by Joy Kogawa
“The truth of the matter is that this—this mess of pottage—was used to strip Canadian children of their birthright."
I opened the kitchen door to let in the late-night air. It was soothing and cool and gave me a comforting feeling of distance from all the things she was saying. She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes wearily as she joined me at the screen door and handed me the last of the sheaf of papers. "I know you were too young to know what was going on," she said, "but it must have been hell in the ghost towns."
The light at the door was not very good but I could read the large print of the copy of a telegram sent to Mackenzie King from some concerned missionaries in Slocan. "Conditions worse than evacuation. Repatriation and dispersal policies the cruelest cut of all. Expensive, inhuman, and absolutely unnecessary. Not even a semblance of democracy or common sense in this latest racial persecution. Segregation being rushed. Loyal people being squeezed out. Elderly parents separated from families. Work offered to the Japan-bound but none for those who stay…."
“Are you in touch with any of the friends you made in Slocan?" Aunt Emily asked.
"No," I said. "Not one."
Aunt Emily knew what had happened to quite a number of people, many of whom were now living in Toronto. Kenji's grandfather, she told me, was a veteran in the Princess Pats in World War 1. He cooperated with the will of the country by taking all his family and grandchildren to hunger, poverty, and ostracism in Japan. Only Mas, Kenji's older brother, remained in Canada.
“And where's Kenji?"
She didn't know. I have never found out.
Distanced as I felt in time to the people of Slocan, I could not feel as remote as the report in the Vancouver Daily Province sounded.
“‘Indifferent' Jap Repats Start Homeward Trek” was the headline of a report dated June 1, 1946.
Six hundred and seventy solemn-faced Japanese…sailed out of Vancouver Friday night bound for the “land of the rising sun”. They were the first of Canada's Japanese to follow soon under Canada's Japanese Repatriation plan. One thousand of them will sail for Japan about June 15.
There were few smiling faces among the boatload. Solemnness was written in their faces; only indifference they showed. The ship of the voluntary repatriates was SS Marine Angel. Friday the first group watched silently as their possessions were hoisted aboard. RCMP carefully scrutinized each bundle, each suitcase, each barrel. They were searching for liquor or firearms.…
"What it must have been like,” Aunt Emily said, "Who knows how or why they decided to leave? Some Issei without their children around couldn't read and simply signed because they were urged to."
The breeze was making a soft whistling sound as it rushed past the screen door. That and Uncle's snoring were the only other sounds to be heard in the post-midnight hour.
"What do you think happened to Mother and Grandma in Japan?" I asked. "Did they starve, do you think?"
Aunt Emily's startle was so swift and subtle it barely registered. But I could feel that somewhere, beneath her eyes, a shutter had clicked, open and shut at my mentioning Mother and Grandma. It was as if my unexpected question was a sudden beam of pain that had to be extinguished immediately.
She stared into the blackness. Sometimes when I stand in a prairie night the emptiness draws me irresistibly, like a dust speck into a vacuum cleaner, and I can imagine myself disappearing off into space like a rocket with my questions trailing behind me.
"Let's go for a walk,” Aunt Emily whispered.
Our eyes took a few moments to adjust to the starlight. We walked slowly along the driveway and down the middle of the gravel road. All the town lights were out and there was no sign of life anywhere except for a neighbour's cat that sauntered out of the ditch beside the road and followed us.
The quietness and spaciousness of the night altered the concentration of our evening's conversation.
"Nomi, I've told you all I can about them," she said. We walked in silence a short distance, then she asked about Obasan's and Uncle's health. And about Nakayama-sensei and his visits to them. For a while she talked sadly about Nakayama-sensei's desperation to keep the community together. To a people for whom community was the essence of life, destruction of community was the destruction of life, she said. She described Nakayama-sensei as a deeply wounded shepherd trying to tend the flock in every way he could. But all the sheep were shorn and stampeded in the stockyards and slaughterhouses of prejudice.
