The Little Exile

by Jeanette Arakawa

  A crowd began to gather in front of the store. Jimmy rode over on the bike Brian gave him. The chrome fenders and spokes glistened in the morning sun whenever it peeked through cracks in the fog. His father and brother arrived on foot a few moments later.

  “I see you’ve been using the chrome polish,” Brian said.

  Jimmy turned his face away as tears filled his eyes. He grabbed Brian’s hand and leaned close. “I’m really going to miss you, buddy. Don’t forget to write.”

  “Me, too.” said Brian, wiping his tears.

  Jean brought me one of her favorite Nancy Drew books, The Hidden Staircase, and insisted I take it.

  “I want you to have it and think of me as you read it,” said Jean and pulled me into a hug, tears rolling down her face.

  “Thanks, Jean. You’re my best friend forever,” I sobbed.

  Soon, the patch of sidewalk in front of the cleaners became totally covered with the Rogers, Irelands, Mrs. Bagley, Mr. Broussard, other shop owners, neighbors, friends, and customers. There were also people I had never seen before. After tears, handshakes, and hugs, Brian and I climbed into the back seat of the car and squeezed in amidst our belongings. Everyone stood at the curb waving as we slowly pulled away. Alice stood in front of everyone with my Betsy Wetsy buggy. I turned away. I felt a terrible sadness having to part with a friend as well as my favorite possession.

  “You won’t be seeing this neighborhood again,” said Brian as we drove away. “Take a good look.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “American Patrol”

  GLENN MILLER

  It took four hours to get to my grandparents’ place in Stockton. We stopped once at the side of the road to eat rice balls and pickled radishes that Mama had prepared. I slept most of the way.

  This was a drive we had taken many times before. It was always in anticipation of seeing Grandpa and Grandma and the huge German Shepherds they kept as watchdogs. My grandparents ran a hotel for Japanese farm laborers and visitors from Japan. Grandpa was a farm labor contractor, which meant that farmers would tell him when they needed help, and Grandpa would arrange for workers from among the hotel guests.

  I had always looked forward to those visits. But this was different. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Grandpa and Grandma. As much as I liked them, this time we wouldn’t be returning home. What was it going to be like, living with them forever?

  “Are we going to live in one of the rooms in the hotel?” I asked.

  “Grandpa and Grandma own the house next door, and it’s been vacant for a while. They were going to tear it down and build a larger house on the lot before the war started. But they can’t do that now,” Mama said. “They’ve fixed it up so we can live there. It has four bedrooms, so it’s large enough for both our family and Uncle Ray’s.”

  When we finally reached the outskirts of Stockton, I spotted the huge gas storage tanks to the left of the road that signaled we were close to our new home. The tanks loomed larger and larger. Soon after, I spotted the top of the large three-story red brick building that was the hotel. It towered over the neighboring short, flat houses.

  “There it is . . . ,” I said softly. “We’re almost there.”

  “You don’t have to make an announcement,” Brian said. “We’re not blind. We can see it, too.”

  “Well, I saw it first,” I said.

  We slowed down as we rounded the corner of Center and Lafayette, where the hotel entrance stood. Two cement steps led up to the double doors. It was topped by an enormous transom in which the address “401 S. Center” floated. We passed the entrance to the driveway just beyond the building on Lafayette Street. The gravel on the driveway crunched under our wheels as we entered the parking area. We came to a stop in front of the back door, where two German Shepherds barked and strained at their tethers to announce our arrival. Uncle Ray and his family had arrived just before us and guided us into a parking spot.

  The screen door to the kitchen burst open and my grandparents came running out to greet us. Grandpa, tall, husky, totally bald, and neatly dressed in dark pants and white shirt, lumbered toward us. Trailing a few steps behind was Grandma, a round lady with wavy hair pulled into a knot on the back of her head. She wore her usual paisley print smock.

  “Welcome. You must be tired from the long trip,” Grandma said as she pushed Grandpa aside. “Come in, come in and eat. Food is on the table. You can unload your things later.” Grandpa laughed and managed to squeeze in a short “Hope you had a good trip.”

