Silver Like Dust Read online

  When night fell, Papa dug a pit and started a fire, and the family gathered around. The boys, Ren and Jack, found six sticks and shaved off the bark, then gave one to each person. Mama and Sachiko, Obaachan’s older sister, unpacked the hot dogs they’d brought, and over the flames the meat would sizzle and spit. Papa told stories and the waves tumbled and snarled at their backs, and the salt dried in sinuous paths on their skin, and right there, in the balmy glow of the fire, Papa’s face fell into a thousand lines of laughter.

  This was long before the war, in the thirties. Long before Mama got sick and long before they lost everything and were forced out of Los Angeles. They were happy, the six of them. Never rich, but never hungry or in need. In that sense, they were better off than a lot of people during the Depression. Papa’s job, at least to a degree, could be credited for this. He worked as a traffic director at a produce market and could bring home fresh vegetables and fruit each day. Obaachan’s mother simply planned the family’s meals around whatever he provided. At the market, farmers would drive their pickup trucks loaded with bushels of vegetables and fruit to the market and sell them to various vendors, who would then take the produce to grocery stores. Papa worked odd hours, getting up and leaving before three o’clock in the morning and working until lunchtime. He did this six days a week. Usually, he would use those precious hours while the children were still at school to sleep, and then he would spend evenings with the family.

  Papa had come to America around 1910, and Mama, a “picture bride” whose parents had arranged the marriage back in Japan, arrived a few years later. Both of them were from Wakayama, a rural province known for its hot springs and temples. They wed in December of 1915, and eventually they saved up enough money to buy a house on a double lot in Los Angeles. They were from Japan, so they could not become citizens. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalized citizenship to “free whites,” and although in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment extended this to African Americans, it was not until 1954 that Asian immigrants could become naturalized citizens. California’s 1913 Alien Land Law prohibited noncitizens from owning land, but Papa and Mama, like many Japanese families, sidestepped the stipulations of this law by deeding the house in the names of their children, who had been born in the United States and were therefore rightful citizens.

  The house on Pico Street, a small frame house with a large covered front porch, sat on the back half of the lot. Papa transformed the front half of it into a botanical oasis, a haven in the midst of so much pavement. He poured himself into that garden, planting and watering, weeding and pruning. At the time of the evacuation, he had over thirty varieties of plants. Bamboo, camellias, wisteria, oleanders—all of them were, like so many other pieces of their life, left behind.

  Obaachan shrugs, wrapping her fingers around the metal cup from the thermos and resting it on her knees. She takes a deep breath. “Hakabanohana is the name for oleander in Japanese. Hakabano means ‘burial ground’ and hana means ‘flower.’ So the actual word means ‘burial flower.’ Most Japanese consider them bad luck. But Papa liked them and planted them anyway.” She smiles a little. “We were only superstitious sometimes.”

  In one of my grandmother’s photographs, her father is standing in his garden, in front of a forsythia heavy with blossoms. He is wearing a dark three-piece suit, and he is holding his fedora hat suspended above his head, as though greeting the person taking the picture. It’s not an ostentatious gesture; it’s more one of deference. Although he does not smile, his mouth is turned slightly upward, and his eyes are tranquil and kind. Even the black-and-white image captures a distinct air of dignity and composure. It is the only picture Obaachan has of her father in middle age, as she would have known him.

  “We used to catch bees,” she says, kicking her legs back and forth. On the wooden bench, her feet do not touch the ground. She watches a pair of gulls swing toward the water. “There were always so many of them, buzzing and swirling in the garden, and we’d wait with our glass jars and then scoop them right in, like this.” She imitates the motion. “And fireflies, too.”

