Farewell to Manzanar (5 page)

Mama's parents were terrified when they saw him coming. He not only led what seemed to them a perilously fast life; he also borrowed money. The story goes that he once asked Mama to borrow as much as she could from Granny. All Granny had at the time was a five-dollar biQ. She gave it to Mama, who passed it on to Papa, who then came stalking into the kitchen, stijff-backed, glaring scornfully at Granny. He was insulted. "It's not enough," he said. "Five dollars. I need more than five dollars. If that's all you've got, I'd rather have nothing!" And he threw the bUl into the fire.

The first time Mama ran away with him, her brothers came looking for her, brought her back to the family farm, and locked her in a second-story room. Mama was so desolate, her oldest brother Charlie couldn't stand it. He leaned a ladder up to her window, forced the latch and let her out.

That time they got away, got married, and made it down to Salem, Oregon, where Papa cooked in a res-

taurant and she worked as a nurse and dietician until my oldest brother was bom, in 1916.

After that she had a child about every two years> nine in the next eighteen, and Papa kept moving, looking for the job, or the piece of land, or the inspiration that would make him his fortune and give him the news he hoped all his life he would one day be able to send back to his relatives: Wdkatsuki Ko made it big in America and has restored some honor to his familys name.

Education mattered a great deal to him. In later years he would brag to us that he "went to law school" and imply that he held some kind of degree from a northern university. It's true that everywhere he stopped he'd be helping a Mend through one legal squabble or another—an immigration problem, a repossessed fishing boat. He worked for tihe government at one point, translating legal documents. But as badly as he wanted us to believe it, he never did finish law school. Who knows why? He was terribly proud, sometimes absurdly proud, and he refused to defer to any man. Maybe, in training for that profession in those years before the Fkst World War, he saw ahead of him prejudices he refused to swallow, humiliations he refused to bear.

On the other hand, his schooling was like almost everything else he tried. For all his boasts and high intentions, he never quite finished anything he set out to do. Something always stopped him: bad luck, a racial barrier, a law, his own vanity or arrogance or fear of losing face.

For a couple of years he tried lumberjacking in Seattle. We have another old photo, this one from the twenties, that shows him standing on a railroad siding, with his boots spread wide, one hand in his jeans pocket and the other holding a wide-brim hat flung high in boisterous greeting—a Nipponese frontiersman with the pine forests rising behind him.

In Oregon he learned a little dentistry (a skill he later put to good used at Manzanar, where he made

dozens of dentures free of charge). He tried farming there too. The alien land laws prevented him from owning property, but he could lease the land, or make a tenancy deal and work it.

A few years before I was bom he had settled the family on a twenty-two-acre farm near Watsonville, California, raising apples, strawberries, and a few vegetable crops. He was making good money, living in a big Victorian house, and it looked as if he'd found his castle at last. But his luck didn't hold. The weU went dry. Thirty years after sailing away from a financial dead end and the remnants of a once-noble family in Japan, he found himself in the middle of America's Depression and on the move again, with eight kids and a wife this time, working his way down the California coast picking prunes, peaches, Brussels sprouts, sending his children into the orchards like any migrant worker's family, hoping their combined earnings would leave a little left over after everyone was fed and the cars gassed up for the next day's search for work.

Just before I was bom he leased another piece of land, in Inglewood, outside Los Angeles, and farmed again, briefly. Then, deciding land was too risky for investing either time or money, he turned to the ocean, started fishing out of Santa Monica, and did well enough at it through the late thirties that by December of 1941 he had those two boats. The Waka and The Nereid, a lease on that beach house in Ocean Park, and a nearly new Studebaker he had made a down payment on two weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The start of World War 11 was not the climax to our life in Ocean Park. Pearl Harbor just snipped it off, stopped it from becoming whatever else lay ahead. Papa might have lost his business anyway—^who knows —sunk his boat perhaps, the way Woody almost sank one ofi Santa Monica a few years later, when he motored into the largest school of mackerel he'd ever seen,

got so excited hauling in the fish he let them pile up on deck, and didn't notice water slipping through the gunwale shts and into the hold until the bow went under.

