Silver Like Dust Read online

  I struggle to understand this painful sense of duty and devotion. Had it been my own brother who’d lost his hard-earned military job and then been forced to join a different branch of the military, I would have been livid. I would have tried to convince him he deserved better. I would have told him he shouldn’t go off to basic training, that he owed the military nothing. Why should he risk his life for a country that had deserted him? Why did no one in her family try to stop either brother? How could they have been so blindly patriotic? And why is it that I can only see their loyalty as irrational and even lamentable?

  These are questions I cannot sort out aloud, and issues I cannot take up with Obaachan. She would feel criticized somehow, and, more importantly, misunderstood. She would smack her lips in that disapproving way and shake her head in frustration. And because she believed at the time that it was her duty as an American citizen to get hauled out of Los Angeles without a complaint, my failure to sympathize and understand might even seem to belittle what she sacrificed. She might shut down, and refuse to tell me the rest of her story. So I keep these thoughts to myself. I must tread with caution this trail of memory we are following, or I could lose it altogether. Obaachan could close the door and let the dust settle over these years once more, and leave me with no way of knowing what happened.

  In Florida, later that afternoon, Obaachan steps from the house and into the courtyard, where I am stretched out on a chaise lounge, dozing off, a worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye in hand. She shuffles past me and inspects the bird-of-paradise, bright orange and purple, arcing just above her head. She stands on her tiptoes and peers out at the cul-de-sac, then turns around, announces that she is heading to the library, and asks if there is anything she can pick up for me. I shake my head.

  “When will you be back?” I ask. It is a question I have inherited from my parents, one they’ve always asked. A nervous question.

  She shrugs, frowning, mildly irritated. “I won’t be long. It’s not far. You don’t need to be concerned. Like I told your mother, I don’t want to be on a schedule for other people.” She smiles a little then, a half apology for her impatience, and asks me again if I want her to pick up a book or a movie. The library loans DVDs, she explains, pronouncing each letter carefully, and she has a DVD player that she has figured out how to use. I tell her I don’t need anything. She walks to the garage and climbs into her silver Toyota, a gift she has recently received from her youngest son, my uncle Jay. It is the first new car she has ever owned.

  That night, when I call my mother, I tell her about the conversation in the courtyard. She sighs and attempts to explain my grandmother’s response. Don’t take it personally, she insists, her voice firm and soothing. (My mother is much tougher than I and rarely takes anything personally. Of course she knows this difference between us, and feels she must try to convince me not to be hurt.) Once, when she was visiting Obaachan, she explains, she had pressed my grandmother in a similar way, for an estimated time of return.

  Obaachan shook her head in frustration. There was no need to worry; she was fine on her own. My mother, in one final attempt to get a return time, tried reminding my grandmother that she was eighty years old.

  “Yes,” Obaachan replied, “and for the first time in my life, I can go anywhere I want without having to answer to someone, without having to keep checking my watch. Your father always kept me on a schedule. We had to have dinner at a certain hour. We had to water the garden at a specific time. And when he was sick, it was even worse. There were only ninety minutes on each oxygen tank. Every time I left the house, I had to keep track of those minutes. And every time I came home, I’d hope that I hadn’t somehow made a mistake. That he wouldn’t have run out of air. So don’t ask me when I’ll be home, please. I don’t have to be home for anybody these days, not the government, not my husband, and not even you. And that’s the way I like it.”

  On the phone my mother tells me again that I have to decide not to take it personally. “Your grandmother has been ordered around her whole life,” she says. “Where to go, when to be home. She was never free to do what she wanted, not until recently. Picture yourself in her shoes, honey. Try to understand.”

  Three days before Christmas of 1941, Life magazine ran an article titled “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.” The article presented photographs of two men, one Japanese and one Chinese, placed side by side. There were arrows drawn with handwritten notes describing the differences in the facial features of the two men. My grandmother’s family did not have the money to subscribe to magazines, and Mama and Papa did not read English, so they would not have had this issue in their home. However, Obaachan walked around Los Angeles all the time, and she would have passed newsstands on the streets downtown, and seen articles like this. I imagine she cringed at the photographs and notes. It was hard not to feel haji when she saw these things and let the hate of those words sink in.

  However, aside from a handful of upsetting articles and headlines, life did not drastically change in those early weeks after Pearl Harbor, at least not for those Japanese who, like my grandmother, were American citizens. Other than being prohibited from leaving the country—which was, of course, a significant violation of their freedom—their constitutional rights had not yet been curtailed. But the Issei, or first-generation Japanese, faced a different situation. Obaachan’s parents were Issei. Born in Japan and not legally permitted to become naturalized citizens, they were now “enemy aliens” living in a country that was at war with their homeland. And because they were enemy aliens, the government froze their bank accounts and other liquid assets. In more ways than one, they were trapped.

