Religion

I discovered religion at the age of six, when my best friend Joanne’s parents asked me if I would like to go to Sunday school with her.

I would have done anything to be with Joanne. After spending the first five years of my life being the youngest and smallest in the family, always tagging along after and being told what to do by big sisters, I was utterly charmed to begin kindergarten at Cabrillo Elementary School and find Joanne. She had the same straight black hair as me, cut short and straight across the forehead. She lived on 24th Avenue, about three blocks away from our house on 23rd Avenue. Best of all, she was my size, and didn’t constantly tell me what to do. We would walk around the schoolyard, hands linked, and people would ask us if we were sisters.

I was also fascinated by our differences—she had a little brother, a sort of alien creature that did not exist in our family of girls. Her house had Superman comic books (which my mother did not allow us to read) and a swing set in the backyard. Her mother was younger than mine and everything she cooked was neat and tasty. She was an excellent seamstress and later, when Joanne and I became best friends, her mother sewed us identical dresses. Her father went around the house in a jiban (undershirt) on hot days (rare, in the Richmond District) and sometimes drank a beer in the evening. I thought her dad was quieter and gentler than my dad (who had the ability to completely intimidate with stern looks and verbal rebukes when we disobeyed), but I later realized that this was not necessarily the case. The only time I thought I probably preferred my own house and my own family was when her father lost his temper at Randy, Joanne’s little brother, and spanked him. It was usually only one good wallop, to make a point; but the sudden violence shocked me. My father never hit us. He didn’t even actually need to lose his temper—he was more like a thunderstorm threatening to break, and it was the threat that scared us immediately back in line.

To me, Joanne’s parents were always polite. I took advantage of this politeness and behaved in ways I would not dare at home. I was the ringleader. We played cowboys and Indians. Joanne and I were the marauding Indians, Randy the hapless rancher. We tied Randy up in a chair as we stole his horses and burned his barn. Randy got into his part—kicking and screaming. The chair overturned. Play screams turned into real ones. Joanne’s mother came running into the room and untied him. Gentle verbal rebukes were directed at Joanne, but both Joanne’s mom and dad knew that I was the real culprit.

Another time, we were in Joanne’s backyard on a hot day, giving dolls baths. Never much of a one for dolls, I became distracted when I realized that I could take a wet rubber eraser, rub the wood siding at the back of Joanne’s house, and gray paint would cloud the bathwater.

“Let’s make a paint factory,” I suggested. Joanne and Randy eagerly came on board, and before long, all three of us were industriously rubbing paint off the back of the house. Joanne’s father came outside and quietly observed our activities, one hand cupping his chin as he searched for a tactful way to get us to stop. I sometimes wonder why Joanne’s parents continued to let me come over to play.

When Joanne’s parents asked me if I wanted to go to Sunday School with Joanne, I failed to perceive any underlying motive, but they probably thought I was headed straight for hell and decided to step in. At the time, it seemed like a social invitation, another door opening and an excuse to see Joanne on the weekend as well as at school during the week.

The Sunday School that Joanne and Randy attended every week was in Japantown, in an old building south of Geary Boulevard. Across an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, lay Post Street, the old Fay Ling Inn restaurant, and the rest of the Japanese community. I learned much later that the S.F. Independent Church, which it called itself, was a post-war incarnation of the old Reformed Church, which had played a central role in the Japanese community before the war. By the time I joined, it consisted of a congregation of mostly old Japanese people, who heard a sermon in Japanese, a few stray younger adults such as Miss Akitchika, who was from Hawaii and taught a Sunday school class, and children (us). The driving force of the Sunday school seemed to be Miss Abe, the spinster organist who spoke English with a heavy Japanese accent and always seemed to dress in black, with a hat with a net veil, even though it wasn’t anybody’s funeral. She was probably in her late forties at the time, but to me, she always seemed at least sixty. She was reputed to be a pharmacist in real life, although we never, in all the years we attended Sunday School, had an occasion to associate Miss Abe with any aspect of real life. For us, she existed solely within the walls of the San Francisco Independent Church on Sunday mornings. The things I noticed about her were the things that were different from anyone else I knew — for example, the way she wiped her nose with pieces of gauze. She didn’t drive, and after Sunday school there would always be a cab waiting to take Miss Abe home.

