To Dorothy

I wrote this around 2005 for my long-time friend, Dorothy Stroup, when, in her 70s, she began suffering from Alzheimer’s. After not seeing her for a few years, an unexpected encounter with her (at Trader Joe’s) made me realize that something was amiss. She was friendly and warm as always, but I had the distinct feeling that she didn’t know who I was. So when I saw her on subsequent occasions when I stopped in to visit her or had lunch with her, I would always tell her the story of our friendship. Finally, I wrote it down and gave it to her.

To Dorothy

In December of 1973 I was a senior at U.C. Berkeley. I was majoring in English literature for no particular reason other than that I loved literature and wanted to be a writer. That August I had returned from a summer hitchhiking around Europe after my junior year abroad at the University of Kent. I was looking for a part-time job over the Christmas break, and heard that a program called The Berkeley Institute was looking for Cal students to be “teaching assistants” for groups of Japanese tourists who were studying English.

I had never wanted to become or even thought of being a teacher, but it was a part-time job, and my recent experience in Europe had awakened a desire to know more about Japan, the land of my ancestors.

I called for more information and spoke to a woman named Dorothy Stroup. She invited me for an interview.

The interview took place at the old sorority building on Bancroft Avenue, next to the Café Roma. An enterprising Japanese businessman named Kurahashi had bought the building and was organizing English language study tours. The classes were held in the old sorority building.

Dorothy was a tall, thin woman in her forties with an energetic and outgoing manner that immediately put me at ease. She told me that the T.A.s would be in charge of a one-hour discussion class and a one-hour pronunciation class. The job paid $3.50 an hour and did not require prior teaching experience, which was good because I did not have any. The Berkeley Institute was mainly looking for responsible Cal students who would expose the Japanese visitors to “real” Americans.

Since I had no teaching experience, Dorothy asked me a hypothetical question: If I were conducting a discussion about a topic, how would I get the students to talk? I thought, then responded that I would probably first find out what they already knew about the topic. That way, people could volunteer whatever they knew and not feel put on the spot by being immediately asked for their opinions. I might have some questions that would draw them out. I would try to relate the topic to their own experiences or an equivalent in their own culture, because it’s hard to talk about something you know nothing about. I myself had often felt at a loss in some classroom discussions when there was not enough context, or when I didn’t feel I knew anything about the topic and had nothing to say.

At the time, I had not yet taught English in Japan, or even been to Japan, so it did not occur to me that Japanese tourists might wonder why they had come all the way to California to study English, only to have a teacher who looked Japanese and had a Japanese last name. That awareness of prejudice would come to me later, in Japan; but I was spared encountering it that December of 1973 because Dorothy Stroup hired me.

Later, she said she had hired me because she felt I was a good listener.

My very first ESL students included a karate instructor who liked Yukio Mishima (Isao), a middle-aged housewife (Ayako), a schoolteacher (Setsuko), and a young salaryman who worked for Nippon Steel (Yoshi), who did tea ceremony for us at the farewell party. It was one of those magical experiences that seem removed from time and place. Each of the Japanese had taken a four-week tangent from his or her tightly structured, routine life and ventured out where lightning could strike. Souls crossed paths once in a lifetime, never to meet again, and lives were changed. My life certainly took a new direction as a result. I discovered that 1) I loved teaching, and 2) I needed to find out a WHOLE lot more about Japan.

Ayako, the housewife, wrote in her evaluation at the end of the class, “In Ruth’s class, words bloom like flowers.” Dorothy was enthralled by this quote. She picked it out and read it to the other teachers. I was to learn, through my long friendship with Dorothy, of which this was only the beginning, that this is what Dorothy does. She builds people up. She is their cheering section.

Lance, my partner at the time, enjoyed my Japanese students as much as I did, and he decided to apply to teach also. We both taught for the Berkeley Institute through the summer of 1975, when the program had more than 1,000 students on the Berkeley campus.

