Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Buddha in the Attic.
Author: Julie Otsuka.
Genre: Literature, fiction, race, immigration, parenthood, WWII.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2011.
Summary: The novel tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as "picture brides" in the beginning of the 20th century. In eight segments, it traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous journey by boat, to their arrival in San Fransisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives: from their experience raising children who would later reject their culture and language, though the American culture rejects them right back, to the deracinating arrival of war. A novel of identity and loyalty, and what it means to be an American in uncertain times.

My rating: 8.5/10
My review:


♥ Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

♥ At night we dreamed of our husbands. We dreamed of new wooden sandals and endless bolts of indigo silk and of living, one day, in a house with a chimney. We dreamed we were lovely and tall. We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her.

♥ Mos of us on the boat were accomplished, and were sure we would make good wives. We knew how to cook and sew. We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours, saying absolutely nothing of substance at all. A girl must blend into a room: she must be present without appearing to exist. We knew how to behave at funerals, and how to write short, melancholy poems about the passing of autumn that were exactly seventeen syllables long. We knew how to pull weeds and chip kindling and haul water, and one of us-the rice miller's daughter-knew how to walk two miles into town with an eighty-pound sack of rice on her back without once breaking into a sweat. It's all in the way you breathe. Most of us had good manners, and were extremely polite, except for when we got mad and cursed like sailors. Most of us spoke like ladies most of the time, with our voices pitched high, and pretended to know much less than we did, and whenever we walked past the deckhands we made sure to take small, mincing steps with our toes turned properly in. Because how many times had our mothers told us: Walk like the city, not like the farm!

♥ The people there were said to eat nothing but meat and their bodies were covered with hair (we were mostly Buddhist, and did not eat meat, and only had hair in the appropriate places). The trees were enormous. The plains were vast. The women were loud and tall-a full head taller, we had heard, than the tallest of our men. The language was ten times as difficult as our own and the customs were unfathomably strange. Books were read from back to front and soap was used in the bath. Noses were blown on dirty clothes that were stuffed back into pockets only to be taken out later and used again and again. The opposite of white was not red, but black. What would become of us, we wondered, in such an alien land? We imagined ourselves-an unusually small people armed only with our guidebooks-entering a country of giants. Would we be laughed at? Spat on? Or, worse yet, would we not be taken seriously at all? But even the most reluctant of us had to admit that it was better to marry a stranger in America than grow old with a farmer from the village. Because in America the women did not have to work in the fields and there was plenty of rice and firewood for all. And wherever you went the men held open the doors and tipped their hats and called out, "Ladies first" and "After you."

♥ On the boat we carried with us in our trunks all the things we would need for our new lives: white silk kimonos for our wedding night, colorful cotton kimonos for everyday wear, plain cotton kimonos for when we grew old, calligraphy brushes, thick black sticks of ink, thin sheets of rice paper on which to write long letters home, tiny brass Buddhas, ivory statues of the fox god, dolls we had slept with since we were five, bags of brown sugar with which to buy favors, bright cloth quilts, paper fans, English phrase books, flowered silk sashes, smooth black stones from the river that ran behind our house, a lock of hair from a boy we had once touched, and loved, and promised to write, even though we knew we never would, silver mirrors given to us by our mothers, whose last words still rang in our ears. You will see: women are weak, but mothers are strong.

♥ Several of us on the boat had secrets, which we swore we would keep from our husbands for the rest of our lives. Perhaps the real reason we were sailing to America was to track down a long-lost father who had left the family years before. He went to Wyoming to work in the coal mines and we never heard from him again. Or perhaps we were leaving behind a young daughter who had been born to a man whose face we would now barely recall-a traveling storyteller who had spent a week in the village, or a wandering Buddhist priest who had stopped by the house late one night on his way to Mt. Fuji. And even though we knew our parents would care for her well-If you say stay here in the village, they had warned us, you will never marry at all-we still felt guilty for having chosen our own life over hers, and on the boat we wept for her every night for many nights in a row and then one morning we woke up and dried our eyes and said, "That's enough," and began to think of other things. Which kimono to wear when we landed. How to fix our hair. What to say when we first saw him. Because we were on the boat now, the past was behind us, and there was no going back.

♥ One of us on the boat became pregnant but did not know it, and when the baby was born nine months later the first thing she would notice was how much it resembled her new husband. He's got your eyes. One of us jumped overboard after spending the night with a sailor and left behind a short note on her pillow: After him, there can be no other. Another of us fell in love with a returning Methodist missionary she had met on the deck, and even though he begged her to leave her husband for him when they got to America she told him that she could not. "I must remain true to my fate," she said to him. But for the rest of her life she would wonder about the life that could have been.