  And yet, on Christmas morning, Obaachan’s family celebrated as they always had: they exchanged a few small gifts and went to church. The pastor read from the book of Luke, and the children collected their tiny white boxes of chocolate on their way out the front door. New Year’s, too, for them was much like it had been in years past. For Japanese families, New Year’s was a much more significant holiday than Christmas. The observance of Christmas had been adopted in America; it was a Christian holiday that they hadn’t celebrated in their home country. New Year’s, on the other hand, involved much older traditions, and was a day steeped in generations of customs.

  Obaachan spent most of New Year’s Day orchestrating her family’s dinner, just as she had the previous two years. Her mother, still wanting to be a part of the event, lay on her bed, calling out questions and instructions. Preparing the tai, or snapper, was a tedious ordeal. First, the body of the fish had to be slit with a sharp knife to ensure that the oven heat would penetrate it evenly. Then the tail had to be curved back into an arch and made to stick up in the air. It was fastened between two slices of daikon with a toothpick. The ridges of the fin were separated, and again, a daikon was placed on either side.

  Obaachan also cooked black soybeans with shoyu and sugar, plus red adzuki beans. She made sushi, steaming the rice and mixing in the sugar and vinegar, then fanning it to give it a sheen. She knelt in Papa’s garden and cut bamboo shoots, then carefully sliced them and added them to the carrots and little imo potatoes, which she cooked with dashi, a soup base that gave it a rich flavor. For dessert there was mochi, the bulbous rice flour pastry that Obaachan had purchased the day before at a Japanese grocery store. And of course, all of the food was accompanied with sake.

  But the meal was only one aspect of the holiday. For Obaachan’s family, New Year’s was not a time for drinking champagne and making a whimsical list of resolutions. It was a day for ref lecting, for thinking about the year that had passed. It was also a time for looking ahead to the future. All disputes were to be settled, and all debts paid. These were not things to be carried into the New Year like baggage; they weighed people down and prevented them from living fully.

  In this spirit of forgiveness and renewal, Japanese families visited friends and neighbors. Because she was confined to her bed, Mama could not participate in much of the holiday, and out
of respect for her, very few people came to the house, preferring to give her her privacy. But Papa made his rounds, cruising through the neighborhood to wish the families he knew a happy year to come. It was a day of new beginnings. A day of hope.

  Through the 1941 holiday season, however, a degree of uncertainty must have hung over their celebrations. Although my grandmother’s family cooked the same traditional meals and participated in the same customs they always had, at the back of their minds, they had to be wondering what the year 1942 had in store for them. After all, they knew that many Japanese families had not been so fortunate as to spend December without trouble. While none of their close friends were affected, Obaachan and her parents learned of what was happening on their radio, in the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, and through the stories that circulated around the community with increasing frequency. All along the West Coast, Japanese fishing vessels were intercepted by officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The fishermen were escorted to land and questioned; some were arrested. Community leaders, Buddhist priests, teachers—essentially anyone in a leadership position in the community—could be considered suspicious. Across Los Angeles, houses were searched by armed men in the middle of the night, and husbands and brothers were handcuffed and hauled off without explanation. Overall, around seven thousand individuals were arrested in this initial roundup.

  Friends of my grandmother’s family began getting rid of belongings that might imply disloyalty: paintings from Japan, for example, or tiny statues of Buddha. They also draped American flags from their porches, hung pictures of great patriots like Washington and Lincoln on their walls, and posted signs that claimed in bold capital letters, “I AM AN AMERICAN” in their storefronts. Obaachan’s family had few relics from Japan, so they had little to take down or throw away. There was the statue of the emperor her mother placed in the living room for holidays. The emperor was a religious figure as much as a political one, but certainly, having a statue of the Japanese ruler in the home could have been misconstrued as treasonous. The family also had a set of painted dolls that were set up on display on Girls’ Day, March 3, and Boys’ Day, May 5. (Japanese believe even numbers to be bad luck and avoid them with great effort, hence the odd-numbered dates of these holidays. My mother, who claims to disdain all acts of superstition, still insists on making three or five sushi rolls, not four or six.)

  For the most part, however, the attempts of the Japanese to show loyalty to America were disregarded. As New Year’s shifted into mid-January and then February, hakujin paranoia and anger heightened. The flags, portraits, and signs were insignificant. Citizenship, too, became irrelevant. What mattered was the dark hair and slanted eyes—and the treachery assumed to be behind those eyes. Soon, my grandmother’s family would realize just how little their patriotism mattered to the hakujin who controlled their fate.

  In fact, with each passing day of 1942, it became more and more impossible to ignore the brewing hostility and anxiety that many California whites felt toward their Japanese neighbors. General John L. DeWitt, the newly appointed commander of the Western Defense Command, the man who eventually orchestrated the mass evacuation, made it clear how he felt about all people of Japanese descent: “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.” Similar sentiments were reflected all across the media—and my grandmother, if not her parents, would have read the headlines and heard the accounts. Henry McLemore, a syndicated newspaper columnist, told his readers:

  I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.

