CHAPTER 1
Rose was always there, even while I was being born. It was a breech birth; the midwife, soaked in her own sweat as well as some of my mother’s, had been struggling for hours and didn’t notice my three-year-old sister inching her way to the stained bed. According to the midwife, Mom was screaming unrepeatable things in Japanese when Rose, the first one to see an actual body part of mine, yanked my slimy foot good and hard.
“Ito-san!” The midwife’s voice cut through the chaos, and my father came in to get Rose out of the room.
Rose ran; Pop couldn’t catch her at first and when he finally did, he couldn’t control her. In a matter of minutes, Rose, undeterred by the blood on my squirming body, returned to embrace me into her fan club. Until the end of her days and even beyond, my gaze would remain on her.
Our first encounter became Ito family lore, how I came into the world in our town of Tropico, a name that hardly anyone in Los Angeles knows today. For a while, I couldn’t remember a time when I was apart from Rose. We slept curled up like pill bugs on the same thin mattress; it was pachanko, flat as a pancake, but we didn’t mind. Our spines were limber back then. We could have slept on a blanket over our dirt yard, which we did sometimes during those hot Southern California Indian summers, our puppy, Rusty, at our bare feet.
Tropico was where my father and other Japanese men first came to till the rich alluvial soil for strawberry plants. They were the Issei, the first generation, the pioneers who were the progenitors of us, the Nisei. Pop had been fairly successful, until the housing subdivisions came. The other Issei farmers fled south to Gardena or north to San Fernando Valley, but Pop stayed and got a job at one of the produce markets clustered in downtown Los Angeles, only a few miles away. Tonai’s sold every kind of vegetable and fruit imaginable—Pascal celery from Venice; iceberg lettuce from Santa Maria and Guadalupe; Larson strawberries from Gardena; and Hale’s Best cantaloupes from Imperial Valley.
My mother had emigrated from Kagoshima in 1919, when she was in her late teens, to marry my father. The two families had known each other way back when, and while my mother wasn’t officially a picture bride, she was mighty close. My father, who had received Mom’s photograph from his own mother, liked her face—her strong and broad jaw, which suggested she might be able to survive the frontier of California. His hunch was right; in so many ways, she was even tougher than my father.
When I was five, Pop was promoted to market manager and we moved to a larger house, still in Tropico. The house was close to the Red Car electric streetcar station so Pop didn’t need to drive into work, but he usually traveled in his Model A anyway; he wasn’t the type to wait around for a train. Rose and I still shared a room but we had our own beds, although during certain nights when the Santa Ana winds blew through our loose window frames I would end up crawling in beside her. “Aki!” she’d cry out as my cold toes brushed against her calves. She’d turn and fall back asleep while I trembled in her bed, fearful of the moving shadows of the sycamore trees, demented witches in the moonlight.
Maybe because my life started with her touch, I needed to be close to her to feel that I was alive. I was her constant student, even though I could never be like her. My face was often red and swollen, as I was plagued by hay fever from the long stalks of ragweed that crept into every crack of concrete near the Los Angeles River. Rose’s complexion, on the other hand, was flawless, with only a dot of a mole on the high point of her right cheekbone. Whenever I was near enough to look at her face, I’d feel grounded, centered and unmovable, less affected by any change in our circumstances.
While Rose was surrounded by admirers, she kept her distance just enough to be viewed as mysterious and desirable. This was something we learned from our parents. Although we were thought well of by other Japanese Americans, we were not indiscriminate joiner types, at least before the war. In school, our classmates were mostly white and upper-middle-class kids who attended cotillions or Daughters of the American Revolution events, activities that were off-limits to us. There were about a dozen Nisei offspring of florists and nursery operators—smart, obedient boys and immaculately dressed girls, who Rose remarked “tried too hard.” Rose’s style was effortless, and when she wasn’t home, I’d shed my plaid dress and secretly try on her signature outfit—a white blouse, long knit khaki skirt and a thin lemon-yellow sweater, a color that most Nisei girls would avoid wearing. I’d study myself in the full-length mirror on the door of the wardrobe, frown at how the skirt bulged at my belly; it was also much too long, falling down to my ankles but covering my thick calves. And that shade of yellow made my own skin look sallow and sickly, further confirming that Rose’s clothes were not for me.
When I wasn’t in school, I spent time in Tropico going on long walks with Rusty. In those early years, we wandered past the tangles of deerweed, which resembled prostrate women, underneath willow trees where blinding-white egrets rested their elegant limbs, and heard the high-pitched song of the Western toads, which reminded me of the buzz of hot electrical wires. This was before the Los Angeles River flooded, causing the city to fill the riverbed with concrete. Afterward, we still heard the toads, but they weren’t as loud.
