Letters to Memory

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  In the same year that the Thurmans moved into Japantown, Lillian Smith published Strange Fruit, a novel about an interracial couple in a small town in Georgia. The u.s. Postal Service and even some booksellers banned the book for lewdness, though it still became a best seller. Five years later Smith published a book of essays, Killers of the Dream, which can be understood as the critical underpinning of her fiction; an analysis and critique of white supremacy, sexual repression, racism, and the church’s split personality of high moralism and Jim Crow segregation. Also significant about Smith—though perhaps never mentioned at the time—was that she was a lesbian, and her novel is dedicated to her partner, Paula Snelling.

  Lillian Smith’s novel acknowledges the connection of the title Strange Fruit to a poem and song written by Lewis Allan in 1937 and performed by Billie Holiday in 1939 at Café Society in Greenwich Village.

  Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

  blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

  black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

  strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  “Under the healing wings of suffering” . . . “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Were you there? Were we there? Memory cared for.

  Ananda, I have a last bone to pick. In the cycle of life, what is justice? Are we to understand that the karma of one’s deeds, good or bad, will eventually catch up—if not in this life, then in another? There is some satisfaction in the possibility, for example that white people will become colored, or the rich will know poverty, but I don’t suppose that’s the greater spiritual plan. What about those who suffer now? Are they living in the skin of their other because that is life’s lesson? If they knew and believed this, what would they do? But what of those victims of unspeakable atrocity, holocaust, slavery, genocide, terror, those slaughtered in the path of war or nature’s blind violence? Holocaust, slavery, genocide— these are only words, only words. It is beyond all comprehension. Howard and John studied and struggled all their lives to understand, to extricate the truth to create a path for others, for Olive and for me. In this regard, you will say that I’ve been a miserable student.

  Howard Thurman in his day was criticized for turning mystic, which to those at the political front seemed to be a turning away from active participation and leadership. Again and again he writes about Jesus as a social activist and rebel, about the relationship of mysticism to social change. If you witness suffering, what is your responsibility, your duty? Sue Thurman asked Gandhi this very question. His answer was, in essence: you must embrace love and, without fear, actively not cooperate. This was perhaps also Thurman’s answer—his mysticism therefore was not a disengagement with social and political life. No social movement could move without the healthy confidence and integrity of each individual, requiring the full engagement with a life self-empowered to act without personal desire or fear, to act with complete generosity.

  In the 316th Jataka tale, a monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit prepare together to observe charity under the full moon. An old Brahmin sitting by a campfire begs for food. The monkey gathers mangoes from the trees. The otter collects fish from the river. The jackal steals a roasting lizard and a pot of curds. But the rabbit, able only to offer grass, throws itself into the fire to be roasted. The fire is cold to the rabbit’s dear gift, and once again, the god Sakka abandons his old Brahmin disguise and, with lilting strokes of his brush, paints the memory of the rabbit onto the face of the moon. A wisp of smoke reminds you of the burning fire.

  Dear Ananda:

  To seat Thurman beside Gandhi beside the Jataka tales is a kind of fusion accomplished by the fiction writer. I’m not trying to say anything new, simply speculating, perhaps attempting to extend Homer’s thoughts of poverty and forgiveness and Vyasa’s insistence on contrapuntal reconciliation.

  I want to answer your query regarding the dinner party, which again I admit is a facile ploy to begin our conversations. And yet the dinner party is where my memory of John resides, in his love of cooking and gathering and his insistence on scintillating conversation. What troubles you is the invocation of Mao’s quote regarding revolution and my response that violent revolution may destroy, well, the dinner party. This, you say, is true, but to say it in the context of genocide and holocaust is completely incommensurable. I agree. What I wanted to suggest are your own gifts that grace the idea of the dinner party—graciousness, art, and ceremony, love of beauty, that reanimate life that can never be the same.

  This incommensurability further troubles you as I have placed disparate historic traumas—Cambodian genocide, African slavery, Japanese American incarceration—together, and they are not the same. Obviously, they are not the same. You wish me to tease them apart, but that work has already been done. Numerous and immense volumes of historic recording to name the historic conditions, the crimes, the victims and the perpetrators. Where does such cruelty come from? Are we not all complicit? There are no commensurate traumas, but if we do not draw parallels, how may we be empathetic? How may we together be held responsible? Together show compassion? How may we be friends in times of duress?

  You speculate on Gandhi’s vision of the entire human race under the healing wings of suffering, and you say that for the Buddhist, suffering is the human condition and attachment is the cause of suffering. Again, in drawing together the disparate, I have collapsed the images of crucifixion, lynching, and self-immolation seeming to generalize the paths from suffering to spiritual enlightenment, to make universal that which is not. And again, I have no intention of making everything the same, but rather in the spirit of Vyasa’s contrapuntal to arrange close encounters. These encounters cause you to wonder at the body’s capacity and sometimes desire for pain and sacrifice and the parallel paths to divinity and humanity, art and cruelty.