“I remember one time Mr. Nakayama came out east to take pictures of as many young Nisei as he could find to prove to the parents back in the camps that their children were alive. How could they know whether the girls working as domestics were all right—whether the young people on the farms were eating adequately—whether the boys who had left the road camps were managing in the cities? The rumors were so bad.”
Throughout the country, here and there, were a few people doing what they could. There were missionaries, sending telegrams, drafting petitions, meeting together in rooms to pray. There were a few politicians sitting up late into the night, weighing conscience against expedience. There were the young Nisei men and women, the idealists, the thinkers, the leaders, scattered across the country. In Toronto there were the Jews who opened their businesses to employ the Nisei. But for every one who sought to help, there were thousands who didn't. Cities in every province slammed their doors shut.
"Didn't any of us sneak back to Vancouver?" I asked. Aunt Emily shrugged, "I heard of one fellow who changed his name to Wong and passed for Chinese."
"Masayuki Wong? Kenzaburo Yip?"
"There must have been a few who tried the trick."
"Did any of us try to get our property back?"
Aunt Emily shook her head. "Well, there's Uncle Dan," she said.
Uncle Dan has become a widower in recent years and I've often wondered whether more than a friendship might not yet spring up between them. Aunt Emily was obviously not thinking of romance. She started telling me instead of his dealings with the government when he was trying to get his farm back.
Uncle Dan, she told me, was one of the most fiercely loyal Canadians among the Nisei, and toward the end of the war he was among the handful of men picked to serve in intelligence work in the Far East. He was a sergeant stationed at H.Q. Malaya Command in Kuala Lumpur, and Aunt Emily said she wrote him letters about what was happening on the home front. The one thing that kept Uncle Dan going, according to Aunt Emily, was his gratitude for the legal assistance of Saskatchewan's politicians and lawyers.
Uncle Dan, I knew, had owned a strawberry farm in the Fraser Valley and his property was included in the land that the Veterans Land Administration bought at scandalously low prices in order to sell it to Canadian war veterans. Uncle Dan, himself a Canadian war veteran, fought his battle but never saw his farm again.
"It's all recorded," Aunt Emily said. "And you know about the Fraser Valley Relief Fund, of course?"
I didn't know. She told me that when the Fraser Valley flooded and the land that had once belonged to Japanese Canadians was under water, there was a public outpouring of help to the farmers and residents of the area. "We sent money," she said, "money to help the people who had taken our farms! I imagine we were hoping that it would show our good faith. Just like a bunch of unrequited lovers. We end up being despised twice as much and treated like cringing dogs."
We were walking up the gravel road again, having done our midnight sightseeing of the two blocks of the main street with its two garages, one Chinese restaurant, a grocery store, one general store, and another restaurant and pool room where the bus stops. We walked east past the railway tracks and out along the highway a short distance before turning back.
It was after two o'clock by the time we got in. Aunt Emily wanted to show me a memorandum to the House and the Senate written by the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians. I was ready for bed.
"I’ll read it another time," I apologized, and Aunt Emily said she'd mail it to
me with Uncle's documents. "For your education," she said.
I don't know what use Uncle's documents are to him now that he's dead. As for me, I suppose I do need to be educated. I've never understood how these things happen. There's something called an order-in-council that sails like a giant hawk across a chicken yard, and after the first shock there's a flapping squawking lunge for safety. One swoop and the first thousand are on ships sailing for disaster. I can remember the chickens in Slocan, their necks and tiny heads thrust low, diving for shelter, one time that a hawk came circling down.
Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky. And the people on the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians rally together, gathering their desperation into cool print.
"It is urgently submitted," they state in the memorandum, that the Orders-in-Council are wrong and indefensible…."
The paper battles rage through the mails onto the desks of busy politicians, while back in the chicken yard one hawk after another circles overhead till the chickens are unable to come out of hiding and their neck feathers molt from the permanent crick. The seasons pass and the leghorns no longer lay eggs. The nests are fouled and crawl with lice.
