To the Stars

by George Takei

  Only I and my black-stained T-shirt knew the truth. After a few washings, however, the black stain came out. But to this day, my mind still retains that absolutely unforgettable Indian greeting. I think it will be etched in my brain forever. “Yo hay, yo hay, mee tah koo lah nah hum poh, om neechi ni chopi.” I have no idea what it means.

  Mrs. Lewis thought I was brilliant at everything. She gave me a straight-A report card and skipped me a year. I went from her second-grade class to Mrs. Rugen’s fourth-grade class. I graduated from a teacher who liked everything about me to a teacher I came to hate.

  * * *

  Mrs. Rugen was a short, stout, rosy-cheeked lady who wore her steel gray hair in a round bun on top of her head. The reddish color in her cheeks was not from a healthy blush; a fine web of red veins gave her face that florid ruddiness. It was a face that never smiled. There was something no-nonsense and hard about her.

  I felt an air from her as chilly as Mrs. Lewis’s was warm. Whenever she asked a question and I raised my hand to answer, she always picked someone else. When I was the only one to raise my hand, she waited a long while for someone else to respond, deliberately overlooking me. If, finally, no one else raised a hand, she very reluctantly called on me. I soon stopped raising my hand.

  In addition to teaching the fourth-grade class, Mrs. Rugen also had afternoon recess yard duty. She was assigned to watch over the playing children. In the school yard, she was the very opposite of the classroom teacher trying to brush off a student. Rather than ignore me, she watched me like a hawk. When playing dodge ball, if I crossed the line of the circle a little too often in the heat of enthusiasm, she would grab my arm with brutal suddenness and yank me back with a reprimand. If I shouted too loudly while playing tetherball, she would blow a shrill, scolding whistle at me for making too much noise. She was never as attentive or as concerned with the other kids’ behavior, and I knew she hated me for some reason.

  During recess one afternoon, Mrs. Rugen was standing chatting with another teacher. I was playing close enough to hear them talking, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Then something Mrs. Rugen said shot out at me like a bullet. She referred to me as “that little Jap boy.” I felt shock, pain, rage, and shame all at the same time. Those words stung me more than any of the other hurtful things she had done to me. But I found myself looking away from Mrs. Rugen, pretending I hadn’t heard her. I just contained that terrible hot feeling inside. To this day, it angers me that I looked away. I didn’t speak up. I swallowed my hurt.

  Even when we returned to the classroom, I felt a churning inside. She might be my teacher, but I couldn’t help glaring at Mrs. Rugen sitting at her desk in front of the classroom. I hated her. But when she stared back at me with that innocent, “What are you looking at?” expression, I avoided meeting her eyes again. Somehow, shame dominated my anger. I had the queasy feeling that her calling me “Jap” had something to do with our having been in camp. And camp, I was old enough by now to know, was something like jail. It was a place where people who had done bad things were sent. I had a gnawing sense of guilt about our time spent in camp. I could not fully understand it, but I thought perhaps we had it coming to us to be punished like this. Maybe we deserved to be called this painful word, “Jap.”

  Jap is only one syllable—the word “Japanese” shortened. A clipped-off, rather-too-spare sound. Yet, this simple syllable has come to acquire over the last century the curious power to lacerate. History forged a neutral sound—hammered by the blunt hatred of racists, fired by the hysteria of political and economic opportunists, and finally by the searing red heat of war—to a fine razor edge. It can just graze—and still open wounds. It can slash and dehumanize. To a Japanese American, “Jap” is a sound that vibrates with threat, an epithet sonorous with menace. Only a sound, an abbreviated word. Yet, the pain it can inflict and the injury it can cause lie in the force that history has hammered into it. “Jap” has become more than a word. “Jap” is an assault weapon.

  I understood then what Daddy had told me about words meant to hurt—words like “keto” and the ones that sound like “sakana beach.” What Mrs. Rugen called me hurt. It hurt too much for the pain to have faded by the end of the day. Even on the way home from school with Onorato, it still hurt, but I didn’t tell him. It was still lingering when I walked into the cleaner shop. I didn’t tell Daddy and Mama what Mrs. Rugen had called me. I was coming to understand that they, too, were uncomfortable talking about our years in camp, and “Jap” was a word that inevitably was associated with those years.

