Letters to Memory

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  The Suzukis’ two sons, Goro and Michio (nicknamed Mike), grew up in Oakland around the West Tenth Church with the Yamashitas. The fathers were both tailors, colleagues in the business who both also died early in the prewar years, Mr. Suzuki in 1929 and Kishiro Yamashita in 1931. At the time of his father’s death, Goro would have been twelve. Growing up in a closed community, you imagine that the Suzuki boys got absorbed from time to time into the Yamashita family. In those years, Kay, who was the family cook for the core seven or eight who then still lived together, remembered that you never knew who or how many hungry buddies John would also bring home for dinner. She would see them come through the door and throw more breadcrumbs into the meat loaf. John called this Kay’s Depression meat loaf, a loaf of veggies and bread with a hint of ground beef.

  John, five years Goro’s senior, remembered coaching him for a speech contest. I assume John tweaked, directed the speech’s emphasis, and Goro, age seventeen at the time, won the contest, the 1934 gold medal from the Japanese American Citizens League for “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.” Not to take anything away from Goro’s personal vision, but in John’s papers, you can read at least three versions of the speech with John’s editorial changes and oratorical instructions for cadence, emphasis, and significant pause. John recommends and pencils above the lines in red: slow & pondering each word, casually, solemnly, meaningful, stylishly slow, weighty, feeling, taper off, rise, strong & full, come down softer, pause, whisper. He then underlines words for emphasis: crisis of democracy, citizenship, selfishness, idealism, sacrifice, humanity. You can see John orchestrating Goro’s oratory with a fine baton. With this speech, they—Japanese Americans—would save America for democracy. They would needle into the hearts of those JACL judges, get them on to their patriotic feet to cheer, and, as they say, not a dry eye in the house. Well, it was the middle of the Depression, and they had no idea what would happen seven years later. Actually, knowing myself a high school teenager under John’s tutelage, I have to bet he mostly wrote the speech, titled in John’s versions: “The Significance of Citizenship in a Changing World.” And after, John suggested matter-of-factly, Goro, a shy kid, got the chutzpah to be a performer. This is one of those beginnings that, I guess, could have gone either way: preacher or comedian.

  Maybe John’s providential intervention is a fiction and its own chutzpah since Goro was also known to croon like both Bing Crosby and Paul Robeson. Twelve years after nabbing the JACL medal, Goro got hauled off to camp like everyone else. Oh yeah, says Asako, here we were arriving in camp, and there’s Goro Suzuki greeting us with a band and singing “Ol’ Man River.” It was really absurd. Apparently over the years, Robeson changed the lyrics, but only those who were there in camp know what version Goro sang, whether the upbeat jazz of Crosby or the spiritual force of Robeson. Maybe it was a mix to meet the irony of the situation.

  What does he care if the world’s got troubles?

  What does he care if the land ain’t free?

  Colored folks work while the white folks play . . .

  Getting no rest till the judgment day.

  I keep laughing instead of crying.

  I must keep fighting until I’m dying.

  And Ol’ Man River, he just keeps rolling along

  Eventually, Goro Suzuki refashioned himself for the stage and television as Jack Soo, the nickname Su assuming a Chinese surname since anyway all Asians look the same; it wasn’t really a lie. It was more like a serious joke. In those days there was no way to get out of camp to go on the road with a Japanese stage name. Juxtaposed in these stories of Goro/ Jack is heartfelt idealism with oppressive racism, and somewhere between impossibility and indignity, the funny and absurd arises. I sense here a wry comedic thread of irony, the sort of mismatch of picture bride to picture husband, of Crosby to Robeson, of entering camp on the river of the Ol’ Man. If Goro, over the years, cultivated the classic nisei deadpan he made famous on Barney Miller, as the detective sergeant Nick Yemana (is that a Japanese surname anyway?)—humor honed on adversity—John was the guy whose eyes lighted up. Years later John would take me to see the Roger and Hammerstein’s musical Flower Drum Song. And there I saw Jack Soo (Goro) crooning and tap dancing with Pat Suzuki. Hey, John chortled with amusement, I grew up with that guy. I gave him his first big break.

