December 13, 1998 · Sunday

Camp memories, part six: Home

We came back to Seattle in October of 1945, near the end, when the camp was closing. The government gave each of us twenty-five dollars and a train ticket.

The store had been a tavern for two years. Other people lived in the house we had rented. We stayed six months in a hostel at one of the churches, six families in the basement with blankets hung on clotheslines for walls, and after Puyallup and Minidoka that seemed almost luxurious, which tells you something.

Our trunks had been stored at the temple with many other families' things. Some of the trunks had been opened. My mother's wedding kimono was gone, and my father's good tools. My composition book from Miss Pearson was still there, at the bottom, under a winter coat. Whoever went through the trunk did not want it. I have it on the desk beside me now. The pages are still blank except for her sentence.

My father found work as a janitor in an office building downtown, nights, and did that until he retired. He never had a store again. He never had anything with his name over the door again. He was not a man who complained, and he did not complain about that. It is one of the things I most wish he had complained about.

One thing had been kept for us, by a neighbor. That is the peony story, and it belongs to spring.

This is the last installment, for now. Emily says eleven people have written to me through this page since April. A woman in Ohio whose father was at Heart Mountain, in Wyoming. A man in California who was at Minidoka as a boy and remembers the canal. A teacher asking whether she may read the installments aloud to her class. Yes. You may. Thank you, all of you. I read every letter twice, the way I read the mail in camp.

November 23, 1998 · Monday

Camp memories, part five: The questions

In February of 1943 the government gave a questionnaire to everyone in camp over seventeen. Two of the questions caused a great deal of trouble. One asked whether you would serve in the armed forces wherever you were ordered. The other asked whether you would swear allegiance to the United States and give up any allegiance to the Emperor of Japan.

My father was not allowed to become an American citizen. The law said so, and had said so for his whole life here. So they were asking a man who was not permitted to be an American to stop being Japanese, which would leave him nothing at all. He sat with the paper at the table in our room for three nights. My mother said nothing. Sam, who was sixteen and not old enough to be asked, said, "Just write yes, Papa." In the end he wrote yes, twice. I do not think he ever forgave the paper.

Some families in our block answered no, or would not answer, and later they were sent to another camp, in California. I remember the trucks. I remember a girl from my class, Sachiko, waving from the back of one. I never saw her again. For fifty years I have looked for her name in the obituaries, and I have never found it, and I choose to take that as good news.

Then the young men began to leave for the Army from behind the fence. Some volunteered in 1943. More were drafted in 1944, George among them. In the mess hall there was a service flag with a blue star for each of them. By the end there were gold stars on it too.

November 3, 1998 · Tuesday

Voted this morning at the church on the corner, as I have in every election since 1950. The poll worker, a young man, asked whether I needed help with the ballot. I told him I have been doing this since before his parents met. He laughed, and then he looked at me and saw that I meant it.

My father became a citizen in 1954, at sixty-one, after the law finally allowed it. He studied for the examination at my kitchen table in his reading glasses, and asked me to quiz him on the Presidents, and he knew them better than I did. The first time he voted he wore his good suit. He came home and hung the suit up and sat on the porch for an hour. My mother said to leave him be.

Last week a man of seventy-seven went back into space. Emily informs me that I have eight years to become an astronaut.

October 14, 1998 · Wednesday

George died five years ago today. It was a Thursday in 1993, in the morning, in this garden. He was raking the maple leaves. His heart stopped, the doctor said, and he would not have known. I was in the kitchen making his tea. I have made one cup of tea every morning since, and it still looks wrong on the table.

George Tanabe was born in Portland in 1925. His family went to the assembly center at the stockyards there, and then to Minidoka, as we did. In 1944 the Army drafted him out of the camp, the same government and the same fence, and he went to Italy and came home with a medal that he kept in his sock drawer and never once discussed. We married in 1950. He worked for the city for thirty-three years. He was quiet and funny and stubborn about his tomatoes, and he let me do the talking, which I understand now was a kind of generosity.

I went to the cemetery this morning with yellow chrysanthemums. Then I came home and raked the maple leaves, because somebody has to.

October 2, 1998 · Friday

Camp memories, part four: Winter, and my mother's garden

We had come to Idaho with Seattle coats. The first winter taught us better. The government handed out old Army coats that came to my ankles, and we carried coal for the stove in buckets from a pile, and at night the walk to the latrine across the frozen block was the longest walk I have ever taken, including the one down the aisle.

At first we went to school in empty barracks, sitting on the floor until benches came. Our teachers were young women from outside, some kind and some who plainly did not want to be there, and some of our own people who had been teachers or college students before. Every morning we said the Pledge of Allegiance. Even at thirteen I noticed: with liberty and justice for all, said by children inside a fence. We said it anyway, every word. I said it. I meant it. I still do, which is my own business.

In the spring of 1943 my mother made a garden. She had never gardened in Seattle; we had the store and a scrap of yard. But at Minidoka she dug the hard ground beside our barrack with a borrowed shovel and carried water in a bucket and planted whatever seeds she could get: radishes, daikon, cucumbers, and morning glories up a string. The dust took some and the heat took some. The morning glories climbed all the way up to the tar-paper eaves.

My father sat on the step and watched her. He did not help. He was not well that year. He had nearly stopped talking. I understand now that he was ashamed, and angry, and there was nowhere to put either one.

My mother's other word, besides shikata ga nai, was gaman. It means to bear what cannot be borne, and to do it with dignity. She said it to me when I cried about school. She never said it to my father. She just watered the morning glories where he could see them.

I think my garden is her garden. I think I have been finishing it for fifty-five years.

September 13, 1998 · Sunday

Tomatoes coming faster than I can give them away. Mrs. Lin from church takes a bag every Sunday and gives me back a jar of something wonderful the next week. She came here from Taiwan in 1970 and her cooking is better than mine, which I say without jealousy, mostly.

George would have been watching baseball all this week. The big man in St. Louis hit his sixty-second home run on Tuesday, and I watched it on the news for George, since he couldn't.

At Minidoka the boys cleared a baseball diamond out of the sagebrush and George played third base. That is the first place I ever saw him. He always said he didn't remember seeing me there, because I was thirteen and he was seventeen, which is fair. I remembered him. He had a way of standing with his cap pushed back like the whole desert belonged to him.

August 18, 1998 · Tuesday

Camp memories, part three: The train

Fifty-six years ago this month we left Puyallup on a train. We had been told Idaho, and nothing more.

The cars were old and it was August. The soldiers told us to keep the window shades down, for our own protection, they said. The car smelled of coal smoke and oranges (someone had brought a whole crate) and of too many people. There were four of us: my father, my mother, Sam and me. When the soldier at the end of the car wasn't looking, Sam lifted the corner of the shade and whispered to me what he saw. A big river. Then brown hills. Then nothing, for a very long time.

We got off at a railroad siding in the desert and were put on trucks. The camp was not finished. The barracks were boards covered with black tar paper, in long rows, in blocks, and there was sagebrush everywhere they had not bulldozed and dust everywhere they had. That first afternoon the wind came up, and the dust came with it, so thick that I could not see my mother's back in front of me. I held on to her coat.

Our room had a coal stove, four Army cots, one light bulb on a cord, and dust on everything, including the dust. My mother sat down on a cot and cried. It was the only time I saw her cry in three years. It lasted perhaps a minute. Then she stood up and asked Sam to go find a broom, and she began to sweep.