With the mention of beef, her mind wandered back into the continuing saga of O Rei do Gado. The first generation of Mezengas and Berdinazzis gradually die off. The second generation sells the coffee farms, exchanging their inheritances for even bigger ventures. Mezenga becomes the King of Cattle and Berdinazzi becomes the Dairy King, and they still hate each other. Raul Cortês plays Berdinazzi, the Dairy King. Miss Hamamatsu thought he was perfect in his role, gradually growing old over the course of the novela. She thought about this incredible opportunity to pretend to be someone else for months and in full public TV view until practically everyone in Brazil knew even the most intimate things about this other you. Maybe being in a commercial wasn’t the same thing, but imagine: she could become the Queen of Beef.
The fourth week in March, Jorginho said, “I think we’ve got a bite. I sent your photos to this magazine operation.” He waved a shiny copy in the air.
She could see the pose of a woman in a string bikini, down on all fours, the most prominent part of her—her buttocks—pressed against the glossy surface of the magazine’s cover.
Jorginho reassured her. “This is a high-class operation. Look at the quality of these photos, the quality of the paper. It’s sophisticated stuff. And prominent exposure. They are doing big business not only with the dekasegi crowd here in Japan but in Brazil as well. After all, beautiful women are beautiful anywhere. I told them they should put some Japanese translations in the margins. Japanese men are crazy for Brazilian women. They could get this market as well. How about it? You could be the foldout in the next issue.” He unzipped the crisp protective cellophane of the magazine and dropped the foldout from the slick pages. A woman, naked except for a cowboy hat and boots, hung there, a limp tribute to Brazilian country music no doubt, and yet, the Queen of Beef. The dekasegi girlfriend of the month.
Bruno Mezenga is unhappily married to the bitchy Sílvia Pfeiffer, who is having an affair with a gigolo. In the meantime, Mezenga meets Luana played by Patrícia Pillar who is involved in the Movimento dos Sem Terra. She comes with a group of landless peasants and squats on Mezenga’s land. Bruno Mezenga proves that his land is in use and that he’s a good man, so Luana falls in love with him. It’s true love. And besides, Patrícia Pillar is so rapturously beautiful even in jeans, without makeup, and playing an idealistic activist, he’d be stupid not to fall in love with her. The secret is that Luana is really a Berdinazzi and doesn’t know it. Fate is at the crossroads.
As a dekasegi, Miss Hamamatsu appreciated the message of the downtrodden, those without land. They had every right to take over land held by absentee landlords and make it productive. Was there no justice in this world? She would be the Japanese mestiça Patrícia Pillar, the righteous and beautiful Luana. She with other dekasegi would take over Japanese contract companies and production lines. One day she would meet a powerful and princely Japanese executive who would sympathize with her plight and fall madly in love with her. It would be a true but forbidden love and eventually, after many episodes, their love would bring two feuding families—Japanese and dekasegi Nikkei—together and change the world.
The naked Queen of Beef still flapped between the porn pages, and Jorginho continued. “Listen, it’s a beginning. Everyone has to start somewhere. It’s understandable why this magazine has really taken off. All these single dekasegi men are living in dorms with other men. All they see is other men, work double shifts and overtime round the clock. Girl, have you no pity? A life of drudgery. What have they got to look forward to? They miss their girlfriends. They don’t get any action. If they go to discos, it’s one woman to ten men. You women can pick and choose. When a beauty like you comes along, it’s natural that we should want to spread the bounty around. It’s just a photo. What’s the harm of a little imagination?”
Miss Hamamatsu looked around at her video recorder world. All at the same time, 150 VCRs were making 150 copies. O Rei do Gado was on all the monitors, but at slightly different moments in the same episode. It was disconcerting to watch. Bruno Mezenga embraces Luana; they kiss passionately. Their theme music surrounds them as the romantic moment is caught from several angles. All the monitors stuttered this image in various stages like a singing round. Since this current novela was picking up popularity, it was necessary to make more and more copies. It was a big seller in all the stores. Next week, maybe all the dekasegi women would be watching this scene, and all the dekasegi men would be staring at the naked Queen of Beef. Imagine.