  Grandma had prepared a Japanese meal of miso soup, broiled mackerel, spinach, pickled vegetables, rice, and tea. She served us in the large dining room where the hotel guests had their meals. There were several long tables in the middle of the room, and a few guests sat deeply engrossed in their meals. Along the left wall was a cash register on a table with a chair next to it. Grandpa usually sat there to collect money from his meal guests. On our frequent visits before the war, Grandpa would be sitting at his post and call to me: “Shizu, come and sing me a song and I’ll give you a nickel!” I always managed to go home with a pocketful of nickels Grandpa had taken from the cash register.

  No one said anything as we ate. Like the other guests, eyes were fixed on the food, as though it required total undivided attention. Other than the occasional slurping of soup and crunching of pickled daikon, it was absolutely quiet.

  “The pickled daikon is unusually crunchy. It makes a nice sound,” I said. “You make good pickled daikon, Grandma.”

  Everyone burst into laughter, although I didn’t think what I said was particularly funny.

  “I always tell the children that good pickled daikon can be judged by the sound it makes when eaten,” said Papa.

  Then Grandpa said, “I’m so glad that we’re all together. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but at least we’re all together.”

  “I hope they let us stay here in Stockton,” said Papa. We’re pretty far from the ocean now.”

  “That would be nice. At the moment, all we can do is sit and wait for orders,” said Grandpa.

  “Does that mean we don’t have to go to school?” Brian asked.

  “No, I think we should just do what’s normal until we get clear orders. Since tomorrow’s Friday, you can rest a day and start school on Monday. It’s just down the street,” said Grandpa.

  “You’ll be going to the school I went to when I first arrived from Japan,” Mama said. “I was twelve then. Just a little older than Brian is now. I had traveled across the ocean all by myself on a ship full of strangers. I didn’t know any English when I arrived, but fortunately, they had special classes for children from Japan. It was a good school then. I’m sure it’s still a good school.” I looked over at Brian and he rolled his eyes as if to say, “Here she goes again, talking about her childhood . . .”

  After dinner, we crossed the driveway to the house that was to be our new home. We entered through the back door. To my surprise, it opened to a narrow hallway that was papered with yellowing Japanese newspapers!

  “I thought you said that Grandpa fixed this house up for us,” I whispered to Mama.

  “That’s what they said they were going to do,” Mama said. “I don’t know what happened. At least it’s clean.” And that was true. It was clean. And if we had been able to read Japanese, we would have been able to catch up on ancient news by reading the walls.

  On the bright side, Brian and I would each have our own room. But the house hadn’t been lived in for many years, so there was no water or gas. That meant that we could do no cooking in this house. Or anything else. We would also have to use the bathrooms in the hotel.

  Mama had four brothers, who were all born here. Three of them lived in the Stockton area. Her oldest brother, William, and his family lived down the road from the hotel, and Uncle Tom farmed in French Camp. Her youngest, Uncle Robert, had recently returned home from San Francisco where he was a student in dental school. Her fourth brother lived in Washington, D.C. Mama’s
three brothers along with Papa and Uncle Ray would be busy for a while getting the house more livable.

  The hotel was at the edge of the shopping district on Center Street, but there were no sidewalks. Once we crossed Lafayette Street, however, there were raised wooden-platform walkways instead of the concrete ones we were accustomed to in San Francisco. Brian was the one who told me about them.

  “You’ve got to see the sidewalks up the street,” he said. “They’re made of wood and they creak and make hollow thumping sounds when you walk on them. Come on! I’ll show you.” Brian ran out the kitchen door and driveway and across the street. First, I walked normally so I could hear the creaking. Then, stomped and jumped. It was almost like pounding on drums. The sidewalks also had roofs over them, bouncing the sound back at me. Moviemakers could easily have made a cowboy movie on Center Street, I thought. There was even a rail to tie up horses.