  She tells me that one of their neighbors, the tall man with strong black arms, grew tomato plants once, and that when he showed them to her from across the fence, she couldn’t believe those full red fruits could grow on such spindly limbs. And that one year, Papa let her till up a spot of his garden to grow sweet corn. That her mouth watered every day when she inspected the tall plants, waiting for them to be ready, and that Papa had to tell her again and again, wait. From the way she talks about him, I can tell that Obaachan respected her father immensely, that she recalls him as fearless, strong, and wise. In another one of her photographs, Papa is seated beside his own father, and he stares indifferently, somberly, outward. And in a third photograph, Papa has the same serious expression, only in that one, he is standing beside his new wife, who looks equally somber. They have probably just met.

  “My father only had an eighth-grade education,” Obaachan says, pulling her navy cardigan more tightly over her shoulders as the wind picks up, “but he knew so much. He could fix almost anything, and, well, he just seemed to understand how things worked.”

  Like many Issei, or first-generation, men, Papa had initially found work in America as a gardener for the wealthy. Before he was hired to direct trucks at the produce place, he simply walked from door to door, knocking and asking owners if they were in need of someone to help with the gardening. Many hakujin were interested in hiring Japanese gardeners, for people quickly realized that most of them were knowledgeable, hardworking, good with the land, and, most importantly, that their labor could be had at a low price. In fact, it did not take long for the Japanese to develop quite a reputation all along the West Coast for being capable farmers.

  Their success with the land, however, came at a cost: many of their hakujin neighbors began to begrudge these accomplishments, and eventually, this bitterness blossomed into a general dislike of the Japanese as a race. In a March 9, 1905, article titled “The Yellow Peril: How the Japanese Crowd out the White Race,” one San Francisco Chronicle journalist wrote:

  The market gardening industry has to some extent been occupied by the Chinese, but in the main it has been held by white men, mostly Europeans … In some places this is rapidly passing to the Japanese, because their living expenses are nominal. With no idle mouths to feed they herd in old shacks, and can exist and lay up money where any white man will starve …

  It took very little time for such sour resentment to surface and, looking back at the history of Asians in the United States, it makes sense that the hostility with which the Japanese were received was merely a continuation of the anti-Asian sentiments that had existed for years. After all, the Japanese were not the first to experience such antipathy. The Chinese had come to America decades earlier, during the 1849 gold rush. Then, in the 1860s, more of them had followed, knowing they could find employment in the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Working at much cheaper rates than their white counterparts, the Chinese were viewed with antagonism. They were stealing jobs from white men. They “work[ed] cheap and smell[ed] bad” and were subhuman, as Professor Elmer Sandmeyer, attempting to describe how white Americans perceived Chinese immigrants, wrote in his 1939 study titled The Anti-Chinese Movement in California. They were—as the 1879 California Constitution itself stated—“dangerous and detrimental to the well-being or peace of the state.”

  This hostile mind-set toward the Chinese transferred easily to the Japanese. In 1884, after centuries of strictly closed borders, the emperor of Japan finally began allowing emigration to the United States, and the Japanese came to America quickly, in great sweeps. By 1892, only a couple thousand Japanese had settled on the mainland, but Californian Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingman’s Party, ended a speech with this statement: “The Japs must go!” While Kearney’s call resonated with many Californians, it did little to curb immigration. Despite their poor reception, the Japanese continued pouring into Cal
ifornia. By 1900, there were around twenty-five thousand Japanese living on the West Coast. That year, J. D. Phelan, the mayor of San Francisco, claimed, “The Chinese and Japanese are not bona fide citizens. They are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made …”

  Obaachan folds her hands and places them in her lap. “We certainly had our own separate spaces,” she says quietly. On the beach below, a jogger passes and nods to us in greeting. Obaachan slides a finger along the edge of the bench, tracing the grain of the wood. “At the movie theatres, there were two levels: the first floor, and a balcony. Mama used to take us to matinees, before she got sick. I don’t know if it was a law or if the studios just had a policy, but I know that I was always seated in the balcony, with the blacks and Mexicans, and other Japanese and Chinese, and that I never once sat on the first floor. Only the hakujin sat down there.”