  * * *

  Daddy and Mama were suffering pains of their own. Something that I never remembered from camp began to happen; Daddy and Mama started to fight.

  Quietly, before we realized it, a chilly tension had grown between them. Their conversations became strained. Sometimes there were long stretches when they didn’t talk to each other at all. But their silences were taut with emotion.

  It first erupted one afternoon after we had come home from school. I was reading in the living room, Henry was listening to the radio, and Reiko was playing in the bedroom. Daddy and Mama were out front in the cleaner shop. We heard the steady rhythm of Daddy’s steam presser stamping down, hissing for a few seconds, thumping back up, then repeating the pattern again. Mama, I guessed, was seated at her sewing machine. Suddenly, the stamping and the hissing of the steam presser stopped, and we heard them talking loudly to each other. I stopped reading, and Henry looked up from the radio. Reiko appeared silently at the bedroom door, her eyes wide. Daddy was shouting, and Mama came rushing into the apartment, cold with anger. The steam presser started up again, this time going at a furious pace. Mama remained in the back, stony and at a loss for something to do. Then she strode into the kitchen muttering to herself. We heard her slapping down plates on the counter and clattering stacks of dishes, all the while keeping up a steady stream of barely audible mutters. The sound of the steam pressing stopped.

  “What did you say?” Daddy bellowed back from the shop. Mama became silent, but the air was charged with tension. I was paralyzed with fear. When the sound of the pressing resumed again, our relief, too, was almost audible. Mama started clattering again in the kitchen. Daddy’s presser answered back with hot hisses. It seemed to turn into an argument between hisses and clatter; clatter and hisses. Then Mama’s challenging mutters again joined the fray.

  “Mama, please don’t do that,” I wanted to say to her. But I was too petrified to speak up. Thankfully, the presser continued, stamping and hissing lividly.

  Then, Mama said in Japanese loudly enough for all of us to hear, “If only he had some spine.” The sound of the pressing stopped. I was frozen in terror. There was an excruciating silence.

  “What!” Daddy barked. Silence. He stomped straight back to the apartment and into the kitchen. “What did you say?” Daddy bellowed. Mama remained silent, then tentatively began rattling the plates again.

  “You think I didn’t hear that?” Daddy roared. The clattering continued. “You think you’re the only one who can rattle plates?” I heard Daddy yell. Mama gasped, and then I heard a plate crash onto the floor.

  “You break plate,” Mama screamed as she ran into the dining room.

  “And I can break more, too!” Daddy yelled as he followed her out with a large plate in his hand.

  Mama rushed into the bathroom, but just before she slammed the door closed, she screamed back at Daddy, “Spineless man!”

  The large plate shattered with explosive force on the door. Reiko shrieked and started to cry. Daddy banged furiously on the bathroom door, demanding it be opened. We all ran up to him pleading, “Please, Daddy, please, please, please, stop.” The banging and our crying continued for some time.

  Finally, Daddy stopped, hugged us, and said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t cry anymore.” Then he closed the shop and drove away.

  There were more confrontations after that between our parents. To tell the truth, they happened too
often. Home became a tense and uncomfortable place. More and more, after school, I started to stay at Onorato’s or Danny’s house. My friends’ homes were such happy, friendly places. I hated coming home to our sour, tension-filled dinners.

  Henry began wetting his bed. It became a regular occurrence. Mama made him take out his yellow-circled sheet and hang it on the laundry line. She thought this exercise in humiliation would cure an eight-year-old bed wetter. It didn’t. Henry’s bed sheet just acquired more overlapping yellow rings. Mama finally had to bleach it, and Henry started all over again with a whitened sheet.

  Reiko was the only one of us who seemed to benefit from Daddy’s and Mama’s sense of guilt over their fighting. They showered her with what Henry and I thought was excessive love and attention. If any goody had to be divided among the three of us, Reiko always got the largest third. If there was only one goody, she got it. She became the princess of a guilt-and anxiety-laden family.