  When speaking about the artists in camp, in particular Obata and Hibi, you wonder if I’ve not romanticized their practice in suggesting that their art avoids reality or seeks escape through nature or the daily. You think about art and music and poetry performed in other circumstances of incarceration, in death and labor camps, and point out that such creativity, using tools and any scarce materials available, is an impulse to sustain one’s humanity and is an act of resistance. And perhaps we should add an act of witness. You remind me that while art may be spiritual practice, it is also political.

  Finally, you refer to this writing as memoir, perhaps family memoir. I don’t know why I felt surprise to see your reference to memoir or why I resist the idea, although I have thought of it as memory. You may wonder at the obvious, but I have had no formed definition for this project except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand.

  In peace,

  LETTERS TO

  Laughter

  Dear Qohelet:

  You’re a preacher’s kid. When we met, we recognized each other immediately, that PK je ne sais quoi, like we’re supposed to be doing something significant eventually or actually, like we were raised with everyone looking on politely resentful, assuming we knew, when we didn’t, and thus, perpetual strangers in a world of blessed woe, primed by difference to serve. One day I heard you lecture, and I turned to you after and marveled, You gave a sermon. You answered, All my lectures are sermons. I thought, maybe mine too. Frustrated PKS. But you must have been really frustrated because finally you entered the seminary and got a master of divinity. I could never do this. Well, you believe, which is kind of necessary. One day I came home from junior high school and announced at dinner that I’d discovered a philosopher named Jean-Paul Sartre and a great idea called existentialism. I can’t remember what John said, but that was the beginning. I have been that kind of PK, heading out in another direction which turns out anyway to be the same. I figure you will understand, that you’ll know the skinny and funny of it.

  Recently I saw again yet another staging of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and I wondered about those good and bad daughters, silent tr
ibute versus false fawning and the misreading of love and honor. Do daughters naturally aspire to be Cordelia, or is this an impossible and romantic notion upset by character and circumstance? No, no, no, no! cries Lear to Cordelia, broken and unwilling to further challenge his fate. Come, he encourages her, let’s away to prison. And then these his last words to his daughter:

  We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.

  When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

  And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

  Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

  Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

  And take upon’s the mystery of things

  As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out

  In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones

  That ebb and flow by the moon.

  I am drawn to memories in which we live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh. Ah, but to laugh at gilded butterflies, this must be the satiric laughter that I am prone to, but John would say that this is not truly laughter, not the laughter that preoccupied his thinking. It is not laughter at but laughter within, I think, that concerned him. I am growing old searching for this kind of laughter, and where is he now that this laughter is needed most? Meanwhile I have found myself beholden to the lost possibility that we take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God’s spies. Perhaps this has been the meaning of these letters, though surely no mystery is revealed here. Simply, we have been together for a time to try.

  Wednesday, August 26, 1942, Kiyo, housed with her one-year-old baby in a converted Tanforan racetrack horse stall—Barrack 20, room 18, wrote in her diary:

  Today is our second anniversary, and a very disappointing one at that. I should learn by now, judging from my past two birthdays, not to look forward to any special day, for the disappointment is too great, and the hurt too deep.

  Not only the fact of the evacuation but marriage itself—that is, in terms of celebrative memory—seems to have been generally a bummer; but then, guys just seem to forget. Once you get married, even if it’s the most glamorous wedding of the year, it’s not about you anymore; it’s about them. This has got to be a sore point in many a marriage, but here further compounded by exchanging a house on Parker Street in Berkeley for a one-room horse stall. Four months previous, Kiyo stood in the rain for several hours with her baby in front of the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, waiting with the rest of the Yamashitas, and every other Japanese American in Alameda County, to board buses en route to a “relocation center.” The day before, she and Sus had been emptying the house of furniture into the early morning hours, packing up their belongings, then sleeping briefly on a mattress on the floor, waking to frantically pack the rest.

  To make matters more intense (notice I don’t say worse, but it’s got to be worse), the entire Yamashita family crowded into the small Parker Street house in those final days to make sure they would evacuate together. Sus was the first son and thus head of family, but this was his family; that is, Kiyo’s in-laws. What a crew. There was mother-in-law Tomi, brothers-in-law John and Tom, sisters-in-law Kay and Iyo, sister-in-law Chiz and her husband Ed and six-year-old Kiku and, finally, an adopted son, Tom Misumi—twelve altogether. It must have been mild chaos. From Kiyo’s sparse and concisely penned diary, we know she packed a crib and mattress and formula for her baby—justifiable and practical, considering. But from stories told, we know that for some reason the Yamashitas also packed an electric waffle iron and a vacuum cleaner. When I read the official edict to bring only what you can carry, the waffle iron and vacuum cleaner seem like items in a tall tale. I don’t know how the group of twelve got all their stuff and a heavy vacuum cleaner from the Parker Street house, about a mile away, to the Congregational Church on Channing near the Berkeley campus, but I remember my father reminiscing about that vacuum cleaner, parked on the sidewalk with the rest of the luggage. Maybe it was a Hoover upright. The old ads say, Give her a Hoover and you give her the Best. Maybe they pooled their resources and gave Tomi the Hoover for her birthday. Kiyo was right to be upset; what woman wants a vacuum for her birthday? They were likely told that the vacuum had to be left behind, but knowing John, he may have surreptitiously tagged it, then slung it on with the luggage, hiding it under the tarp, as the truck pulled away in the rain.

