1001 Cranes

by Naomi Hirahara

  I wave good-bye from the sidewalk. After the car turns the corner, I take a big breath through my nose. And then another and another. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot smell the smog.

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 2: Select an origami paper with a color that is vibrant, bright, and hard to miss. Gold and silver are the best.

  Three Kinds of Kami

  I know that there’s not just one kind of grandma. I know this because I met Nana, the grandmother of my best friend, Emilie, when she was visiting from New York City. Nana’s hair was short—real short, like a businessman’s—and as white as a polar bear’s coat. She wore huge round earrings from Africa and brightly colored clothes that had no zippers or buttons. When she spoke to us, she got right in our faces; the rims of her red-framed glasses almost hit our cheeks. She wanted to know everything about us—whether we’d had boyfriends (Emilie, yes, for two weeks; and me, no, never), whether our school taught sex education, and whether we regularly read (Emilie, no, except for celebrity magazines; and me, yes, especially manga). She kept telling us that girls needed to learn skills and make money; they couldn’t depend on men, and besides, women outlived men. Emilie was totally embarrassed, but I thought Nana was funny. After that first interrogation, Emilie made sure her nana never ever met her friends again.

  I’ve also had firsthand experience with my grandma on the Kato side, my dad’s mom. My cousins and I call her Baa-chan—yeah, like a sheep crying out to another sheep. My grandpa on that side is called Jii-chan. Jii-chan and Baa-chan live in the East Bay near Berkeley. Baa-chan’s fingers are kind of bent, but she doesn’t let that stop her from pinching my arms and cheeks. She buys me stuff all the time, but she keeps the price tags on everything, because she knows that her taste isn’t the same as mine.

  Even though we call her Baa-chan, Dad’s mom knows nothing about Japan. Nothing. She and Jii-chan, have a Japanese scroll in their living room and sometimes she wears clothing made of kimono material, but she always tells us, “I’m pure USA, born and bred. Hundred percent American.”

  If you’re 100 percent, I think, why are we calling you Baa-chan? And why did you beat all that monku stuff into Dad’s head?

  Grandma Michi is really different from Baa-chan. She never touches me unless it’s to push me along so I’ll walk faster. She doesn’t tell us stories about living on a farm and catching rabbits in the summertime. I don’t really know anything about Grandma Michi.

  But Grandma Michi does know a lot about Japan. I asked her once if she had ever lived there, and she gave me a long, cold look, as if I had accused her of being a Nazi. “No, never,” she said, barely looking at me.

  Then how come you know so much? I wanted to ask her. That’s how it is with Grandma Michi. It’s like you’re walking in a minefield and you don’t know when the bombs might go off right underneath you. That’s why I’ve learned to keep quiet and watch.

  Right now Grandma Michi has me sitting at the counter at Gramps’s flower shop. She has spent the past hour talking all about 1001 cranes. Some of it is actually interesting.

  She explains to me that the tradition of a thousand cranes goes back to a long time ago, when Japanese people walked around with samurai swords.

  “Origami” is the combination of two words: “ori,” meaning “to fold,” and “gami,” “paper.” “But ‘gami’ is really ‘kami,’” she explains. “When the Japanese say ‘paper,’ they say ‘kami,’ not ‘gami.’”

  “Well, why don’t they just say ‘orikami’?” I ask.

  “Sometimes when they combine, they change the sounds a little so it’s easier to say the word. But ‘kami’ can also mean ‘hair’ or it can mean ‘god.’ So you have to be careful.”

  Careful of what? I wonder. It isn’t like I’m going to be walking around saying “I want a piece of kami to write on. I need to brush my kami. Kami bless you.” I don’t dare verbalize my thoughs, because Grandma isn’t the type to take kindly to jokes. And she is in an especially bad mood right now.

  I am having my first crane-folding lesson in the flower shop, the 1001 cranes’ “first base of business,” Grandma tells me. This is where we snag most of our new customers. If they need flowers for their wedding or anniversary, they often need a 1001-cranes display. Back at the house is where we make the displays.

  My lesson with Grandma is not going well. She has created a D pile and even an F pile for the ones that don’t make her cut.