  * * *

  A constant air of unease permeated our house. It made me nervous when Daddy and Mama were silent for any stretch of time. But I hated even more the end of those silences. Whenever I heard a sharp sound from the shop out front—a pair of scissors put down with force on the front counter, a ruler slapped down on Mama’s sewing machine, or even the soft thud of a bundle of laundry dropped on the floor—I would flinch. Was this going to be the beginning of another traumatic argument? Thankfully, most were false alarms. The only reassuring sound to come from the front was the steady rhythm of Daddy’s steam presser.

  I believed there could be nothing more terrible than our parents’ fights. One busy Saturday night, however, I learned there were worse terrors. The shop was open late, and the three of us kids were in back in the living room. As I read I could hear the comforting rhythm of Daddy’s pressing and hissing. Suddenly, I thought I heard Mama stifle a gasp. The pressing stopped. A chill stabbed my back. I heard loud voices and then the sound of heavy, thudding footsteps coming our way. Mama staggered into the apartment shielded by Daddy, who was being shoved by a young Mexican man. Then, I saw the glint of a gun he held right next to Daddy’s head. I froze.

  “Please, I’ve got kids back here,” Daddy said.

  “Where you keep the big money?” the man growled.

  “Mama, get it,” Daddy ordered urgently.

  Mama ran back to the bedroom. The man’s dark eyes flashed all over our apartment as he stood with Daddy in the doorway between the apartment and the shop. Daddy’s eyes were fixed on the gun.

  “What she doing?” the holdup man snarled.

  “Mama!” Daddy shouted.

  She came back from the bedroom clutching a crumpled brown paper bag. As she passed by me, I saw her surreptitiously slip a wad of money held in her right hand under a sofa pillow. She hurried over to the man and thrust the paper bag toward him.

  “Take all money,” she said. He glared at the rather airy brown bag.

  “That’s all?”

  “That all,” she answered.

  “Please, that’s all,” Daddy affirmed.

  The man stared at Mama menacingly, then grabbed the bag, and he was gone. Like a quick, horrible nightmare, it was over. Only stunned silence remained. Then, Reiko started to cry.

  Daddy and Mama rushed back to the shop.

  “Be careful. Be careful,” Mama was whispering. I peeked from the doorway into the shop. Daddy was outside looking down the street.

  “They drove away to the north,” Daddy said. As he came back in the shop, he said, “There were two of them. One was waiting out in the car.” Daddy immediately locked up and called the police.

  When they came back into the apartment, Mama went straight to the sofa and retrieved the wad of money she had hidden.

  “What’s that?” Daddy asked. “I take money out bag and hide,” she answered, holding out the thick roll of bills.

  “What! You mean you didn’t give him the whole thing?” Daddy was incredulous. “You held out on that guy?”

  “We work hard. This hard-earn money.” And with that, Mama put the money on the table.

  My mother is a strong woman. I was starting to realize how strong. Her strength, though, was made up of equal parts quick-thinking mixed with simple greed; courage combined with a good portion of foolhardiness. Because of Mama’s swift shuffle, the holdup man got less than half the money in the bag. He took several small bills, quarters, and dimes in the change box under the front counter and about three hundred dollars that Mama handed him in the brown paper bag. Later, Daddy and Mama counted the wad of money that Mama had hidden from the robber. It totaled almost five hundred dollars.

  About half a year after the holdup, Daddy and Mama were at a hospital visiting a sick friend. As they were leaving, Mama heard a voice she thought she recognized. It was a deep, drink-ravaged growl. She looked down the sidewalk and saw the backside of a man pushing someone in a wheelchair. Instantly, she recognized the hulking figure of the man pushing the chair. It was the holdup man.

  “Daddy, that him,” she whispered. He glanced over quickly and agreed.

  “Hurry, let’s get to the car,” he said.

  They drove around the block to reconfirm what they had seen and then went straight to the police station. The man was immediately arrested.

  * * *

  Mama’s avarice had stiffed the holdup man when he committed the crime, then her sharp ears sent him to prison for it.

  Mama was observant about many things. She was becoming especially perceptive about the way my friends dressed and wore their hair. She didn’t like Danny Sandoval’s long, ducktail haircut. She didn’t like it at all. She felt uneasy about the wide, draped-at-the-ankles trousers he wore. And she detested his thick-soled shoes with the noisy horseshoe-tapped heels.

