Authors: Kimi Cunningham Grant
The two of them would stroll around the dirt paths of the fairground, the light waning, the day still hot. Sometimes, they headed down toward the racetrack and leaned against the fence. Other days, they sat by the lagoon or circled around the old livestock barns. “We tried to make the best of the situation,” Obaachan explains, folding her hands together. “We couldn’t leave, so we did what we could.”
It is strange for me to think about my grandparents, both in their early twenties then, getting to know each other through evening walks around a prison. And it is even stranger for me to consider the irony of their situation, for while life for the two of them remained peaceful and perhaps even promising for those months at Pomona, beyond the barbed-wire fence, the world was at war. Even in other assembly centers, there were outbreaks of violence. At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a Los Angeles gardener with a history of mental illness was shot to death by guards for trying to escape. At Lourdsburg, a farmer and a fisherman were also gunned down. Though the camp guards claimed they thought the two were trying to escape, it was later revealed that upon arrival at the camp, the men had been too sick after the long journey to walk from the train station to the gate, and were actually trying to make their way inside.
Furthermore, while my grandparents were prisoners at Pomona, that summer of 1942, the Nazis began gassing Jews at Auschwitz. Rommel ravaged North Africa and marched toward Cairo. And island by island, nation by nation, the little country of Japan was taking over the Pacific. They completed their capture of Burma and moved into India. In June, they invaded the Aleutian Islands. In July, New Guinea. At the height of its power, the empire of Japan controlled what was at the time the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, French Indochina, Siam, Malaysia, Korea, and part of China. In essence, they’d taken over every piece of land from Japan to Australia.
“At times, I would almost forget,” Obaachan admits, pulling her cardigan more tightly around her shoulders. “I would forget that the reason why we’d been sent away and were living this whole different life was because there was a war going on out there.” But then, there were startling reminders, people and words that pulled my grandmother back into reality. At the mess hall, she picked up bits and pieces of conversations as people moved through the line. “They’re going to kill us,” she heard one gray-haired man whisper to another. He shifted his eyes, watching to see who else might be listening. “I’ve heard they will send us by train to a place where they will kill all of us. Even the women and children …”
The man was not alone in his fears; lots of rumors about what their fate would be made their way around the camp. The oppressive heat, the feeling of being caged, and watched, were beginning to take their toll on the residents of Pomona. As the summer progressed, my grandmother sensed that tensions had increased. At the mess hall, children grew more rambunctious, tugging at their mothers’ skirts or dashing around the tables. Old folks became grumpier as they stood in line, demanding another serving of white rice or complaining that they’d been given less than the person in front of them. The prisoners were growing anxious.
In the toaster oven, the
mochi
begins to puff up to almost triple its original size, and Obaachan stands, removes it with a pair of wooden chopsticks, and places it onto a plate. When you first take
mochi
out of a refrigerator, it is small, hard, and pretty flat, similar to a cookie, but when you heat it, it grows larger, like a marshmallow over a campfire.
“Ojichan had so many stories,” my grandmother continues, thinking again of my grandfather as she walks gingerly to the table. “Do you remember that about him? That he liked to tell stories?”
I nod. Many of my childhood memories consist of my sitting at my grandfather’s feet, listening to him talk, watching his bushy eyebrows leap up and down.
“There was never a dull moment with him. I never felt bored,” she says as she sits down at the island again. When he told her about the man at the docks, she felt as though she, too, had stood in that immigration line. When he described his first bite of a donut, she tasted its powdered sugar on her tongue. He could bring life and excitement to any tale.
“I felt that I had experienced so little,” Obaachan says. “We were the same age, and yet he had
lived
so much more than I had.”
While my grandfather had spent his early life in Japan and had moved as a young man to live on his own in a foreign country, my grandmother had lived a sheltered life with her parents, and had rarely left Los Angeles. While my grandfather was working at a San Francisco hotel and renting a room, my grandmother was still in the house on Pico Street, taking care of her invalid mother, dreaming of going to college one day. And while my grandmother remained close to her parents into her twenties, Ojichan never saw his family again after leaving Japan. Shortly after he had arrived in the United States, in 1938, he received a letter from his mother informing him that his father had died of stomach cancer.
