Miss Mori was replaced by Mr. Blackwell, a Caucasian missionary from the Anglican Church, a man who had once taught English and Bible studies. He was living in Vancouver when Miss Mori announced her departure. When the school committee found out about him from church contacts, he was invited to teach at our camp. He agreed to take over grades one to four for the rest of the year, and he found a room in a boarding house across the river. He had an old black car. Every day, he drove it across the bridge, right up to the school door.
Everyone stopped work for the wedding, which took place outside on a sunny fall Saturday afternoon. A canopy had been created and decorated, and Miss Mori and Tak stood under it and were married by a minister from across the river. The minister left immediately after the ceremony. With the temperature cooling down, we all moved inside the schoolhouse to celebrate in the community room. Many of the women had baked, and Mother had made a special cake in the oven of her stove. Other families had donated butter and sugar to help with the cake.
At a signal from one of the older girls, Miss Mori’s pupils, including me, gathered quickly in one corner of the room. We stood, tall and proud, and sang to the new couple “Don’t Fence Me In,” a song Miss Mori had taught us the year before. Miss Mori wiped at tears while we sang, but at the end of the song, she joined everyone in the room as they clapped and cheered.
I had made a special card for my departing teacher, using a precious sheet of thick paper from one of Okuma-san’s books. I folded it across the middle and drew a mountain and a schoolhouse. I tried to make these look like our mountain and our schoolhouse. Across the bottom, in indigo ink, I drew the river. I wanted Miss Mori to remember me and I wanted her to know that I was going to miss her. Okuma-san stayed at my side much of the afternoon, and he presented the new couple with a book of Japanese legends from the two of us.
School carried on, and as always, we started the morning by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and singing “God Save the King.” Mr. Blackwell had brought a large rolled map with him from Vancouver, and this was hung on the dividing wall between classrooms. He used a pointer, and pointed to all of the pink areas and said, “This is the Empire, and we are proud to belong to it.” There was a round globe on a stand on the other side of the classroom, and Keiko sometimes pointed out the names of countries as we spun the globe during our breaks for lunch or recess.
Mr. Blackwell was a kind teacher but he insisted that we work hard. He also decided, that year, to give us new names. He told us it was difficult for “white” people to pronounce Japanese names, so he gave us English names. I was called Benjamin Okuma the rest of the time I was at that school. Sometimes, he called me Ben. The following year, Mr. Blackwell stayed on and taught the upper grades. That is when he changed Hiroshi and Keiko’s names to Henry and Kay. Okuma-san and the other children continued to call me Bin. I did not like being called Benjamin at school, and sometimes I forgot to look up when Mr. Blackwell called out the English name he had given me.
All our lessons were in English now, even though Miss Mori had sometimes spoken the Japanese language when she was teaching. Mr. Blackwell, however, insisted: English in the classroom and English in the schoolyard. Some children did not speak Japanese at all; others began to learn English only when they first started school.
There were evening classes now, too—these provided extra help for high school students—as well as community classes for adults. Classes were offered in drama, dance, sewing, carpentry, singing and calligraphy. Uncle Aki had persuaded Auntie Aya to take one of the classes, and she said she would try calligraphy. She had done this before, when she’d lived in Washington, and she would try again. But only if Uncle Aki accompanied her to the classes.
At Okuma-san’s, once my homework was done in the evenings, I was permitted to do as I wished until bedtime. There were books on his shelves, perhaps even more books than there were in my classroom. The textbooks and readers at school had to be shared because there weren’t enough to go around. These were the same texts that every other child in British Columbia was using, and they had been ordered through the Security Commission’s purchasing office. But in Okuma-san’s shack, the books were different in every way.
I began to take them down, one at a time, to examine them closely. There was one about animals I especially liked, and Okuma-san read the accompanying stories to me. When I was alone, I turned the pages slowly and made up my own stories to go with the pictures. These were not animals such as the ones that lived in the woods and mountains around the camp. These were not wild horses that galloped between the rows of shacks on spring and summer mornings, or chipmunks that darted among tree trunks, or black bears that ambled up on the Bench. These were not loping coyotes silhouetted on the ridges of surrounding hills. This book was populated by monkeys and badgers and hares and crabs and foxes, and sparrows that danced on their tails and held fans tucked to their wings. Some animals wore kimono-like robes and geta, wooden clogs, on their feet, and some were full of mischief. They especially liked to trick one another.
Okuma-san told me what he knew about these creatures. He also told stories that were not in his books, but that he had heard as a boy. Sometimes he talked about people he had met long ago while travelling in the big world I had never seen. When he spoke about his travels, I pictured the spinning globe in the schoolhouse and imagined Okuma-san in a small boat, paddling over its round surface, crossing seas with ease, pulling up on the shore of one foreign land after another.
OKUMA-SAN HAD BEEN an only child, born in Victoria just before the turn of the century. His parents were importers of silk and tea, and they had owned a store that did very good business. The school he attended in Victoria had divided classrooms: Japanese and Chinese children on one side, Caucasian children—hakujin—on the other. The same divisions existed in the play area outside. A fence split the schoolyard down the middle: Japanese and Chinese children at one end, hakujin children at the other. That was the way things were then, Okuma-san explained. He had always hoped that the hakujin children would accept him as he grew older, but Japanese children played together and hakujin children did the same.
