Clark and Division Page 2

  The boss’s son, Roy Tonai, was officially listed as the owner of the produce market because he was American born. He had a mean crush on Rose, and everyone said that they probably would get married, especially because Roy was already twenty-four and ready to settle down.

  “I hear there’s going to be a dance at Nishi this weekend,” Mom said after dinner one evening. “Roy’s mother told me that he will be driving in their new car. He wants to take you.”

  “I’m sick of this talk of Roy and me.” Rose threw her napkin on the table. “I’m not marrying him, Mom. I know that will ruin your plans to lord it over everyone at the market.” Her response to my mother initially surprised me as I observed that other Nisei girls would have been delighted to be in Rose’s position. Roy was handsome, with a square jaw and a thick mane of hair that he combed back with oil. In spite of being the boss’s son, he hauled crates of vegetables like any other employee.

  But Rose was like our father; she didn’t like to be boxed in. Whenever you tried to trap her in a corner, she’d get out. I think about that often now. How she must have fought that day in Chicago. Even all these years later I sometimes shut my eyes tight and try to transport myself back, to pretend that by willing myself there in my mind she might somehow have felt less alone.

  Chapter 2

  December 7, 1941, wasn’t a typical Sunday for us Itos, starting at dawn, long before we knew what was going to happen. I was feeling poorly and so was Rusty. He was twelve, ancient for a golden retriever. He was practically deaf and had a bum rear leg; when he walked, he jerked like a car with a flat tire. Yet he soldiered on, his big mouth open in a smile and his wet pink tongue sticking out whenever I took his leash off a nail in the wall.

  Mom, Pop and Rose left the house at five in the morning to help prepare for a wedding reception at the local Buddhist temple. The bride was a distant relative on Mom’s side; most of Mom’s relatives were in Spokane, a thousand miles away from us, so even a second cousin once removed was valued as a close blood relative if they lived in Los Angeles.

  I, with my high fever, could not attend, so Mom had prepared me a pot of okayu, rice porridge, before they left. In fact, I was eating a bowl of the okayu with a red pickled plum floating on its glossy white surface when someone pounded on our door. I ignored it and so did Rusty, who couldn’t hear a thing.

  More pounding. Annoyed, I put down my chopsticks and tightened the belt on my bathrobe. Pop had drilled a peephole about three inches below the factory-made one to accommodate our height, and I pressed my eye against it. Floppy black hair and dark eyebrows. Roy Tonai.

  I didn’t want anyone, much less a man, to see me in my threadbare bathrobe, but Roy was practically family. I blew my nose in a handkerchief, stuffed it into my pocket and opened the door. “For God’s sake, Roy, what’s going on?”

  My aching head couldn’t grab hold of the words coming out of Roy’s mouth. Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Killed American servicemen. This would definitely mean war. We knew plenty of produce workers who had come from Hawaii, dark men with melodious accents who had formerly worked on sugar plantations. I pictured Hawaii as a paradise of coconut trees and white sand beaches. It felt unbelievable that Japan would want to bomb such a place.

  Within an hour, my parents and Rose had returned. The wedding had been called off because of the “incident.” I felt faint. My mother put her hand on my forehead and ordered me to go straight to bed. I was happy to comply but I couldn’t rest. Produce workers under Pop’s leadership trampled in and out of our house expressing worry and dismay.

  A day later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially declared that the US was at war with Japan. Our world shook and our friends began to disappear. Roy’s father got picked up and was placed in a jail in Tuna Canyon with Issei Buddhist priests, Japanese-language instructors and judo teachers. Several days later the government sent him and the others on a train to who knows where. Since Pop didn’t serve on any boards of language schools or other Japanese-type groups, he wasn’t picked up, which he later took as an insult, as if he wasn’t influential enough to be seen as a threat to national security like the others.