  There were similar rules with other public areas. The roller-skating rink was only open to Japanese on Sunday nights; they could not go any other day of the week. They were only permitted to use public tennis courts on Sundays as well. And they were not allowed to swim in public pools. “I remember that the Rafu Shimpo, the Japanese newspaper in LA, would have a large sports section on Mondays,” Obaachan says. “Only one day of the week because all the Japanese sporting events were held on Sundays. It was the only day we were allowed to use public areas for things like tennis.” She pauses, frowning, tapping her index finger on the wooden bench. “And we mostly shopped in Little Tokyo, or at very large department stores. We didn’t go in the smaller hakujin stores.”

  As I listen to my grandmother talk, I cannot help noticing the contradiction—the odd and complicated problem of what preceded what. Japanese immigrants were not legally allowed to become citizens. They were not hired by white employers. They were not permitted to integrate in social spheres. And yet they were criticized by the public and the media for just that: for not fitting in, for keeping to themselves, for not being “bona fide citizens,” for not being American.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, both the government and the media played a role in developing the notion of “the yellow peril.” In 1901, the United States Industrial Commission released a statement claiming that the Japanese were “… as a class tricky, unreliable, and dishonest.” The San Francisco Chronicle, arguably the most influential newspaper on the West Coast at the time, began a lengthy anti-Japanese campaign in February of 1903, seven years before my grandmother’s family had arrived in America. The campaign opened with this front-page streamer: “The Japanese Invasion, The Problem of the Hour.” The paper asserted that Japanese men were a danger to American women, and claimed that “every one of these immigrants … is a Japanese spy.”

  Obaachan looks at me, squinting a little as the wind blows more violently. Grains of sand tumble across the boardwalk, hissing against the wood. “But, you see, Mama and Papa worked very hard to instill a positive attitude in us children,” she says. “No matter what happened.” You didn’t complain about unfairness or inequality. You didn’t resent the hurtful or negative things that happened to you. You followed the rules. You didn’t resist. “There’s a word for it,” Obaachan says, “shikataganai.”

  There are things that cannot be changed, and you don’t try to change them.

  Shikataganai is a new word to me, and I wonder if it’s a word I will ever really understand. It lurches off the tongue in spasms of hard sounds: k, t, g. Its very notion feels un-American, that some things are unchanging, or unchangeable. I am too much of an optimist—or maybe just too much a product of the late-twentieth century—to accept this word the way my grandmother does. I consider all of this, frown, and take a sip of coffee.

  “It’s a way of thinking,” Obaachan explains, watching me. She leans forward and crosses her legs at the ankles, her Easy Spirit tennis shoes clean and bright in the early morning gray. “It’s a saying that all Japanese told each other when something unfair was happening, like the laws, or the headlines that said everyone was a spy or that we were all sneaks. Even in the concentration camp, people would shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Shikataganai.’” She searches my face and senses that I don’t grasp it, that I fail to understand how a group of people could collectively embrace such an attitude. “You don’t get it because you were born so much later,” she says. “You have to remember, this was before the civil rights movement. We didn’t even know about rights. It wasn’t in our vocabulary. Everything was very different.”

  Just five years before Obaachan’s father arrived, in 1905, the Asiatic Exclusion League was established, with the primary goal of halting immigration from Japan and even expelling the Japanese already established in California. The league, along with groups like the American Legion, the Native Sons of the Golden West, and the State Federation of Labor, pushed for a 1920 version of the Alien Land Law, which would prohibit the Japanese from accessing farmland altogether, whether by buying it or leasing it, regardless of whether or not they were citizens. Finally, under the provisions of the 1924 Immigration Act, it became illegal for people ineligible for citizenship—which meant, essentially, those of Asian descent—to immigrate at all to the United States. By that time, Obaachan’s parents had already settled on Pico Street and started their family.