  Sometime in 1978, I remember finally meeting Jack Soo at the Centenary Methodist summer church bazaar in Los Angeles. I say I met Jack Soo, since his famous comedic and performer’s face was by then so familiar, but the man I really met was Goro Suzuki, who, ailing from cancer, stood with John among the booths of snow cones, teriyaki sticks, and flipping ping-pongs into bowls of goldfish. On a hot August weekend, John stepped forward unsteadily on his cane. The two men had perhaps only seen each other a few times since the war years. One of the last encounters may have been as long ago as 1949 in Oakland when John presided over Mrs. Suzuki’s funeral. And though John may have wished for an old joke, one last consummate wisecrack, Goro, unable to speak, held John’s hand and wept.

  Qohelet, I had expected to write funny stories, but all the laughter here seems contained in another dimension, and I think no one is laughing. Well, there is the problem of context, as in let’s away to prison . . . to laugh. There is nothing romantic here about laughter. It’s not about some expression of indomitable spirit. It’s just necessary, a survival tool, but also a way of perceiving. John always expressed a dislike for the guy with a chip on his shoulder. He thought if you couldn’t get rid of that injurious chip, that it would find its way into your heart and corrupt your being. You could never be a whole person carrying about a wounded sense of being wronged. Your anger would surface and hurt others, usually those who loved you best. He thought camp was the most unjust, cruel, and oppressive event of his life, but he was adamant that it would not control his character, well, he would say, his soul.

  Then there was his job, that of being a preacher, a pastor, a minister—all rather loaded words for the job, but nevertheless, the job. I finally opened the dusty boxes marked sermons and found dozens of seven-by-ten-inch black spiral notebooks of years of Sunday preaching, but also of weddings and funerals. As required by the church, the names of and dates for each wedded couple and each dead person are carefully noted, along with the particular ceremonial proceedings, prayers, songs, and personalized speechmaking. There were the baptisms as well. Over the years, he must have married, baptized, and buried hundreds of people. Beginnings and ends, cycling forever. I had forgotten this ceremonial part of his job, the required institutional, communal, and spiritual blessings that mark our lives. Plus, there were holidays, and a congregation’s illnesses, trials, and tribulations. You could but shouldn’t do this job without conviction and sincerity, and not with a chip on your shoulder. All his writing over the years, sermon after sermon, even at the end when thinking became muddled or compressed, expresses his deep and passionate belief. Agnostic that I am, I fashioned an idea about John as tilted toward social justice and the eventual ideas of liberation theology; that too was his job, but the empathy upon which the community depended, as if their daily bread, was based in an expression of what he called love and creative laughter. There is an intangible sense that he embodied, for others, this way of being. Therefore he was wanted there, always, at beginnings and endings.

  A Catholic-raised friend of mine has said that the reason for Sunday mass, despite what anyone might believe about the place of religion or, for that matter, Sunday in the week, is to remind us of our better selves. In those war years, whatever the rest of the country on Sundays thought of their better selves, the old Oakland West Tenth Church bunch at Tanforan and later Topaz attempted to gather to reflect on, most likely: Why us? John remembered giving an early sermon at Tanforan entitled Dust, Diarrhea, and Degradation. He called it the Three Ds. Only the sermon’s title remains. I want to know what reflective Bible passage inventively accompanied this sermon, and I have to imagine the significant pause at the sermon’s close—did
they laugh, grumble, scratch their heads, or weep? And his final words . . . Now let us pray.

  John’s notes show a series of titles for camp sermons, among them Tombstones Over the Desert; Stables, Scorpions & Sugar Beets; DeAmericanization in the Desert; Dining in the Desert; Sagebrush, Scorpions & the Second Mile; Barracks, Sand & Stars; and Blossoms in the Dust/Desert. I have no idea what Jankee Just Jibes refers to, though it could have been a popular jazz tune, and Greeks Have No Word for It is pretty cryptic. John does feature two titles on his key theme, laughter: Love’s Laughter Lost and For Tomorrow’s Laughter. I wonder if substituting laughter for labour is significant? A second list must be typed later, and the titles show greater anger: Incarceration & Bestiality, though I wonder what he meant by bestiality; Delinquency in Deprivation; Desert Dementia—Sagebrush & Sanity. My particular favorite, however, is Japanese Bite the Dust. Only the titles exist. Good grief, I think, they could be comedy routines or songs, but they are sermons.

