An older Japanese couple find this perfect peach on the road and are all excited to eat it, when—Pop! It turns into a little boy. Having no kids of their own, they happily raised Momotaru. They taught him to be respectful, brave, and kind, and he was a kid who listened and learned. Peach Boy was loved and loving, and grew into a fine young man. He made loyal friends who helped him defeat awful demons, and together they made the world happy ever after.
But it’s only in my dad’s stories where a Japanese child could defeat the demons. In “real life,” everyone sees us as the demons—with triangle hats, slanted eyes, and dagger-like fingernails. The Yellow Peril.
It only makes sense to take us from our homes and keep us in boxes. It makes sense to take anything of value so we can’t grow into bigger monsters or buy bigger weapons. It only makes sense for demons to be counted, fingerprinted, and given cards to track our movements. Look at the monster I am now: a withered, toothless old woman. I told you I’m losing my filter. I hate such bitter memories sticking to me like tar sands. I want this toxic stuff to go away forever. Let me live in the la-la land of only positive memories. Alzheimer’s is such an asshole. Let me just remember the good things.
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Hitomi let out a deep breath and focused on the fresh eggs and milk she would get for cleaning the house for Mrs. Armstrong. Every bit helped, and she would just have to do her part. She knocked on the door so hard that her knuckles stung with each rap.
James opened the door. Her seventeen-year-old neighbour was a looker: strawberry blond crew cut, tall, well-muscled, and a wide smile.. He towered above her and was one of the most popular boys and the star basketball player in school. James wedged the door open for her while holding a piece of toast and licking strawberry jam from his lips. He spoke in a sing-song voice, and the illusion of his prince-like beauty shattered away. “Ahhh-sooo! Hi-Tommy!”
James liked to practice his “Japanese” by making “Ahhh-soo” sound like “asshole.” He also knew her name, but she had long given up correcting him; James said her name like this on purpose, hoping to get a rise out of her. She took off her sandals and pulled her socks from her skirt pocket and slipped them on. Her heart beat faster already; she could hear a clock ticking in the living room but no other sounds. There were eight kids in his family, and there was usually someone yelling or crying.
“Is your mom home?” she asked.
“Nope. They’ve all gone to our cousins’. I decided to stay home and be in charge of things.” He popped the last piece of his toast in his mouth and grinned.
“I’m going to clean the toilet.” Hitomi ignored the knot tightening in her stomach and went straight to the bathroom. She hoped James would not follow her there.
“I spilled milk on the kitchen floor, so you have to do that first.” A bit of jam sat sickly sweet in the corner of his mouth.
She blew at her bangs and marched to the kitchen where she spotted the offending white puddle on the patterned linoleum. She grabbed a bucket and rag and began sopping up the mess.
He stood over her like a boss in the sugar beet fields. “I heard you got to celebrate your birthday at the RCMP station.”
Her ears burned as she wrung out dingy milk into the bucket. “Isn’t it every girl’s dream to have her sweet sixteen surrounded by handsome RCMP officers?”
Hitomi wanted to sound tough, but she could hear the hurt in her voice. She grounded her teeth, remembering how each fingertip was dirty with ink, and then pressed on to paper like a debasing form of calligraphy. Flash! Went the camera. Happy Birthday! The government had indelible proof she was now old enough to be a war criminal. Her sweet sixteen gift was a lifetime responsibility to always carry her alien registration card.
“Funny girl.” James’ laughter grated like steel wool. “Let’s see your card, I know all you Chinks have to carry them.”
Only Japanese had them, but that James got his racial slur wrong was the least of her worries. Hitomi ignored him and strode to the sink and dumped out the milk.
“Are you deaf? Give it to me.” His voice changed again to the awful sing-song tone Hitomi hated. “Oh, me so sowwy. You no speakee Engrish, right?”
