Silver Like Dust (7 page)

“Evacuees must carry with them on departure for the Reception Center, the following property:

a. Bedding and linens (no mattress) for each member of the family.

b. Toilet articles for each member of the family.

c. Extra clothing for each member of the family.

d. Sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls and cups for each member of the family.

e. Essential personal effects for each member of the family …”

But what kind of extra clothing should they take? Heavy winter coats or lightweight summer dresses? What were “essential personal effects”? And how many toiletries would they need exactly? To make things more difficult, each person was limited to what he or she could carry in terms of how many parcels. No extra luggage was permitted.

At last the server returns with our food, one hot plate in each hand. He places the garlic shrimp in front of Obaachan, and then sets down my Pad Ga Pow. The sweet smells of shallots and basil pour off my plate. The chicken, with its savory sauce and scattered bell peppers, looks delicious. Obaachan gushes over the meal, tells the server she was here a few months back, with her son, and that today we’re celebrating my birthday. The server makes a slight bow, grins, and backs away. For a few minutes, we eat in silence, enjoying the unusual blends of flavors.

Then, Obaachan chuckles as she remembers something. “What I recall being most anxious about with the packing was the “toiletries” part. We thought about sanitary napkins, and we were terrified by the prospect of running out. We bought
hundreds
of them!” She and the two cousins went out and bought large pieces of canvas and then sewed them into giant sacks. They filled each one with sanitary napkins, stuffing it with as many thick white pads as they could. “We didn’t know if we’d be able to buy them where we went. We didn’t know anything.” She sighs. “You just had to guess, and try to prepare as best you could.”

Her mother’s heart condition further complicated those preparations. First, there was the decision as to whether or not she should even go along. Her doctors had spoken with the authorities and had obtained special permission for her to stay behind in Los Angeles. She would simply live in the hospital as a long-term patient. To an extent, knowing Mama was in the hands of qualified physicians would be reassuring to Papa. After all, there might not be doctors, hospitals, clean facilities, or beds where they were going. The conditions might be too harsh; the weather, too severe. In fact, the trip itself might be too much for her. The doctors had warned from the start that even under the strictest supervision and the most ideal circumstances, Mama’s weak heart would not last long.

But on the other hand, the idea of leaving her behind was deeply unsettling; there was no guarantee that they would or
could
come back. Ever. And in the meantime, would the family be able to keep in touch with her? If her health grew worse, would someone contact Papa? Would he be able to come say goodbye? Would the family ever see her again? In the end Papa decided that Mama should not stay behind. Despite the risks involved in what might lie ahead, having her close to him and knowing he could be there for her if she needed him was most important.

On one of the six afternoons they had to prepare for their departure, Papa and Uncle Kisho went shopping at a department store downtown and picked up matching winter coats for their wives: thick, gray ones with fur collars. Although they did not know whether they would actually need them, the possibility of facing a winter without a warm coat was not a challenge they were willing to ask their wives to risk. Obaachan’s father also picked up some metal camping plates and an electric hot plate. These articles, along with the sheets, towels, and clothing, were added to the suitcases. Item by item, the family was checking off the list.

But packing was only one part of preparing to leave. The house, the furniture, the belongings that could not be carried—arrangements had to be made for all of these things. While many people chose to store their furniture and appliances in governmentrun warehouses, Papa wanted to avoid having to do that. The posted instructions made it clear that there would be no guarantees regarding items left in those warehouses: “The United States Government through its agencies will provide for the storage
at the sole risk of the owner
of the more substantial household items, such as iceboxes, washing machines, pianos and other heavy furniture …” What that meant, Papa understood, was that there was no way of knowing whether those things would be there when he returned.

Instead, he found a tenant to rent his house, fully furnished: a minister, an African American man whose church was nearby. As soon as the family found out where they would be sent and what their mailing address would be, Papa would contact the minister. For his part, the minister promised to send the agreed-upon amount each month by a certain date. Papa felt good about the deal. Compared to many Japanese, who had no choice but to sell off their farms and belongings for far less than their worth, he had not made such a bad arrangement.

