September 26, 1999 · Sunday

Put most of the garden to bed today. Pulled the bean vines. Cut the peonies to the ground and marked each one with a bamboo stake, so that Mark doesn't step on them in December putting up the Christmas lights. Planted the garlic. The maple has begun to turn at the very top, the way it always does, from the top down, as if someone were pouring the color in.

A reader wrote to me last week and asked how I can be so forgiving. She said she would not be. I thought about it all week while I pulled beans, and this is where I have landed.

I do not forgive the order. The order was paper, and paper does not need my forgiveness; it has an apology on file now, in writing, signed. The people I have forgiven, mostly, one at a time, because I have lived among them for fifty-four years and I wanted to sleep at night. But I have not forgotten, and I will not. I keep the tag in the sewing box. I tell the children. I write it down here. Forgetting would be the only unforgivable thing, and it would be mine.

My mother called me Masae. My first-grade teacher called me Mae. I have two names, and I suppose two of most things: two languages in my kitchen, two ways of saying shikata ga nai. One means give up. The other means now set the table. I am seventy. I have chosen the second one every morning I can remember, and some mornings it was a near thing.

The garlic is in. It will come up in the spring whether I watch it or not. That is my favorite thing about garlic.

September 22, 1999 · Wednesday

Monday, late in the morning, the radio said there had been a great earthquake in Taiwan, in the middle of the night there. I called Mrs. Lin from church at once. Her sister lives in Taichung. She had not been able to reach her. The telephones were not working.

Last night Mrs. Lin called me back. Her sister is alive. Her building is cracked through and she is sleeping outdoors with her neighbors, in a tent that belonged to somebody's son. Mrs. Lin told me this in a flat voice, and then she said, "She took only her pills and her photographs," and her voice broke on the photographs.

I have thought all day about how little holds us up. A house is boards and nails and an agreement with the ground. In 1942 it was a piece of paper on a telephone pole. In Taiwan it was the ground itself. Nobody is promised a floor. I have known that since I was twelve, and I still forget it every morning, when I walk into the kitchen and find the floor there.

I took Mrs. Lin a pot of rice and the last of the tomatoes, and we sat at her table and did not say much. Some days that is what can be done.

September 17, 1999 · Friday

Today I spoke to Lily's fifth-grade class. Lily is ten. She asked me in August, and she has been preparing them for three weeks as though I were the President.

Ten-year-olds ask different questions from eighth graders. Did you have a dog? (A cat, Kuro. We left her with a neighbor and I never learned what became of her. I told them I think she lived a long, fat life. It may even be true.) Did you have to go to school in the camp? (Yes. For some reason this made them feel better.) Did anybody give you candy? (Sometimes at Christmas, from church people outside, in boxes.) Were you scared? (At the beginning. Then mostly bored. Being bored for three years is its own kind of hard.)

And one small boy by the window: "Will Lily have to go?"

I told him no. I told him that the country had said it was wrong, in writing, and that people like his teacher and like him were the reason it would not happen again, because they would remember. I hope that is true. I said it as though it were.

Lily held my hand all the way out to the car. At ten years old, in front of her friends. I am writing that down so I will have it.

September 11, 1999 · Saturday

Pickle day. Cucumbers and the last daikon, salted and pressed under a plate with a brick on it, the way my mother did, except her brick was a stone from the Snake River country that she carried home from Idaho in a suitcase. I have the stone. I use the brick. The stone is on the windowsill.

Emily drove me to the Japanese market in the International District for rice vinegar and a sack of rice. She got her license this spring and drives with both hands at the top of the wheel, very straight, like a woman carrying a tray. At a four-way stop I said it was a great deal to ask of a grandmother, and she said, "Grandma, you were in a camp. You can handle my driving." I laughed so hard she had to pull over. I don't know if I should have laughed. It means the story is theirs now, too, to use however they need. I find I don't mind.

August 29, 1999 · Sunday

What my parents lost

I was a bookkeeper, so here is an accounting of what my parents lost, as well as I can reconstruct it fifty-seven years later, from my father's ledger, which I have, and my memory, which is less reliable.