♥ Or the married man for whom we had once waited, on a bridge, in the rain, late at night, for two hours. And for what? A kiss and a promise. "I'll come again tomorrow," he'd said. And even though we never saw him again we knew we would do it all over in an instant, because being with him was like being alive for the very first time, only better. And often, as we were falling asleep, we found ourselves thinking of the peasant boy we had talked to every afternoon on our way home after school-the beautiful young boy in the next village whose hands could coax up even the most stubborn of seedlings from the soil-and how our mother, who knew everything, and could often read our mind, had looked at us as though we were crazy. Do you want to spend the rest of your life crouched over a field? (We had hesitated, and almost said yes, for hadn't we always dreamed of becoming our mother? Wasn't that all we had ever once wanted to be?)

♥ That the photographs we had been sent were twenty years old. That the letters we had been written had been written to us by people other than our husbands, professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts. That when we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away-I want to go home-but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.

♥ The took us swiftly, repeatedly, and all throughout the night, and in the morning when we woke we were theirs.

♥ In the beginning we wondered about them constantly. Why did they mount their horses from the left side and not the right? How were they able to tell each other apart? Why were they always shouting? Did they really hang dishes on their walls and not pictures? And have locks on all their doors? And wear their shoes inside the house? What did they talk about late at night as they were falling asleep? What did they dream of? To whom did they pray? How many gods did they had? Was it true that they really saw a man in the moon and not a rabbit? And ate cooked beef at funerals? And drank the milk of cows? And that smell? What was it? "Butter stink," our husbands explained.

♥ Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked-our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover. ..Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan. Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters-they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars-we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do.

♥ Wherever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese-we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite-but none of their vices-we didn't gamble or smoke opium, we didn't brawl, we never spat. We were faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans. We were soberer than the Mexicans. We were cheaper to feed than the Okies and Arkies, both the light and the dark. A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. These folks just drift, we don't have to look after them at all.

♥ And everything was as it should be. But when we woke up we found ourselves lying beside a strange man in a strange land in a hot crowded shed that was filled with the grunts and sighs of others. Sometimes that man reached out for us in his sleep with his thick, gnarled hands and we tried not to pull away. In ten years he will be an old man, we told ourselves. Sometimes he opened his eyes in the early dawn light and saw that we were sad, and then promised us that things would get better. And even though we had said to him only hours before, "I detest you," as he climbed on top of us once more in the darkness, we let ourselves be comforted, for he was all that we had. Sometimes he looked right through us without seeing us at all, and that was always the worst. Does anyone know I am here?

♥ Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly; a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of Modern Screen magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without fixing anything back in return we knew there would be a price to pay. He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife. And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man's eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.

♥ We lived in a dirt-floored shack beneath a willow tree in the middle of a wide, open field and slept on a mattress stuffed with straw. We relieved ourselves outside, in a hole in the ground. We drew our water up from a well. We spent our days planting and picking tomatoes from dawn until dusk and spoke to no one but our husband for weeks at a time. We had a cat to keep us company, and chase away the rats, and at night if we stood in the doorway and looked out toward the west we could see a faint, flickering light in the distance. That, our husband had told us, was where people were. And we knew we never should have left home. But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had.

♥ They did not want us as neighbors in their valleys. They did not want us as friends. We lived in unsightly shacks and could not speak plain English. We cared only about money. Our farming methods were poor. We used too much water. We did not plow deeply enough. Our husbands worked us like slaves. They import those girls from Japan as free labor. We worked in the fields all day long without stopping for supper. We worked in the fields late at night by the light of our kerosene lamps. We never took a single day off. A clock and a bed are two things a Japanese farmer never used in his life. We were taking over their cauliflower industry. We had taken over their spinach industry. We had a monopoly on their strawberry industry and had cornered their market on beans. We were an unbeatable, unstoppable economic machine and if our progress was not checked the entire western United States would soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony.

♥ One of us blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she was dead. Others of us learned to live without thinking of them at all. We threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. We put away our mirrors. We stopped combing our hair. We forgot about makeup. Whenever I powder my nose it just looks like frost on a mountain. We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. We stopped writing home to our mothers. We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting. We simply worked, that was all. We gulped down our meals three times a day without saying a word to our husbands so we could hurry back out into the fields. "One minute sooner to pull one more weed." I could not get this thought out of my mind. We spread our legs for them every evening but were so exhausted we often fell asleep before they were done. We washed their clothes for them once a week in tubs of boiling hot water. We cooked for them. We cleaned for them. We helped them chop wood. But it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. And often our husbands did not even notice we'd disappeared.

♥ How to raise yo your skirt on the street to reveal just the right amount of ankle. You must aim to tantalize, not tease. How to talk to a husband. How to argue with a husband. How to deceive a husband. How to keep a husband from wandering too far from your side. Don't ask him where he's been or what time he'll be coming home and make sure he is happy in bed.