  “Always match the edges. You can’t go wrong if you go from there,” Grandma Michi says, peering over my elbow. “And no white should show,” she repeats for the tenth time, as if revealing white is as bad as letting someone see your underwear.

  Why don’t they just make origami paper that is colored on both sides, instead of leaving one side white? That would get rid of the “white” problem for sure.

  The most boring part of origami is making folds and then unfolding them. “Now you have guiding lines,” Grandma says. From these lines you can flip the paper and make more complicated folds. So it begins: fold the square piece of paper in half, like a sandwich, and then open. Fold it in half in the other direction and then open. Then it starts to get a little trickier: fold two diagonal corners together to form a triangle, open, and do the same with the other corners. All the while, watch those edges and make sure the white doesn’t show. Grandma is fanatical about the folded corners. They have to be as sharp as the point of a knife. If they aren’t, the cranes are thrown into the D pile or the F pile to go straight to crane hell.

  Once the guiding lines are created, the hard part comes. You have to fold all the insides into each other to create a smaller square that opens up like a flower. As I flip the paper and make all the folds and corners, I feel as though my belly is going through the same strange movements.

  I am attempting my eleventh bird—an F—when the bell attached to the top of the door rings. A customer has come to pick up arrangements for a fund-raiser. “I’ll need to help him load up his van,” Grandma Michi says to me, wiping her hands on her apron. “Watch the shop for me, all right?”

  Before I can monku, Grandma disappears into the back room and goes out the back door. I sigh and study the dreary storefront. Linoleum squares, in a pattern of swirled tan and white like cold coffee with curdled cream, line the floor. The shop is really clean—Grandma makes sure of that—but still it seems crowded.

  One metal stand holds greeting cards: “Happy Anniversary,” “Happy Birthday,” “Get Well,” and, of course, “In Sympathy.” Gramps’s customers must be into sickness and death, because there are more of those cards than anything else. They are all depressing, no cartoon characters or bright colors. Instead, they feature stiff irises or ugly lilies that look fake and especially out of place in a flower shop.

  On the opposite side of the store, next to the counter, is a long freezer with a sliding glass door. Inside are Grandpa’s masterpieces; I understand why people travel far for his arrangements. A dozen perfect roses in a glass vase. The long stems, smooth and thornless, are straight as needles and positioned as carefully as fake-pearl pins in a bride’s fancy hairdo. Each bud is partly open, a beautiful woman’s red lips. Another arrangement is more fun: blue flowers, with edges like baby bonnets, placed underneath a spray of white-shaped bells and dazzled with daisies, each petal outstretched as if happy to be alive—at least for now. In the corner is a Hawaiian number, tropicals that look like an exotic display of animals: bright orange beaks, the furry nose of a woolly mammoth, and red feathery crowns.

  The wooden counter I sit at is worn and smooth, probably from all the times my grandparents have slid floral arrangements across it to their customers. Gramps keeps his tools neatly to one side, in a shoe box. A funny circular metal tool that wraps around stems of roses to dethorn them. Green floral tape. Pruning shears. Stacked beside the box are two photo albums—one of flower arrangements, and the other of 1001-cranes displays.

  To keep my folded cranes clean, Grandma makes me use a large
cutting board that looks like it has been pulled from the counter in someone’s kitchen. I’m not quite sure if my efforts are just practice or will be used in someone’s 1001-cranes display. With the edge of my fingernail, I crease the folded square and then fold the sides to meet a line in the middle. The resulting shape resembles a gold kite waiting to be released in the wind.

  The bell rings again, and I expect to see Grandma. Instead, it’s a black girl a little younger than me. She’s swimming in a white martial arts outfit that looks like a canvas robe and pants. There’s an orange belt around her middle. Her hair is puffy yet neat—like two loaves of french bread braided together.

  “You’re Auntie Michi’s granddaughter,” she says.

  Auntie Michi? I can’t imagine Grandma Michi ever being an “auntie.” First of all, she doesn’t have any sisters or brothers that I know of. And second of all, I picture aunties as being soft and gentle, smelling of perfume. Definitely not Grandma Michi.

