by Leslie Helm
I had never visited Ise Shrine, the most sacred Shinto shrine in Japan, so I decided to take a detour to see the famous site. The shrine is rebuilt every twenty years on an adjacent lot because the main pillars on which the entire building rests are buried directly into the soil in accordance with ancient designs and would start to rot. The old shrine is dismantled, and its pieces distributed to shrines across Japan. Only a single post is left in the ground covered by a small hut, as if to keep alive that divine connection between the natural world that the earth represents and the sun goddess.
I attached myself to a tour group that traveled slowly through the shrine complex. When we finally reached the top of the stairs to see the shrine, there was only a white curtain that stretched fifty feet across a dirt field. “Where is the shrine?” I asked the guide.
“It is hidden behind the white curtain,” he said. “Ordinary people are not allowed to look upon it.”
At first, I felt duped and walked away. I had traveled two days for this? I suspected that the curtain, like the one that hid the Wizard of Oz, concealed a lie. That impression was reinforced when I heard a tour guide explain to his group how exposure to the shrine had helped a bald man grow new hair.
When I returned to look again on that white curtain, I could not shake the feeling that it really did hide something powerful and mysterious. Shinto, with its focus on the daily rituals that bound the people to the earth—the planting and harvesting of rice, of birth and of marriage—had rooted Japanese to their land for millennia. This place of worship modeled after ancient rice granaries was identical in every detail to the original structure built fifteen hundred years ago and yet was only ten years old. It was a powerful metaphor for the paradox of change and continuity that was so much a part of Japanese life. I had always felt that traditions like these, which saw the Japanese race in a special light, excluded people like me with mixed blood. Yet, for the first time I understood Japan’s dilemma: How do you maintain this rich and complex culture while at the same time adapting to powerful new currents of technology and society? Would Japan ever totally accept inter-racial marriage, adoption and people of other cultures?
As I traveled across Japan that summer of 2004, I felt as if I were in a twilight zone in which everything was connected. I spent an evening with an English teacher who had received Julius’s autobiography from my father’s cousin Richard and had become obsessed with the story. The two had met on an Internet site where they both engaged in their hobby of trading license plates. The man intended to travel to Rosow, the birthplace of Great-Grandfather Julius, to find out more about his past.
On my way back to Tokyo, I received e-mail from a collector whose hobby was to track down the “spirit life” of his ancient clocks. One of his clocks had the name of my other great-grandfather, Edmund Stucken, pressed in relief on its copper exterior. We had connected that summer by chance when the collector’s son, using the Internet, had come across the Stucken name in a biography of my brother, Chris, who was on the board of the Japanese-American Chamber of Commerce in Seattle. The father had been searching for the proper home for his clock for thirty years. We drank coffee and exchanged stories about our respective journeys into the past. I knew that Atsushi would love the clock and suggested he give it to Atsushi.
A few days later, Marie arrived in Tokyo with our two kids, meeting me at the condo some Japanese friends let us borrow for a week. The next day we went to a fancy shopping district to look for a kimono for Mariko so we could attend a kimono party we had been invited to. “Do I look Japanese?” Mariko turned to me and whispered as we walked along the crowded sidewalk.
I smiled and stepped back a little to give her a good look. Mariko wore a white dress printed with hundreds of tiny purses that looked like tiny slices of watermelons. She was gorgeous with her black hair cut shoulder-length. She walked with her shoulders back, her head held high and a spring in her step. Her face was open and easy to read. The young Japanese people who walked by seemed, by contrast, sullen and unhappy.
“Not really,” I said. “You walk different. You wear different clothes.” I meant it as a compliment—she seemed more free-spirited than the people walking by—but she did not like what I said. Mariko frowned slightly as if to hide her thoughts, to meld with the crowd.
Only then did I realize how desperately Mariko still wanted to fit into Japanese society. When people in America asked her if she was Japanese American, Mariko had a simple answer. “No. I’m Japanese and American.” I had been impressed by that answer. It didn’t occur to me that she meant it in a very literal sense.
We took a train to Hiratsuka where we had arranged to meet the Komiyas, our distant Japanese relatives. The Komiyas took us to visit the grave of my great-great-grandfather, Hiro’s father, beside the elevated bullet-train tracks. Then we walked to the father’s house for tea.
When we had finished our tea, Katsuaki’s mother brought out a large box.
“We thought Mariko might enjoy this,” she said.
When Mariko opened the box, her eyes lit up. It was a yukata, a light cotton summer kimono. The mother helped Mariko put it on. Mariko modeled it for us. She looked radiant clothed in the material of bright reds and blues.
On the way home, Mariko was quiet. She chose to sit on the other side of the train carriage as she often did when she didn’t want people staring at us, wondering what her relationship was to us. Back at the condo, she lay on her futon and read a Japanese comic book she had purchased on the way home. I was making a pot of tea and Marie was reading a book.
“I want to find my biological mother,” Mariko said suddenly.