♥ They bragged about us to their neighbors. They bragged about us to their friends. They claimed to like us much more than they did any of the others. No better class of help can be found. When they were unhappy and had no one to talk to they told us their deep, darkest secrets. Everything I told him was a lie. When their husbands went away on business they asked us to sleep with them in their bedrooms in case they got lonely. When they called out for us in the middle of the night we went to them and lay with them until morning. "Hush, hush," we said to them. And, "Please don't cry." When they fell in love with a man who was not their husband we kept an eye on their children while they went out to meet that man in the middle of the day. "Do I look alright?" they asked us. And "Is my skirt too tight?" We brushed off invisible specks of lint from their blouses, retied scarves, adjusted stray locks of hair so they hung just so. "You look beautiful," we said to them, and then we sent them on their way. And when their husbands came home in the evening at the usual hour we pretended not to know a thing.

♥ Nobody was watching us then. Nobody was talking to us. Nobody was sneaking up on us from behind as we were cleaning her fixtures to see if we'd missed any spots. The whole house was empty. Quiet. Ours. We pulled back curtains. Opened windows. Breathed in the fresh air as we moved from one room to the next, dusting and polishing their things. All they see is the shine. We felt calmer then. Less afraid. We felt, for once, like ourselves.

♥ Some of them asked us to speak a few words in Japanese for them just to hear the sound of our voice. It doesn't matter what you say. Some of them asked us to put on our finest silk kimonos for them and walk slowly up and down their spines. Some of them asked us to tie them up with our flowered silk sashes and call them whatever names came to mind, and we were surprised at what those names were, and how easily they came to us, for we had never before said them out loud. Some of them asked us to tell them our real names, which they then whispered to us again and again until we no longer knew who we were. Midori. Midori. Midori. Some of them told us how beautiful we were, even though we knew we were homely and plain. No man would look at me in Japan. Some of them asked us how we liked it, or if they were hurting us, and if so were we enjoying the pain, and we said yes, for we were. At least when I'm with you I know I'm alive. Some of them lied to us. I've never done this before. And we, in turn, lied to them. Neither have I. Some of them gave us money, which we slipped into our stockings and gave to our husbands that same evening without saying a word. Some of them promised to leave their wives for us, even though we knew they never would. Some of them found out we were pregnant by them-My husband has not touched me in more than six months-and then sent us away. "You must get rid of it," they said to us. They said, "I will pay for everything." They said, "I will find you employment elsewhere at once."

♥ Sometimes, while we were lying with them, we found ourselves longing for our husbands, from whom we had run away. Was he really so bad? So brutal? So dull? Sometimes we found ourselves falling in love with our bosses, who had kidnapped us at knifepoint as we were coming in from the fields. He brings me things. He talks to me. He lets me go fro walks. Sometimes we convinced ourselves that after one year at Eureka House we would have enough money to pay for our passage back home, but at the end of that year all we had was fifty cents and a bad dose of the clap. Next year, we told ourselves. Or maybe the year after that. But even the prettiest of us knew that our days were numbered, for in our line of work you were either finished or dead by the time you were twenty.

♥ And for all of this we were forever grateful to our new husband, without whom we would still be working the streets. The moment I saw him I knew I'd been saved. But every now and then we'd find ourselves wondering about the man we had left behind. Did he burn all our things the day after we left him? Did he tear up our letters? Did he hate us? Did he miss is? Did he care whether we were dead or alive? Was he still working as a yardman for the Burnhams on Sutter Street? Had he put in their daffodils yet? Had he finished reseeding their lawn? Did he still eat his supper alone, every evening, in Mrs. Burnham's great big kitchen, or had he finally made friends with Mrs. Burnham's favorite Negro maid? Did he still read three pages from the Manual of Gardening every night before going to bed? Did he still dream of one day becoming majordomo? Sometimes, in the late afternoon, just as the light was beginning to fade, we took out his yellowing photograph from our trunk and looked at it one last time. But no matter how hard we tried we could not make ourselves throw it away.

♥ And even though we had not come all the way to America to live in a tiny, curtained-off room at the back of the Royal Hand Laundry, we knew we could not go home. If you come home, our fathers had written to us, you will disgrace the entire family. If you come home your younger sisters will never marry. If you come home no man will ever have you again. And so we stayed in J-town with our new husbands, and grew old before our time.

♥ We bought our groceries at Fujioka Grocery, where they sold all the things we remembered from home: green leaf tea, Mitsuwa soap, incense, pickled plums, fresh tofu, dried seaweed to help fend off goiters and cold. We bought bootleg sake for our husbands at the pool hall beneath the brothel on the corner of Third and Main, but made sure to put on our white aprons first so we would not be mistaken for whores in the alley. We bought our dresses at Yada Ladies' Shop and our shoes at Asahi Shoe, where the shoes actually came in our size. We bought our face cream at Tenshodo Drug. We went to the public bathhouse every Saturday and gossiped with out neighbors and friends. Was it true that Kisayo refused to let her husband enter the house through the front door? Had Mikiko really run away with a card dealer from the Toyo Club? And what had Hagino done to her hair? It looks like a rat's nest. We went to Yoshinaga's Dental Clinic for our toothaches, and for our back and knee pains we went to Dr. Hayano, the acupuncturist, who also knew the art of shiatsu massage. And whenever we needed advice in matters of the heart-Should I leave him or should I say?-we went to Mrs. Murata, the fortune-teller, who lived in the blue house on Second Street above Asakawa Pawn, and we sat with her in her kitchen with our heads bowed and our hands on our knees while we waited for her to receive a message from the gods. If you leave him now there will be no other. And all of this took place on a four-block-long stretch of town that was more Japanese than the village we'd left behind in Japan.