Hitomi was a third generation Japanese, Sansei; she was born here and spoke English, not Japanese, fluently. She steadied her voice to sound calm and in control, but in her mind, she hurled curse words like lightning on a stormy night. “I am here to clean your house.”
In one long step, he came uncomfortably close to her. “You need to know your place. Hand it over!” His breath smelled of yeasty bread and sugary strawberries.
She focused all her attention on rinsing the bucket in the sink while her stomach clenched like a fist. ”No.”
“I’ll help myself.” He leaned against her and groped at her chest; the pretense of searching for an alien card gone as soon as he touched her.
“Stop! Get off me!” She pushed hard against his chest, but he just tightened his grip on her waist.
Hitomi would not let this happen again. She snatched the frying pan from the counter and smashed it against the side of his head.
He let her go, and she backed away, only to see flashes of darkness and shards of light after his fist drove into her forehead. The force threw her to the ground, and she put her hands up to defend herself, but she felt like a drowning woman whose body had already sunk to the bottom of the lake.
His face loomed close, and his smile reminded her of the skull and crossbones on bottles of poison. “I wonder how dirty a dirty Jap is?”
Journal Entry: Square with the number 8 in it of the bigger rectangle of June
Some days my thoughts just whirl around me like rides at the PNE going so fast I can’t get a hold of any of them. I get all wired up and scared, and my social skills which were never the greatest, just plummet like a broken rollercoaster gone off the wooden tracks. My filter gets flung off, and I’m speaking raw messy emotions and offending a lot of people. I don’t mean to.
Aya, my grandniece, she’s the one who visits the most and gets the brunt of my time-befuddled moodiness. She asked me the other day if she could bring me something from the store, and I told her I wanted peach boy. Aya thoughtfully brought me a bag of peaches on her next visit. My heartbeat raced at the sight of the fuzzy golden fruit. Memories of other pasts rocketed through me, of a small peach of a boy who dies over and over again on the day of his birth. There were complications that a pregnant teenage girl on her own in the dark of night couldn’t be expected to deal with. But the guilt of not wanting the baby, the guilt of it dying and hiding its death—these things haunt you.
As if I were an Asahi baseball player, I picked up one of the peaches and nailed it against the wall. I threw another and another so quickly that it took Aya a moment to realize what was going on and grab back the bag.
“Peach boy! Boy!” I screamed.
“I’m sorry, Auntie. I must have misunderstood.” My poor grandniece shook her head and got tissues to clean the yellow juices dripping down the wall. I can still smell their sweet summery scent coming from all that mangled flesh sprawled on my beige carpet.
There was too much to explain to her; I couldn’t get my pain and story into words. Instead, wicked things escaped my lips. “There won’t be a next time! You’re thirty-eight and your wife is even older! You’re way past your due date, Christmas cake. You waited too long to have kids and now you can’t have any! All that in-vitro and money wasted on your shrivelled up eggs!”
Aya’s leaf-green eyes had looked all the greener as she quickly wiped away tears. She hucked the mashed peaches into the garbage can and left with this crumpled-leaf goodbye.
Forgive me. I am iota of flotsam. A senile speck of sentience. A mouthy old Asian lady.
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Hitomi sobbed and yanked at her hair as she left the Armstrong’s house. At least her salty tears wiped away the horrid smell of
strawberry jam and sweat still clinging to her. The shame pulsed through her like constant waves. She didn’t want to think about what happened. Not now. Not ever again. She wanted to get away as fast as she could, but the ripped feeling forced her to walk slower and bow-legged.
Even if she dared say what James had done to her, no one would believe her. And if they did, they would blame her. They would never blame him. Hitomi was the devil. She was the dirty Jap. She was the one already fingerprinted by police. Her parents certainly couldn’t help her. They were demons too, barely holding on to their pride after losing so much already. The truth would just cause them more agony because they could do nothing. This is a white man’s world, and the law was on his side. She had to know her place.