  “Danny only ten year old. Why he dress like little pachuco?” she would complain to me. I was surprised Mama knew what pachucos were. I had thought the day might be coming soon when I would have to explain to her that pachucos were the grownup boys in high school and older who hung out together and dressed in the sharpest, most stylish ways. Not only did she know all this, but she thought they were gangsters. I tried to explain to her that Danny dressed the way he did because he had older brothers and he was just wearing their hand-me-downs. She seemed reluctant to accept that reasoning.

  Mama became alarmed when Onorato started to wear his hair in a heavily greased ducktail. When she saw Onorato’s new haircut, she scowled. Without comment to him or me, she went straight to Daddy and began a frowning, whispered conversation—all the while glancing over at Onorato’s shiny, slick head. I was embarrassed. Onorato’s parents never made comments about the way I dressed. I resented Daddy’s and Mama’s doing that to my friend.

  * * *

  Beyond their big fights, I was beginning to sense other, more subtle, changes happening in my parents. Their great drive for normalcy in our lives began shifting more toward defining our differences from the community we were living in. It wasn’t just in the clothes we wore or the style of hair. It was in their thoughts about our education, their feelings about our culture, and their hopes for our future.

  They didn’t want us to lose the Japanese we spoke at home. In fact, they wanted us to get better. They enrolled us in Saturday Japanese language classes. When we protested that we went to school five days a week and our friends got to play on Saturdays, Mama would just recite her old maxim, “Hito wa hito, uchi wa uchi.” “Others are others, our house is our house.” When we noted that it was expensive and we should save the money, Mama and Daddy responded that we would be grateful later in life that they spent this money now. We grumbled that we didn’t feel grateful right now.

  Even at regular school, our parents nudged us to be better. They bought us a set of the voluminous Encyclopedia Brittanica when they could ill afford it. Many evenings, Daddy would sit with us on the living room sofa and read to us from it. It was fun learning about the miscellanea of the world connected only by their common beginning
letter. One evening, he was reading to us from the S volume of the encyclopedia. This was when I first learned about William Shakespeare.

  * * *

  Three months after the Cinco de Mayo fiesta, our parents took us to Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles for the Nisei Week Festival. This was a festival of Japanese American arts and culture held every August. It was a colorful combination of traditional Japanese arts, crafts, and martial arts, with such singularly American components as talent shows, baby contests, an outdoor carnival, and a beauty pageant. The highlight of this week-long festival was the Ondo Dancing parade on the final evening. The streets of Little Tokyo were full of folk dancers—male and female from old folks to tiny tots, anyone wanting to participate, all dressed in their cool, summer kimonos, called yukata. The dancers belonging to classical dance schools were clad in showy, matching silk kimonos. It was a beautiful sight—a sea of dancers stepping and swaying to the lilting melody of the samisen, a kind of Japanese guitar.

  None of the formally trained dancers—as exquisite and lissome as they were—were as memorable as a giant black man, an old-time Little Tokyoite that Daddy told us was affectionately called “Little Joe.” He wore a hachi maki, the white cotton headband, around his shiny, shaved head and a crisp, white-and-blue cotton summer yukata wrapped around his huge body. His towering six-foot-plus height and massive physique made all the other dancers around him look downright diminutive. But his great bulk gave the surprising grace and ease of his movements a charming grandeur that made him a crowd favorite. Excited shouts of “Here he comes,” “Hey, Little Joe’s coming” were heard when he approached.

  “It’s just like before the war, with Little Joe back,” I heard one man saying to his wife nostalgically.

  “Look how he’s aged, though,” the woman observed.

  As Little Joe gracefully glided by, I heard the husband say to her, “Yeah, but look at you. No change.” She gave him a hard punch on the shoulder.

  * * *

  Daddy and Mama started a new activity on Sunday afternoons—family drives looking at houses for sale. They emphasized that we were only looking, not really buying. We still had to save up more money, they told us. It was great fun, but I wondered why, if we were only looking, we were driving around only in areas like the Crenshaw district or Culver City or the San Fernando Valley. It was more interesting driving around beautiful neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Bel Air where the houses were the biggest and the grandest. If they wanted us to do our best in school, then on our Sunday drives we should ride through only the best neighborhoods, I insisted.