  The following week as we walked the two blocks to our new school with Grandpa and Mama, Brian and I walked very deliberately on the creaky wooden boards that led to Franklin. Then we galloped.

  “Don’t make so much noise when you walk,” Grandpa said. “You’ll disturb the shopkeepers along the street.”

  “We stomped all day yesterday and no one seemed to mind,” said Brian.

  “Yesterday was Sunday. All the shops were closed. If you’ll look inside the show windows, you’ll see that there are people inside,” said Grandpa.

  We walked tippy-toe.

  “Don’t act silly,” Grandpa scolded. “Just walk normally. I just want you to be considerate of others. Common sense tells you that noise made directly in front of someone’s property is going to be heard inside.” Grandpa scolded. Brian and I apologized. I liked it better when he was asking me to sing and dance.

  A block later, we found ourselves in front of a large three-story building. It dominated the school yard that surrounded it. Off to one side there was a smaller square building. It had the shape of a building block with windows.

  “That’s where my classes were held when I first arrived from Japan,” Mama said as she pointed to the smaller building. “I don’t know what it’s used for now. At that time, children like me who didn’t speak English were taught here. Grandma had left me in Japan when I was five years old. Grandpa came to America shortly after I was born. . . .” There she goes again. . . .

  Brian didn’t roll his eyes this time. Instead, he said, “That must have been hard for you to come to a country where you didn’t know the language. But you speak pretty good English now!”

  “That was twenty-five years ago,” Mama said. “When I first arrived Grandpa and Grandma spoke only in Japanese, so I didn’t need to know English except at school. And even at school, all my classmates were from Japan. So it wasn’t that bad.”

  As we passed Mama’s old school, I could hear the familiar sounds of kids on the school playground. I felt a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Another new school, new kids. We turned the corner and entered the playground. I kept my eyes down.

  “Hi, Mr. Nishimura. Are these your grandchildren?”

  I looked up and saw a girl about my age standing in front of us. She was “of Japanese Ancestry.” She was with two others who were also “of Japanese ancestry.” I looked around and almost everyone was “of Japanese Ancestry!” I had never before seen so many kids on a school playground who looked like me in one place before. I soon learned that we were living in the middle of Stockton’s Japanese Town!

  This is different, I thought. Then, I could feel the knot that was my stomach dissolving. Children began to gather around us, eager to meet the “new kids.” Worries about explaining “what” I was and “where I came from” were gone. Worries about explaining why I had moved here were gone. For the first time in months, I could just relax and be myself. Everyone seemed eager to meet us.

  Yukiko and Haruko, two sisters who lived down the street from the hotel, became my best friends. Haruko was my age and Yukiko was a year younger. They were both about the same size, but towered over me. Haruko’s long forehead was interrupted halfway down to her eyebrows by the straight cut of her bangs, while Yukiko’s hair was combed back from her face. They both wore brown boots with tassels. I would have loved to have a pair like that.

  Their parents owned a candy store just up the street from the hotel along the wooden walkway. My stomping as I passed the store became a signal for the girls to come running out to join me on our walk to school. On the way home, we stopped by the shop and we each got a piece of candy. I looked forward to that.

  My class was a mix of third- and fourth-graders. Of the thirty students in the room, six were not Japanese Americans. Although it was close to the end of the school year, I was able to fit right into the lessons. There wasn’t any “catching up” to do. During recess, two teams of kids hit a ball tethered to a pole from both directions in attempts to wind the ball completely around the pole. It was a new experience for me. None of the public playgrounds or schools in San Francisco offered tether ball. We also played a team game called Jintori. The goal was to capture opponents. I had never played that before, either.

  When I returned home from school after making my stop at the candy store, I entered the hotel by the kitchen door. Grandma and Mama always had a snack ready for Brian and me. It was usually a rice ball wrapped in seaweed with a pickled plum hidden inside. This would be accompanied by a Nehi orange drink. Delicious.

  I wasn’t allowed to ever use the hotel’s front door.