  I wait to see if the girl is going to buy something, but from the way she walks around, I know that she’s just here to waste time. I ignore her and concentrate on my latest crane. I take the kite shape and bend the top of it down. A couple of swift swipes of the fingernail to ensure a sharp line, and then open it all up again to the folded square. Now is the toughest challenge, tougher than anything that has come before: lift the bottom corner to form the shape of a baby bird’s open mouth, and finally, close to a diamond shape. Half of the diamond is slit in half, and I know that the slit needs to face the bottom. Fold the sides to the middle again. These folds are not guiding lines but one step from the finale. I have the head and the tail now; I just need to fold up and then in. With my last two cranes, I was bogged down by an F-rated lumpy head or crooked tail, but this one is different. The neck of the crane remains elegant and straight, its folded head demurely lowered. Where is Grandma? I have just folded a perfect crane, worthy of the A pile. I lay it delicately on its side on the wooden cutting board.

  “Not bad,” the girl says, and takes one of my origami papers. Her slender fingers then move back and forth quickly, as if she’s knitting the paper with her bare hands. And then, voilà—a perfectly formed grade-A crane.

  I sit here, stunned. This pint-sized karate kid knows her origami.

  “I was going to help Michi with the one-thousand-and-one-cranes displays. But that was before you came along.”

  I narrow my eyes. I can’t say that I’m a big fan of Grandma Michi, but she still is my grandmother, not this girl’s.

  “Why are you dressed in a karate outfit?” I finally ask. It’s not like me to speak to strangers like that, but I feel she is challenging me.

  “It’s not karate; it’s judo. And it’s called a gi.” She sticks out her front teeth (she has a slight overbite anyway) and spits out the last word. “My dad works at the dojo around the corner sometimes.”

  I look at her blankly and she sighs. “Do-jo. It’s a place where we learn judo.”

  I know what she’s getting at: I’m the Japanese person, so I should know all this stuff. But I don’t, and I’m kind of proud that I don’t. Like I’m a little bit like Baa-chan right now, with her American flag pin that she sometimes wears.

  The bell rings, and Grandma steps in, sweat running down the sides of her face like clear liquid sideburns. She looks dazed for a moment, as if she has been exposed to the sun too quickly.

  She then takes note of the white-uniformed girl in the store and smiles. “Oh, so you’ve met my favorite little helper, I see,” she says.

  Eggs, Ketchup, and Shoyu

  Grandma Michi’s little helper has a name. It’s Rachel Joseph. I’ve made up my mind that I don’t like Rachel Joseph. I don’t care that Grandma Michi calls the girl her favorite, but it’s obvious that Rachel Joseph does. I can tell by how she smiles, her upper teeth all jammed in her small jaw. She likes to be called Grandma Michi’s favorite. That’s fine, I think. You can wear that crown.

  “I’d like you to be nice to Rachel,” Grandma Michi says as we are driving home.

  I’m surprised that my grandmother is still thinking about that little judo girl.

  “I’m nice,” I say, knowing that it really isn’t true. But how did Grandma Michi figure that out so quickly?

  “Sometimes she likes to sit in the shed in back of the shop, next to the Dumpster. It’s a playhouse for her. She knows the combination to the lock.”

  Whatever, I think. If she wants to hang out in a probably rat-infested shack, it’s her business.

  When I get back to the house with Grandma Michi, I check to see if Dad has called. But he hasn’t.

  “Are you sure the answering machine is working? Looks pretty old.” Their message machine has two minicassettes—one for outgoing messages, the other for incoming—and I flip up the lid to make sure the tape for incoming is still intact.

  “No messages for you, Angela,” Janet repeats. “I checked, two times.” She flutters her single eyelids, her straight lashes pointed downward like the brushes of a vacuum cleaner. “What about your cell phone?”

  I haven’t touched my phone since Mom gave it to me this morning. If it was any other time, I would be checking out all the features and text-messaging my friends in Mill Valley. But somehow, the cell phone makes me mad. Like it’s a bribe for me to behave myself. I do want to hear from Dad, so I finally open it up and check for messages. Nothing. Maybe Dad doesn’t even have my number. I wait for a little while and call his cell. The voice mail picks up. My heart first jumps at the sound of his voice and then feels heavy. I think about leaving a message but hang up before the recording gets to the beep.