After supper, in the evenings, Okuma-san’s father liked to sit on a chair by the front door outside the small bungalow where they lived in Victoria, smoking a cigarette and watching the goings-on of the street. The cigarettes he smoked were hand-rolled and inserted into the end of a yellow-stained ivory holder. The father smoked one cigarette per night, always after supper. He puffed slowly and did not allow anyone to disturb him while he smoked. If it was raining, he stood in the doorway to stay dry.
When Okuma-san was nine years old, his father decided to travel to Japan to visit the companies he dealt with in his business, and he took Okuma-san along to learn something about the country of his ancestors. They sailed on a freighter, and Okuma-san described that stormy voyage with huge waves crashing over the ship’s bow. He was told to stay below in his bunk, and was not permitted to climb the steps to the outer deck because the wind was so strong he might be lifted off his feet and blown over the side. When he became seasick, one of the crew members gave his father a chunk of ginger root and told him to have Okuma-san drink warm tea made from the grated root. After he drank this, the seasickness went away.
When he and his father arrived in Japan after the difficult journey, they visited the village where his late grandparents had been born. He was told stories of his grandfather, who had gone out in a boat every day to catch fish. The grandfather had been a fisherman all his life, but he couldn’t bear to touch the scales and skin of the fish he caught. He could not bear even the smell of the fish.
Here, I interrupted. I knew about fishermen and how they came in and out of the bay in the fishing village where I had been born. I knew about the stink of fish on First Father’s clothes when he used to return to our house after fishing up and down the coast for weeks.
“Well, then, if he couldn’t touch the fish, how did your grandfather get them off his boat?” I
asked. “He would have to sell them, wouldn’t he?” I had never heard of such a fisherman.
“I was told that he wore special gloves made from rubber when he handled the fish,” Okuma-san replied. “And when he became ill from the stench, he leaned over the side of his boat and emptied his stomach. But he remained a fisherman because it brought him a good living.”
It wasn’t the sea that claimed the lives of Okuma-san’s grandparents. They had died of a contagious disease, the name of which he did not know. He thought it might have been cholera. They had died within days of each other.
During that trip to Japan, Okuma-san was taken to Osaka by his father, who made the decision to leave him there so that he could attend school for a year. Okuma-san boarded with an older British missionary couple. Okuma-san’s father wanted him to learn about Japan in school, but he also wanted him to continue to speak English.
His father said he would be back in one year to bring him home. He promised that Okuma-san’s mother would accompany him when he returned the following year.
Okuma-san was amazed to live in a place where everyone was Japanese, and he enjoyed walking through the streets without being noticed. It was the first time he had not been surrounded by Caucasian faces, even though he was living with a hakujin couple.
But at the Japanese school he attended, things did not turn out quite so well. His teacher, his Sensei, was ill-mannered and short-tempered. He had dark eyebrows like bushes grown thick to keep outsiders from peering in to see the world of his thoughts. Okuma-san did not like the teacher or the school. He was taunted by other Japanese boys because he was different, and because he had come from a land across the ocean where none of the other boys had been. The Japanese he spoke was unlike that of the others, and this, too, gave him trouble. He had a hard time making friends. The man and woman with whom he boarded, a childless couple by the name of Dowson, were kind to him and treated him like a son. Still, he looked forward to the day his parents would return so that he could leave the school he disliked so much. His father and mother sent him two letters during the year: the first told him how much he was missed; the second gave their approximate arrival date and the name of the freighter on which they would be sailing. His father was going to meet with new business partners, because he had decided to import Japanese dishes, as well as silk and tea.
But the freighter never arrived in Japan. It went down in a storm in the Pacific, and Okuma-san became an orphan before his tenth birthday. The missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Dowson, tried to get information, and when it was finally confirmed that his parents were dead, they decided to adopt him. It was not difficult to obtain permission, because they were British and he was Canadian, and because he had been born in the Empire. They taught him about England and travelled with him to that country in the same year. After that, his education took place in the great capital of London.
I interrupted again. “I know where London is,” I said. “King George lives there. Keiko showed me on the map at school. We have a picture of the King and Queen on the wall in our class and we sing ‘God Save the King’ every morning.”
“Well, London is the place I lived,” said Okuma-san. “And I sang the same anthem when I was a boy, and I walked past Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen live, many times. When I was young, two other kings lived there: King Edward and a different King George.”
But life had turned out differently for Okuma-san, because in London, he was still an outsider. He did not look like anyone in the streets or at school. He learned to be quiet and to stay out of trouble. Whenever he could, he stayed indoors and read books in the library so the boys would not taunt him in the schoolyard.
I had never been to such a place, and Okuma-san told me about the library at his London school and the public library not far from the house where he had lived with the Dowsons. He had walked through rooms lined with shelves from ceiling to floor, every shelf stacked with books. More books than he had ever seen.