  Even before this, after one too many cups of sake, our father had spewed vitriol about the ways the world pressed against us Japanese. The Issei were already barred from buying land in California, and by 1920 the state was making it hard for them to even lease. Now with the war there was the curfew, which restricted the movement of all Japanese Americans. It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t leave the house before six o’clock in the morning; all his hakujin co-workers, even the ones from Germany and Italy, were free to go anywhere at any time. By six o’clock he would have missed out on multiple orders from the Midwest and East Coast.

  Rose, meanwhile, hated having to be at home by eight o’clock every evening. “They’ve even canceled the flower market socials,” she’d complain to me. The Nisei gatherings at the cavernous building on Wall Street, a few blocks away from the produce market in downtown Los Angeles, hardly seemed like a threat to the government to me.

  Rose’s connections with Nisei groups helped us know how to toe the line in Tropico at the beginning of World War II. Richard Tokashiki, whose father owned a flower shop on Los Feliz, told her where we should turn in our radios and our father’s hunting gun, which he used to scare off rabbits. Richard was also the one who got Rose on the bandwagon to support a patriotic Nisei group, the Japanese American Citizens League. They would set up tables at different daytime events to recruit members. She kept trying to get me to come with her but I couldn’t bear to be away from Rusty, who had stopped walking entirely and refused to eat. It was like he knew what was going to happen to us—or maybe he was absorbing the unspoken tension in the house.

  One day I finally relented and manned a table with Rose to sign up new members after a talk by a JACL leader from Utah. I felt like such a fraud because I myself didn’t bother to become a member. There was something about the oath of allegiance that we were supposed to sign, alongside our black-and-white headshot and a fingerprint of our right index finger. The statement announced that we supported and defended the Constitution, “so help me God.” After getting their signature verified by a notary public, members were encouraged to carry the piece of paper in their pockets and purses, as if that documentation would be evidence that they were real Americans.

  The campaign didn’t sit right with me. Only the American-born could join the group. But what about our parents? They were the ones who’d had to struggle to build a life in America. They chose it, strove for it. Meanwhile Rose and I miraculously appeared here, magically American, without even having to journey across the Pacific Ocean.

  I was among two hundred Nisei at Los Angeles City College. The other students were from Japanese communities in Uptown, South Central, Boyle Heights or Little Tokyo and often congregated in regional cliques. I didn’t take school that seriously. Like Rose, I was spending most of my time working at the produce market in the winter of 1942. The market seemed different, as if a major earthquake had thrown it off its foundation. The men seemed rougher and more impatient. Some customers dropped their accounts for no reason. In one case, the operator of a chain of grocery stores specifically said it was because we were Japs.

  Pop didn’t seem overly worried. “Everyone needs food. They need to eat. And everyone knows our vegetables are number one,” he told Roy and all the other workers. But his grin disappeared as soon as the men left his office.

  I was afraid to bring up Rusty’s decline in health because everyone in the family was so preoccupied with this war business. One Friday afternoon I was watching him breathing so hard in the backyard that I couldn’t stand it. It took me three awkward and painful attempts to hoist Rusty into a wheelbarrow from our shed. Bumping him down Glendale Boulevard past the rail yard, I transported him to a plain storefront where there was an animal doctor who usually treated horses.

 
The veterinarian delivered the bad news that I feared. My dog’s heart was failing. Rusty looked up at me knowingly. He was ready to let go.

  It was getting cool by the time we were home. Rusty lay under a cedar tree, his breathing becoming even more labored. “Rusty, I love you. I love you,” I repeated as I buttoned my heavy coat and lay down next to him. I smelled his stinky breath together with the earthiness of dirt, a combination that still haunts me today.

  Through the windows, I could see the silhouettes of my parents and Rose clearing off the dining-room table as it was getting dark. I couldn’t discern Mom’s staccato of Japanese words, but I did hear my name. I knew that I should get up and tell them where I was but I didn’t want to leave Rusty’s side. I was so tired and let myself doze.