I wished that my teen years could have been spent outdoors alone with my dog, but my growing up involved being around other people my age. As I didn’t have that many opportunities to socialize with the hakujin girls outside of school, when I was invited to do so, it was a momentous occasion. One day in eighth grade, Vivi Pelletier, who sat next to me, handed me an invitation to her pool party. It was handwritten on off-white stationery with scalloped edges. The Pelletiers, who had moved to Los Angeles from Europe, were rumored to be connected to the movie studios. They lived in the Los Feliz Hills and were one of the first families in the area to get their own pool.
I held on to that invitation so tightly that it was moist when I showed it to Mom, who wondered if I should go. It would be a high-tone hakujin affair, and who knows how I could end up shaming the family. I was known to make faux pas, like running around with a stain on my shorts because my menstruation pad had shifted during an undokai, a sports event in Elysian Park for our Japanese-language school.
And then there was the matter of my swimsuit. I had an old striped cotton swimsuit whose fabric sagged around my oshiri, making me look like I was wearing diapers. That suit was good enough for Japanese potlucks at White Point, not far from the fish canneries on Terminal Island, where close to two thousand Issei and Nisei lived. It would not do, though, for Vivi Pelletier’s pool party.
“Just let her go,” Rose told my mother. “I’ll take her to get a new suit.”
We went to the dry goods store in Little Tokyo on First Street. Their selection was limited, but I found a navy blue one-piece that covered my ample buttocks.
I brought the folded suit in a bag with my present, a bath powder puff set, which I thought was appropriate for a girl originally from France. I had never attended a party for a hakujin girl and carefully watched all the guests so that I didn’t make any serious mistakes. Quite a few mothers were also in attendance but I was relieved I had come alone. Being the only Japanese, Mom would have felt awfully out of place, and Rose would have been bored out of her mind.
We had finished eating egg salad sandwiches with the bread crusts cut off when Vivi’s mother pulled me aside into a room she referred to as the salon. I feared that I had done something wrong again.
“I am so sorry, but can you come some other day to go swimming with Vivi?”
Did Vivi’s mother think that I had come unprepared? “I have my swimsuit in my bag.”
“No, no dear. That is not the problem.” Mrs. Pelletier had wide-set eyes and a high forehead, which made her look like one of the forest animals in Disney’s Snow White.
I finally figured it out. It was like Brookside Park in Pasadena; the mothers didn’t want me to go into the pool with their daughters.
I fled out the front door without saying goodbye to Vivi. It was a long downhill walk, and my body shook as I stomped on the asphalt.
When I let myself into our back door, Rose turned from the dress pattern she and Mom were cutting at the kitchen table. “Why are you home so early?”
I couldn’t help but to burst into tears, and relayed what had happened.
“I told you not to go,” Mom murmured in Japanese. When she felt slighted by her Issei friends, fellow immigrants from Japan, her anger would manifest itself like a hot streak, but when it came to hakujin men and women, my mother became deflated, half believing what they thought about us.
Rose was not having it at all. “I didn’t waste an afternoon shopping for nothing,” she muttered. She demanded that I go with her to confront Mrs. Pelletier. I tried to resist, but as usual I was overpowered by my sister, who dragged me to the car. When she insisted on something, my whole family eventually went along with it.
Rose pushed on the Pelletiers’ doorbell multiple times in rapid succession. On the doorstep, she cut a striking figure—dress cinched at her tiny waist and her skin almost glowing. She didn’t even give Mrs. Pelletier a chance to say hello. “Did you invite my sister to your pool party and then tell her not to go into the pool?”
Mrs. Pelletier’s face turned beet red. She tried to excuse herself by saying that it was fine with her, but her guests were uncomfortable. “Aki is welcome to come and swim at any other time,” she said.
But Rose, as usual, didn’t back down. “This is unacceptable. You owe my sister an apology.”
“Oh, dear, I am so sorry. Truly I am. I am new to America.”
But we’re not, I thought.
Rose didn’t make any speeches about racial equality or anything like that. We remained silent on the drive home. I went to sleep early that night and after sundown she climbed into my bed and wrapped her arms around me. Her breath smelled sour from the takuan, Mom’s prized pickled radishes, from our dinner. “Don’t you let them ever think that they are better than you,” she whispered in my ear.
The next Monday, Vivi, looking embarrassed, returned my bag with my folded bathing suit and a card in the same off-white stationery, probably a thank-you for my birthday gift. I barely acknowledged her and threw the bag in the hallway trash can without opening the card.
