July 20, 1998 · Monday

Sixty-nine on Saturday. Joanne made chirashi, the scattered sushi, the way I taught her, with the egg cut in thin strips, and Paul brought a cake from the bakery in the International District. Lily, who is nine, made me a card with a drawing of me in the garden wearing a hat as big as an umbrella. It is an accurate drawing.

At the table Emily asked whether I remembered my thirteenth birthday. Everyone went quiet in the way my family goes quiet when the war comes up, as if somebody has dropped a dish. I said yes: thirteen matches instead of candles, and the singing through the walls. And then, because they were all looking at me, I told them the rest of what I wrote here in May. Paul did not know about the matches. He is forty-five years old.

In August of 1942 we went on the train to Idaho. That is the next installment. The beans need picking first.

June 13, 1998 · Saturday

The peonies opened this week. Deep pink, nearly red at the center, and a smell like roses with pepper in it. There are eleven plants now along the south side of the house, and all of them came from one root. I promised to tell their story, and I will, but not in June, when I should be weeding. Next spring, when they come up again. They have been patient for a long time. So can I be.

Emily came after school and showed me how to put a picture on the page. It is a small pink flower. It is not a peony; Emily says the computer does not have a peony. It will do.

May 20, 1998 · Wednesday

Camp memories, part two: Puyallup

The Army called it Camp Harmony. It was the fairgrounds at Puyallup, about thirty-five miles south of Seattle, where the fair is held every September. Some families were put in the animal stalls. They had been whitewashed, but in the heat you could still smell what they had been. We were luckier, if that is the word. We were in one of the parking lots, where long barracks of new lumber had been put up in a few weeks. The walls between the rooms stopped short of the roof. You heard every family on the row: every cough, every quarrel, every baby. My mother whispered for four months.

We were each given a canvas sack and told to fill it with straw from a pile. Those were our mattresses. My brother Sam, who was fifteen, made a joke about being a horse, and my father did not laugh.

When it rained, the lot turned to mud. When it did not rain, it was dust. We stood in line for everything: the mess hall, the latrine, the showers, the mail. My father had never stood in a line in his life. He had his own store. I watched him learn to stand in a line.

Over the fence you could see the top of the wooden roller coaster, standing still. I looked at it every day. I don't know why I remember it better than the fence.

Some of the college students among us started a school in one of the halls, and a girl from the university taught me long division that summer. On July 18 I turned thirteen. My mother found a cake somewhere. I have never learned where. There were thirteen kitchen matches stuck in it instead of candles, and the whole row sang to me through the walls.

May 10, 1998 · Sunday

Mother's Day. Joanne took me to lunch at a place with cloth napkins and made me order dessert. Paul called from the Eastside and put Daniel on the telephone. Daniel is seventeen. He said, "Happy Mother's Day, Grandma," and then, "Wait. Is it Grandmother's Day too?"

I thought today about my own mother in the spring of 1942: a woman of forty, the store gone, the house nearly empty, cooking the last supper in her own kitchen with the last of the rice. She set the table as if company were coming. That is what I remember most. The good cups.

Her phrase was shikata ga nai. It cannot be helped. People say it now as though it meant giving up. It did not mean giving up, the way she said it. It meant: now set the table.

The tomato starts are on the back porch in coffee cans. Too cold still to put them out.

April 30, 1998 · Thursday

Camp memories, part one: The notice

Fifty-six years ago this week, my family left our home.

After Pearl Harbor things happened quickly, and then slowly, and then quickly again. In February the President signed an order. In March there was a curfew for us; we had to be indoors by eight in the evening. Sam thought the curfew was the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone, because of baseball.

In April the notices went up on the telephone poles. My father read the one on our corner with his hands behind his back. It said all persons of Japanese ancestry, "both alien and non-alien," were to be removed. Non-alien was what they called me. I was born in Seattle. So was Sam.

We had about a week. My father and mother had a small grocery. He sold the stock, the scale, the cash register and the delivery truck to a man who came around with cash in an envelope and knew exactly how little we could not refuse. I will not write the number. My father never said it aloud either, but I saw it later in his ledger, in his handwriting, and the handwriting was not steady.

We could take what we could carry. Bedding, clothing, a plate and a cup and a fork and a spoon for each of us. My mother wrapped the dishes in our underwear. The night before we left she burned some things in the kitchen stove: letters from her sisters in Hiroshima, a book of poems, some photographs. I did not understand it then. I understand it now. She was afraid of how the letters might look to someone who could not read them.

We were given a family number. Each of us wore a tag with the number on it, tied to a coat button, and the same number went on every suitcase. I still remember it. I will not write it here. It was enough to wear it once.

I was twelve. I carried one suitcase, my school sweater, and a composition book my teacher, Miss Pearson, gave me on the last day. Inside the cover she had written, Keep writing, Mae. I didn't, not for fifty-six years. Perhaps this counts.

April 25, 1998 · Saturday

Planted the peas today, two months late. In Seattle you are supposed to plant peas on Washington's Birthday, and George always did, rain or no rain, but it has rained on every weekend since February and my knees are not George's knees. Sugar snaps, along the back fence. The ground was cold and sticky.

George's Japanese maple beside the front steps is leafing out red, the way it does for about two weeks before it settles into green. He planted it in 1961, the year we bought this house on Beacon Hill. It was the size of a broom. Now the boy next door climbs it.

The peonies are up. Red shoots, like asparagus that has been embarrassed. They have their own story, and I will tell it another time.

I have been thinking all week about how to begin the camp part. I think I will begin with the telephone pole.

April 19, 1998 · Sunday

My granddaughter Emily set up this computer for me this afternoon. It used to belong to her father, my son-in-law Mark, who has bought a new one, and it now sits on the sewing table in the back bedroom, where the light is good. Emily is fifteen. She showed me how to turn it on, how to find this page, and how to type into the box and press the button that makes the words appear for anyone in the world who cares to look. I asked her who in the world would care to look. She said, "Grandma, that isn't the point."

My name is Mae Tanabe. I am sixty-eight years old. I was born in Seattle in 1929, and I have lived here all my life except for three years and five months, when the government sent my family somewhere else. I was a bookkeeper for thirty-one years. I am a widow. I have a garden.

My parents named me Masae. My teacher in the first grade found Masae too long and called me Mae, and I let her, because I was six and it seemed easier. My mother called me Masae until she died. Everyone else calls me Mae. I have answered to both names for sixty-eight years, and Emily said that should be the name of the page. So it is.

This spring Emily's history class asked each student to interview a grandparent about the Second World War. She interviewed me at my kitchen table with a tape recorder, and I found that I had never told my own children most of it. It was not a secret. Nobody asked, and I did not offer, and then fifty years went by.

So I am going to write it down here, a little at a time, between the garden chores. Puyallup first, then Idaho. I will try to be exact. I was a bookkeeper. I do not like a column that doesn't add up.