It was Miss Abe who defined Sunday School for us. I recall countless Sunday mornings belting out fundamentalist Christian hymns such as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” Miss Abe’s standbys, to the relentless pounding of her enthusiastic pedaling. Occasionally we sang other less regimented, more lilting hymns such as “Sweet Hour of Prayer” or “In the Garden.” But “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” were unavoidable. There was one recurring moment in “Holy, Holy, Holy” where Miss Abe invariably failed to give the note its full four beats. On the count of four, she would be off on the next refrain, and each time this happened, I would mentally turn into an incarnation of my Italian piano teacher and stifle the urge to scream in annoyance, “COUNT!!  COUNT!!!! YOU MISSED A BEAT!! Can’t you HEAR IT??” The music was actually the best part. I did not particularly enjoy the scripture reading, and the sermons were a real snooze, being delivered in Japanese, which none of us understood.  At every Easter or Christmas, we were obliged to put on a program for the rest of the congregation. Each child had to memorize and recite something totally insipid, but which I suppose Miss Abe thought was charming. “We wish you a merry Christmas, to you (point) and you (point) and you (point). We hope the angels’ message in your hearts will come true.” We went along with it, though, understanding in some unspoken, intuitive way that it was as important to her that we act out this ritual as it was to my mother to dress us up in dresses and Easter bonnets on Easter Sunday when we would have been far happier in our worn-at-the-knees corduroy pedalpushers and horizontally striped t-shirts.

My mother probably liked getting me out of the house on Sunday mornings. Soon my sisters joined. Every Sunday morning, all four of us would pile into Joanne’s father’s car, a rounded pink and white Chevy with tailfins, with Joanne and Randy waiting in the front seat. The best part, for me, would be after church, when a plan would be made for me to spend the rest of the day at Joanne’s house, or for her to come over to ours. Church was something to be borne or endured, the price to pay for the reward of going to Joanne’s house, where we would spend the afternoon acting out our favorite movies (like “The Sound of Music”), I would recount old episodes of “The Twilight Zone” that Joanne hadn’t seen, or we would terrorize her little brother and read his Superman comic books. My family had moved, I had changed schools, and this was now the only time that Joanne and I could get together.

My eldest sister Joan was the first to defect. Lured by peer pressure, she abandoned the old Independent Church and started attending Pine Methodist on the other side of Geary Boulevard. Pine conducted their sermons in English as well as Japanese. There were far more young people in the congregation—including boys—a fact which did not hold any interest for me, but which was starting to matter to Joan.

Kathy and Susan soon followed. For a while, I held out. I continued to go over to Joanne’s house on many weekends, but now, instead of cowboys and Indians, we were the Beatles.  She was John and I was Ringo.

Then Pine Methodist moved out to the Avenues, just five blocks from our house. Japantown was being “renewed”—the weedy lot between Geary and Post Streets was being excavated for a high-speed underpass. Old Victorians were being torn down, long-standing businesses like the Fay Ling Inn evicted, and a modernistic Japan Center was being constructed, complete with touristy pagoda. Joanne, Randy and I began attending Pine Methodist, and in the excitement of Thursday night volleyball games and a youth group that elected me President, Sunday School with Miss Abe faded rapidly into oblivion along with Easter bonnets and idiotic holiday recitations. Now there were ski trips and activities to benefit social causes—and boys.

Whether it was because of Vietnam or just a phase of adolescence, in high school I examined my conscience and realized that the only reason I was attending church was that I enjoyed the Thursday night volleyball games with Joanne, Joey and Roger. My feelings about God were mixed. I was not opposed to believing in Him, but by the same token, his existence just didn’t seem to matter very much. I had seen too many good people suffer and bad people go unpunished. There were too many wrongs in the world, and only people seemed to be doing anything to try to correct them.

By this time, Joanne and I had drifted apart in favor of other school friends. Church was the only place we socialized. My youthful principles did not consider socializing a valid reason to attend church. My religious life came to an end.

Many years later, after leaving home, leaving country, leaving the entire world of my childhood behind, I was back in Japantown, picking up groceries in a market on Post Street. There, looking a bit older (seventy rather than sixty) but essentially the same, was Miss Abe. It was a shock to see her, as, for me, she had virtually ceased to exist the minute I quit Sunday School. I had never even bothered to find out what happened to the Independent Church when Japantown underwent its facelift.

“Miss Abe,” I said, approaching her. “How are you?”

She looked as if she were seeing a ghost, but a pleasant one. I don’t even know if she knew who I was. I said my name, and we exchanged a few stock expressions of pleasure to be meeting again after all these years.

Suddenly it all came back. “Holy, Holy, Holy.” The Easter baskets. The gauze, the veil, and the waiting cab.

“Would you like a ride?” I asked. “I’m parked right outside.”

I helped her into my car, and she directed me to her place of residence, not far. We did not talk much; there was not much to say. She thanked me, and I saw her to her door. I would not see her again; but I was glad that I’d had this one opportunity to remember, to make a gesture, to acknowledge what I had been in too much of a hurry so many years before to acknowledge then—debts and obligations that never had anything to do with religion, or even personal friendship, but were nevertheless an undeniable, ineradicable thread in the fabric of my life.

“Western Addition, 1962“: Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Licensed under cc by NC-ND 2.0