♥ Whenever we left J-town and wandered through the broad, clean streets of their cities we tried not to draw attention to ourselves. We dressed like they did. We walked like they did. We made sure not to travel in large groups. We made ourselves small for them-If you stay in your place they'll leave you alone-and did our best not to offend. Still, they gave us a hard time. Their men slapped our husbands on the back and shouted out, "So solly!" as they knocked off our husbands' hats. Their children threw stones at us. Their waters always served us last. Their ushers led us upstairs, to the second balconies of their theaters, and seated us in the worst seats in the house. Nigger heaven, they called it. Their barbers refused to cut our hair. Too coarse for our scissors. "Please excuse," we said to them, and then we smiled and stepped aside. Because the only way to resist, our husbands had taught us, was by not resisting. Mostly, though, we stayed at home, in J-town, where we felt safe among our own. We learned to live at a distance from them, and avoided them whenever we could.

..And when we'd saved up enough money to help our parents live a more comfortable life we would pack up our things and go back home to Japan. It would be autumn, and our fathers would be out threshing in the fields. We would walk through the mulberry groves, past the big loquat tree and the old lotus pond, where we used to catch tadpoles in spring. Our dogs would come running up to us. Our neighbors would wave. Our mothers would be sitting by the well with their sleeves tied up, washing the evening's rice. And when they saw us they would just stand up and stare. "Little girl," they would say to us, "where in the world have you been?"

But until then we would stay in America just a little bit longer and work for them, for without us, what would they do? Who would pick the strawberries from their fields? Who would get the fruit down from their trees? Who would wash their carrots? Who would scrub their toilets? Who would mend their garments? Who would iron their shirts? Who would fluff their pillows? Who would change their sheets? Who would cook their breakfasts? Who would clear their tables? Who would soothe their children? Who would bathe their elderly? Who would listen to their stories? Who would keep their secrets? Who would tell their lies? Who would flatter them? Who would sing for them? Who would dance for them? Who would weep for them? Who would turn the other cheek for them and then one day-because we were tired, because we were old, because we could-forgive them? Only a fool. And so we folded up our kimonos and put them away in our trunks and did not take them out again for years.

♥ We gave birth quietly, like our mothers, who never cried out or complained. She worked in the rice paddies until the day she felt her first pangs. We gave birth weeping, like Nogiku, who came down with fever and could not get out of bed for three months. We gave birth easily, in two hours, and then got a headache that stayed with us for five years. We gave birth six weeks after our husband had left us to a child we now wish we had never given away. After her I was never able to conceive another. We gave birth secretly, in the woods, to a child our husband knew was not his. We gave birth on top of a faded floral bedspread in a brothel in Oakland while listening to the grunts coming through the wall from the next room. We gave birth in a boardinghouse in Paraluma, two weeks after moving out of Judge Carmichael's place up on Russian Hill. We gave birth after saying good-bye to our mistress, Mrs. Lippincott, who did not want a pregnant maid greeting guests at her door. It just wouldn't look right. We gave birth with the help of the foreman's wife, Señora Santos, who grabbed our thighs and told us to push. Empuje! Empuje! Empuje! We gave birth while our husband was out gambling in Chinatown and when he came home drunk the next morning we did not speak to him for five days. He lost our entire season's earnings in one night. ..We gave birth to babies that were so beautiful we could not believe they were ours. We gave birth to babies that were American citizens and in whose names we could finally lease land. We gave birth to babied with colic. We gave birth to babies with clubfeet. We gave birth to babies that were sickly and blue. We gave birth without our mothers, who would have known exactly what to do. We gave birth to babies with six fingers and looked the other way as the midwife began to sharpen her knife. You must have eaten a crab during your pregnancy. We contracted gonorrhea on our first night with our husband and gave birth to babies that were blind. We gave birth to twins, which were considered bad luck, and asked the midwife to make one a "day visitor." You decide which one. We gave birth to eleven children in fifteen years but only seven would survive. We gave birth to six boys and three girls before we were thirty and then one night we pushed our husband off of us and said, quietly, "That's enough." Nine months later we gave birth to Sueko, whose name means "last." "Oh, another one!" our husband said. We gave birth to five girls and five boys at regular eighteen-month intervals and then one day five years later we gave birth to Toichi, whose name means "eleven." He's the caboose. We gave birth even though we gad poured cold water over our stomachs and jumped off the porch many times. I couldn't shake it loose. We gave birth even though we had drunk the medicine the midwife had given us to prevent us from giving birth one more time. My husband was ill with pneumonia and my work was needed outside in the fields. We did not give birth for the first four years of our marriage and then we made an offering to Inari and gave birth to six boys in a row. We gave birth to so many babies that out uterus slipped out and we had to wear a special girdle to keep it inside. We almost gave birth but the baby was turned sideways and all that came out was an arm. We almost gave birth but the baby's head was too big and after three days of pushing we looked up at our husband and said, "Please forgive me," and died. We gave birth but the baby was too weak to cry so we left her out, overnight, in a crib by the stove. If she makes it through till morning then she's strong enough to live. We gave birth but the baby was both girl and boy and we smothered it quickly with rags. We gave birth but our milk never came in and after one week the baby was dead. We gave birth but the baby had already died in the womb and we buried her, naked, in the fields, beside a stream, but have moved so many times since we can no longer remember where she is.

