American Woman

by Susan Choi

  Anne has dug the book up from her closet; Little Man, the small parrot she impulsively bought when her husband left her, gouges her books with his beak and splatters them with his odorless yet ubiquitous shit, and so she locks up the ones from the library to try to preserve them, and then forgets all about them for months. The memoir she checked out purely as a distraction, a queer novelty, but then she’d been mesmerized by the mistress’s robust vulgarity and her casual racism. There are constant blithe mentions of “coloreds” and “cute pickaninnies” and “little Jew lawyers,” and daffy tirades about “Japs” while recalling the years of the war. “We had to make sure to black out the windows, even up at McCloud, so the Japs wouldn’t come bomb the house! Oh, those dirty Japs hated the Boss. Back in his newspaper days, Boss was one of the first telling it like it was. California had gotten so careless, and let in all those Japs. Japs are like rats—now, they are: they eat garbage, and there’s no way to kill them! Boss and I were so relieved when we heard from the President that he would put all the Japs into camps. Boss called to tell FDR it was high time already!”

  BUT THE MISTRESS isn’t part of the story; the stunning kingdoms aren’t, either, although Anne keeps thinking, as she tries to scrape away all the trivial matter that sticks to this story like lint, that nothing much ever remains when you get to the bottom. There is only the girl, Pauline, who has always been a story, from the time of her birth, no matter what she has done. Pauline, snatched by the cadre for her totemic power; she’s ended up looming over them all. They will all be forgotten, the dead and the two who’ve survived. No one will ever wonder what they were so angry about, what they hoped to achieve. Those things are too easily known, while Pauline is unknowable, although the promise of her upcoming trial has obscured that dull truth. Her trial will reveal everything, or so everyone hopes; the story will finally write itself. Anne, plying her beige rental car across the Great Plains with her parrot and her pile of books, is just another small striver in a great wagon train, hopeful and facing long odds.

  Joe Smith isn’t part of the story, either. But as with the mistress, Anne attached great hopes to him at the time—until she actually met him. It had been at the start of the summer that an old friend of hers from her very first job in New York called her out of the blue. “Is it true that you’re doing a piece on Pauline?” her friend Michael asked. “I might have something for you, or at least someone to fob off on you. He may be completely insane, or he may be your Deep Throat.”

  Michael told her that the previous summer, long before he had heard from the current “Joe Smith,” another man who declined even to provide an unconvincing pseudonym had phoned to claim that he “might have a way” to get a tell-all book penned by Pauline. “I told him, give it to me,” Michael said, “and don’t you breathe a word to anybody else! I promised him all kinds of money our press doesn’t have. I begged for a meeting but he wouldn’t even give me a phone number. We’d meet once, he’d hand it over, I’d pay. I said sure; I figured I’d work out the details later, if it turned out to be even a little bit true. After the phone call, I thought I might have met him before. I mean, why me? His voice rang a bell, as if we’d met at a party a long time ago. A few weeks or a month after that he called again to ask was I still interested. I said I was, he said that he’d meet with me ‘soon,’ and that’s the last time I heard from the guy. I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This ‘Joe Smith’ guy rings a bell, too.”

  “The same bell?”

  “Honestly? Who the fuck knows. The phone calls were a whole year apart. I can’t be sure that the voice was the same. I just can’t believe it was two separate guys and their both calling me was a total coincidence. Sure, nowadays two hundred people a day claim Pauline’s come and shopped at their store, that she ate at their diner, she played pool in their bar, she pumped gas at their station, she’s pregnant, she’s a lesbian, she’s with the Black Panthers, whatever. Those two hundred people a day call the cops, they don’t call Michael Levitz, Book Editor.”

  “So this ‘Joe Smith’ was a book agent, before he turned into Deep Throat?”

  “It doesn’t help his credibility much,” Michael joked.

  “It sure doesn’t,” she said.