“We were two very different people,” Obaachan says, “from two very different worlds.”
And yet there was something that drew her to him.
“I was always surprised that such an interesting person would want to be involved with someone so dull, like me,” Obaachan admits, smiling a little. “At first, I didn’t believe it could be true.”
I consider my collection of childhood memories of my grandparents. My grandfather was always the one who talked to us and played with us. And in nearly every memory, my grandmother was standing behind him, or off to the side, her lips pressed together. While my grandfather tickled us or told stories or played hide and seek, Obaachan washed brown rice in the sink, or shelled sweet peas at the table, with the two bowls in front of her, one for the pods and one for the peas. My sense is that my grandmother always lived in my grandfather’s shadow, regardless of whether or not they had visitors. He was clearly the dominant personality of the two of them. And, as my mother has told me, Ojichan was always the one in charge of their home.
My grandmother’s disbelief that such a well-traveled, worldly man would take an interest in a quiet, demure young woman gets me thinking about why they
did
end up together. In some respects, she’s right: my handsome, intelligent, sociable grandfather probably would have had his pick of young women, and yet he chose her. And it seems just as unlikely that Obaachan would have been attracted to an ostentatious person like my grandfather, especially because she so deeply respected her own father, who was so quiet and steady.
But perhaps my grandfather saw in Obaachan exactly what he was looking for. He knew that he could never be happy with someone vivacious and outgoing; that kind of woman would have stolen the attention from him. Instead, he needed someone who would listen to his stories, without interrupting or showing indifference, even when she had heard them a hundred times before—someone who would listen just because she loved him and knew that telling those stories gave him such joy. In other words, he needed someone like Obaachan. The fact that she had already proven herself to be a good caretaker probably didn’t hurt either. My grandfather wanted children so badly, and Obaachan would have seemed like a good candidate for taking care of a family.
As for why Obaachan chose in the end to marry my grandfather—I simply ask her. The answer does not come quickly, or even directly. She sighs, thinking about it. “Well, I guess I can best explain it to you like this,” she says. “In
The Forsyte Saga
, by John Galsworthy, there’s a young woman who receives a marriage proposal from someone who really loves her. But she isn’t sure she loves him back. When the woman asks her father what she should do, he tells her she should accept the proposal, because it is always better to be the one in a relationship who is loved more, not the one who loves more.”
She pauses for a moment, pushing at the
mochi
with her chopsticks. “So what I can tell you about this is that I sensed that he loved me, even before we were married. That he really, truly loved me.” She says nothing more, and I conclude that his love, his devotion, was enough for her.
By early August, Obaachan and her family knew that their time at Pomona was coming to an end. The authorities announced that within a few weeks, the prisoners would be relocated to their permanent camp. The family knew that across the country, there were ten camps, and although they had not been told where their permanent camp would be, they did understand that their departure was imminent.
My grandfather was among the first to leave. The authorities had asked for men—specifically, young, strong, and single men—to go to the permanent camp a few weeks early, and he had volunteered. No specific details were provided regarding what he and the rest of the volunteer crew would be doing; all they knew was that they would be finishing a camp somewhere.
“He saw it as a way to get out of Pomona, which he said seemed to grow smaller, hotter, and more crowded each day,” Obaachan explains. “Plus it was an opportunity to make extra money.”
She takes the first bite of
mochi
and tells me that it’s delicious. “Would you like some? There’s another in the fridge. I can cook it for you.”
I tell her I don’t like
mochi
very much, and she shakes her head. My brother and I are still not avid eaters of Japanese food, and Obaachan blames my mother for this. Years ago, she used to warn my mother that she needed to cook more Japanese food for us—that if we didn’t eat it often enough, we wouldn’t like it. Obaachan was right: we eat it, but we don’t love it. The family joke is that my cousin, adopted from Korea, adores Japanese food.
