Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  “I’d like to drive around,” she says as we exit the building, buttoning her jacket against the cool afternoon, “past my old house and the elementary school. I’d like you to take some pictures.”

  We climb into the car and drive out of the parking lot, and I follow my mother’s directions: turn left here, pull in right there. I photograph her standing in front of her old school, near the tall steps that stretch all the way up to the front door. Next, we head to the street where she grew up. Even though a new family now lives in their old house, she insists on a photograph of herself in front of it. Reluctantly, I turn off the ignition and crawl out of the car again.

  “People live here,” I say quietly, as if the new owners might hear me from inside. There are cars parked in the driveway. “You can’t just stand in someone’s yard.” Having grown up in central Pennsylvania, where landowners post their acreage with black-and-orange signs and take the crime of trespassing seriously, I’ve always been mindful of encroaching on other people’s property.

  “If they come out, I’ll just tell them this is where I grew up,” my mother says. In this moment, her sense that any misunderstanding could be easily handled with a conversation reminds me of my grandfather. Like him, she’s not at all shy, and she is always happy to talk to anyone. She jogs over to the mailbox and stands in the lawn, grinning, thrilled. I feel guilty for tainting the experience with my warnings and embarrassment.

  The house, a small yellow ranch, has fallen into mild disrepair, with the windows old, the screens dirty, and the siding dull and discolored. The lawn is overgrown, and weeds grow from the cracks in the sidewalk. This is where my grandparents moved after they lived in the concrete-block apartment. My mother, the third child and born in 1948, never lived at that first place.

  “Did you get it?” she asks, still smiling for the camera. I tell her I took two pictures and show her the images on the small camera screen. “Good,” she says. We drive around Seabrook and the neighboring towns, stopping twice for subs, once at a small one-story building that looks like it might have been a gas station fifty years ago, and also at a quaint shop with wide wooden-plank flooring. My mother says the subs in South Jersey are the best in the world, and she intends to get her fill since she hasn’t been here for so long. She sits in the passenger seat, her fingers wet with olive oil, watching out the window and eating. At her age, my mother can still outeat me, and yet she manages to stay thin. (I’m convinced this is because she rarely sits in one place for more than ten minutes.)

  For the reunion, held at a local country club, my mother has borrowed from a friend a black dress, knee length and with a few discreet gemstones near the neck. She curls her hair and slips on a pair of heels. “Everyone will be jealous,” I tell her as she prepares to leave the hotel.

  The rest of our weekend in New Jersey consists of taking a few more snapshots of favorite places, and after we’ve made all the stops on my mother’s itinerary, we head back, across the wide Chesapeake again, through the midsection of Pennsylvania, home.

  Chapter 15

  ITEM BY ITEM, OBAACHAN IS PACKING UP HER HOUSE IN Florida. My family has decided that it makes most sense for her to move to Pennsylvania, to live near my mother, who the siblings agree is the best caregiver of the four of them. Relocating my grandmother to Pennsylvania means that she’ll live closer to me as well, so I suppose I should be happy about it. In a few weeks, she will drive up the coast in a U-Haul with my uncle Jay, with what’s left of her belongings on board.

  When I arrive for what we both know will be my final visit to her place in Florida, I’m struck immediately by the sparseness inside. The painting of a swamp that used to hang above the couch in the living room, with its tans, yellows, and grays, is gone. The collection of family photographs on the spare-room bookshelf—weddings, school pictures from grandchildren, family vacations—has been packed up. The Japanese doll, posed in a long navy kimono, that used to sit on the glass table near the entryway, has been removed. About half of Obaachan’s furniture isn’t there either.

  “The Salvation Army has already been here once,” she tells me as we walk into the living room. “They took the one bed, and later, I’ll give them the glass table where I do my Sudoku puzzles and one of the couches. But the other has a tear in the back, so they won’t take it.” The Salvation Army refuses any furniture that’s damaged, she explains, then looks at me with a grin. “Maybe I can sell it on craigslist.” My uncle, who has gotten rid of lots of unwanted items through this website, including a free artificial Christmas tree that thirty people wanted, has told her about the wonders of craigslist. Obaachan insists she has no interest in using the Internet, but she still likes to “know what’s going on” in the world of cyberspace.

  “All of this packing, it’s kind of like at Heart Mountain,” Obaachan says, gesturing toward the walls and empty space of her kitchen. Just as she would have done sixty years earlier, my grandmother must evaluate, piece by piece, what she truly wishes to take with her. Obaachan looks at me, searches my face for a brief moment. “I packed up everything except for two plates, two bowls, two sets of silverware, two glasses. Plus one pot and one frying pan.” She shrugs. “You’d be surprised at how little you really need. You learn to be resourceful.”

