When I was a little girl, and my mother put me to bed, she did not tell me stories about enchanted forests or beautiful princesses. I had seen “Sleeping Beauty.” I knew “The Three Bears.” These were not the stories I wanted to hear from my mother.
“Tell me the story of when I was born,” I would say, mummified up to my chin by bedcovers. There were no magic wands or fairy godmothers in this story. No poisoned apples or pumpkins that turned into coaches. It was a simple story, a sequence of mundane events, barely connected and sparingly described, peopled not by bad wolves or evil stepmothers, but sisters, my father, my mother of course, and friends of the family. The reason I wanted to hear that story, the reason I liked it so much, was because I was in it. It was real.
Life for me began just eleven short years after the Japanese dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, precipitating events that would inflict on my family a kind of willed amnesia that would last for forty years.
As soon as he could after the war, my father moved us out of Japantown, into an orderly and integrated neighborhood where we had an Armenian grocer, a Russian delicatessen, an Italian piano teacher, and kind hakujin neighbors named the Freemans. The Richmond District of San Francisco, where I grew up, was always foggy. The fog would come in off the Pacific during the night, and when I woke up, I would hear the mournful dialogue of fog horns warning ships in the Golden Gate. Sometimes the fog would burn off by noon, and we would get a glimpse of the blue sky that California is supposed to be so famous for. But often the fog remained all day, or came back in the afternoon, so thick and low that it seemed like a white smoke. If we went anywhere else in the city, we must have looked like foreigners, just come in from Siberia, in our sweaters and coats and knee-high socks. We probably had an intensity, too, that outside people—people who lived in the sun—lacked. A seriousness. An introspection, come from too many days spent inside the house reading, or a range of options that did not include barbecues and lying on the beach.
In school we learned about the explorers, the Mayflower, the American Revolution. When we studied California history, we learned about Father Junipero Serra and the California missions. History, it seemed, focused on the conquerors, never the conquered.
The first time I went to Japan, I was twenty-two. My plane lifted off from San Francisco International, gaining altitude as it banked over the Golden Gate. Down below I could see the Richmond District, the geometrical avenues where I had spent my childhood. Then the plane entered the fog, and for a few seconds there was nothing but whiteness outside my window. For a few seconds, there was no east or west, no time. No memory. Suddenly, we were through. Above the floor of clouds, the sky was blue. The wing of the plane reflected pure sunlight. It was like this all the time I was growing up, I thought. We were down there, under the fog, going to school and church and piano lessons—and all that time there was this blue sky, this glorious sun. And suddenly I hated that fog. I’m out of it, I thought, my heart leaping. I’m on this side now.
Going to Japan was like that for me—like breaking through the fog and seeing, for the first time, in full light, where I had come from. What my grandparents had left behind. What they had intended to return to, until circumstances intervened and they ended up staying in America. Until I went to Japan, I was a person without a past; I looked into a mirror and saw no reflection. All I knew was the little white house on 23rd Avenue, in the Richmond District.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that the house my mother returned to from the hospital, after she had me, wasn’t that house. The school where my sisters had a Halloween parade that day wasn’t the school that was just up the hill from that house. All those years, I had imagined the story, my story, in the wrong place.
Living in that fog-shrouded world perhaps made it easier for my mother and father to forget the past—America’s lack of faith, the internment, the shame. To forget a heritage that cast suspicion on their loyalty. I didn’t have to forget—I never knew.
In wartime, one must choose sides. But the price for doing so can be paid for generations.
(First published as “The Story of When I Was Born,” in Into the Fire: Asian-American Prose, Greenfield Review Press, 1996)
“Teddy reading“: Courtesy of Hannah Swithinbank. Licensed under cc by NC-ND 2.0
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