  “Joe Smith” had her meet him on the pigeon shit–spattered, exhaust-hazed, deafeningly loud traffic island park a few blocks south of Macy’s. “Can we talk somewhere else?” she asked when he arrived, but he insisted on telling her everything there; he wouldn’t even sit down on a bench. He was her age, early thirties; athletic and restless; he made her walk up and down on the cramped little island with him, as the midday traffic coursed around them. At some point within the past months, he told her, the FBI had discovered a farmhouse where Pauline had been hiding. They’d also linked Pauline to someone named Jenny Shimada. Joe had happened to drop by the farmhouse, because he’d once had a friend who lived there, and who he always hoped to track down again. Instead, FBI men ambushed him. They hadn’t been able to keep him—he’d done nothing wrong—but they’d asked lots of questions, revealing much more of what they knew to Joe, than Joe revealed to them, in the end. This boastful remark oddly clashed with the tic Joe had going in one eyelid, like an insect trapped under his skin. “You write for Time,” he broke off suddenly.

  “Well—not anymore.” She tried to explain the difference between freelancers and staff writers; she had worked for Time, but she’d been just a so-so reporter, she hadn’t had the gene for it. She was better at features. Now she contributed to a few different general-interest weeklies—this was too esoteric for Joe. He convulsed with impatience.

  “I’ve seen your byline in Time,” he insisted. “Listen: this is what you need to print. The FBI knows that Pauline is with Jenny Shimada. They never knew Jenny Shimada had ties to the cadre. But now they’ve found out, and they’re not telling anyone else. You’ve been on this story a while. You’ve never heard Jenny’s name, right?” When she agreed this was true he said, “See! You don’t rustle the bushes when you’ve got the deer right in your sights!”

  “Joe, the fact that no one at FBI headquarters has mentioned Jenny Shimada isn’t proof that they’re interested in her. Don’t you think that’s a little bit paranoid?”

  He paused to let her know that he’d taken offense. “If you knew what I know, you would never have said that,” he said.

  “I’m just trying to explain that I need more than you’ve told me so far. Please. I need a way to substantiate this.”

  “Don’t call the Feds with the stuff I’ve just told you,” he cried. “Then they’ll move, right away! Michael said I could trust you.”

  “You can trust me—”

  “And you can trust me,” Joe cut in. He’d grabbed her notebook and written SHIMADA in an almost illegible scrawl. Then the light had changed on Broadway, and before she could stop him he was instantly gone in the crowd.

  IN SAN FRANCISCO after five days of driving—she’s traced the route the girls took, another bit of lint that won’t be in the story; already this long past year of Pauline’s invisibility and Anne’s questing confusion has been termed by the fast-thinking TV newsmen as “the lost year,” which means no one need find it—Anne knows Jenny Shimada isn’t part of the story, either. Even now that she knows that Joe Smith told the truth. She thinks of what her friend Michael had said: that two hundred people a day claim Pauline’s in Tibet, that she’s riding a Harley. That she’s with someone named Jenny Shimada. The whole year before the arrests that was how it had been: the static so constant and loud, the sightings so scattered and varied. The FBI couldn’t know if Juan really had broken a tooth and was likely to visit a dentist; if Pauline really had materialized on an old woman’s crumbling estate outside Rhinebeck, New York. So that the FBI had, on the one hand, gone with the broken-tooth tip and wasted countless man hours briefing dentists all over the country. So that Anne had, on the other hand, checked that Jenny Shimada was a known fugitive, and left it
at that. Now she knows the truth, but Jenny still isn’t the story. Jenny’s nobody’s story. Although this might be why Anne pursues her, if only in her spare time. Because she knows no one else will; and that even she, in the end, will stash Jenny away with the mistress and the wonderful homes, and with whatever new lint—good, unusable stuff—she picks up.

  The State of California turns out to have far more extensive records on J. Shimada, b. 1924—Jenny’s father—than on Jenny herself, b. 1949. Anne feels the lint settling again. James Shimada is the only child of immigrants from Japan, a farmer and his wife who by the late 1930s have saved enough money after years of truck farming to open a small produce stand in L.A. James Shimada excels at baseball, is called “Jim” by his friends, wins a scholarship to UCLA; he professes an intention to go to film school and make Westerns. But in the fall of 1942, instead of entering UCLA on his scholarship, Jim, like all other Japanese and japanese-Americans who live in California, is interned in a “War Relocation Center” by the federal government. After Pearl Harbor, the previous winter, Jim had gone to enlist, as had some of his friends. He had not been allowed to, not because of his age—he’d been just seventeen—but because of his Japanese blood.