  She uses the stainless-steel pot to cook her oatmeal in the mornings and to steam brown rice. She can simmer soups and make popcorn in that pot as well. In the frying pan, she can cook an egg for sukiyaki or sauté some fresh vegetables for stir-fry. Determined to use up the items in her pantry rather than throw them away or haul them to Pennsylvania, she has grown creative in her cooking.

  “Your uncle wants to have the grapefruit trees cut down,” Obaachan tells me as she peers out the kitchen window, frowning. “He’s thinking about resale, you know. He says they’re ugly.” The grapefruit trees are not as graceful as they once were, a few years ago, when I’d climb the trunk and shimmy across the limbs, plucking fruit and dropping it into a cardboard box. With each of the more violent storms that have begun hitting central Florida, the trees have grown a little more worn, a little less green. But they still bear fruit. Plus, my grandparents planted them together when they first moved here, two small plants, and in twenty-one years, they have grown full-size. Ojichan, I feel sure, would have disapproved of this plan to remove the trees and would have put up a fight about it. But Obaachan won’t say a word. I suspect that in her mind, she feels she should be grateful for the twenty plus years of rent-free living she enjoyed here. Besides, it’s not in her nature to argue about these types of things.

  “I found something of Ojichan’s,” she tells me later that evening. She shuffles into the spare room where I am reading, hands me a worn leather-bound rectangular photo album, about six-by-twelve inches, and sits down at her wicker-and-glass table set. “It’s some pictures and some things that he wrote. Back when I first found it, a number of years ago, I had to get my sister to translate it because it’s in Japanese. So all the notes in English, they’re hers.” Although Obaachan grew up speaking Japanese with her friends and family in Los Angeles, she and my grandfather never spoke the language at home and chose not to teach their children. After the war, they no doubt thought it best to avoid practices that might lead neighbors to believe they weren’t “American.” Today, after decades of not speaking Japanese, my grandmother barely remembers the language of her youth.

  I open the album, run my fingers gently over the black pages. My grandfather has written in white ink in the margins. The translated notes, all on different scraps of paper, are in the handwriting of the great-aunt I’ve never met. I leaf through the album. A black-and-white photograph of the long bridge with its series of arches, stretching over a wide river. A beautiful picture of a grove of cherry trees, in full blossom, with two groups of people seated beneath them, dated 1934. My grandfather’s Japanese characters—the language he tried to teach me at the kitchen table when I was young—stretch vertically beside the photograph. Ojichan would have crossed t
his bridge each morning on his way to school.

  A piece of paper from my great-aunt slides out. I squint at her translation. Most of Ojichan’s notes are done in a sort of poetry, she writes, so the translating is difficult:

  “I think about each tree and have deep memories. Think about singing that song—o-te te tsunaide—in my kindergarten days … I think about the village of Iwakuni with buds and blossoms appearing in the early spring. The natural sounds of the mountain and the river remind me of dreams of my home country that I left behind.”

  There are other photographs, too, and more notes. In one picture, a group of men are leaning over, working the earth. San Francisco, August 16, 1938, it says, and in the margin Ojichan has written this: “No matter where you go in the world, people are close to nature and like to mix with the earth. Here they are hoeing, and it reminds me of home, and I feel sad.”

  Then there are a series of three photographs of my grandfather in America. He is leaning against a car, ankles crossed, hand on hip. The caption reads: “Taken near Star Florist Shop. Feeling very homesick.” And beneath that, a lengthier note: “Living alone in a foreign country without parents, siblings, or friends, trying to keep pace with society here, was painful and sad. Without education and personality, being ‘driven’ in a foreign culture was difficult and painful. It’s a wonder that with a constant feeling of agony in my heart, that this little body was able to withstand all the difficulties I faced.”

  As I read the words of my grandfather in this album, at last I am able to better understand his tragedy. How intense his struggle must have been here in America, a teenager alone in a country of strangers, in the 1930s. Who was there to listen to him? How would he have known whom to trust? His words in the album are marked by a loneliness and lostness that I never saw in him, so many decades later—that he grew out of, or hid, perhaps, even from his wife. Although he never fully lost that tendency toward wildness that brought about his coming to America in the first place, he never mentioned just how deeply he missed his homeland either. He never used the word “regret” when he talked about that dreadful decision to throw a stone at the statue’s face, at least not when he spoke to us children about it, but he must have felt some remorse for that action, especially in his early years in this country.

  I ask Obaachan if he ever considered returning.

  “No, never. My husband never wanted to go back to Japan,” Obaachan says, shaking her head for emphasis, “even when he received the telegram from his family saying that his father had gan, or cancer, and insisting that he come home right away. When his father got sick, it was not that long after he came to America, but he knew already he would never go back.” Later on, after my grandparents were married, they tried to bring Ojichan’s mother, by that time a widow, to the United States, but there was a long waiting list for people from Japan—families who’d been separated, for instance—who wanted to come to America after the war. She died before her name was reached.