♥ They ate at the table like grown-ups. They never cried. They never complained. They never left their chopsticks standing upright in their rice. They played by themselves all day long without making a sound while we worked nearby in the fields. They drew pictures in the dirt for hours. And whenever we tried to pluck them up and carry them home they shook their heads and said, "I'm too heavy" or "Mama, rest." They worried about us when we were tired. They worried about us when we were sad. They knew, without our telling them, when our knees were bothering us or it was our time of the month. They slept with us, at night, like puppies, on wooden boards covered with hay, and for the first time since coming to America we did not mind having someone else beside us in the bed.

♥ Some of us preferred our daughters, who were gentle and good, and some of us, like our mothers before us, preferred our sons. They're the better gain on the farm. We fed them more than we did their sisters. We sided with them in arguments. We dressed them in nicer clothes. We scraped up our last pennies to take then to the doctor whenever they came down with fever, while our daughters we cared for at home. I applied a mustard plaster to her chest and said a prayer to the god of wind and bad colds. Because we knew that our daughters would leave us the moment they married, but our sons would provide for us in our old age.

♥ Not once did we eve have the money to buy them a single toy.

And yet they played for hours like calves in the fields. They made swords out of broken grape stakes and dueled to a draw beneath the trees. They made kites out of newspaper and balsa wood and tied knives to the strings and had dogfights on windy days in the sky. They made twist-up dolls out of wire and straw and did evil things to them with sharpened chopsticks in the woods. They played shadow catch shadow on moonlit nights in the orchards, just as we had back home in Japan. They played kick the can and mumblety-peg and jan ken po. They had contests to see who could nail together the most packing crates the night before we went to market and who could hang the longest from the walnut tree without letting go. They folded squares of paper into airplanes and birds and watched them fly away. They collected crows' nests and snake skins, beetle shells, acorns, rusty iron stakes from down by the tracks. They learned the names of the planets. They read each other's palms. Your life line is unusually short. They told each other's fortunes. One day you will take a long journey on a train. They went out into the barn after supper with their kerosene lanterns and played mama and papa in the loft. Now slap your belly and make a sound like you're dying. And on hot summer nights, when it was ninety-eight degrees, they spread their blankets out beneath the peach trees and dreamed of picnics down by the river, a new eraser, a book, a ball, a china doll with blinking violet eyes, leaving home, one day, for the great world beyond.

♥ Beyond the farm, they'd heard, wherever you went you were always a stranger and if you got on the wrong bus by mistake you might never find your way home.

♥ They had secret words that they whispered to themselves whenever they felt afraid. They had favorite trees that they climbed up into whenever they wanted to be alone. Everyone please go away. They had favorite sisters in whose arms they could instantly fall asleep. They had hated older brothers with whom they refused to be left alone in a room. He'll kill me. They had dogs from whom they were inseparable and to whom they could tell all the things they could not tell anyone else. I broke Papa's pipe and buried it under a tree. They had their own rules. Never sleep with your pillow facing toward the north (Hoshiko had gone to sleep with her pillow facing toward the north and in the middle of the night she stopped breathing and died). They had their own rituals. You must always throw salt where a hobo has been. They had their own beliefs. If you see a spider in the morning you will have good luck. If you lie down after eating you will turn into a cow. If you wear a basket on your head you will stop growing. A single flower means death.

♥ We praised them when they were kind to others but told them not to expect to be rewarded for their good deeds. We scolded them whenever they tried to talk back. We taught them never to accept a handout. We taught them never to brag. We taught them everything we knew. A fortune begins with a penny. It is better to suffer ill than to do ill. You must give back whatever you receive. Don't be loud like the Americans. Stay away from the Chinese. They don't like us. Watch out for the Koreans. They hate us. Be careful around the Filipinos. They're worse than the Koreans. Never marry an Okinawan. They're not real Japanese.

♥ A few of us were unable to have [children], and this was the worst fate of all. For without an heir to carry on the family name the spirits of our ancestors would cease to exist. I feel like I came all the way to America for nothing. Sometimes we tried going to the faith healer, who told us that our uterus was the wrong shape and there was nothing that could be done. "Your destiny has been settled by the gods," she said to us, and then she showed us to the door. Or we consulted the acupuncturist, Dr. Ishida, who took one look at us and said, "Too much yang," and gave us herbs to nourish our yin and blood. And three months later we found ourselves miscarrying yet again. Sometimes we were sent by our husband back home to Japan, where the rumors would follow us for the rest of our lives. "Divorced," the neighbors would whisper. And, "I hear she's dry as a gourd." Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she would make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not-the only thing he wanted, he had said to us, was to grow old by our side-we could not stop thinking of the children we'd never had. Every night I can hear them playing outside my window in the trees.