All of Aunt Emily's words, all her papers, the telegrams and petitions, are like scratchings in the barnyard, the evidence of much activity, scaly claws hard at work. But what good they do, I do not know—those little black typewritten words—rain words, cloud droppings. They do not touch us where we are planted here in Alberta, our roots clawing the sudden prairie air. The words are not made flesh. Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again. All my prayers disappear into space.
twenty-eight
1945. Lethbridge, Alberta. A city. Ah. We have come to a city of wind with stores and streets and people angled against the gusts and behold we are sitting safely out of the blowing debris in a restaurant at a round table and there are flat oval-shaped dishes with vegetables and thick cup-shaped bowls containing strange, dry, rather hard rice.
In a corner by the window is a jukebox like the one in the Green Light Café in Slocan. Two unshaven men are sitting beside it. Throughout the meal, one keeps beckoning to me with his crooked finger and he winks and holds out a five-dollar bill. Whenever I glance around he is there staring, his stubbly red-blotched face hanging down, and as he breathes, his whole chest and shoulders heave. The man beside him grins and nods, pointing to the money. Beyond them, bits of dust and papers splat against the window and the pane sucks back and forth. The walls shudder.
I poke Obasan's arm and she shakes her head so slightly it is almost as if there is no movement. Her lips have barely changed but there is a tightness to them. She has the same wary expression as we leave the restaurant.
The truck in which all our luggage has been piled is pulled up outside and the wooden sides of the truck heave in the wind. I stand close beside Obasan, watching but not watching as Uncle, his eyes looking sideways to the ground, nods as a man talks to him. The man's cap is drawn down so far I cannot see his face. Uncle turns and I am lifted onto the back of the truck with Stephen and the boxes and bags. Uncle climbs into the back with us and we are off down across the city streets and out over a strange empty landscape. It is flat as the ocean for as far as I can see with a few farmhouses like ships on the horizon. Here and there are straight unnatural rows of fierce almost leafless trees pruned like the brooms of a chimney sweep.
I am standing balancing against the corner, and peer through my fingers into the wind. We have bumped off the pavement onto a washboard road and there is a whirling storm of dust that flumes behind us. In the shaking of the truck and the buffeting of dust and wind, I can only breathe in short shallow gasps. The sides of the truck and the floor shake and bounce and the chains at the back clank in a Raggedy Ann jig. I squeeze my eyes together against the wind and hold the corners of the truck, my arms outstretched. My dress flaps wildly. I am a flag fraying against the sky. Or a scarecrow or a skeleton in the wind.
"Where are we going?" I shout to Uncle.
He is sitting up straight like a sphinx on a box and staring at the land. We have come to the moon. We have come to the edge of the world, to a place of angry air. Was it just a breath ago that we felt the green watery fingers of the mountain air? Here, the air is a fist. I am leaning into the corner, a boxer cowering against the ropes. Uncle, his hands on his knees, is a statue beside me.
"Where are we going?" I shout again, moving along the edge of the truck, closer to Uncle.
He nods but doesn't reply. The wind howls and guffaws at my eardrums.
Running along beside the wind-tunnel road is a ditch of brown water bordered with grass and weeds fluttering like laundry. On the miles of barbed-wire fences, there are round skull-shaped weeds clinging or occasionally careening off into the brown air. We keep heading straight down the road and we are the only thing moving on the earth.
When we stop finally, it is at the side of a small hut, like a toolshed, smaller even than the one we lived in in Slocan. We are at the far end of a large yard that has a white house in the middle. Between the shed and the farmer's house are some skeletons of farm machinery with awkward metal jaws angled upward, like the remains of dinosaurs in a prehistoric battleground. There is a mound of earth beyond the machines which Uncle tells me later is a root cellar. The farmer's house is a real house with a driveway leading into a garage. It makes me think of our house in Vancouver, though this is not as large. Through the whipping brown dust, I can see its white lace curtains in the window and its border of determined orange flowers. Our hut is at the edge of a field that stretches as far as I can see and is filled with an army of spartan plants fighting in the wind. Every bit of plant growth here looks deliberate and fierce.