  “Ojichan always said, ‘I would be dead by now,’” Obaachan says. She pauses. “That’s the way he looked at it. He meant the war.”

  With over two million combat casualties and an estimated 580,000 civilian deaths, Japan lost nearly four percent of its population during World War II. Many of those combat casualties would have been young men, around my grandfather’s age. Ironically, my grandfather’s foolish behavior as a teenager—throwing that rock at the statue—and his parents’ severe response—sending him to America, alone—may have saved his life.

  It would be a stretch, I think, some weak but treacherous attempt to find the enormous ripples of that single action, to unite too many events—my grandparents’ marriage, the birth of their children, my own life and my brother’s—to the throwing of that stone back in 1938. Doing so would somehow trivialize everything about my own existence. But the idea does flicker through my mind, tempting me, daring me to make that link.

  The next morning, in the courtyard of Obaachan’s house, the two of us sit at the glass table, finishing our bowls of chicken salsa soup. A light breeze lifts the spindly branches of Obaachan’s two tomato plants, which we just planted the day before. Before my grandfather passed away, he made a wheeled platform for potted plants so that he and Obaachan could easily maneuver them around the courtyard. If there’s a thunderstorm with high winds, for instance, Obaachan can easily wheel all of her plants closer to the house, where they’re protected by the roof’s overhang.

  “Ever since you started asking me about all of this, the war, Heart Mountain,” Obaachan says, folding her napkin and placing it on the table, “I’ve been trying to think about why this happened to me. I could have died from spinal meningitis when I was eight. Another time, when Papa took me with him to buy sashimi, I was almost hit by a car. Two times in my childhood, I came very close to dying. But I didn’t. So now I’m asking myself why. Why did I live?”

  She forms this question carefully, frowning at the way the words feel on her lips, as though the idea has not occurred to her until recently. I ask her if she has come up with an answer, and she frowns, shrugs just a little. “I think maybe I survived because I was supposed to raise my four children, you know, be a good mother,” she says slowly. All four of them grew up to be good, hardworking people, and she is proud of them. “I guess I’m still figuring it out,” she adds. “But I believe everyone has a purpose,” Obaachan continues. “I believe that, and I always have.” She pauses again. “The answer will come to me,” she says quietly, with confidence, looking out over the garden, at the tall bird-of-paradise arcing at the entrance, at the full, red hibiscus waving in the breeze, vibrant.

  Bibliography

  Conrat, Maisie & Richard. Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans. Los Angeles, CA: California Historical Society, 1972.

  Daniels, Roger. Concentration Camps: North America. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, Inc., 1981.

  —. Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1972.

  —. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. Revised ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

  DeWitt, John L. Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943.

  Fugita, Stephen S. & Fernandez, Marilyn. Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember Their World War II Incarceration. Seattle: Washington University Press, 2004.

  Hong Kingston, Maxine. “No Name Woman.” The Best American Essays of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates & Robert Atwan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

  Ishigo, Estelle. Lone Heart Mountain. Los Angeles, CA: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1972.

  Kashima, Tetsuden. Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

  Komoda, Shusui & Pointner, Horst. Ikebana: Spirit and Technique. Dorset, England: Blandford Press, Ltd., 1976.

  Lagnado, Lucette. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

  Mackey, Mike. Heart Mountain: Life in Wyoming’s Concentration Camp. Powell, Wyoming: Western History Publications, 2000.

  Meyer, Dillon S. Uprooted Americans: The Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority during World War II. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1971.

  Spicer, Edward H., Hansen, Asael T., Luomala, Katherine, & Opler, Marvin K. Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1969.

  Spiegelman, Art. Maus I. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

  U.S. Department of the Interior. Wartime Exile: The Exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

  Wakatski, Jeanne. Farewell to Manzanar. New York: Bantam, 1973.

  Additional Bibliographic Notes

  For a timeline of the internment of the Japanese Americans, along with useful links to the
various executive orders related to their internment, I used this site:

  http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/timeline.html

  I am grateful to independent historian Mike Mackey, who never seemed to tire of my emailed questions about Heart Mountain. His essay “A Brief History of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the Japanese American Experience” was especially useful in developing a stronger sense of everyday life at Heart Mountain. It also features some interesting photographs from the camp. It’s available at:

  http://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/history.htm

  All of my information about Pomona before 1942 was found at:

  http://www.fairplex.com/fp/AboutUs/History/1920s.asp

  I found much of my information on the progress of the war at:

  http://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/

  For my details on the Battle of Guadalcanal, I used this website:

  http://www.guadalcanal.com/battleofguadalcanal.html

  All of my information about the deportation of Canadian and Latin American Japanese is from:

  http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/anthropology74/ce3m.htm

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.