Hitomi stopped. She balled up her fists and punched herself in the stomach until bile rose to her throat. She slapped herself in the face until the stinging rang through her skull like a bell. She dug her nails in her arms until she drew blood. She held her face in her hands and screamed a silent scream wishing someone somewhere could understand her pain.
Journal Entry: Time: two freckles past a hair o’clock
When I first started time travelling, the little lights guided me. It always starts with me floating in blackness. But I never feel alone or scared. I feel this deep well of love that stretches the universe, and then one by one, the tiny dots of light start flashing around me lightly like the wishes blown from dandelions. They’re always excited and whisper amongst themselves because they have this big plan to help “me,” and I happen to be a “me” who can help with the helping.
When they speak, it’s like petting a cat where you are touching a thousand different hairs but it all feels like one warm spot of soft fur. The lights don’t like to talk much about it, but they are the parts of me’s that refused to go. These are the sad bits of me’s. They are the angry bits of me’s. The bits of me’s that won’t give up and go away even though their timelines have long since extinguished. These are the rebellious bits of me’s from every strand of my possibilities.
The lights always liked that show MacGyver, and they think we can do a little hotwiring with the strands of time and quietly make a difference. They have been travelling everywhere, finding each other and banding together. They tell me they have always been with me; I just couldn’t see them until now. They were the little voices that said I could do it. They were the little voices that sent the subtlest of warnings and the slimmest of hints. They were glowing all around me, these iotas of flotsams. Surreptitious specks of sentience. Eternal bits of an Asian girl still fighting.
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Etsuko, Hitomi’s four-year-old sister, pranced in circles and waved her arms, pretending to be a butterfly. Sitting by the warm stove, Hitomi absently touched her stomach, which has grown hard and rounded like half a basketball. A heavy pit of worry had also been growing deep inside her. Thankfully, winter sets in faster and longer in Alberta than in British Columbia, and she could hide in her brother’s oversized hand-me-down sweaters. After doing her final origami fold on a soup can label, Hitomi chewed on her fingernails that had lost their white rims.
“Look,” Hitomi said. Etsuko’s eyes widened, and she flapped over with her invisible wings.
There was a hole in the origami, and Hitomi set her lips to it and blew. Etsuko squealed and clapped her hands as the two-dimensional paper turned into a three-dimensional ball. Hitomi batted it over to Etsuko who caught it with a belly full of giggles. Their youngest sister Kyoko slept in the corner of the room, not bothered at all by their romping around playing catch. Hitomi smiled at the peaceful sleeping face of Kyoko and at Etsuko’s easy joy at such small things in life, meanwhile worries constantly chewed away at her. I will not be able to keep this secret forever. What future will I have? What future will this child have? Through no fault of its own, it is the child of two demons. No one will want it to exist. Not its father. Not even me, its mother.
Journal Entry: November — No remember 12 :)
My grandniece Aya is a social studies teacher and is always asking me about what happened during and after the internment camp days. I tell her I don’t remember. My parents rarely spoke of their loss after the war; it’s family tradition not to talk about it. But since I’m going soon, and she has given me so much, I’ll write a little more for her here. When the Canadian government finally allowed us to leave our boxes, the first thing my dad did was go back to Salt Spring Island to see if he could get our house back. The new owners, fellow islanders we had gone to church with and sold produce to, said no. I remember my mother sobbing when my dad told her the news. There was once a community of about one hundred Japanese farmers and fishermen who lived on Salt Spring Island before the war. So many of them tried to buy their homes back, or buy up new land, or get a job there. The answer was always the same. No. The “real” Canadians on the island wanted a Japanese-free timeline and now they had it. Why would they give that up? Go look in the phone book today for Salt Spring Island, you’ll be lucky if you find even one Japanese name.
We moved to Burnaby where my parents started again. From working three or four jobs each to save enough money, they eventually bought a little plot of land and farmed once again. My brother Sadao eventually took it over. I went to college and studied to be a nurse. I tried to get a job as a nurse on Salt Spring Island. Even though I knew they had vacancies, they told me with icy politeness that there were no jobs at this time. What they left out of the sentence was “. . . for Japs like you.”