“None of our non-Japanese neighbors were willing to help,” Obaachan says, shaking her head and setting her fork on her plate. “They wouldn’t store things for us, or assist in any way. These were people we’d known for years, people who’d watched my siblings and me grow up. But all of a sudden, they wanted nothing to do with us. We were on our own.”

Like Obaachan’s father, Mama, too, had her decisions to make. Although she was not a sentimental woman, she insisted on holding on to her Noritake china, the lovely white set her parents had sent from Japan as a wedding gift. She would not, as her friends and neighbors did, sell something so valuable for a meager amount, nor would she smash them to pieces, as some desperate women did in a flurry of spite. She would not give them up if she could help it. Papa, always resourceful, found a church that was willing to store his wife’s beloved china.

“My sister has it all now,” Obaachan says with a smile. “She showed it to me the last time I went to visit her, in LA, a few years ago. My mother never made it back to the West Coast, you know, but Sachiko must have gone to the church and picked up Mama’s china, after the war.” Her voice quiets at this memory. The irony is still painful. “It’s strange, what survives, and what doesn’t.”

The day of evacuation finally arrived. April sunshine tumbled auspiciously on the yard, and the forsythias Papa had spent years caring for bloomed in bright yellow splashes in front of the house. Mama, using a smooth black cane Aunt Maki had purchased from a family friend, stepped cautiously off the porch. Obaachan held on to her mother’s arm, supporting her. Mama’s hair was twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she wore a gray tweed suit. Papa made one last trip through each room of the house, doing a final check, or maybe saying goodbye to all that he had worked for.

At the sidewalk, the minister waited with his wife. Papa handed him the keys, and the minister reminded Obaachan to send him their new address as soon as she learned what it was. Because her father could not read or write in English, Obaachan would be the one responsible for corresponding with the minister. The men shook hands, and Papa managed a muffled “thank you” in English, one of the few phrases he knew. As they reached the corner of the lot, Obaachan took a final look at the house, and then at Mama, who seemed tired already, leaning on her cane. The minister’s wife raised her arm in a wave. Papa never turned back.

Each area of each city was assigned a specific meeting place, a building or parking lot where the families needed to be by noon on April 7, with all packed belongings in hand. It was all detailed on the posted instructions.

“Ours was the church where my family attended,” Obaachan says. She leans back in her chair, then dabs her lips with her napkin and takes a sip of water. “It was strange, of course, going to a place you knew well, and had been to many times before, but under such different circumstances.”

The seven of them shuffled the few blocks to the church, the sewn knapsacks slung over one shoulder, the suitcases gripped in the opposite hand. Papa carried Mama’s things. In the parking lot a few hundred people gathered, and they huddled together in quiet clusters. Papa and Uncle Kisho went to stand in line and register their families. “We became numbers at that point,” Obaachan says, cutting a shrimp in half and swirling it in the sauce. She leans back in her chair. “You were registered as a number, not as a name.”

A pair of scales was set up at the registration table, and a stern group of burly, uniformed men roughly picked up each suitcase and slammed it onto a scale. Those who had brought too much luggage were treated with cold impatience and commanded to remove items from their bags until the required weight was reached. These belongings were left scattered on the street outside the church, and they were scavenged the moment the buses pulled out of the parking lot. Today, photographs of these meeting places—with open suitcases, clothing, musical instruments, and other items tossed about, and
hakujin
looking for things worth keeping after the busloads of Japanese had been carried away—capture the event.

At first Obaachan’s Mama tried to stand in the church parking lot, but before long she grew too tired. She sat on the concrete steps that led to the church entrance. Other women sat in circles nearby. Red Cross workers carried trays of coffee through the crowd, as if offering comfort in a natural disaster.