I was caught by surprise. As a little girl, she had often asked about her biological mother, but it had been many years since she had shown any interest. Looking back now, it’s clear to me that my search for family had re-awakened her interest in her own biological parents.
“I don’t know if we would be able to find her. We don’t know her address,” I said.
“Isn’t there somewhere we could go to find out?” she asked.
“We could, but they have a policy against revealing this kind of information.” Then I added something I would regret for the rest of my life: “Your biological mother has our address. She could find you if she wanted.”
As soon as I spoke, I froze.
“You didn’t need to say that,” Marie said to me sharply.
Mariko looked at me with tears welling up in her eyes. “I hate you,” she said, shaking her head.
I grimaced, as I often did when I was uncomfortable, as my father always did. Mariko thought I was mocking her.
“Nobody hurts me as much as you.” She spit the words out at me before turning around and going to her room.
Only now, years later, have I begun to understand that my failure at that moment as a father also reflected my tendency to evade difficult questions of love and human relationships by turning to logic. Mariko had expressed a longing to meet her biological mother and connect with the Japan of her birth. My role as a parent should have been to offer my support, to help her in any way she needed to achieve her heart’s desire. Yet instead I had hurt her deeply. I had undermined her confidence by questioning her biological mother’s desire to see her.
What I had said to Mariko was not the whole truth. Even if Mariko’s biological mother had wanted to establish a relationship with Mariko, she likely would have been reluctant to contact us, believing she would be intruding in our lives.
I should have been better prepared for the question. I knew that earlier generations of Asian children adopted by American families had faced many problems. I had read books about the alienation they felt growing up in white communities cut off from their cultures and from people like themselves, but I had convinced myself that we were different. We were culturally sensitive, I told myself. Our love was unconditional. I believed it was better to tell the hard truth than to allow my daughter to build up illusions about what her biological mother might be li
ke.
I had not understood that just as I was searching into my past to establish my sense of identity, to come to peace with Japan, Mariko needed to take her own voyage to understand her past, to find her family roots. Yes, she was in our family tree, but somewhere out there, she knew, was another family tree. Now that I had undercut her, it would take Mariko far more courage to do what she had to do.
As I think of that day ten years later, I realize that something else lay behind what I said: I was afraid of sharing my children with a stranger, even if that stranger was her biological mother. That’s the truth. When Marie and I started thinking about adoption, I was secretly relieved that Japanese adoption policy did not allow biological mothers the option of continuing to visit their biological children as had become common in the United States. I didn’t like the idea of having a third parent involved because of the potential for emotional turmoil in us and in our children.
It always pained me when I read stories of adopted children who left their adoptive parents and latched onto their biological parents as if genetics could trump all the thousands of hours of love and nurturing adoptive parents give. So while I had always resolved to help Mariko find her birth mother when the time came, I had hoped that wouldn’t happen until she had grown up. I couldn’t accept the possibility that, as adoptive parents, Marie and I couldn’t fulfill all the needs of our children.
I have often heard people say that raising children is just a question of loving them. How wrong that is. Love is just the beginning. I should have known. Dad had loved me too, I now understand, but that was not nearly enough.
WE STOOD THERE AT THE bank of the river, my son Eric and I, leaning against the rubber river rafts pulled up on the gravel, while the guide ran through the basics.
“Wedge your feet under the inflated sides of the raft,” he said. “That’ll keep you from being thrown out of the boat.”
We were about to ride the Upper Klamath River as it plunged ten miles from where we were, high in the southern Oregon mountains, down through deep gorges and steep hairpin turns before meandering across the California border. We would pass through forty rapids, including some of the toughest in the Northwest. At one segment, called Hell’s Corner, the river would look like a waterfall as it cut through lava beds so sharp they had ripped holes in the bottoms of similar rafts. Other tour organizations, I later learned, required participants to wear wetsuits as protection. We only wore life jackets and helmets.
It was Eric’s sixteenth birthday and an opportunity for me to spend some time with my son. He remained a mystery to me in many ways. For years he loved reading encyclopedias about electricity and weather and would even enjoy wading through electronics manuals. I envied him for his self-assurance and his logical mind. Whereas I found manuals confusing and preferred to learn things through trial and error, Eric patiently learned the inner logic of every device in the same way he learned to navigate complex computer games.
Recently, he had started to show more interest in his Japanese past. He had started using his Japanese birth name as his computer sign on; and I had heard him boast to his friends that he could speak Japanese. When I had tried to talk about our family history, he had responded simply, “They are not my relatives. They have nothing to do with me.” I tried to explain to him at the time that families were not only about blood ties. Marie, he and I were all part of the same family even though none of us was related by blood. Eric was not convinced.
That summer he had begun training for football, and his arms and shoulders bulged. When Eric was younger, he and I often locked arms in a sumo stance and pushed against each other on the slippery wood floor of the kitchen. Now on the few occasions when we locked arms, I could hardly budge him. Once, Eric simply lifted me in the air as I had once done to him as a boy. I was embarrassed, but I also felt a moment of joy—in these teenage years, we had so little physical contact. Eric spent most of his time on multiple computers playing games, connecting with friends over Facebook and listening to music on his iPod. There were frequent battles of wills as I tried to get him to help more around the house. I missed the bundle of squealing, laughing joy that Eric had once been. I worried we were drifting apart as my father and I once had.