  When I awoke, Rusty’s body was stiff and cold and I knew that he was no more. I couldn’t bear the thought of raccoons or coyotes clawing or tearing at his flesh. Using an old shovel from the shed, I found a spot of loose dirt where Mom planted her shiso plants every spring. I began digging a hole, hitting hardpan about midway but using the nose of the shovel to break though. In the darkness, I buried him.

  When I walked into the house, I was completely covered in dirt.

  “What happened to you?” Rose asked, almost dropping the plate that she was drying.

  “Rusty’s dead.”

  No one said anything, not even scolding me for being out of the house during curfew.

  I first saw the exclusion order nailed to a telephone pole near a popular Scottish-themed restaurant on Los Feliz Boulevard in March. I was terrified by the black type calling out, instructions to all persons of japanese ancestry. The order stated that we “aliens and non-aliens” had to report to a Civil Control Station at an address in Pasadena in the beginning of May. We were instructed to bring linens, toiletries and clothing, only in bundles that we could carry. Where was the government taking us?

  Since many of the male Issei leaders were already gone, their wives came by our house, bereft, afraid, confused. Mom extinguished any flames of panic. There was no time for emotion. We had to cross an unknown body of water in a rickety rowboat. If we paused to cry or ask questions, we were bound to sink.

  We packed up our belongings in cardboard boxes, the straw trunks that our parents had brought when they first came to America and, of course, wooden produce crates. One German farmer let us use his barn in San Fernando to store most of our boxes. A Mexican produce worker held on to our silverware and Pop’s tools. A church in Glendale agreed to keep our photo albums. As parts of me were being cut off and scattered in different places, I was quickly learning not to be too sentimental about anything.

  Roy, as the owner of a produce market, was privy to inside information from local politicians and businessmen. One day he came by to tell us that he, his mother and sister were going to report early to an assembly center in the Owens Valley in hopes that we would not be displaced to an unknown location in another state. Called Manzanar, it was about a four-hour drive toward Death Valley, and surrounded by the Sierra Nevada mountain range. “At least we’ll be in California,” he said to my parents and Rose while they stood in the middle of our empty living room.

  Rose, who normally wouldn’t give Roy the time of day, listened intently and nodded. “Better to know where we’ll be,” she agreed.

  Pop handwrote a list in pencil of where all our belongings were stored and slipped the paper in the ribbon band of his felt hat. “We will all come back before you know it,” he said. Pop’s emotions ran hot and cold, depending on how much he drank, but when it came to the family and business, optimism had been his key to success so far.

  I had no such hope. I walked along the concrete riverbank in search of a last song from the toads. I laid some wildflowers at Rusty’s grave, my mother’s former shiso patch. Like Mom, I was pretty sure that we wouldn’t be back again and in the remote chance we were, we wouldn’t be the same.

  The frames of the more than five hundred barracks were already standing when we arrived at Manzanar in late March 1942. We drove up in a caravan with military police tailing us. When I emerged from Pop’s Model A, I felt my heart clamp down into my chest. The wind howled and blew through my hair, forcing my skirt to hide in between my legs. The military police immediately confiscated the Model A and Pop’s face fell, as if he finally understood what would be taken away from us.

  The camp was divided into thirty-six residential blocks, which comprised fourteen barracks, twenty by a hundred feet in size, arranged in two rows of seven. Each barrack was divided into four rooms. We lived in a room with Roy’s mother, widowed aunt and older sister, while Roy stayed in a bachelor barrack, also in Block Twenty-Nine. Through my window I could see the Children’s Village, a special unit that housed orphans from three prewar children’s homes, including one called Shonien, which wasn’t far from Tropico. The orphans, who ranged in age from toddlers to nearly adults, were a mystery to us as they had their own kitchen and kept to themselves, for the most part. Issei nurserymen eventually planted a garden and cherry blossom trees around the Children’s Village as if plants could heal the wounds of displacement.