Jorginho replaced the centerfold. “Actually, the guys at this magazine are looking to expand their horizons. They’re interested in exploring the video end of the business. This is in the future of course, but it’s a marketing opportunity they’d be foolish not to take advantage of. I’m working on them to sell my idea about commercial inserts in video rentals. I think they’re interested in investing in it, you know, as a start. You have to start somewhere.”
Miss Hamamatsu followed the kisses around the room, copied from one VCR to the next, 150 times. The scene closed. To be continued. Then the credits came up. She ejected the master copy and inserted another with the next episode. “I guess you’re right,” she agreed. “I imagine you have to start somewhere.”
“Of course they’re going to invest in the Miss Nikkei Contest. Their investment will bring us over the top. Hey.” He pulled her away from her work and caught her in an embrace. “I’m also planning a ballroom dance with Miss Nikkei and her entire court. It’s going to be the event of the year!” he exclaimed. He took his queen in a precarious waltz around her electronic prison. “By the end of the year, my dear, we’ll be dancing our first dance.” He ended with an exaggerated bow and she with a grand flourish.
Then she hurried to push all the play/record buttons.
Jorginho paused to worship her. A moment of reverence and then the theme song. Miss Nikkei. She was the best of both worlds.
THAT WAS ALL
Wakako Yamauchi
Last night I dreamed about a man I hadn’t thought about in many years. He was my father’s friend, a hold-over from his bachelor days. As far back as I can remember, starting somewhere in the late twenties, Suzuki-san visited us—though not frequently—and my earliest memory of him begins with these visits when at four or five, I used to run from him. I hated the feel of his hands; they were tough and calloused from farm work. My father’s bachelor friends were constantly reaching for me—perhaps they were amazed that he, bachelor of bachelors, had settled down to domesticity with this beautiful woman, himself not so handsome, not so cunning (still not losing his bachelor ways—the drinking, the gambling), and had this scrawny kid, or perhaps they were recalling other children spawned in other wombs and brought to life only by seeing and feeling me and remembering. At that early age I suspected something sinister about their caresses, because I did not find this touch-touch attitude in men with families. Japanese people rarely touch, and my father . . . I cannot recall the warmth of my father’s hand, except the sharp snap of it against my thigh when I misbehaved. My father acted as though I should accept these attentions from his friends as accommodations to him. I thought they were more for my mother’s sake.
Born in 1924 in Westmoreland, California, the playwright and author WAKAKO YAMAUCHI has this to say about her work: “It took forty years, Garrett Hongo, and the Feminist Press to get Songs My Mother Taught Me published. I’m proud to say that the Hungry Mind Review (now called The Ru minator) has included it in the 100 Best American Books of the 20th Century. Over these past decades I have continued writing, covering some of what I learned along the way, some mysteries that still elude me, joys that persist, and many of the bad habits that cling like burrs on an old dog’s shanks.”
Raised on that desert farm under the patronage of two adults wrapped in their own set of problems and isolated from peer values, my imagination was left to run rampant. Although I cannot now believe it was entirely a misconception, I had the suspicion that all men were secretly and madly in love with my mot
her, who was the most beautiful and charming of all women. Magically emerging from that desert floor, she endured the harsh daylight realities and blossomed in the cool of the evening. After the bath. And I was sure no man in his proper mind could resist her. My father, I thought, was not in his proper mind.
My mother was a perfect Japanese wife except with my father in the bright light of day when she did the bulk of her nagging. My father’s strength was his silence which he applied in varying pressures from Arctic chill to rock mountain imperturbability to wide open, no horizon, uninhabitable desert silence. My mother’s emotional variances were my barometer: today she sings—fair and mild; today she remembers Japan—scattered showers; today he has made her unhappy again.