My grandniece says it is not our shame. It’s the shame of a society that has lost its moral compass and likes to point the finger at the victim. Aya talks all fancy, saying things like, “we live in a world that cuts along lines of race, class, and gender, and it is those on the bottom who feel and rightfully fear the blade the most.” Schooling has changed so much since my day. You looked at a teacher the wrong way and you could be whacked with a ruler; Japs was the “nicest” word used for Japanese, and girls could only wear skirts to school no matter how bloody cold it was outside.
Aya told me of this activity she did with her class where she sticks a bunch of large gold stars on the wall. She has six kids come up to form a pyramid, so the top kid can reach the stars on the wall. She asks who has to work the hardest and carry the weight. The kids of course say the bottom people. Who has it the easiest and can reach the stars? The kids say the person on the top. Then she has the kids imagine back in the past when Europeans came and stole Aboriginal land and kidnapped Africans to work as slaves. Who got the benefits? Kids would say it was the white landowners at the top collecting the stars. On the day that slavery was abolished, did that change the power structure in society? In 1996 when the last Canadian residential school was closed, did that change the power structure? And the kids would answer: no. Aya says it led to some deep discussions and the kids really got it. They talked about how the people on top didn’t want to look hard at how they got those stars, and how hard it was for people on the bottom to make change with such a heavy history of oppression. There is still a lot of racism; why Gertrude in 12A just called me a Chink this morning, but I think things are slowly getting better. It’s a much better time to be born Japanese in Canada.
Still I’m trying to let it all go; I have my own secret connection to the stars now, the stars that matter. The little lights call me. Alone I am an iota of flotsam. A senile speck of sentience. A little old Asian lady. But together, deep in my sleeping world of time travel, we can pool our power. The lights of me’s have been practicing, testing, and investigating. We can do some rewiring, but it will require sacrifice. We have known the sharp taste of loss and sacrifice in all our timelines, but there is a sweetness to this one that makes it easily bearable.
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Hitomi woke in the middle of the night with a stabbing pain in her belly. Deep in her abdomen, it felt like her muscles were contracting in
to a three-dimensional letter U. Her eyes watered as she tried to pretend nothing was happening. She forced herself not to moan, afraid to wake her family, but the pain came in waves that got stronger and longer. Hitomi crept to the door in the pitch black, away from the warm nest of her family. With a quick creak of the door, she was out. The crisp, cold air tingled against her skin—the magic of the night making her feel alive and real. Darkness covered up the wounds of day and made everyone beautiful and equal. It was just Hitomi and the universe.
Then pain ratcheted through her body again, and she leaned over and held her knees. Once it finished, she stood up and looked to the sky. Tears ran down her face as she stared at the first star she laid eyes on. “I wish I may, I wish I might, wish this wish I wish tonight.” She made her wish—a wish that baggy sweaters would soon no longer be able to hide.
Hitomi crunched through the snow in her rubber boots to get to the outhouse. She couldn’t get there fast enough and threw up, tendrils of stream swirling off the pile of puke. Despite the cold, Hitomi sweated as another contraction rocked through her. She ran to lean against the outhouse door, panting and moaning quietly.
She couldn’t ignore the urge to push the baby out anymore. She pushed and pushed. Hitomi felt things tearing like she was an alien fruit shooting out a rock-hard pit. Little lights flashed in the corner of her vision, and dizziness enveloped her sense of reality. Voices that sounded like one voice spoke to her. She saw no one there, but a sudden rush of warmth around her chest and shoulders made her feel like someone was holding her.
Suddenly she found herself floating in blackness. But she didn’t feel alone or scared. “We are always here for you. You are loved,” the voices said. The bright lights danced around her, and love from every corner of the universe poured into Hitomi.
Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 10