If any single event climaxed those prewar years, it was, for me at least, the silver wedding anniversary we celebrated in 1940. Papa was elegant that day, in a brand-new double-breasted worsted suit, with vest and silk tie and stickpin. He was still the dude, always the dude, no matter what, spending more money on his clothes than on anything else. Mama wore a long, crocheted, rose-colored dress. And I see them standing by our round dining room table, this time heaped not with food but with silver gifts—^flatware, tureens, platters, trays, gravy bowls, and brandy snifters. The food was spread along a much larger table, buffet style, in glistening abxmdance—chicken teriyaki, pickled vegetables, egg rolls, cucumber and abalone salad, the seaweed-wrapped rice balls called sushi, shrimp, prawns, fresh lobster, and finally, taking up what seemed like half the tablecloth, a great gleaming roast pig with a bright red apple in its mouth.

A lot of in-laws were there, and other Japanese families, and Papa's fishing cronies, a big Portuguese named Goosey who used to eat small hot yellow peppers in one big bite, just to make me lau^, and an Italian named Blackie, with long black sideburns and black hair slicked straight back, wearing black and white shoes and a black suit with white pinstripes. These two were his drinking buddies, as flushed now as Papa was from the hot sake that was circulating and the beer and whiskey.

Papa announced that it was time to carve the pig. We all stood back to make a wide half circle aroimd that end of the table. He had supervised the roasting, now he was going to show us how you cut up a pig. When he knew everyone was watchhig this—^we were his audience, this dining room his theater—he lifted a huge butcher's cleaver, and while Goosey and Blackie, trying not to giggle, held each side of a long cutting

board beneath its neck, Papa chopped the head off in two swift, crunching strokes. All the men cheered—^the sons, the carousers. The women sucked in their breath and murmured. Three more strokes and Papa had the animal split—^two sides of roast pork steaming from within. With serious face and a high-held, final flick he split each side in half, quartering the pig. Then he set the cleaver down, stepped back, reached behind him without looking for a towel one of my sisters somehow had there waiting, and as he wiped his hands he said imperiously to his sons, "Cut it up. You girls, bring the platters here. Everybody wants to eat.**

That's how I remember him before he disappeared. He was not a great man. He wasn't even a very successful man. He was a poser, a braggart, and a tyrant. But he had held onto his self-respect, he dreamed grand dreams, and he could work well at any task he turned his hand to: he could raise vegetables, sail a boat, plead a case in small claims court, sing Japanese poems, make false teeth, carve a pig.

Whatever he did had flourish. Men who knew him at Fort Lincoln remember him well. They were all Issei, and he was one of the few fluent in Japanese and English. Each morning the men would gatiher in theh: common room and he would read the news aloud, making a performance of it by holding the American paper in front of him and translating into Japanese on the spot, orating the news, altering his voice to suit the senator, the general, or the movie star.

Papa worked as an interviewer there, helping the Justice Department interview other Isseis. He almost became an alcoholic there on rice wine the men learned to brew in the barracks. And somehow, during the winter of '42, both of his feet were frostbitten. No one quite knows how. Papa never talked about that to anyone after he got back. But it isn't difficult to imagine. He arrived from Long Beach, California, at the beginning of January, in a country where cattle often freeze to death, and he was of course a prisoner of war.

SEVEN

Fart Mjincain: A.n InterM^ienv

"What is your full name?'*

''WakatsukiKor

"Your place of birth?''

"Ka-ke, a small town in Hiroshima-ken, on the is* land of Honshu."

"What schools did you attend in Japan?"

"Four years in Chuo Gakko, a school for training military officers"

"Why did you leave?"

"The marching. I got tired of the marching. That was not what I wanted to do."

"Have you any relatives serving in the military, now or in the past?"

"My uncle was a general, a rather famous general. He led the regiment which defeated the Russians at Port Arthur in nineteen five."

"Have you ever been in contact with him since com-ing to the United States?"