  Jim and his parents are sent to Manzanar, in the Owens Valley desert northeast of L.A. Nothing in particular seems to happen to Jim in the first six months or so of his internment to set him apart from the rest of the camp. But in the spring of 1943, the government drafts a loyalty oath to administer to internees that consists of two questions. 1) Will you serve the U.S. in the army—if you are allowed? 2) Will you renounce loyalty to Japan? By the spring of 1943, a pro-Japan movement—very small and very violent, made up mostly of boys who were once sent to Japan by their parents for a few years of school—has given rise to gang violence throughout Manzanar. The loyalty oath causes panic. The second question particularly, about renouncing loyalty to Japan, is rumored to be a trick: if you answer yes, it will be used against you, as an admission you’ve had loyalty to Japan. The panic is exploited by the pro-Japan gangsters, and both the panic and the gangsters are exploited in turn by anti-Japanese opinion makers in the press, who point out that the Japanese in the U.S. are clearly a threat, their prior Americanness just a cunning façade. Pauline’s grandfather, in a series of loud editorials, propagates this view in his newspapers.

  Inside camp, Jim Shimada is beaten by the pro-Japan gang over whether he’ll say yes or no to the loyalty questions. Jim Shimada, before this, had not been a political person. There were ways in which camp, in the beginning, had almost seemed tailor-made for the restless teenager, before his parents lost their home and their just-purchased fruit stand because they’d failed to make mortgage payments while interned and unable to work; before he’d heard his mother sobbing one night on her cot. Before the Rubicon of the loyalty oath, when camp just seemed strangely—like camp. Unsworn, as-yet-uninquisited, neither a yes/yes, no/no, yes/no, or no/yes, Jim is picked up by one of the administrative security details in the midst of his bloody beating, which he is fiercely resisting, and transferred, away from his parents, to a new camp for “incorrigible” Japanese, which has just been established at the northernmost edge of the state, in the wild Cascades.

  The Camp for Incorrigibles, unlike Manzanar, has no ameliorating aspects. There are no old people or children, no family groups whatsoever. None of the “amenities” that have been slowly established at Manzanar—the weekend dances for the young people, the permission to grow vegetables, the earnest white lady librarians who come from the cities with donated books. The Camp for Incorrigibles is an actual prison, even if none of its prisoners have been confined with due process. The cellblocks are horse-stable construction, with no heat or hot water to bathe. Jim has bronchitis almost from the time he arrives to the time he leaves, fifteen months later. He is also given, and gives in return, broken bones, concussions, knife wounds, purple bruises, split skulls, and continual torrents of verbal abuse. By now the war is an abstraction to them, the reviled “Japs,” half of them just teenage boys, who eat their often spoiled food, cast-off rations from everywhere else, beneath the poised muzzles of guns of white boys their same age, sometimes from their same towns. With overseas casualties climbing, Roosevelt reverses himself on Japs in uniform, and Japanese-American boys are invited to get out of camp by enlisting in segregated battalions. This is a moot point for Jim, not even thought of, but then the policy is liberalized further, and all boys in all camps over eighteen are drafted. Jim refuses; he suggests the government give back his parents’ house and fruit stand, reimburse them for the years of lost income, and let them go home, and he’ll think about it. He’s tried and convicted of draft evasion, and transferred to a federal prison.