♥ They trailed their fathers from one yard to the next as they made their gardening rounds and learned how to trim the hedges and mow the grass. They waited for us on wooden slatted benches in the park while we finished cleaning the houses across the streets. Don't talk to strangers, we told them. Study hard. Be patient. Whatever you do, don't end up like me.

♥ Some of them-our firstborns-hardly knew any English and whenever they were called upon to speak their knees began to shake. One of them, when asked her name by the teacher, replied, "Six," and the laughter rang in her ears for days. Another said his name was Table, and for the rest of his life that was what he was called. Many of them begged us not to be sent back, but within weeks, it seemed, they could name all the animals in English and read aloud every sign that they saw whenever we went shopping downtown-the street of the tall timber poles, they told us, was called State Street, and the street of the unfriendly barbers was Grove, and the bridge from which Mr. Itami had jumped after the stock market collapsed was the Last Chance Bridge-and wherever they went they were able to make their desires known. One chocolate malt, please.

One by one all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads. They forgot the names of the flowers in Japanese. They forgot the names of the colors. They forgot the names of the fox god and the thunder god and the god of poverty, whom we could never escape. No matter how long we live in this country they'll never let us buy land. They forgot the name of the water goddess, Mizu Gami, who protected our rivers and streams and insisted that we keep our wells clean. They forgot the words for snow-light and bell cricket and fleeing in the night. They forgot what to say at the altar to our dead ancestors, who watched over us night and day. They forgot how to count. They forgot how to pray. They spent their days now living in the new language, whose twenty-six letters still eluded us even though we had been in America for years. All I learned was the letter x so I could sign my name at the bank. They pronounced their l's and r's with ease. And even when we sent them to the Buddhist church on Saturdays to study Japanese they did not learn a thing. The only reason my children go is to get out of working in the store. But whenever we heard them talking out loud in their sleep the words that came out of their mouths came out-we were sure of it-in Japanese.

..Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs. They preferred their own company to ours and pretended not to understand a word that we said. Our daughters took big long steps, in the American manner, and moved with undignified haste. They wore their garments too loose. They swayed their hips like mares. They chattered away like coolies the moment they came home from school and said whatever popped into their minds. Mr. Dempsey has a folded ear. Our sons grew enormous. They insisted on eating bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast instead of bean-paste soup. They refused to use chopsticks. They drank gallons of milk. They poured ketchup all over their rice. They spoke perfect English just like on the radio and whenever they caught us bowing before the kitchen god in the kitchen and clapping our hands they rolled their eyes and said, "Mama, pleas.

..They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.

♥ A few ran wild. They formed their own gangs. They made up their own rules. No knives. No girls. No Chinese allowed. They went around late at night looking for other people to fight. Let's go beat up some Filipinos. And when they were too lazy to leave the neighborhood they stayed at home and fought among themselves. You goddamn Jap! Others kept their heads down and tried not to be seen. They went to no parties (they were invited to no parties). They played no instruments (they had no instruments to play). They never got Valentines (they never sent Valentines). They didn't like to dance (they didn't have the right shoes). They floated ghostlike, through the halls, with their eyes turned away and their books clutched to their chests, as though lost in a dream. If someone called them a name behind their back they did not hear it. If someone called them a name to their face they just nodded and walked on. If they were given the oldest textbooks to use in math class they shrugged and took it in stride. I never really liked algebra anyway. If their pictures appeared at the end of the yearbook they pretended not to mind. "That's just the way it is," they said to themselves. And, "So what?" And, "Who cares?" Because they knew that no matter what they did would never really fit in. We're just a bunch of Buddhaheads.

♥ They learned not to go out alone during the daytime and what to do if they found themselves cornered in an alley after dark. Just tell them you know judo. And if that didn't work, they learned to fight back with their fists. They respect you when you're strong. They learned to find protectors. They learned to hide their anger. No, of course. I don't mind. That's fine. Go ahead. They learned never to show their fear. They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.

