accompany his performances these days. Sheldon was playing in small clubs around South Jackson, but Oscar Holden was on a police watch list now, for speaking out against the treatment of the residents of Nihonmachi, and had a hard time getting gigs. The price you pay for speaking your mind – you lose the ability to have your singing voice heard. A tragedy, Henry thought.
No, more than a tragedy, it was a crime, having that ability stolen from him. His record had sold out and became sort of a collectors’ item, for a while anyway.

‘Hear anything from up yonder?’ Sheldon saw Henry and pointed with his chin, eastward, in the direction of Idaho. In the direction of Minidoka.

Henry shook his head no, trying not to look as down as he felt.

‘I’ve been to Idaho once, it’s not that bad. I had a cousin that would run liquor across the border into Post Falls years ago, during Prohibition. It’s pretty, all those mountains and such.’

Henry slouched on the curb. Sheldon handed him his empty lunch pail.

‘Oh, it’s been a long time since I was what anyone might have called a “young man,” but boy,’ he said, ‘I can see it in your eyes. I know you trying to put on your brave face – that face that even your mama might not see through. But me, Henry, I’ve seen enough hard luck in my lifetime. I know what you got, and you got it
bad
.’

Henry stole a peek at Sheldon. ‘What? That obvious?’

‘We all felt it, boy. Watching everyone get rounded up like that. That’s enough heartbreak to last a lifetime for some people. Down here, in the
so-called International District
– you, me, the Filipinos, them Koreans coming over, even some of the Jews and Italians, we all felt it. But you, it hurt you in a different way, watching
her
go.’

‘I let her go.’

‘Henry, she was
going
whether you let her go or not. It’s not your fault.’

‘No –
I let her go
. I didn’t even really say goodbye as much as I sent her away.’

There was a moment of silence as Sheldon fingered the keys on his sax. ‘Then you get yourself to some pen and paper and you write to her—’

Henry interrupted. ‘I don’t even know her address. I let her go, and she hasn’t even written to me.’

Sheldon pursed his lips and let out a big sigh, closing his sax case and sitting on the cold cement curb next to Henry. ‘You know where Minidoka is, right?’

‘I can find it on a map …’

‘Then let’s go see her – they must have visiting hours up there just like down in Puyallup. Let’s you and me jump in the
belly of the big dog
and go see her.’

‘Big dog …’

‘Greyhound, boy! I have to spell it all out for you? We catch a bus, I ain’t got nothing but time right now anyway. We leave on a Friday, come back on a Sunday, you don’t hardly miss no school or nothing.’

‘I can’t do that …’

‘Why, you’re thirteen now, ain’t you? You’re a man in your daddy’s eyes. You can make a man’s decision and do what you gotta do. That’s what I’d do.’

‘I can’t just leave my mother, and what about my father?’

‘What about him?’

‘I can’t just leave him. If he found out I’d gone all the way to Idaho to see a Japanese girl, his heart would give out completely …’

‘Henry.’ Sheldon looked at him more seriously than he’d ever done before. ‘Your daddy having himself a heart fit, that
ain’t your fault either. He’s been fighting the war in his head, in his heart, ever since he was your age back in China. You can’t take credit for stuff that goes back to before you were even born. You understand me?’

Henry stood up and brushed the dirt off the seat of his pants. ‘I gotta go. I’ll see you around.’ He smiled, as much as he could, and walked off in the direction of home.

Sheldon didn’t argue.

He’s right
, Henry thought. I
am
old enough to make my own decisions. But Idaho, that’s too far, too dangerous. What business do I have running off like that, to a place I’ve never been? If something happened to me, who would take care of my mother? With my father bedridden, I’m the man now. I might even have to quit school and go to work to help pay bills. And besides, running off wasn’t responsible. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that money wasn’t an issue. The money from working at Camp Harmony was more than enough to pay his way, and the windfall from Auntie King would cover everything else.

No, I can’t do it. It just isn’t practical right now
.

When Henry got home, his father was in bed, sound asleep. Since the stroke, he didn’t even snore as loudly as he used to. Seemed like everything he did was a pale shadow of his former self. Except his spotlight of condemnation, which always seemed to shine on Henry. No matter where Henry was, he felt it.

His mother came up the stairs behind him with a basket of laundry taken from the clothesline shared by others in the alley. ‘You have a birthday card,’ she said in Cantonese. She took it out of her apron pocket and handed it to him. It
was a bright yellow envelope, slightly bent and dirty. Henry recognized the stamp.

He knew who it was from just by the handwriting – it was from Minidoka. From Keiko. She hadn’t forgotten him.

He looked at his mother, a little bewildered but not apologising.