It was inevitable that Dorothy and I would become friends. I learned that she had lived in Hiroshima for several years. My father’s family had immigrated to Berkeley from Hiroshima in the early 1900s. I read some of Dorothy’s short stories that were set in Japan. The tea shop where her characters met, the Yanagi-ya in Hondori, the main shopping arcade in the city of Hiroshima, was near my aunt’s sweet shop. I had another aunt (by marriage) with the same name as the main character of the novel that Dorothy was writing. And I had relatives, like Dorothy’s main character, who had (and had not) survived the atom bomb.

Dorothy took an interest in my writing. I had only written a few terse short stories then, and when I look back at early drafts written at the time, I realize the extent of Dorothy’s generosity in encouraging me. She often invited me to visit her writers’ group meetings with Molly, Alice, Sue, Jane, and others. I felt rather intimidated there, to tell you the truth. The members of her group were intellectual white middle-class women, older and far more experienced than I. They drank wine. Molly smoked those thin cigars and threw amazing clay pots that she broke and glued together again. In those days I always felt the painful weight of judgment like a guillotine always about to descend, and I don’t feel I always verbalized enough to deflect it. That feeling was probably more in my head than due to anything the others did or said. As the years passed, and I accumulated my own life experiences, I would make infrequent but occasional appearances at their meetings, and they welcomed me warmly like an old friend.

Dorothy, Lance, and I took a UC Extension fiction class taught by Jeffrey Klein. The most tenacious memory from that class is of a classmate—a middle-aged white guy named John who wrote a story about a guy who designs exotic costumes for strippers. The one called “Kyoto” had strategically placed gongs and a torii-shaped g-string (although I doubt very much that John was familiar with the word “torii.”) I remember this, and can’t remember the stories that I myself wrote for that class!

Dorothy, Lance and I took another class taught by Dorothy’s friend, Michael Rubin. Michael would later (in 1988) be one of my thesis advisors at S.F. State and nominate three of my short stories (“Wild Mushrooms,” “American Fish,” and “Driving to Colma”) for an award (the Wilner or Henfield—I can’t remember which). He was particularly moved by “Driving to Colma,” a story that grew out of my father’s last fight with cancer. Michael did not tell me that he was dying of AIDS when he read it.

But I get ahead of myself. The teaching experience at the Berkeley Institute enabled Lance and me to get a job at the Language Institute of Japan in Odawara. We taught there from September of 1975 to July of 1977, when we returned to Berkeley and once again began teaching for the Berkeley Institute. By that time it had become the English Language Program of U.C. Extension. Lance and I self-published a textbook of Story Squares, a technique which we had learned and developed at LIOJ, and the English Language Program bought (if I recall correctly) over a thousand copies. We also enrolled in the master’s program in Creative Writing at S.F. State. It was for Gina Berriault’s short story workshop in the fall of 1978 that I wrote a five-page first draft of a story called “The Loom.”

Dorothy used to tease me because, unlike most writers who write lengthy first drafts, then pare and cut in the revising process, I tended to write spare, terse first drafts that were more like concentrate of story than a story itself. (I can still hear Kim Yong Ik, a writing teacher in my senior year at Cal, saying “Your writing is like the bone. You need some flesh.”) In subsequent drafts, a paragraph would expand into a scene or flashback that could go for several pages. My stories were like those paper flowers from Chinatown that suddenly bloom and unfold when you drop them into water. Dorothy’s friend Michael Rubin gave me feedback on “The Loom” and it grew to 13 pages. (Years later, in Japan, I would take up the story once again, and it would expand to 22 pages. It was this 22-page version that won the American-Japanese National Literary Award in 1983.)

But I remember writing the first draft of “The Loom” because I started it in Moffett Library after my dad had driven me back to Berkeley, stopping to visit my mother’s weaving class on the way. The next day was Thanksgiving, and I stayed up late, writing the whole draft in a few concentrated hours. Lance was in Japan, being interviewed for the position of director of LIOJ.