  I cannot find in any correspondence or documented memory any mention of the vacuum cleaner, but Kiyo makes two brief mentions of waffles in her diary, on June 4 and August 26 of 1942. The June 4 entry says that they all went to the ironing room and had a feast of scrambled eggs and ham and waffles. Ironing room? I think I know why the ironing room. When John told his story, he said, that of course they were the only family with these electric appliances, but when they plugged them in, they blew the fuses and shut off the lights. When this happened, he’d yell out in innocent protest through the porous wood slats, Hey, what happened? Who did that? Not again! Someone, turn on the lights! As if no one smelled the waffles. So with that consequence in mind, the waffle iron would require the requisite power supply found in the ironing room. Meet me in the ironing room, honey. You can iron while I waffle iron.

  The second mention of waffles is on August 26, the unfortunate second wedding anniversary. It’s a concessionary entry toward the end of Kiyo’s day. Chizu planned a waffle party for our anniversary, and we all enjoyed waffles. Nobu Kajiwara made the party possible by bringing the eggs and butter, and he and Ish and Hachi were there besides the rest of us. Maybe Chizu, and for that matter Nobu and John, knew Sus’s ineptness at celebrating, and surely felt Kiyo’s disappointment and difficulties caring for a baby in scarce circumstances. Or maybe any excuse for a party was necessary to subvert hopelessness. I think about that smuggled-in waffle iron and the preciously saved eggs and rationed pats of butter, and I feel that defiant strain of rebellion and extravagance that for better or worse marks the family. But then, there is Kiyo’s final sentence on this day: Sus went to play bridge at the Nishimuras and did not return until very late. Ah well, they tried.

  I wonder about the waffle iron and the vacuum cleaner, if they made it from Tanforan to Topaz, from California to Utah. You always read about Topaz and the dust storms that lifted the desert sand in blinding swirls and penetrated everything, seeped into the barracks and frosted the interiors in thick layers. You can’t imagine that the Hoover upright survived such abuse. This wasn’t urban household dust or even an occasional button or bug. This was grit and living creatures—scorpions—that might have ground the gears, dried up the lubricating grease, torn the bag, snuffed out the motor. Or maybe not; maybe the Hoover Company distributed their machines around Topaz to test the Best. Daily, Topazians swept the outside from the inside back outside. Bringing a vacuum cleaner to the Utah desert was like the surreal project of the Walrus speculating with the Carpenter, who wept like anything to see such quantities of sand, and wondering if seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year . . . that they could get it clear? What had John thought as he shoved it onto the truck. Maybe, What the heck, maybe it will come in useful. Or maybe Tomi really wanted to keep it and doggedly insisted, so urusai, and hauled it over, and besides, They didn’t confiscate it, and who’s defining what we can carry anyway? And then later, John’s amusement over the absurdity of its bulky useless presence. Good for vacuuming horseshit. The first stories I heard him tell about camp were these, chuckling in glee, as if to assure me of comic relief.

  I wonder why, after packing up for storage an entire household, these two items remained unpacked. Okay, I know: someone insisted on vacuuming the empty house before finally vacating it. This idea in the face of forced evacuation seems to me so Japanese-hyphenated-American—the tacit recommendation to leave your previously occupied space cleaner than you found it. How many picnic and campsites have we left cl
eaner than we found them? How many rentals? Dorm rooms? Borrowed kitchens? Concentration camps?

  And okay, how about waffles for a last breakfast before heading away to an uncertain future? What John would call a sayonara breakfast. Get some sustenance in the belly before being exiled to prison camp. I recall that one of John’s favorite and most famous meals was Sunday brunch, which he believed must consist of corned beef and hash brown potatoes, eggs, sausages, bacon, and waffles with liberal amounts of butter and syrup. Waffles were special, celebratory, and I never understood why until now.

  Somewhere in the Topaz desert: bits of gears and electronics, a rusty molded iron plaque in square patterns, the flat double prongs of an untethered electric plug. Somewhere in the dust and scrub this extravagance, this spontaneity, this comic relief.

  Sometime around 1910, Tomi boarded the Chiyo-Maru to chaperone eleven young women, all picture brides, from Yokohama to San Francisco. We date the trip to around 1910 because Chizu, who seems to be one or two years at the time and you figure, according to John’s calculations, still breastfeeding, is in the photographs. The tallest and most strikingly beautiful young woman in the group must be the future Mrs. Suzuki. The story was that Tomi worried the entire trip about arriving in San Francisco and the eventual meeting with her picture husband, who was shorter and not, in Tomi’s opinion, much of a matching beau. If Tomi was five feet, who knows what tall was in the day, but Mrs. Suzuki embraced her fate, and the rest is history.