  Before I go to bed tonight, I walk over to the two masks beside the door. I focus on the face of the smiling woman. What are you so happy about? I ask her silently. And why is your face so pale? I’ll never understand why being the color of plaster is considered beautiful in Japan.

  The more I stare at the mask, the more confused I become about her expression. Is she really laughing? Or maybe crying? Or both.

  I sleep in the sleeping bag again, this time on the couch, where my mother slept the night before. When Gramps wakes me up to eat on Sunday, it is nine o’clock. Grandma and Aunt Janet have already left to deliver a 1001-cranes display to a wedding.

  “I can do breakfast real good. In camp I worked in the mess hall,” Gramps says. The camp he’s talking about is not summer camp, but a camp in the swampland in Arkansas where he and his family were locked up during World War II for being Japanese. I don’t know why anyone would have mistaken Gramps for being real Japanese—that is, born in Japan. He speaks hardly any Japanese, and his favorite television shows are all-American westerns, although a lot of times he has seemed to root for the Indians more than the cowboys.

  He breaks four eggs, two in each hand, against the edge of the skillet, lines of egg whites dripping onto the stove top. He is all thumbs, but I can’t blame him for trying to cheer me up.

  “Set the table, will you, An-jay? And don’t forget the ketchup. And the shoyu.”

  I’m not quite sure what Gramps is preparing for breakfast, but I am too tired to ask. In Mill Valley, we usually eat fresh raspberries and blueberries over granola with soy milk. What appear here are two runny sunny-side up eggs over fried bologna and a side of rice.

  “You eat rice for breakfast?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Gramps says, squirting ketchup on his eggs and then dousing them with soy sauce. “In fact, I betcha most of the world eats this stuff.”

  My stomach starts to turn and I take a sip of orange juice.

  Gramps notices that I’m not eating. “You’ve been living up in that hakujin town too long.”

  Whenever I’m with Gramps, he inevitably starts his hakujin talk. His universe is clearly defined for him: the Japanese world and the hakujin, white, world.

  “I have a black friend at school,” I say.

  “But I bet she’s hakujin inside.”

  I roll my eyes. When Gramps g
ets into this mode, there’s no talking to him.

  “So what are you going to do today? I was thinking of fixing Janet’s old bike for you.”

  “I brought my skateboard.”

  “Skateboard? Isn’t that what those crazy hakujin boys do?”

  My skateboard, an old concave wooden deck with four tan polyurethane wheels, is nothing special. But it’s my main source of independent transportation and I am planning to go as far as it will take me.

  “Well, don’t go too far,” Gramps says. “Gardena isn’t what it used to be.” In spite of his reservations, he takes an old shoelace threaded through a key and places it around my neck. “Put that underneath your shirt, so no one can see,” he says.

  I do as I am told, feeling the coldness of the key against my breastbone above my bra. It is one of those bras with molded cups, 34A. In the crisscross intersection is a tiny embroidered pink flower sitting in the middle of a green fabric leaf.

  I don’t make it past the lawn before I hear someone calling to me from the driveway next door. It is a Japanese woman about my grandmother’s age. “Hello there. Hello. You must be Michi and Nick’s granddaughter. I’m Ruth Oyama and this is my husband, Jack.”

  Mr. Oyama holds a black Bible; Mrs. Oyama’s Bible is in a quilted book cover with handles. My family isn’t religious, so I always am both curious about and repelled by people who go to church. Certain Christian people’s faces seem especially bright, like they are shining a light into the dark corners of my mind. The lady, Mrs. O, has a piercing gaze, and I feel that she can see right through me.

  “Oh,” I finally say, realizing that they are waiting for me to introduce myself. I drop my skateboard onto the driveway. “I’m Angela. Angela Kato.”

  “Kato…Your dad related to the Katos in San Gabriel?” Mr. Oyama asks.

  I crinkle my nose and nudge my skateboard with the toe of my sneaker. “I don’t know. My dad’s from northern California,” I say.