"No. I have contacted no one in Japan."

"Why not?"

"I am what you call the black sheep in the family."

^'So you have never returned to your homeland?"

"Nor

"Because you are the black sheep/'

"And because I have never been able to afford the trip. I have ten children"

"What are their names?"

"How can I remember that many names?"

"Try."

"William is the oldest. Then Eleanor, Woodrow, Frances, Lillian, Reijiro, Martha, Kiyo, and lefs see, yes, May."

"That is only nine"

"Nine?"

"You said there were ten."

"I told you, it is too many to remember."

"It says here that you are charged with delivering oil to Japanese submarines off the coast of California"

"That is not true."

"Severalsubmarines have been sighted there"

"If I had seen one, I would have laughed"

"Why?"

"Only a very foolish commander would take such a vessel that far from his home fleet"

"How can you explain this photograph?"

"Let me see it."

"Aren't those two fifty-gallon drums on the deck of your boat?"

"Yes."

"What were you carrying in fifty-gallon drums ten miles from shore?"

"Chum."

"Chum?"

"Bait. Fish guts. Ground-up fish heads. You dump it overboard and it draws the mackerel, and you pull in your nets, and they are full of fresh fish. Who took this photograph anyway? I haven't gone after mackerel in over a year."

"What do you think of the attack on Pearl Harbor?"

"I am sad for both countries. It is the kind of thing 44

that always happens when military men are in con-troir

''What do you think of the American military? Would you object to your sons serving?"

''Yes. I would protest it. The American military is just like the Japanese/*

"What do you mean?"

"They also want to make war when it is not nee--essary. As long as military men control the country you are always going to have a war."

"Who do you think will win this one?"

"America, of course. It is richer, has more re-sources, more weapons, more people. The Japanese are courageous fighters, and they will fight well. But their leaders are stupid. I weep every night for my country."

"You say Japan is still your country?"

"I was born there. I have relatives living there. In many ways, yes, it is still my country."

"Do you feel any loyalty to Japan or to its Em* peror?"

Silence.

"I said, do you feel any loyalty .. /'

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine."

"When were you born?"

"I am the interrogator here, Mr. Wakatsuki, not you."

"I am interested to know when you were born."

"Nineteen thirteen."

"I have been living in this country nine years longer than you have. Do you realize that? Yet I am pre* vented by law from becoming a citizen. I am prevented by law from owning land. I am now separated from my family without cause..."

"Those matters are out of my hands, Mr. Wakat* suki."

"Whose hands are they in?"

"I do not like North Dakota any more than you do. The sooner we finish these questions, the sooner we'll both be out of here."

^'And where will you go when you leave?''

"Who do you want to win this war?"

"I am interested to know where you will be going when you leave/'

*'Mr. Wakatsuki, if I have repeat each one of these questions we will be here forever. Who do you want...?"

"When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?''

EIGHT

Inu

with Papa back our cubicle was filled to overflowing. Woody brought in another army bunk and tick mattress, up next to Mama's. But that was not what crowded the room. It was Papa himself, his dark, bitter, brooding presence. Once moved in, it seemed he didn't go outside for months. He sat in there, or paced, alone a great deal of the time, and Mama had to bring his meals from the mess hall.

He made her bring him extra portions of rice, or cans of the syrupy fruit they served. He would save this up and concoct brews in a homemade still he kept behind the door, brews that smelled so bad Mama was ashamed to let in any visitors. Day after day he would sip his rice wine or his apricot brandy, sip till he was bhnd drunk and passed out In the morning he would wake up groaning like the demon in a kabuki drama; he would vomit and then start sipping again. He terrified all of us, lurching around the tiny room, cursing in Japanese and swinging his bottles wildly. No one could pacify him. Mama got nothing but threats and abuse for her attempts to comfort him.

I turned eight that fall. I remember telling myself that he never went out and never associated with others because he thought he was better than they were and was angry at being forced to live so close to them for the first time in his life. I told myself they whispered about him because he brewed his own foul-smelling wine in our barracks.