We returned to LIOJ in July of 1979. Dorothy had planned a trip to Japan to do research for her novel, and we invited her to teach at LIOJ for the summer. That summer we had, in addition to Dorothy, John Battaglia (“machine-gun John,” as he came to be called) from New Jersey; Vickie Christie from Reno, Nevada; Bill Gatton (whom Lance and I had met in the Creative Writing Program at S.F. State), and others. Dorothy taught a group who fell in love with a Story Square about a fellow named John, who wants to marry Mary and have children. But Mary is a liberated woman who wants to go to Japan to teach English. The class decided to make a video dramatizing the story. For some reason, I was Mary. The poor Japanese fellow who was John, desperate to get me to accept his proposal, declared, “I will take you to Japan!” I ad-libbed, “What am I, a suitcase?” For the rest of that month, the young women in the class went around saying, “What am I, a suitcase?” and breaking into giggles while demurely covering their mouths.

Between the two summer sessions there was always a workshop for Japanese English teachers, followed by a wild LIOJ teachers’ weekend at Hatsushima, an island off Atami. I have a picture of Dorothy and Elena Pehlke in bathing suits at the Hatsushima pool.

After teaching summer classes at LIOJ, Dorothy went down to Hiroshima to do research for her novel, In the Autumn Wind. It was published in 1987. I remember that Dorothy’s yellow Honda was in the shop, so I drove her into the city to meet with the publisher from Scribner’s. I dropped her off at the Fairmont Hotel and went to my mom’s to hang out. Dorothy called me when the meeting was over. I picked her up and brought her to a Chinese restaurant on College Avenue, where several friends had gathered to celebrate.

Reading Dorothy’s novel brought back memories of Hiroshima, especially Miyajima, the island where my grandfather was born. When I was in Japan teaching at LIOJ, I had had the opportunity to visit Hiroshima and Miyajima with my father (in 1976). It was an extremely emotional trip, as he took me to visit the graves of the grandparents I had never met. We retraced some of his childhood memories, such as the makunouchi bento in Fukuya Department Store, and we looked for the neighborhood where his parents had lived after returning to Japan from Berkeley in 1926. But the neighborhood had been completely destroyed when the atom bomb was dropped, and there were no familiar landmarks. I knew at the time that someday I would write about this trip I took with my father. But I wasn’t ready to write about it yet. My father died of cancer in 1984. Reading Dorothy’s novel, I knew the time had come. In the spring of 1987, I wrote “Wild Mushrooms,” sitting in the Zephyr Café on Balboa at 38th (between ESL classes I was teaching for Alemany Community College).

In May of 1987 I left ESL and started working for Clarke Consulting Group (CCG) in Redwood City. I was doing intercultural training for client companies such as Intel (which no one outside of Silicon Valley had heard of at the time) and Procter & Gamble. My trainees were Japanese employees of these companies. I welcomed the opportunity to work with Japanese again, as, during my stint with the S.F. Community College District, I’d had mainly Southeast Asian, Central and South American, European, and Middle Eastern students, and I missed Japan. It was a corporate setting, Monday through Friday, and a long commute. But I didn’t want to give up my roots in Berkeley and move to the Peninsula, which I’d always found vaguely depressing and bland. Our Japanese trainees were always housed in nearby Foster City, the suburban planned city that reminded me strongly of “The Twilight Zone.” You remember that episode where the main character is an astronaut and lands on a planet that looks like earth—but isn’t. That’s what Foster City brought to mind.

When I made the transition from ESL to intercultural training for corporate clients, I did not have occasion to see Dorothy as much. I worked for Clarke Consulting Group from 1987 until 1998, when it closed up shop in California due to the long-running recession on both sides of the Pacific. During those years, it was writing that helped me maintain my link with Dorothy.