Suzuki-san lived in Niland 30 or 40 miles from us in a treeless landscape of sand and tumbleweed. I don’t know why this area, not so distant, seemed more desolate than where we lived, maybe because where we lived there was a mother and father and a child, and where Suzuki-san lived, there was only him and two bleak structures, a kitchen and a bedroom, and the land beyond this complex and ranch was untouched from year to year, century to century—only the desert animals pocking its surface and the rain streaking the sand in a flash flood now and then. That seemed awesome to me.
I remember a visit to his homestead. I was six or seven. It was winter and my mother bundled me in a heavy coat and packed the car with pillows and blankets and we drove for what seemed hours. I was disappointed when we got there because there was no one and nothing to play with and in this incredibly boring place, the sun was blinding, the wind biting, and my mother was again in the kitchen cooking and mending Suzuki-san’s clothes, and my father was walking up and down the furrows with Suzuki-san. I tried staying with my mother but the kitchen depressed me; without a woman’s touch, it looked like the inside of a garage—no embroidered dish towels, crocheted potholders, nor a window with a swatch of dotted swiss fluttering.
I walked along with my father and Suzuki-san but their frequent stopping to examine plants, scratch the earth, turn over equipment, bored me and I wandered off to the desert. My father was not alarmed; on that windswept land a few loud bellows carried for miles and would quickly draw me back to him. Besides, there was no shrub taller than myself I could hide behind, no ditch I could drown in, and snakes and vipers were not considered a threat.
I wandered around looking for—I don’t know what—maybe some indication that someone had been here before me and left something for me, and finding nothing, I stood by the fine pure sand the winds had pushed against a shrub and mused that it was possible I was the first person who had ever been on this particular mound of sand and put my shoe to that dust that began with creation and then my hand and then my cheek and then my hair and finally rolled myself on it and fell asleep.
My mother said later, brushing the sand from my coat with hard quick hands, “I think she rolled in the dirt,” and my father said contemptuously, “Like a dog,” and Suzuki-san looked at my mother with those bemused eyes that pretended to know something he didn’t and I grew very angry and denied it all.
It was his mocking eyes that I disliked.
Intuitively I knew that my father, close to 40, and my mother, perhaps not yet 30, had abiding ties with Suzuki-san that started earlier than my arrival, perhaps somewhere back in Japan in Shizuoka, and perhaps on something less mysterious than appeared on the surface. I thought later maybe Suzuki-san had loaned my father a vast sum of money.
Suzuki-san was unlike my father’s other bachelor friends, who still followed the crops along the length of California, cutting lettuce in Dinuba, harvesting grapes in Fresno, plums, peaches, and finally strawberries in Oceanside and those little known places—Vista, Escondido, Encinitas. They spent their money as soon as they got it—drinking, gambling, carousing—until at the southernmost end of the state, they looked for us and stayed two or three months eating my mother’s cooking, and drinking my father’s wine, oblivious to my mother’s sighs which grew deeper as the visits wore on. Although Suzuki-san drank with my father too, he never permitted himself the coarse laughing and out-of-control drunkenness characteristic of the other roustabouts. Also Suzuki-san leased a parcel of land and farmed it like a family man—although he had no family that anyone spoke of either here in America or in Japan—nor did he show any apparent need for family, nor did my father or mother show interest in seeing him married. The need only surfaced now and then when he would catch me unaware and hold me squirming in his sandpaper grasp. Or sometimes it showed in the way he looked at my mother with his amused eyes. Perhaps when these needs were strongest, Suzuki-san came to us and ate with us, often bringing something special for my mother to cook, examining each morsel on his hashi before bringing it to his lips and chewing slowly—movements as sensual and private as making love. Once when he caught me watching him, he laughed and slipped some food into my mouth in a gesture so intimate I flushed warm and my father coughed suddenly. Those days he would stay overnight, sleeping on a cot in the kitchen and leaving in the morning after my mother’s good breakfast.
Then about the time I turned fifteen, something very strange happened to me.
Suzuki-san was visiting us on this summer evening. We had finished supper; the day’s warmth was still with us as we sat on the porch fanning away gnats and insects that flew past us toward the light of the small kerosene lantern. The air was still and the cicadas hummed without beginning or end. Suzuki-san returned from his bath stripped to his waist and sat next to me.