  “Our guests don’t want to be bothered by little girls.” Grandpa said. “They want to be able to relax in peace.”

  That seemed a little unreasonable to me. What did he think I was. A tornado? I could enter a room without disturbing its contents. They wouldn’t even know I was there. So, one day, I decided to use the front door.

  When I opened it, the air, thick with cigarette smoke, made me cough and my eyes water. I just held my breath and squinted. Immediately inside the door was a wooden counter, much like the one at the cleaners except that this one resembled a fancy cabinet with extra pieces of wood along the edges and the middle. The wall behind it was covered with small numbered cubbies. I guessed they were home to the keys to the rooms upstairs. The wall to the right was lined with cloudy windows. These were not “portals to the outside world,” I thought, but just providers of light for the tables placed next to them. The tables were for playing games and were littered with money, cards, and overflowing ashtrays. Directly in front of me, a man leaned over and a thin stream of brown liquid shot out of the corner of his mouth into a broad-rim brass bowl on the floor. Had I been a few seconds earlier, I might have ended up with a nasty brown stain on my dress. There were other men in long-sleeved undershirts and overalls, with sun-bronzed heads and faces covered with stubble. Tiny cigarettes were clenched between their teeth, and their eyes squinted against the smoke curling up their faces as they sat hunched over Japanese “hana” playing cards. Hana cards had beautiful simple drawings of flowers and nature scenes in vivid colors on the playing side. The men slapped the hana cards on the table as they played their hands.

  As I walked through the room to the entrance of the dining room, one of the men called out to me, “Shizu!” just as my grandfather had always done. It was short for my Japanese name, Shizuye.

  “Sing a song for me!”

  Just like my grandfather would say! It made me stop. Then he pushed his chair from the table and smiled at me as he pulled a sack labeled “Bull Durham” from his shirt pocket and stretched it open. Then, from a flat package with the words “ZigZag” printed on it in large letters, he slid out a thin piece of paper and held it in his left hand. He poured a line of tobacco down the middle of the paper, put the sack of tobacco to his mouth, and grabbed the short piece of string dangling from the opening with his teeth. By turning his head, and pulling with his hand, he closed the sack. Then he dropped it into his shirt pocket, freeing his right hand. Next, he held the tobacco-lined paper with both
hands, rolled it to the outside, licked the edge, and sealed the tobacco in. He twisted one end and stuck it in his mouth. Out came a match from somewhere that he swiped across his pants. The match burst into flame, and he lit the cigarette.

  “Shizu!” The sound shattered my concentration. This time it was my grandfather calling me. “Come out of there! This is no place for little girls!”

  “Oh, oh . . . ,” the card player leaned over and whispered to me. “Looks like you’re in trouble.”

  “You stay out of there,” Grandpa said as he came around behind me and guided me out with his hand firmly on my back. “And, you, Nakano,” he said over his shoulder, “don’t be talking to my granddaughter.” We were both in trouble.

  * * *

  We stayed with my grandparents for two months until we received notice that we had to move. Again. This time it was to a camp at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds.

  “What’s a ‘camp’?” I asked.

  Nobody knew for sure. All they knew was that we would be able to take only what we could carry. We would no longer have a car.

  A couple of days after the order, I was called into Mr. Cecil Owens’s office. He was the principal at Franklin. I didn’t look forward to seeing him, since principals held bad memories for me.

  Mr. Owens was sitting behind a vast book-and-paper-cluttered desk. The light streamed in through the opening in the ceiling like a spotlight on this tall man who had a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. He had dark bushy hair that covered his head, eyebrows, and chin.

  “Please sit down, Marie,” he said. He looked at me across his desk, hunching his back so our eyes were at the same level. His pale blue eyes twinkled as he spoke.

  “Your teacher tells me you’re a good student. And I want it to stay that way. I’m concerned there may not be schools where they’re sending you.” I had only been at Franklin for two months and Mr. Owens was concerned about my welfare. My heart felt full. I thought it would burst.