We would get together once or twice a year to catch up. I finished my master’s degree at the end of 1988, and my thesis became most of the stories in The Loom and Other Stories, which was published in 1991. Dorothy came to my first reading at Black Oak Books, where I talked about the long, hard road to finding a voice and waiting for others to be ready to hear it. Dorothy introduced my name to the organizers of the Pleasant Hill Recreation Center’s annual literary luncheon, and they invited me to speak, along with Whitney Otto, Elizabeth Tallent, and others. Dorothy and Ruth Finnerty came to hear me speak and lend moral support. In all of the public appearances I made to promote my book, that was probably the biggest audience—over 300. But by that time, I (who had always dreaded public speaking) had discovered that I loved taking audiences on the journey of one writer of color—me—and I relished every chance I got to reach audiences I might never otherwise have had a chance to reach.

Dorothy promoted my book for me through her contacts in Japan. She would introduce me to her Japanese professor friends. There’s a picture of Dorothy and me with one of her friends in front of Chevy’s (where we had lunch, and Dorothy’s friend, in his halting English, had told me that my stories were “hard-boiled.”) I think he meant “boiled down” or spare—as no one has ever drawn any parallels between me and Raymond Chandler.

In 2001 I began scoring TOEFL essays for the Educational Testing Service at their Oakland center in order to supplement my income as an online writing instructor and independent contractor after CCG had folded. So I got to see Dorothy again, as she was doing it also. She was deep into the sequel to her first novel, but was worried because her memory was beginning to fail her. I think it was also in 2001 that I ran into Ellen Rosenfield on Hopkins Street, and she invited me to give a lecture to the English Language Program’s international students. It would be Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month in May, and the requested topic was the Japanese-American interment. Inwardly I groaned. It’s kind of like Asian actors’ always being given martial arts roles. THAT again? I dutifully agreed. As old as the topic might seem to me, I knew it was always a revelation to others. I was worried that I would not be able to make the subject new for myself, and that my talk would be boring.

I hit on the idea of framing the talk with a tribute to Mine Okubo, the Berkeley artist who had recently died. I would show slides of some of the prints she had made of camp life. The students might be able to envision the internment more viscerally if I mentioned familiar Berkeley locations where internees had gathered with their belongings to be taken away. I ended with a quote from her about the importance of telling people about the internment to ensure that it would never happen again. After the talk, several students came up to the front and surrounded me.

They looked almost awed (not of me, but of the experience I had described). Dorothy, of course, had come, and when I had finished speaking with the students, she and I went and had lunch at La Fiesta on Telegraph.

Later I heard that several Korean students had complained about the lecture. They objected to the topic and voiced the opinion that Japanese-Americans had been treated too well. Of course they were speaking from their own perspective as a people who had been mistreated by the Japanese. But they completely missed the point that most of the internees were not even Japanese, that the Constitution had been violated. I was amazed that a lecture about the internment (which I’d been worried might be too passé) could cause such controversy. And only a few short months later, the message about “never happening again,” which I’d been worried might sound trite, would become most chillingly relevant for Muslims and Americans of Middle Eastern heritage.

In June of 2002 I started working for GlobalEnglish, an e-learning product development company. Once again I began the commute to Brisbane, the cubicle existence. I stopped scoring essays at ETS and got out of touch with Dorothy.

I wanted to write this because I want Dorothy to know how much her friendship has meant to me. She gave me my first teaching job. She encouraged me in my writing. She gave me the benefit of the doubt when others rushed to judge. I don’t know how many times she had me over to her house for dinner and made me feel that I mattered in the world. She even introduced me to guys after Lance and I split up (a jerk, then a Turk, I joked). She brought Alan to the famous Sasaki New Years at my mother’s house. She was my role model—a single woman, a writer, with a room of her own. She is the closest thing to a mentor I have ever had. She is my friend.

from your friend, Ruth Sasaki

“Dorothy.” © R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.