Still, they dreamed. One swore she would one day marry a preacher so she wouldn't have to pick berries on Sundays. One wanted to save up enough money to buy his own farm. One wanted to become a tomato grower like his father. One wanted to become anything but. One wanted to plant a vineyard. One wanted to start his own label. I'd call it Fukuda Orchards. One could not wait until the day she got off the ranch. One wanted to go to college even though no one she knew had ever left the town. I know it's crazy, but... One loved living out in the country and never wanted to leave. It's better here. Nobody knows who we are. One wanted something more but could not say exactly what it was. This just isn't enough. One wanted a Swing King drum set with hi-hat cymbals. One wanted a spotted pony. One wanted his own paper route. One wanted her own room, with a lock on the door. Anyone who came in would have to knock first. One wanted to become an artist and live in a garret in Paris. One wanted to go to refrigeration school. You can do it through the mail. One wanted to build bridges. One wanted to play the piano. One wanted to operate his own fruit stand alongside the highway instead of working for somebody else. One wanted to learn shorthand at the Merritt Secretarial Academy and get an inside job in an office. Then I'd have it made. One wanted to become the next Great Togo on the professional wrestling circuit. One wanted to become a state senator. One wanted to cut hair and open her own salon. One had polio and just wanted to breathe without her iron lung. One wanted to become a master seamstress. One wanted to become a teacher. One wanted to become a doctor. One wanted to become his sister. One wanted to become a gangster. One wanted to become a star. And even though we saw the darkness coming we said nothing and let them dream on.

♥ What did we know, exactly, about the list? The list had been drawn up hastily, on the morning of the attack. The list had been drawn up more than one year ago. The list had been in existence for almost ten years. The list was divided into three categories: "known dangerous" (Category A), "potentially dangerous" (Category B), and "pro-Axis inclinations" (Category C). It was nearly impossible to get your name on the list. It was extremely easy to get your name on the list. Only people who belonged to our race were on the list. There were Germans and Italians on the list, but their names appeared toward the bottom. The list was written in indelible red ink. The list was typewritten on index cards. The list did not exist. The list existed, but only in the mind of the director of military intelligence, who was known for his perfect recall. The list was a figment of our imaginations. The list contained over five hundred names. The list contained over five thousand names. The list was endless. Every time an arrest was made another name was crossed off the list. Every time a name was crossed off the list a new name was added to it. New names were added to the list daily. Weekly. Hourly.

♥ And even though our husbands had warned us-They're afraid-still, we were unprepared. Suddenly, to find ourselves the enemy.

♥ Every evening, at dusk, we began burning our things: old bank statements and diaries, Buddhist family altars, wooden chopsticks, paper lanterns, photographs of our unsmiling relatives back home in the village in their strange country clothes. I watched my brother's face turn to ash and float up into the sky. We set fire to our white silk wedding kimonos out of doors, in our apple orchards, in the furrows between the trees. We poured gasoline over our ceremonial dolls in metal trash cans in J-town back alleys. We got rid of anything that might suggest our husbands had enemy ties. Letters from our sisters. East Neighbor's son has run away with the umbrella maker's wife. Letters from our fathers. The trains have been electrified and now whenever you go through a tunnel you do not get soot all over your face! Letters from our mothers written to us on the day we'd left home. I can still see your footprints in the mud down by the river. And we wondered why we had insisted for so long on clinging to our strange, foreign ways. We've made them hate us.

♥ Yuriko's husband, a traveling fertilizer salesman who had been less than faithful to her over the years, could only fall asleep now if she was right there by his side. "It's a little late," she said, "but what can you do? Once you marry, it's for life."

♥ Some nights our husbands lay awake for hours going over their pasts again and again, searching for proof that their names, too, might be on the list. Surely there must be something they had said, or done, surely there must be some mistake they had made, surely they must be guilty of something, some obscure crime, perhaps, of which they were not even aware. Only what, they asked us, could that obscure crime be? Was it that toast they had given to our homeland at last year's annual summer picnic? Or some remark they may have made about the President's most recent speech? He called us gangsters. Or had they made a contribution to the wrong charity-a charity whose secret ties to the enemy they knew nothing about? Could that be it? Or had somebody-somebody, no doubt, with a grudge-filed a false accusation against them with the authorities? One of our customers at the Capitol Laundry, perhaps, to whom we had once been unnecessarily hurt? (Was it, then, all our fault?)n Or a disgruntled neighbor whose flower bed our dog had made use of one too many times? Should they have been friendlier, our husbands asked us. Were their fields too unkempt? Had they kept too much to themselves? Or was their guilt written plainly, and for all the world to see, across their face? Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty? Did it fail to please in some way? Worse yet, did it offend?

♥ But at two in the morning when we looked out our windows and saw our friends and neighbors raiding our barns we did not dare set foot out our front doors, for fear that we, too, would be turned in to the police. Because all it took, we knew, was one phone call to get your name on the list. And when our older sons began staying out all night downtown on Saturdays we did not ask them where they had been when they came home late the next morning, or who they had been with, or how much she had cost, or why they were wearing I Am Chinese buttons pinned to the collars of their shirts. "Let them have their fun while they can," our husbands said to us. So we wished our sons a civil good morning in the kitchen-Eggs or coffee?-and got on with our day.

♥ They reminded us to carry our alien identification cards with us whenever we left the house and avoid all public discussion of the war. If asked, however, to give our opinion, we were to denounce the attack loudly, in a no-nonsense tone of voice. "Do not apologize," they said to us. "Speak only English." "Suppress the urge to bow."