  A copy of one sermon given at Topaz on Sunday, September 26, 1942, does exist, and indicates that perhaps the list is at best facetious. John’s title for this sermon: Created in the Image of God. Here he reflects on his free life at home near the San Francisco Bay and at school at Cal with 100 careers to choose from. Considering he’s a Japanese American talking about the Depression years, it sounds a bit exaggerated, but I suppose he’s describing it as a kind of Eden. But then there’s the reality now of living literally east of Eden, in Block 6, barrack 3, Room E. 5 cots in a room . . . And you and I facing a brutal reality today. We can only see DUST—desert barracks and very little of the future. The picture is dismal—it isn’t rosy—it is unpredictable . . . From these casual thoughts, he jumps to observing that they will soon live ten thousand together, and that, in short, there’s work to do. Now to the meat of his sermon, Part II, which is to say that man has a brain and, like God, is empowered to create the world around him. He refers here to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and to the Nobel-winning scientist-physician Alexis Carrel, who turns out to have done eugenics research in Vichy, France. But what did John know, confined within barbed wire? And who among the Topazians knew Niebuhr? John believed in human progress and that science and philosophy and theology were all in cahoots, on the same higher path for the greater good of man. You wonder about the scripture attached to this homily; there is no record, and what could it possibly be? I wonder what those folks suffering dust and degradation thought that September Sunday. Did they get up and walk out into the desert and think: I have God’s brain, and there is work to do with God’s brain. One state catty-cornered to the southeast, in that continuing desert, in a place called Los Alamos, men were hard at work using God’s brain.

  Qohelet, now that you’re a bona fide preacher yourself, you’ll say it’s easy for me to make fun of these camp sermons. After all, I wasn’t there. And the unfairness of hindsight. Someone had to tell these forlorn and humiliated folks that they were remarkable and godlike, that love’s labour could be lost but not love’s laughter. Again, I’ve failed to know laughter. Maybe you’d say laughter is not about happy or sad. Perhaps it’s about beginnings and endings and being there.

  Qohelet, in the final scene of King Lear, yet another stage is strewn with dead bodies: Lear and his entire family, all dead—three daughters, two sons-in-law, along with a trusted counselor and his bastard son, and the jester. Well, the jester was done in in an earlier scene, but, for me, his absence hovers over this bloodbath. You see his humor turn sour and satiric, but his fool’s honesty and loyalty are not enough to save him. The death of laughter. Thus Lear veers precariously into dementia; he must become his own fool. So it is that, as your namesake declares, even kings who have achieved great deeds, built great houses, and accumulated great wealth, have no advantage under the sun . . . O how the wise dies just like the fool! . . . All is vanity and the pursuit of the wind.

  I know you know this narrative, but let me, the fool, be your resuscitated guide through the seasons of men. Further . . . the race does not belong to the swift, nor the battle to the valiant. So, too, bread does not belong to the wise, nor wealth to the intelligent, nor favor to the clever, for a timely incident befalls them all. That is, if you have a chip on your shoulder, think again about how the chips have fallen, fairly or unfairly and for no good reason. Why are you angry, and to whom or what can you direct your anger? What revenge will finally assuage your pain? This is vanity and the pursuit of the wind. And you are a fool if you think that just men receive justice and that fools, like me, are condemned. Human life is vanity, or to translate it more literally: a breath, a whiff, a puff, vapor—illusory and ephemeral. God’s hand is pervasive but inscrutable. You cannot know your destiny. No amount of knowledge can make you truly wise. But, and this is a big but, there is a small compensation: the gift of joy. A small, potent gift of the daily. Hold the hand of the small one. Embrace your companion. Give away your bread and your coat. When times are good, enjoy; when times are bad, see . . . So I have commended joy because there is nothing better for people under the sun, but to eat, drink and enjoy . . . Go, eat your food in pleasure, and drink your wine with a merry heart.