Finally, buses with armed military police pulled up. Standing outside the bus, gripping their rifles and looking straight ahead, the police ordered everyone aboard. At this point still not knowing where they were headed, hundreds of people filed into the buses. Obedient, quiet. “Nobody resisted,” Obaachan remembers. “I think people had the mind-set that this was what we could do to help. We loved America just like everyone else, and if this was the way we could serve our country, we were willing to do it. We saw it as our duty.”

The Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights organization consisting of only
Nisei
(those who were American citizens), had encouraged people to believe this though the discriminatory legislation continued. Their creed, written in 1940, included these words: “Because I believe in America, and I trust she believes in me, and because I have received innumerable benefits from her, I pledge myself to do honor to her at all times and all places … in the hope that I may become a better American in a greater America.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the JACL had pledged loyalty to the United States while condemning the treachery of Japan. When a mandatory evacuation was announced, they urged the Japanese to leave without resistance—to do their duty by obeying the rules.

The
Nisei
who made up the JACL would have been young, optimistic folks, some of them college educated. I can’t help thinking about the 1960s, when twenty-somethings protested the Vietnam War and the government, and about now, when my friends march at anti–death penalty rallies and insist on buying fair trade coffee. Were this type of roundup to happen in my own day, I feel confident that my generation—my post–civil rights, optimistic, unafraid generation—would unite to oppose what it would undoubtedly deem unjust. But, as my grandmother has pointed out to me, we did not grow up in the same world.

As the caravan of buses drove through the city of Los Angeles that April day, people stopped to stare. Some pointed and a few yelled. “You don’t belong here!” hollered a middle-aged man. “Dirty Japs!” shouted a young girl. “This is what you deserved!” yelled a mother, holding her infant son to her chest.

Even though my grandmother had always lived in, and was quite accustomed to, a country that resented her race—even though she had seen all the headlines and heard the radio reports with their accusations and assumptions—she had never felt so despised as she did riding through Los Angeles that April afternoon. She was ashamed to be Japanese. She was ashamed to be American.

At the Thai restaurant, when we’ve at last filled our stomachs and scraped what we couldn’t finish of our meal into two Styrofoam boxes, Obaachan takes out her red wallet and places a few crisp bills on the table. Offering to cover the tip would offend her. This dinner, she reminds me, is my birthday gift. I thank her again for the outing, and we walk to the car. Whenever she has visitors, my grandmother does not drive. Although she has never had an accident, she prefers sitting in the passenger seat to driving, especially at night. She hands me the keys. I push the button to unlock all the doors, and help her into the car. Sometimes, the seatbelt is difficult for her to reach on that side.

We pull out of the parking lot and head home. In the hour or so we have spent at the restaurant, Melbourne has grown dark. The bright lights of strip malls illuminate the sides of the road: dry cleaners, 7-Elevens, banks, and real estate agencies flash past.

From the floor of the backseat, our leftovers are beginning to soak the air with their heavy scent. Beside me, my eighty-year-old grandmother holds her purse on her lap, her hands resting on its top. She is quiet now, tired from a long day of remembering, and ready to head home.

Chapter 4

O
N THE FINAL DAY OF MY SECOND TRIP TO
F
LORIDA,
Obaachan asks me to help her pick the grapefruit. Outside the kitchen window, in the small patch of yard between her house and the row of shrubs lining the road stand two trees that she and my grandfather planted when they first moved here, in 1989. Each now stretches over twelve feet tall and has wide branches with thick, shiny leaves. Swollen yellow fruit, dusted with a chalky black substance, burdens the branches, and they sag a little from the weight.

“We’ll need this,” Obaachan says, pointing to a four-foot wooden ladder in a corner of the garage. I grab it, haul it awkwardly to the closest tree, and set it up, checking its strength by trying to rock it back and forth in the grass. Obaachan places a cardboard box once used to haul Dole bananas on the ground at the foot of the tree. “The kind they use for bananas are the best,” she explains. “The sturdiest.”