Jiichan

I don’t remember my grandfather.

Jiichan died when I was too young to remember him, but old enough to be afraid of death. He haunted my childhood by appearing in a nightmare so disturbing that I used to force myself to recall it every night before going to sleep so that I wouldn’t dream it again. (I was convinced that nightmares visited only the unsuspecting.)

In my dream, there was a large pile of laundry, mainly sheets, on the floor of the dining room in our house on 23rd Avenue. I was sifting through it with my sister, playing in the mountainous folds suddenly dropped into the midst of the usually neat order of my mother’s house. We climbed the mountain; our feet sank into the soft mass. Suddenly I clutched a stiff hand. I screamed, and the dream ended abruptly; but I knew, without seeing the rest, that it was Jiichan‘s corpse in there.

My sisters, being older, had known Jiichan and did not have such dreams. They were not afraid of him. They remembered his quiet presence watching over them as they played in the back yard of the house on Pine Street. They remembered him tending his beloved cherry tree. I was the only one who needed to reconstruct him. I tried to do it by collecting facts—his name, for example, where he was born, that he had left Japan and come to San Francisco sometime around 1896.

But a part of me has always distrusted language, especially facts. We are so often deceived by them into thinking that we know something. Language is applied after the fact. It is a way of labeling an experience, and if we have never been to Wakayama, Japan, it means nothing that our grandfather was born there. Or if we were not alive in 1896, how can we understand what it meant to leave Japan at that time to come to America?

In 1975 I went to Japan to teach English. I didn’t really know why I was going. Finding one’s roots at that time was an expression which had been rendered meaningless by overuse. It was just that part of me that distrusts language, wanting to trade facts for knowing.

Other people don’t seem to be haunted by the need to bring their grandfathers alive. Perhaps they remember their grandfathers, spoke the same language and heard their stories. If you know who you are and where you come from, or if you are accepted in American society at face value, you can forge ahead and never look back. My Asian face doesn’t let me forget my origins. Every time I start to forget, I will come upon that stiff hand, which will remind me. And if I don’t know who my grandfather was, who I am, I will scream with terror. But if I know, then I will know that it is my grandfather’s hand that I hold; and I need not be afraid.

(First published in Into the Fire: Asian-American Prose, Greenfield Review Press, 1996.)
“Jiichan and his cherry tree” © R.A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.