I never knew my grandmother. She died before I was born. My dad seldom talked about her, about any of his past… Here are my grandparents with a child who is probably my aunt, Momoko, circa 1910. They were living in Berkeley, CA around that time. Their eldest child, a son, was with his grandparents […]
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Tag: Hiroshima
Sakaye’s story
In 1935, the Takahashis’ next-door neighbor on Pine Street brought one of his younger sisters to San Francisco from the family home in Hiroshima. Sakaye was nineteen. Like her three sisters (Momoko, Misao, and Masako) and younger brother, Shigeru (my dad), Sakaye had been born in Berkeley, where her parents ran a grocery store on […]
A Telegram to Topaz
Once West-Coast Japanese Americans were dispersed and more or less settled in ten concentration camps throughout the interior, letters reached out for reassurance like fragile threads to and from the outside world. A telegram, forwarded by the Red Cross, found its way to my grandmother in Topaz, sent by my father’s mother in […]
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 […]