The grocery: stock, fixtures, scale, register and the delivery truck, sold in six days for a sum I will leave in the ledger. The lease on the store. The car, a 1936 Ford, sold for a price that sent my father out to walk around the block twice. The furniture we could not store. My mother's wedding kimono and my father's good tools, taken from the trunks at the temple. Letters, books and photographs, burned by our own hands in our own stove.

Those are the items with numbers. Then the columns I cannot fill. Three years and five months. My father's voice, which did not come all the way back. His name over a door. My mother's belief that if you are honest and work hard, the country will see it. (She said she kept it. I do not think she did.)

The redress check came to me, and to George, and to Sam, with the letter. It did not come to my parents. The law paid only those who were still living when it was signed in 1988. My father died in 1962, and my mother in 1978. In the ledger of my family, their line has no entry on the other side.

I do not write this to be bitter. I write it because a column that does not add up should be shown, not hidden. That is the whole of bookkeeping, and I have come to think it is most of history.

August 16, 1999 · Monday

Saturday we had Obon here, in our own way.

It is not the temple's Obon. We went to that in July, to the Bon Odori in the street by the Buddhist temple, and I danced three dances with a few thousand people and sat out the rest on a folding chair. This one is only the family's. We began it the summer after George died. In the middle of August, when my mother always said the dead come home to visit, we invite them.

Joanne hung paper lanterns in the maple. On a card table by the back door I set out the photographs: my father in his store apron, before; my mother in her own garden with the peony behind her, after; George in his Army uniform looking about fourteen; and George in this garden with a tomato in each hand, looking about seventy.

We ate cold somen, inari sushi, Gwen's potato salad, Mark's hamburgers, and watermelon. After dark Emily put a tape in her portable stereo and taught everyone the Tanko Bushi, the coal miner's dance: dig, dig, carry it over your shoulder, shade your eyes and look up at the moon, push the cart. My son-in-law, who is Irish, did it very seriously, and Lily laughed until she got the hiccups.

The last Obon I remember that felt like this one was in the summer of 1943, at Minidoka. The old people insisted on it. They danced in a circle between the barracks in the evening, in the dust, in cotton yukata that had come all that way folded in suitcases, with the guard tower at the edge of it all. I remember thinking, at fourteen, how foolish it was to dance there. I understand now that it was the opposite of foolish. They were telling the dead where to find us.

August 1, 1999 · Sunday

Emily redid my page today. She says the old one looked like "a tombstone in a snowstorm." It is now the color of sage, which was her choice, and has a small trowel on it, which was mine. She left the older pages as they were, so you can see how it looked when I began. I said that was very historical of her.

She also showed me the counter at the bottom of the page. It says more than twenty-six thousand people have looked at this journal. Emily says a good many of those are her, checking. I think she exaggerates, but only a little. To the rest of you: thank you. I don't know what you see here, but I am glad somebody is looking.

Cucumbers are pouring in along the fence, the thin-skinned Japanese kind with the bumps. I slice them with a little salt and rice vinegar and they are gone by supper.

July 19, 1999 · Monday

Seventy yesterday. It is a number I have been looking at from a long way off for a long time, the way you see the mountain from the freeway on a clear day and think it is close.

Joanne had everyone to dinner. Paul made a toast, which was really a speech, with notes on a card. He read aloud, to my great embarrassment, a paragraph from this journal: the one about my mother setting the table with the good cups. Then he raised his glass and said, "Here's to setting the table," and everyone drank, and I had to go into the kitchen for a minute to see about the rice.

Paul and Daniel went to the first game at the new ballpark on Thursday. Daniel wore George's watch and they got there two minutes early. Paul said the grass looked painted on. George would have had opinions about that.

At seventy, I am almost six times as old as I was at Puyallup. It has been fifty-four years since the camp closed. It still takes up more room in me than all of them.

July 3, 1999 · Saturday

Tomorrow is the Fourth. In camp we celebrated it. I want to write that plainly, because young people find it hard to believe. That first summer at Puyallup there was a flag and a program and the Pledge, and at Minidoka later there was baseball and a parade of Boy Scouts in the dust. We sang "God Bless America" inside a fence. I sang too. I meant it. I was thirteen, it was my country, and I did not know what else to do with it.

George used to say the Fourth was the only holiday he had paid for twice. Tomorrow we will go to Paul's, and Mark will grill, and the girls will write their names in the air on the driveway with sparklers, and when somebody starts to sing, I will sing.