From the time Okuma-san was first adopted in Japan, and later, after moving to England, Mrs. Dowson recognized his love of music and taught him to play piano in her home. When he was in his early teens, he was sent to an advanced teacher. After the end of the Great War, his adoptive father died. Mrs. Dowson was left with little income, but she sold her house and moved the two of them to a smaller place. Knowing it was Okuma-san’s dream to continue to play piano, she provided him with enough money to travel to Vienna, where he spent the next three years studying music. He took extra classes in the German language at night. When his money ran out, he wrote to Mrs. Dowson to tell her he would have to come back to England. But the letter was returned to him by Mrs. Dowson’s brother, who told him she had recently died. That was when Okuma-san decided to return to North America. Now that he was a young man, he wanted to see if he could make a life for himself in the country of his birth.
I listened to these stories because I had never considered the fact that Okuma-san had once been a boy. Now I was forced to learn that he had lost not one set of parents but two. I did not like the way parents kept dying in his stories, nor did I like to think of him as an orphan, which was what I considered myself—even though my first family lived just along the row of shacks, a short walk from our doorstep. But one thing was different. When Okuma-san was adopted, he had been allowed to keep his Okuma surname, whereas I had not been allowed to keep the surname Oda. Nor did I want to, not anymore. If First Father did not want me, I reasoned, then I did not want his name.
Although I listened carefully to the things that had happened to Okuma-san, I was also waiting to hear a different kind of story. I thought about how he had arrived late at the camp, almost two years after everyone else. I did not ask about his wife, the singer, because he seldom talked about her. I had heard Mother say that the lines in his face were there because of grief over his wife’s death. But too many people died in his stories, and I did not want to hear more about death.
Then I thought of something else.
“Tell me about the bear,” I said suddenly. “How did you catch the bear when you first moved here to the camp?” This had been on my mind for some time, but I had never asked. I wanted to go to school and tell Hiroshi and Keiko that I had finally found out.
“Ah,” said Okuma-san. “It was fortunate for me that the bear cooperated.”
But that was all he would say.
Two wooden blocks clapped together. The clean knock of sound arrested all other noise in the room. An unseen hand wound the camp gramophone and set the music spinning. Unrecognized fathers took their places on the raised wooden platform, and I knew that First Father was among them. At school, Hiroshi had told me that Mother had been sewing a costume during the past several weeks, helping to prepare for the shibai, the winter play.
The storyteller stepped forward slowly, an air of magnificence about him. He made us wait, taking time to settle himself on a stool at the edge of the lantern-lit stage. A black curtain slid away from a painted backdrop and fell into darkness. No longer did I see a rough platform on wooden props. No longer did I see fisherman, farmer, mill hand, carpenter, cannery worker, storekeeper, factory hand. Instead, I saw imposing figures, the whirl of dark robes, makeup and mask, watercolours, banners of calligraphy fluttering before my eyes.
The story unfolded; a brand-new script had been created. All the roles, including women’s, were acted by the men. They had been practising for weeks, ever since the end of harvest. In the schoolhouse, after hours, props had been constructed and painted, and these had been pushed against the walls of the community room and covered over so we could not see what was on the backdrops before it was time for the performance. Even Okuma-san had put on his heavy coat and disappeared on weekends, working in secret alongside other men who were painting and nailing boards and planning the entertainment for this December night.
How we laughed, how we laughed, how our hands flew to our mouths. Between scenes, while backdrops were being changed, two men came out and sat a
t the front of the stage. Each man wore baggy trousers, hakama, and tabi, split-toe socks. They faced each other and held a running conversation and told jokes that made us laugh some more. One man held out a ripe banana, began to peel it slowly and carefully, and then tapped the side of his hand. A neat slice fell off. He tapped his hand again and another slice fell, the same size as the first. Everyone in the audience was roaring with laughter, but while I was laughing, tears rolled down my cheeks. The second man began to catch the slices, until finally, the banana skin was empty. How could this happen? I wiped my eyes. I couldn’t understand. It was only when I was older that I was shown the trick of piercing the skin of an unpeeled banana in layers, beforehand, with a long needle, making a steady stitch all the way around—an invisible stitch that would not be seen by the audience.
Auntie Aya and Uncle Aki were seated in the row in front of me, and Auntie Aya was wearing a new navy dress with a sparkly belt that Mother had made for her from material Uncle Aki had ordered from Eaton’s. It was the first time I had seen my aunt all dressed up. In the winter months there was no place to go anyway, except to visit from one shack to another. Apart from her calligraphy classes, she rarely left her shack. When she did go out, Uncle Aki was right beside her, hovering near, as always.
When the second act of the play was over, everyone clapped and clapped and protested and called for more, but the curtain was pulled and closed. The actors had run out of script. The jokes had been spent. The evening had come to an end.
When we’d entered the crowded community room at the beginning of the evening, Okuma-san had ensured that I would be seated next to Mother and my brother and sister. Ba and Ji were farther along in the same row. Ba had patted her thick pocket, where the end of a new envelope could be seen sticking out—another letter from the place called Manzanar. She was extra happy this night, because Sachi and Tom had written that they were expecting their first baby in April. This would be the first grandchild for Ba and Ji.
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