  Before that, though; before the draft, the refusal, the trial, the words spoken in court and transcribed and ensconced in the great vault of criminal annals; before Jim Shimada’s release under President Truman, who quietly pardons all the Jap draft resisters in 1947; before Jim briefly marries a young woman who is probably already unhappy to be attracted to him, who is made more unhappy by him, who bears him a daughter and then blessedly dies; before Jim renounces his country and takes his daughter to the land of his parents, Japan, and renounces it, too, and moves back, penniless and defeated; before the daughter embarks on her own catastrophic adventure; one night at the Camp for Incorrigibles, there’s a riot, and then a jailbreak. As is often the case, the cause later can’t be determined, but it seems trivial; it has something to do with the dinner. Dinner is rotten again, or there isn’t enough. Chaos breaks out in the kitchen and spreads through the mess; boiling water is thrown on a man. Guards come running with guns, there’s a general stampede. One of the incorrigibles runs outside and steals a truck and drives off wildly; others cling to the side doors or jump in the back, catching the outstretched hands of comrades. The truck careers wildly left and right, the boys and men bang back and forth, armed guards dive out of the way and then suddenly there is a breach, the front gate has been flattened, and those who’ve rushed out of the mess, which is smoky with tear gas and awful with shrieks, breaking glass, firing guns, without thinking rush into the night. Jim Shimada, just eighteen years old, always thin as a whip but now skinny, hacking from bronchitis, limping from a fresh fight, his cheek purple, his lip split, his thin shirt in shreds, runs also, awkwardly, in his camp-issue sneakers, which are splitting away from their soles. Like the runners of a marathon the escapees surge out as a mass, but then thin out, slow down, break into little groups. They are suddenly silent with terror. It is a winter night, well below freezing. Jim is inured to the cold now but sees his breath clouding the air, feels the burn in his throat. Above him he might see the distant pristine Cascade moon. The next morning the news of the “jailbreak” is sensational all over the land, is particularly trumpeted in Pauline’s grandfather’s chain of newspapers under such headlines as JAPS BUTCHER COOK, OVERWHELM PRISON GUARDS, ATTEMPT FURTHER MURDEROUS RAMPAGE, but it isn’t a rampage at all. They jog wordlessly down the dirt road, by the delicate light of the moon. Soon they’ll be picked up by soldiers with guns, soldiers of their own army, but for now they just slowly lose steam. They would die in these mountains, they know; there is nowhere to go. Anne unfolds her map of California and traces the McCloud River’s route. She finds the long-ago site of the Camp for Incorrigibles by the small lake it once sat beside. No, Jim Shimada could never have made it. Even at their closest proximity the two places are almost fifty miles apart. Fifty miles of twelve-thousand-foot peaks and untamed wilderness. Still, for the mistress ensconced at McCloud the putative threat was delicious; perhaps those hysterical headlines had all been for her. Anne still remembers the passage, but she’s glad that she brought the book with her. “One night we had the awfullest scare. The Japs at the camp had a riot—who knows what they all got so angry about? There the President was, letting them live without lifting a finger on your taxpayer dollars, but they still had to make a big fuss. They broke out and we knew they
were coming to murder us all!”

  THAT NIGHT in her hotel room Anne lies in bed and treats herself to a bottle of wine. She has to be careful; on some nights like tonight, strangely stirred up and sad, she’s gotten in bed with a drink, because it’s fun to play with Little Man that way, and let him march up and down on her chest. She usually wakes up the next day with a throbbing hangover, Little Man looking down from the headboard at her with reproach. You’re not supposed to fall asleep with your parrot, lest you roll over abruptly, and crush him.

  But this night she lets herself drink, and thinks about the strange contacts that make up the world. “Joe Smith”—she knows now his name is Rob Frazer—and Jenny Shimada. The other Shimada, jogging down a dirt road on a subzero night by the light of the moon. Jim Shimada’s not part of the story. Pauline’s grandfather fifty miles off, his excitable mistress. None of this is the story. There’s no room, there’s no good place to put it; in the end it’s just static and lint. The two girls who thought they could make history, while all the while it had made them: that’s not even the story. Although Anne thinks she sees that part clearly, sees the actors hemmed into their stage, the stock costumes they wear, the old backdrop hanging in wait.

  2.

  Months before learning that Jenny had been arrested Jim Shimada felt a heightening of sensitivity, or maybe just of irritability. He hated to call it paranoia, but it was paranoia. If it wasn’t that, it was something worse: guilt. A habit of guilt it repulsed him to find in himself. He had felt a tinge of guiltiness his whole life after being interned; the same blameless guilt that had made him feel disgust for his parents, and for everyone else who’d been wrongly accused. Jenny once had asked him why they knew no Japanese in California. “Do you want to?” he’d said. “They’re all sheep!” But he’d been the same way and still was; so that he sweated when he saw a policeman; and though he even filed his taxes on time, he still expected the dark suits of the FBI men to appear on his doorstep again.