‘It’s OK’ was all she said as she walked away with the basket of clean laundry.

Henry didn’t even go to his room to open it. He carefully peeled it open right there and read the letter inside. At the top of the page was a small pen-and-ink drawing of a birthday cake, colored with watercolor. It read ‘Happy Birthday, Henry! I didn’t want you to go, but I knew I was going anyway, so what could you do? I don’t want to trouble your family or make things worse between you and your dad. I just wanted to let you know I was thinking about you. And miss you more than you’ll know.’

The rest was about camp life. How they had a school there, and how her father was doing. His law degree wasn’t much good to him when it came time to pick sugar beets every day.

And the letter closed with, ‘I won’t write you again, I don’t want to bother you. Maybe your father is right. Keiko.’

Henry’s fingers shook when he read the last line again and again. He looked at his mother, who was now in the kitchen and had been watching him from the corner of her eye. She held her hand to her lips, looking concerned.

Henry half-smiled at her and found his way to his room, where he counted out the money he’d saved all summer and the lucky money from Auntie King. He then found an old suitcase
at the top of his closet and filled it with enough clothes and clean underwear to last a few days.

Walking out of his room, he felt like an entirely different person from the one who had walked in. His mother looked at him, blanketed in confusion.

Suitcase in hand, he headed for the door. ‘I’m going to the bus station, I’ll be back in a few days. Don’t wait up for me.’

‘I knew you’d do the right thing,’ Sheldon said, smiling from the aisle passenger seat of the Greyhound bus bound for Walla Walla. ‘I knew you had it in you – saw it in your eyes.’

Henry just looked out the window as the city streets of Seattle gave way to green hills up and toward the pass between western and eastern Washington. He’d found Sheldon, and his suitcase in hand was all the prompting his friend had needed. ‘Let me get my hat’ was Sheldon’s only response, and the two of them gathered their things and headed for the bus depot, where they bought two round-trip tickets to Jerome, Idaho, the closest town to Camp Minidoka. The tickets cost twelve dollars each – Henry offered to pay for Sheldon’s out of the money he’d saved up from working that summer, but Sheldon declined.

‘Thanks for coming with me. You didn’t have to pay, I had enough—’

‘’Sokay, Henry, I never get out of the city enough anyway.’

Henry was grateful. Deep down, he’d wanted to save enough money. At least enough for
three
return tickets. He was going to ask Keiko to leave with him. He would give her his button and try to sneak her out during a visit. Anything was worth trying at this point. She could stay at his auntie
King’s house on Beacon Hill, or so he thought. Unlike his father, Auntie King had no qualms about her Japanese neighbors. She had said so herself, one time, much to Henry’s surprise – somehow, she was more forgiving, more accepting. It was a long shot, but it was his last, best hope in the current situation.

‘You know where this place is?’ Sheldon asked.

‘I know how it was in Puyallup, at Camp Harmony. If we get close enough, we’re gonna have a hard time not knowing where it is.’

‘How can you be so certain—’

Henry cut him off. ‘There’s supposed to be nine thousand people imprisoned there. That’s like a small city. It’s not going to be a problem finding the camp. The problem will be finding Keiko among all those people.’

Sheldon whistled, to the dismay of an elderly woman in a fur hat, who turned around and scowled at him.

Henry didn’t mind sitting in the back of the bus. But for some reason Sheldon seemed to resent it. Grousing once in a while about how
this was the Northwest and not the Deep South
and the bus driver had had no business jerking his thumb toward the back of the bus when he and Henry boarded. Still, they went. Going this far, to someplace unknown, was potential trouble enough. The good thing about sitting in the last row was not having anyone behind them to stare or ask questions. Henry pretty much disappeared into the rear corner of the bus, looking out the window, and those glaring back didn’t even make eye contact with Sheldon.

‘What happens if we get there and no one rents us a
place to lay our heads for the night?’ Henry asked.

‘We’ll manage. Not the first time I slept out-of-doors, you know.’

But despite Sheldon’s optimistic attitude, Henry had a very real concern. Right before all the Japanese were evacuated from Bainbridge Island, Keiko’s uncle and his family had tried to resettle somewhere farther inland – where the Japanese were scrutinized less. Some Japanese families were encouraged to leave voluntarily. Some even thought doing so would prevent incarceration. The problem was that no one would sell gasoline to those families fleeing the city, or rent them a room. Even places that were virtually vacant turned them away or put up their closed signs as the Japanese families got out of their cars. Keiko’s uncle had made it as far as Wenatchee, Washington, before being forced to turn back because no one would sell him any gas. He turned back and was rounded up like the rest.