  Each block had a set of lavatories, separate for men and women. I was completely horrified when I first stepped into ours because there were no separations between toilets. Mom, Rose and I took our bathroom breaks together because we could take turns holding up our coats or towels to shield the person on the toilet. Our periods, which used to occur at about the same time while we lived in Tropico, disappeared altogether while we were in camp, a sign of the terrible stress that we were under. Even though we didn’t voice our complaints out loud, our bodies knew our truth.

  In the beginning our family stayed together, enduring the completely foreign environment as a tightly knit unit. But as the weeks passed, our ties loosened. Rose’s cool magnetism attracted both sexes. It was only a matter of time before a Nisei group, Just Us Girls, known as JUGS, recruited her to be one of their members. Now most of her meals and evenings were spent with them. I was so hurt to be excluded that instead of forcing myself on Rose and her new friends, I avoided her circle entirely.

  Camp took its toll on my parents. Without his title of produce market manager, Pop began to wither and turn inward. Woodworking or gardening, which many of the Issei men embraced, were futile activities, he believed. Instead he started drinking more heavily, hanging out with other old miscreants who were intent on making the best bootleg alcohol out of corncobs or anything else they could find in camp.

  Mom continued to keep up appearances. Little baby gray hairs began to sprout along her hairline, and she spent most mornings either plucking them out or having me or Rose do the tedious chore. She made sure to have a list of things to do every day. As she completed each task, she wrote a check mark beside it. I heard her explain to the other Issei women that’s what they needed to do, too, to not lose their minds.

  I got a job with the Supply Department, which issued jackets and blankets when the weather got cool. That’s where I met Hisako Hamamoto, who was from Terminal Island. Hisako was a bit plump, but she didn’t care. She even made fun of the extra roll of fat around her waist, poking it after we shared a meal. In the early mornings, we’d walk to the Victory Garden to help Roy and some sons of flower growers prepare the soil for seeds of lettuce or spinach. One day as we were sitting in the dirt, Hisako yelped in pain. The culprit? An evil scorpion, which I flattened with the heel of my shoe. Hisako’s upper thigh, where the scorpion had injected its venom, was bright pink and swollen, and I helped her to the closest mess hall, where I cleaned the wound and made a cold compress of ice.

  “No sign of its stinger, so you’ll be all right,” I reassured her, explaining that Rusty had not been so lucky on one of our walks by the Los Angeles River. Pop showed me how to remove the scorpion horns from Rusty’s paw with a pair of tweezers and treat the wound.

  “You’d be a good nurse
,” Hisako complimented me as she pulled her skirt down. “You’re good in an emergency. I myself can’t think straight.” Actually, I was a crybaby, but when immediate danger loomed, I was able to access another part of my brain and complete tasks that I never thought I could do.

  Hisako’s observation stayed in my mind and when I heard about the nurse’s aide program at the Manzanar hospital, I enrolled. I never saw Rose much, anyway, as she would stay out late to make paper flowers for special events at the mess hall at night: weddings or send-off parties for Nisei soldiers in the US Army. Some of my father’s roguish new friends eviscerated the JACL leaders who had lobbied for our boys to be drafted in the first place. Why did we have to spill our blood on the battlefield to prove that we were loyal Americans? Let us out of our cages first and then maybe we’d consider military service.

  I was sympathetic to their viewpoint, but could not say anything to Rose, who was spending most of her time with the pro-JACL Nisei. I even heard rumblings that she was an inu, an informant who was ratting out the Issei or Nisei who had been educated in Japan, sending them to Department of Justice detention centers like the one Roy’s father was in. That accusation was preposterous, but camp was becoming polarized between the accommodationists and the dissenters.

  By the spring of 1943, the government was starting to push the “loyal” Nisei out of camp into the general population of free Americans, as long as they stayed away from the western military zone. Instead of returning home to California, we had to move into unfamiliar towns and cities in the Midwest or the East, anyplace that needed cheap labor to replace the men who had been sent to fight overseas.