  They say Ecclesiastes contains instructions from an old sage to youth, but like every other ancient text passed dubiously over centuries, its authorship is contested, and some say it never really belonged in this sacred canon. Who is this narrator whose message is read as contradictory, pessimistic, and skeptical, radical in thought, and far afield from the God of divine covenants and prophetic hope, exceptional interventions, and targeted retributions? This is neither the word of God nor of prophets. It is rather the observation of a wise man. Materialist that I am, I find these recommendations finally sane, outside of special promises to special people and special homelands. No one in this world gets saved. Death is the great equalizer.

  Homer would note that the narrator of Ecclesiastes likely lived in Palestine under the governance of the great Persian Empire between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and that the context of his concerns was the crossroads of commerce, the standardization of coinage, the imposition of taxes, and the economic volatility that made humans unequal. And Vyasa would remind us of the traveling nature of story and meaning, the narrative flashes recalling the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh or perhaps the Assyrian sage Aqihar, his Proverbs discovered in the Egyptian Elephantine. Who can know the origins of this text said to be penned by the mercurial narrator, Qohelet? Then, Ishi would comment on the anthropology of the narrative, its grounded humanism, and Ananda on its insistence on the worldly as ephemeral and illusory, the cyclical nature of life. But then, you could suggest what John might say—that Ecclesiastes marks the threshold and particular promise of Jesus, his teachings about charity, and, finally, his resurrection and the death of death. I have to quibble greatly with John and admit that I don’t believe in the death of death. Not believing in death as the end and great equalizer is in part why, I think, we continue to kill each other.

  From time to time in the postwar years, John was invited to preach at Howard Thurman’s Fellowship Church. Sometime in 1949, he gave this sermon: The Laughter of the Human Soul. Of all the notes, scribbling, letters, and post-stroke essays, this sermon makes most sense to me. Here, laughter is a sign of and a sense of self-integrity, as he says, feeling at home in one’s world, with a kinship to others and the self-confidence of direction. It has taken me years to understand this very simple but, I know now, nearly impossible way of being. Now I see that at every turn, this is what he looked for in others, and this is what he hoped for, for himself, for his family, for his children. Death was always a heartbeat away, and life, therefore, not to be taken for granted. And laughter allowed for spontaneity and exuberance and extravagance, giving balance to the tough practice of responsibility, play in the diligence of political action, freedom in intellectual pursuit. Even if all is vanity and the pursuit of wind, John thought we should stop occasionally for a belly laugh.

  Two weeks ago today, Joh
n’s fourth great-grandchild was born. Born three weeks early, he was almost immediately carted away to a neonatal unit for observation. A sophisticated cart contraption enclosed his six-pound, velcroed-in mini-person, hooked up all his vital signs to a digital dashboard, pumped oxygen to his little nostrils, fluids to his tiny veins, and lifted and wheeled itself onto an ambulance. All this for transport only three blocks away. It was the NASA capsule of an astronaut. In the brief space of his transport, I watched the new infant, not yet a day old, through the thick, shatterproof plastic window. Where’re you going, I chuckled. To the moon?

  His dark eyes suddenly opened for the first time and communicated to me his first thought, Hey, when did I sign up for this?

  I answered, Astronaut what your country can do for you. I laughed at my own joke, but the nurses and paramedic crew, all at least a generation younger than me, kindly smiled and shrugged.

  Now when I think about it, every one of John and Asako’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren opened their eyes to some possible, but in my mind sardonic, and defining first thought.

  Are you my mommy?

  Fooled you; I’m a monkey.

  Who are you?

  Who knew?

  Do you love me?

  They sent me to the wrong place.

  You have no idea.

  Dear Qohelet:

  My first thought is to thank you for remembering the preacher’s wife. Never mind the PK, what about the pw? What about her service, so often hidden but assumed? In these moments, you remember the women in your life.

  Your poetic sensibility lingers on the waffle iron and the vacuum cleaner as ironic metaphors for camp internment. Amusingly, you wonder what sort of waffle batter, whether a Japanese American recipe, though I assume it must have been some version of Bisquick. In your knowledge of this history, you speculate about laughter as a survival tool but also as a way to reconciliation, that laughter might have invited closure and empathy to the ugly partition of the community into yes-yes and no-no.