  A journalist in Obaachan’s city echoed these feelings in the Los Angeles Times on February 2: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched. So a Japanese-American … grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.” And on February 12, Fletcher Bowron, the mayor of my grandmother’s beloved hometown, said, in a special radio broadcast in honor of Lincoln’s birthday, “There isn’t a shadow of a doubt but that Lincoln, the mild-mannered man whose memory we regard with almost saintlike reverence, would make short work of rounding up the Japanese and putting them where they could do no harm.” With so many prominent individuals making such strong pronouncements, it was only a matter of time before action was taken against the Japanese living on the West Coast.

  In the early months of 1942, the authorities started urging Japanese families to leave their West Coast homes and move east, away from the volatile Pacific. They called it a “voluntary evacuation,” implying that those folks who chose to leave would be doing so for their own safety. But, with their financial resources frozen, how were these Japanese, whose mere appearance by this point both frightened and enraged many hakujin Americans, supposed to relocate and start over? How much success would they find in wandering into, say, an Oklahoma town, and attempting to open a business and buy a house? They seemed to be doomed from the start. Still, despite their poor odds, around nine thousand of them did attempt to follow the government’s recommendations, packing up their vehicles with essentials and heading east.

  Obaachan’s family did not try this voluntary evacuation. Instead, they stayed put, which, it turned out, was for the best. Those families who attempted to leave on their own were met with hostility, and all across Los Angeles, accounts of failed attempts were whispered about and passed along. My grandmother no doubt heard these stories. In her neighborhood, she could have learned of someone who’d been forced back by armed posses at the border of Nevada. At the store down the street, tales of others who’d been locked up overnight by nervous local officials. And in Little Tokyo, a story of a young man who’d been refused fuel by three gas stations, and who’d eventually turned back with his wife.

  Having realized that the voluntary evacuation had not panned out as they’d hoped, the government began formulating alternative plans. On March 2, General John L. DeWitt declared the entire West Coast a military zone. A few weeks later, on March 27, the Five-Mile Curfew was enacted. Although the curfew technically applied to all enemy aliens living in that military zone—that is, the Germans and Italians, along with the Japanese—it was easier to enforce it on the Japanese. They looked different, and so were an easy target, whereas the Germans and Italians blended in with most other hakujin.

  Essentially, the curfew was a set of rules regulating when and where enemy aliens could go. It restricted them from traveling beyond a five-mile radius of their homes unless they were going to or from their place of employment, or evacuating from the military zone. The curfew also mandated that enemy aliens never leave their homes between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. Obaachan’s father, who left for work at the produce market during these forbidden hours, was supposedly safe as long as he could prove he was going to work by showing the appropriate papers. But if, for some reason, he’d seemed suspicious, or if he’d failed to provide sufficient evidence of his shift hours and place of employment, he would’ve been arrested. His family would not have been told where he’d been taken.

  Obaachan’s Papa prided himself on being a law-abiding man, though, so he stressed the importance of obeying the rules, even if they seemed unnecessary or unfair. In fact, he never said whether or not he agreed with the laws; he simply emphasized the value of respecting them. “A nation cannot thrive if people decide to create their own rules,” he’d told his children when they were young. “Your mother and I chose to move to this country, and we must be willing to follow its laws.” He and Mama had taken great care to raise their family with this mind-set.

  The Five-Mile Curfew, while inconvenient, did not do much to hinder my grandmother’s existence, and it was relatively easy for her and her family to adjust to its demands. Mama, with her heart condition, rarely left the house to begin with. Papa simply had to m
ake sure he had the appropriate paperwork with him on his way to and from work. Obaachan would not have dared to venture out in the dark alone anyway. It was far too dangerous, and she was far too timid to risk being a victim of one of the random assaults on Japanese she kept hearing about on her daytime trips to Little Tokyo.

  Shortly after the Five-Mile Curfew was passed, though, a more troubling announcement was made: all people of Japanese ancestry were to go to the police and hand in their guns, swords, and shortwave radios. Whereas most people did not put up much of a fuss regarding the Five-Mile Curfew, at least not those my grandmother knew, this new decree created more of a stir. Back then, listening to the radio was the best way to learn what was going on outside the local area. For Obaachan’s parents, their shortwave radio was a vital connection to the world because it could pick up stations from Japan, which of course featured announcers who spoke their native language. Unable to understand or read much English, her parents depended on the reports they picked up on that radio, their primary means of staying up to date on the world’s news.

  However, as soon as Obaachan’s father learned about the order to hand in all weapons and radios, he pulled the plug of his radio from the wall. Without a word of frustration, he wrapped the cord into neat folds and secured it to the back of the radio with a piece of brown twine. He grabbed his fedora hat, the one he wore in the winter months, tucked the radio under his arm, and headed for the police station to turn it in.