  A significant turning point in the movement to exclude the Japanese occurred on October 11, 1906, when the San Francisco School Board ordered all Japanese children to attend the segregated Oriental School, where Chinese children were required to go. Although this action went largely unnoticed in the United States, the Japanese press—and Japan—was outraged. The act violated a clause from the 1894 Commerce and Navigation treaty the two countries had signed, and the Japanese knew it. So did Theodore Roosevelt. He called the action “intemperate” and deemed Californians “idiots” for instigating an international conflict that reached far beyond the city limits of San Francisco. In an attempt to resolve the problem, Roosevelt, in what became known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” eventually did the following: he convinced the school board to reinstate the Japanese students into their original schools; put an end to Japanese immigration to Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii; and persuaded the Japanese government to stop issuing passports to laborers. The Gentlemen’s Agreement, then, achieved precisely what the exclusionists had been pushing for: it slowed down the tide of immigration.

  “I know you have trouble understanding,” Obaachan says slowly, “but it never occurred to me to feel upset about the way the hakujin thought of us, or to complain about how we were treated.” She pauses, fiddling with a button on her sweater. “We understood that we were not part of their world.”

  Obaachan turns toward the ocean and watches the water froth and sputter as it crashes below. Far away, where the water meets the sky, a boat passes. “Besides,” she says softly, “we had our own family struggles to worry about. Things that seemed more pressing. My spinal meningitis. I was just a small girl when I got it. Seven, maybe eight years old.”

  She was quarantined at the hospital, unable to see her parents or siblings, and she vividly remembers the morning when the doctor and nurses came in to draw spinal fluid with a long needle. “They thought I might die,” she whispers. But, after a few days, she was sent home and told to stay in bed for a week. Everything seemed fine until one afternoon, when she picked up the telephone, held it to her left ear, and couldn’t hear the voice on the other end. Because the hearing loss was only in one ear, she hadn’t even realized what had happened.

  “It’s not a big deal, being deaf in one ear,” she says with a shrug. “I just can’t hear as well in a group of people, like when the whole family gets together, or when someone talks very quietly. If they’re sitting on the wrong side, it’s hard for me to hear what they’re saying.”

  I can’t help but wonder if my grandmother’s quietness all these years might stem, at least in part, from this hearing issue. Combined with her shyness and my grandfather’s spirited and garrulous nature, it’s no wonder Obaachan rarely
joined a conversation.

  “More than my own sickness, though,” she continues, “was my mother’s illness. That was much more, well, much more of an upset to our family life.”

  Obaachan had just turned thirteen when her mother learned she had an irregular heartbeat. With the diagnosis, Mama essentially became an invalid and was confined to her bed. Up to that point, she had been an active mother, playing with the children, taking them to matinees and the city library, cooking, cleaning, and attending to all the household duties. When she was warned by her doctors that she needed to limit her activities to avoid straining her weak heart, however, all of this came to an end. There were no more family outings on Sunday afternoons or after school, and the daughters had to take over Mama’s chores at the house.

  For Obaachan’s sister, the transition was not that momentous. Sachiko was five years older, and, at eighteen, had finished high school. She’d already negotiated those difficult years when the body stretches and swells, when new colors drop from it, when new aches weigh it down. Sachiko spent her days working as a cashier at a nearby Japanese grocery store and devoted her evenings to sewing. Bent over at the kitchen table, straining and concentrating beneath the tepid glow of the overhead light, she measured and cut, pinned and then stitched together the fabrics. She was making herself a new wardrobe. She had a life, an existence that was about to extend itself beyond the small world of her parents.

  For Obaachan, though, the changes brought on by Mama’s illness were much more challenging. She was younger and more in need of maternal support. Every afternoon, right after school, she headed straight to her parents’ bedroom, knocked on the door, and then entered when Mama called her in. She seated herself on the edge of the bed and talked about her day. Funny stories from math class. That a girl got in trouble for passing a note. How the social studies teacher, the one with lovely blonde hair, had married a World War I flying ace over the weekend, and how she had pasted his photograph on the bulletin board and told the class her last name was different now.