At school, I was able to make a couple of friends, but only with girls who seemed as isolated as me. The only thing that we had in common was our fear of being alone at lunch and recess. I couldn’t wait until I was in high school, on the same campus as Rose. Our high school had been built five years earlier, a gothic structure that looked like Wuthering Heights, except it stood on a sunny hill instead of a foggy moor. When I finally entered tenth grade, I followed Rose and her groupies around like Rusty followed me from one room in our house to another. She’d barely acknowledge me in public—only occasionally remarking with an eye roll, “What can I do; she’s my little sister.”
Rose was the only Nisei girl in the drama club. One late afternoon she came into our bedroom carrying a bound script, her cheeks flushed. “I’m the lead, Aki, can you believe that?”
I waited for her to make an announcement at dinner, but she didn’t, just gulped down Mom’s okazu, a stir-fry of pork and tofu, faster than usual. “Why didn’t you say anything to Mom and Pop?” I asked her when we both were in bed.
“I didn’t want to jinx it. Or get Mom too excited.”
That was indeed something to consider, as Mom was known to get on the phone or go into Little Tokyo or the produce market to “accidentally” run into people to ebaru about our latest accomplishment—well, specifically Rose’s. I didn’t mind that I wasn’t the subject of her boasting. By being under the radar, I was free to be completely average.
I practiced the lines with Rose every night. Babette Hughes’s One Egg was a one-act comedy, which surprised me because my sister wasn’t the type to crack jokes. The play featured three actors in a café—a male customer, a female customer named Mary, and then the waitress.
As I read the lines for the man and the waitress, it became clearer and clearer to me that the two customers were fighting over something more than eggs. There was some charge of romance and it disturbed me.
“Are you sure that it’s okay that you are playing Mary?” I finally asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t put my apprehension into words. We were all used to invisible rules and taboos, breathing them in as they hung in the air of our houses, schools and churches. In California, Japanese could not marry whites, and I sensed that Rose’s casting was a subversive act by the drama teacher. I was both excited and scared for Rose; her insistence not to be treated any different from anyone else could get her in trouble.
About a week before the production, Rose came into our room, her usually bright eyes red and puffy.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my stomach turning in anticipation of trouble.
“Nothing. Who said anything was wrong?” she snapped back at me. She stopped asking me to rehearse lines with her, and the script disappeared from our room.
The evening of the play, Rose made some excuse that she had to go to Doris Motoshima’s house to plan a fundraiser for the school service club. I couldn’t stay back and took Rusty for a long walk all the way to the high school. There were no windows in our auditorium, so I snuck into the lobby, only to have one of the ushers, a senior like Rose, stop me to say that dogs were not allowed. I grabbed the program, though. Outside I saw that Rose was listed as the waitress and Sally Faircloth was Mary. After tying Rusty to a tree beside the auditorium, I returned to the lobby.
“I think that there’s a mistake here,” I said to the usher, who I remembered was in the glee club. “My sister is playing Mary, not the waitress.”
The usher shrugged. It was a minor detail that he obviously cared little about. Finding him utterly useless, I took a seat in the back. The seats were only half-full, mostly with middle-aged parents. I watched another one-act play in progress; the acting was earnest and saccharine. And then came the start of One Egg. Rose entered the stage as the waitress, wearing a simple light-blue dress that you’d see worn by employees in any greasy diner. That was the only thing about Rose’s character that seemed subservient. She wore a pair of shiny black patent leather pumps—her best shoes, in fact—and her hair was immaculately curled with a big royal blue bow tied at the top. Her lips were painted bright red, no doubt her favorite Red Majesty shade. As I had read the play in my rehearsals with Rose, the waitress was a maddening, irritating service worker. In Rose’s version on stage, she was a siren, teasing the male customer—“no sir, yes sir,” and diminishing the female customer played by Sally Faircloth.
When she climbed in bed that night, she was still wearing her lipstick from the play.
“How did it go?” I asked, my head still on my pillow but my eyes alert and searching.
“I saw you sitting back there,” she said. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“The waitress was the better role, anyway,” I said, almost convincing myself of it. Rose didn’t have to tell me that the switch was the result of some complaint. By this time, we understood how the world worked for us. To articulate the attitudes against us would give them power and credence. We preferred to release the pain silently, let it rise in invisible balloons that we couldn’t see but we could feel, bumping against our foreheads and shoulders, warning us not to stray too far from what was expected.
After Rose graduated from high school, she went to work as a clerk at Pop’s produce market, typing out orders from grocery stores. Pop left for work at dawn, receiving the crates of vegetables that arrived in flatbed trucks, vans and huge transport vehicles. Rose took the Red Car into work at a more sensible time, around eight. After graduating from high school, I would sometimes accompany her downtown when I started taking classes at Los Angeles City College. I was proud to sit next to her and tried to keep my ankles crossed like she did. When we arrived at the subway terminal building on Hill Street, though, I would realize my legs were wide open, my skirt taking up most of the seat.
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, ...
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