In the half dark I saw his brown body and smelled his warm scent and in the summer night with the cicadas’ pervasive drone in my ear and the scent and sight of Suzuki-san’s body assailing my better judgment, I fell in love.
I sat in the protective shadows of the night and watched the face I’d never before regarded as handsome and scrutinized the eyes that always seemed to mock me. I wondered about the wasted years this man had kept his perfect body to himself, never giving or receiving the love that was most certainly available to him. I wondered why he continued to work in his self-imposed exile and what future he hoped for himself . . . and whom he would share it with. An indescribable loneliness and sorrow came over me. I wished he would touch me again. He’d long ago stopped that.
Then he looked at me. My stomach turned and roiled with things terrible and sublime and sensual and sexual and rotten that I was unable to contain. They passed through me and fouled the still night. My father grunted and walked away. My mother glared at me and fanned the air away from herself and Suzuki-san.
I was mortified. I was betrayed by my mother, who should have found a way out for me. Instead she separated herself, denied me, and remained aloof, the lady of evening dew, and I . . . I was humiliated. Suzuki-san’s eyes did not change. I went into the house.
That was all, that was all.
A few years later my father, unable to stave off the economic disaster that was our inexorable fate, moved us on to Oceanside. And a few years after that, war with Japan broke out and changed the course of our lives and we along with thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans, were incarcerated in Arizona. Maybe Suzuki-san was also in the same camp. I don’t remember seeing him.
And I fell in love at least three times thereafter—each time with the same brown body, the same mocking eyes—and the last time, I was drawn into a tumultuous love affair that spanned twenty-five years and ended on a rainy January morning. And perhaps I should add, I have not loved since.
And last night I had this dream:
I was living in a lean-to which I instinctively knew was part of Suzuki-san’s house. The house itself was in terrible disrepair. It looked like a wrecking ball had been put to it. The floors buckled and the walls caved inward.
I felt I should offer to do something for the man who kindly shared his house with me, battered though it was. I was thinking of my mother who had so long ago done his cooking and mending. I went about gathering clothes I might wash for him. While going from room to
room I passed a cracked and dusty mirror and in the fragmented reflection, I saw myself—older than my mother had ever been, older than I remembered myself to be.
I found two items to wash: an ancient pair of twills, moldy and stiff but unworn, and a sock, which I recognized as my own, half filled with sand.
Then I saw him in one of the rooms.
As it is with dreams, I was not surprised when I saw he was the same man I remember on the summer night when I so suddenly fell in love. He was naked to the waist, his body was tight and brown, he wore the same pants. In my head I thought, “He hasn’t changed at all—still 35 . . . what would he want with this fifty-year-old woman I’ve grown to be?” But my mouth said, “I hope you’re not paying a lot of rent for this place.”
He said, “The rent is cheap.”
It was my fault. I should not have started a conversation sounding so shrewish. I looked in his face to see if I could find some recognition of me . . . the me that he once wanted to hold . . . the me that was part of my mother’s evening dew . . . the me that was gone forever.
I watched him until he could avoid me no longer and in my dream his eyes mocked me again . . . as they have always done.
A PERSONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
First, a warning: This is definitely not a complete listing of works of fiction by Asian and Asian American authors who write in English. I am happy to report that since the publication of the original Charlie Chan Is Dead in 1993, there are many, many more writers around than I had included in that first edition’s “Selected Readings” list. Obviously, some of the writers on this revised list have written many more books of fiction than I am able to note here. And because of space constraints, I have regretfully had to omit books of poetry and nonfiction by Asian and Asian American authors that have had an enormous influence on me. I have included books by several Philippine, British, Canadian, Caribbean, and Pacific Islander authors. Nowadays, with a little effort and computer know-how, one can actually order these once hard-to-find books through the Internet. I also recommend checking out the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, which has an excellent bookstore that one can visit in person, or online at www.aaww.org. It was a delightful challenge to put together this personal bibliography of novels and short-story collections. Here then, alphabetized by author:
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