When the rafting guide came to the end of the talk, we put on our lifejackets and helmets and climbed into the raft together with two other teenage boys and their father.
“Now, we need a leader with some experience. Any volunteers?”
I raised my hand. I hadn’t rafted much, but I was confident I could handle it. I hadn’t yet heard the story about the woman who had broken her leg falling out of the boat. She had to complete the entire trip on the rapids with a piece of bone sticking out of her leg.
“Okay,” the guide said turning to me. “Just make sure everybody responds at the same time when I give a command.” I could do that.
As we pushed off, the sun glistened on the water. I felt a charge of energy as I dug my paddle into the water and the current began to carry us along. The waves slapped at our boat playfully, sending spray into our faces. We paddled up to a pillow of water that gathered before a giant boulder and then plunged down a chute to the right.
A momentary panic sent my heart racing, then I felt a wall of water crash over me and I laughed out loud. “Disneyland will never be able to create a ride like this,” I shouted to Eric over the roar of the crashing water, and I could see the hint of a smile.
As we shot down the river, we bumped into rocks and saw explosions of water as waves crashed into each other. The sense of danger only added to the thrill. Our boat seemed to have little trouble navigating the rapids; our paddling hardly seemed to matter.
“Right forward,” said the guide as we approached the edge of a precipice and shot down. I dug my paddle down but there was no water. The raft had slid up the side of the boulder and my side was in the air. In a flash, I was thrown into a boiling churn of freezing water.
Calm down, I told myself. I leaned back and lifted my legs as the guide had advised, but the river spun me around and tossed me against one boulder after another. Water forced its way through my nose and throat. I couldn’t breathe. When the boulders finally gave way, I fell down a waterfall and plunged into a deep pool where an undercurrent pulled me down, holding me under water until I was swallowing water and choking. Just when I thought I could come up for air, the undercurrent pulled me down again. I was drowning.
I’m going to die, I thought. And just as that thought hit me, I was struck by another, even more terrifying thought. Where’s Eric? I struggled to swim, but I was a ragdoll against the relentless current.
I had to turn back, somehow swim up this river, but the onrush of water was just forcing more water down my throat. Just when I thought my lungs would give out, I saw a blur of orange and an outstretched arm. A hand grabbed my right arm firmly and pulled me in. It was Eric. His dark eyes bathed me with their warm concern. My world turned inside out. I was happy, relieved he was safe. He was alive. He was alive! But I also felt weak and helpless. Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be saving my son?
A thirteen-year-old boy was sobbing loudly beside me. “I want to get off this boat. I want to go home.”
“There is nowhere to go,” said the guide. “We have to get through this.”
The boy curled into a ball and continued to cry.
“Are you okay?” I asked Eric. “Does that hurt?” I pointed to a large scrape along his stomach.
“I’m fine.”
“Thanks for helping me,” I said. “I thought I was going to drown.”
Eric did not respond, and I wondered if I now looked smaller in his eyes.
But there was no time for chit chat. Just as we all got back to our stations, the raft headed toward another sharp drop. “Forward right,” said the guide, now speaking more loudly.
We dug in. I felt a pain in my chest. As we went down Branding Iron, I paddled with everything I had, but my strength had left me. Each boulder loomed like
a menace. I shuddered at the sight of sleepers, rocks close to the surface that appeared as dark spots on the water surface. The river seemed to boil with fury, tipping the boat sharply from side to side and whipping my face. I shivered with cold while, under my right arm, my rib cage burned with pain. I looked back at Eric, calm and determined. I felt proud of him, and that helped me to swallow my own pride.
“I’m going to have to switch with you,” I told Eric after a few minutes. “I don’t have the strength. You should be the leader.”
Eric took my place and dug his oar powerfully into the water. It was now largely he and the guide powering the boat around the rocks. The rest of us were shivering and tired. We wondered if we would survive another fall. How glad I was that Mariko and Marie were not on this trip. How glad I was that we had come through this. How glad I was ...
Suddenly, the boat stopped: we were wrapped around a rock that rose four feet out of the water. The rushing current pressed the ends of the boat around either side of the rock. I was high above the water on the left side of the rock, and Eric was just below me on the same side. The others were on the front of the boat wrapped around the opposite side of the same rock.
“Let the air out on your side,” the guide screamed to me.
“What?” We were stuck on a rock in a raging river and I was supposed to let the air out of the boat?
“Now!” said the guide.
I crawled up to the top of the raft and leaned precariously over the side, trying not to look down at the raging river. I slowly unscrewed the cap. “Ssssssss.” The boat was collapsing and I would soon fall into the raging river. “More” said the guide. I was afraid but I continued to let the air out.