“Well, just before Ojichan boarded the train to leave,” Obaachan continues, “he looked at me and said that he would find me as soon as he could. We understood that we’d be going to the same place—that everyone at Pomona would be sent to one permanent camp—but that’s about all we knew.”
She pokes at the
mochi
with her chopstick, def lating it, and I sense how difficult it must have been for her then, saying goodbye to my grandfather. She was in the dark about so many details. Part of her feared that the rumors about being exterminated were accurate, and that my grandfather would be executed as soon as he arrived. And she felt that in those days, it was too dangerous to hope for good things—for marriage, for children, for a life with someone who cared about her. It was not so much that she didn’t trust the young man she was getting to know; it was more that there had been so many changes and disappointments in the previous ten months that she was hesitant to hope for anything.
For the rest of the inmates at Pomona, the exodus began about two weeks after Ojichan left. It was a slow process: all five thousand of them could not leave at once, so the authorities divided everyone into groups and sent people away five hundred at a time. Those who remained would watch as a long line of prisoners stepped out beyond the barbed wire and marched toward the waiting trains. The armed guards, who placed themselves at every twentieth person, shouted to keep people in line. “Two feet between each person! Slow and steady!” Because small children were part of the line, everyone was ordered to walk slowly enough that the little ones could keep up.
Obaachan, standing with her father, stared as the procession of prisoners passed. Their faces showed fear, weariness, sadness, confusion. She watched the elderly struggle to keep the correct pace and worried about her own mother, who she knew would soon be making this same march. Children, just a few years old, reached for a parent’s hand to hold. Some of them raised their arms to be carried.
“I wonder where it is,” Obaachan said softly, hoping for some word of comfort from her father. Maybe he had heard a piece of news that he could share.
Papa shrugged. “The ten camps are in isolated locations,” he said in Japanese. “Far away from coasts and major cities. Some are in the South, some in the North.” He turned to look at her. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
“Maybe it will be another fairground, like Pomona.”
He did not respond to Obaachan’s speculation, but instead watched the passing line of prisoners, who left in their wake a long train of dust.
Chapter 6
T
HE FOLLOWING
M
AY
, O
BAACHAN FLIES TO
Pennsylvania again to attend my college graduation and spend two weeks visiting my family, and she announces that while she is here, she plans to begin making a quilt. “With a pineapple pattern,” she says. “For your aunt’s new house in Hawaii.” She’ll embroider the individual squares of stiff white cotton, stitching each pattern of X’s with yellow and green embroidery floss, and then she’ll send the squares to the local Amish to be sewn together and quilted into the final product.
My mother, grandmother, and I have gathered in my parents’ kitchen on a dreary afternoon. We’ve just returned from a trip to Buchanan’s, the fabric store in the nearby Amish village of Belleville, and our purchases are strewn in disarray across the kitchen table, the brown bags spilling their fabric, a yellow measuring tape draping over the stacks. Even though I tend to dislike crafts, I agreed to ride along to Buchanan’s in order to spend some time with my grandmother. Somehow, three hours later, it turns out I’m making a quilt of my own, a patchwork, with no embroidering required. My mother, who has always wanted a daughter who was able to sew and “be useful” in the way of household activities—she bought me a sewing machine for my graduation present—has roped me in. Now that I’ve spent over eighty dollars on flannels and batting, I’m regretting my decision to join them.
Obaachan and my mother, drawn to quilting and the idea of women circling up for an afternoon of gossip, are anxious to begin, and they offer their help. (Perhaps they also sense that if they don’t get me started, the flannels and batting will be shoved back into their brown bag and tossed forever into a closet.) As my mother searches for some sewing supplies in her office, Obaachan stands in front of the woodstove, its warm air blowing against her back. It’s unseasonably cold for this time of year and damp from all the recent rain.