Uncle leaps off the truck and talks with the man, then they both begin unloading the boxes, the wind whipping Uncle's thick hair till it stands up like a rudder on his head. Obasan and Stephen and I carry a box into the one-room hut. The door slams open and soot and dust leap to the walls. We prop open the door against the buffeting wind and form a convoy, carrying and dragging boxes into the room. When we are done at last, and close the door, we are finally able to breathe.
A round stove stands in the middle of the room like a fat sentry on duty. There are a broom and some rags in a corner and a wooden stand against the wall by the door. Nothing else. One room, one door, two windows. One window faces the farm machines, one faces the field.
The farmer's truck is thrumming across the yard and we are alone in this wind-battered place. Uncle and Stephen are piling the boxes against the wall opposite the door, and Obasan squats, pressing the rags against the space under the door.
The first night we sleep on quilts on the floor, the four of us side by side, my legs held stiff and straight. In the morning I waken to the sound of Uncle coming through the door with a bucket of water. A thick brown dust has settled over everything, and as I sit up the blanket moves, leaving its imprint on the naked floor. I lie down again and close my eyes.
twenty-nine
There is a folder in Aunt Emily's package containing only one newspaper clipping and an index card with the words "Facts about evacuees in Alberta”. The newspaper clipping has a photograph of one family, all smiles, standing around a pile of beets. The caption reads: “Grinning and Happy."
Find Jap Evacuees Best Beet Workers
Lethbridge, Alberta, Jan. 22
Japanese evacuees from British Columbia supplied the labour for 65% of Alberta's sugar beet acreage last year, Phil Baker, of Lethbridge, president of the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers' Association, stated today.
"They played an important part in producing our all-time record crop of 363,000 tons of beets in 1945," he added.
Mr. Baker explained Japanese evacuees worked 19,500 acres of beets and German prisoners of war worked 5,000 acres. The labour for the remaining 5,500 acres of Alberta's 30,000 acres of sugar beets was provided by far
mers and their families. Some of the heaviest beet yields last year came from farms employing Japanese evacuees.
Generally speaking, Japanese evacuees have developed into most efficient beet workers, many of them being better than the transient workers who cared for beets in southern Alberta before Pearl Harbor….
Facts about evacuees in Alberta? The fact is I never got used to it and I cannot, I cannot bear the memory. There are some nightmares from which there is no waking, only deeper and deeper sleep.
There is a word for it. Hardship. The hardship is so pervasive, so inescapable, so thorough it’s a noose around my chest and I cannot move anymore. All the oil in my joints has drained out and I have been invaded by dust and grit from the fields and mud is in my bone marrow. I can't move anymore. My fingernails are black from scratching the scorching day and there is no escape.
Aunt Emily, are you a surgeon cutting at my scalp with your folders and your filing cards and your insistence on knowing all? The memory drains down the sides of my face, but it isn't enough, is it? It's your hands in my abdomen, pulling the growth from the lining of my walls, but bring back the anesthetist turn on the ether clamp down the gas mask bring on the chloroform when will this operation be over Aunt Em?
Is it so bad?
Yes.
Do I really mind?
Yes, I mind. I mind everything. Even the flies. The flies and flies and flies from the cows in the barn and the manure pile—all the black flies that curtain the windows, and Obasan with a wad of toilet paper, spish, then with her bare hands as well, grabbing them and their shocking white eggs and the mosquitoes mixed there with the other insect corpses around the base of the gas lamp.
It's the chicken coop “house” we live in that I mind. The uninsulated unbelievable thin-as-a-cotton-dress hovel never before inhabited in winter by human beings. In summer it's a heat trap, an incubator, a dry sauna from which there is no relief. In winter the icicles drip down the inside of the windows and the ice is thicker than bricks at the ledge. The only place that is warm is by the coal stove, where we rotate like chickens on a spit, and the feet are so cold they stop registering. We eat doves of roasted garlic on winter nights to warm up.