♥ In the newspapers, and on the radio, we began to hear talk of mass removals. House to Hold Hearings on National Defense Migration. Governor Urges President to Evacuate All Enemy Aliens from the Coast. Send Them Back to Tojo! It would happen gradually, we heard, over a period of weeks, if not months. None of us would be forced out overnight. We would be sent far away, to a point of our own choosing deep in the zone of the interior where we could not do anyone any harm. We would be held under protective custody arrest for the duration of the war. Only those of us who lived within one hundred miles of the coast would be removed. Only those of us on the list would be removed. Only those of us who were non-citizens would be removed. Our adult children would be allowed to remain behind to oversee our businesses and farms. Our businesses and farms would be confiscated and put up for auction. So start liquidating now. We would be separated from our younger children. We would be sterilized and deported at the earliest practicable date.

♥ We felt closer to our husbands, now, than we ever had before. We gave them the best cuts of meat at supper. We pretended not to notice when they made crumbs. We wiped away their muddy footprints from the floor without comment. At night we did not turn away from them in bed. And if they yelled at us for failing to prepare the bath the way they liked it, or grew impatient and said unkind things-Twenty years in America and all you can say is "Harro"?-we held our tongues and tried not to get angry, because what if we woke up the next morning and they were not there? How would we feed the children? How would we pay the rent? Satoko had to sell off all her furniture. Who would put out the smudge pots in the middle of the night to protect the fruit trees from an unexpected spring frost? Who would fix the broken tractor hitch? Who would mix the fertilizer? Who would sharpen the plow? Who would calm us down when someone had been rude to us in the market, or called us a less-than-flattering name on the street? Who would grab our arms and shake us when we stomped our feet and told them we'd had it, we were leaving them, we were taking the next boat back home? The only reason you married me was to get extra help on the farm.

♥ We continued to work our fields as we always had, but nothing felt quite real. We nailed together crates to box up crops we would not be able to harvest. We pinched the shoots off of grapevines that would not ripen until after we had left. We turned over the soil and planted tomato seedlings that would come up in late summer, when we were already gone. The days were long and sunny now. The nights were cool. The reservoirs full. The price of snow peas was rising. Asparagus was nearing an all-time high. There were green berries on the strawberry plants and in the orchards the nectarine trees would soon be heavy with fruit. One more week and we would have made a fortune. And even though we knew we would soon be leaving we kept on hoping that something would happen, and we would not have to go.

♥ Others of us remained quiet and prepared to leave as best we could. We sent notes to our children's teachers, apologizing to them in our broken English for our children's sudden and unexpected absence from school. We wrote out instructions for future tenants, explaining to them how to work the sticky flue in the fireplace and what to do about the leak in the roof. Just use a bucket. We left lotus blossoms for the Buddha outside our temples. We made last visits to our cemeteries and our temples. We made last visits to our cemeteries and poured water over the gravestones of those of us whose spirits had already passed out of this world. Yoshiye's young son, Tetsuo, who had been gored by an angry bull. The tea merchant's daughter from Yokohama, whose name we could now barely recall. Died of the Spanish influenza on her fifth day off the boat. We walked the rows of our vineyards one last time with our husbands, who could not resist pulling up one last weed. We propped up sagging branches in our almond orchards. We checked for worms in our lettuce fields and scooped up handfuls of freshly turned black earth. We did last loads of wash in our laundries. We shuttered our groceries. We swept our floors. We packed our bags. We gathered up our children and from every town in every valley and every city up and down the coast, we left.

..Our dogs ran after us with balls in their mouths, eager for one last toss, and for once, we had to turn them away. Go home. Neighbors peered out at us through their windows. Cars honked. Strangers stared. A boy on a bicycle waved. A startled cat dove under a bed in one of our houses as looters began to break down the front door. Curtains ripped. Glass shattered. Wedding dishes smashed to the floor. And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone.

♥ Some of us left weeping. And some of us left singing. One of us left with her hand held over her mouth and hysterically laughing. A few of us left drunk. Others of us left quitly, with our heads bowed, embarrassed and ashamed. There was an old man from Gilroy who left on a stretcher. There was another old man-Natsuko's husband, a retired barber in Florin-who left on crutches with an American Legion cap pulled down low over his head. "Nobody win war. Everybody lose," he said. Most of us left speaking only English, so as not to anger the crowds that had gathered to watch us go. Many of us had lost everything and left saying nothing at all. All of us left wearing white numbered identification tags tied to our collars and lapels.

♥ Sachiko left practicing her ABCs as though it were just another ordinary day. Futaye, who had the best vocabulary of us all, left speechless. ..Misuyo left graciously, and with ill will toward none. Chiyoko, who had always insisted that we call her Charlotte, left insisting that we call her Chiyoko. I've changed my mind one last time.

♥ There were children who left thinking they were going camping. There were children who left thinking they were going hiking, or to the circus, or swimming for the day at the beach. There was a boy on roller skates who did not care where it was he was going as long as there were paved streets. There were children who left one month short of their high school graduation. I was going to go to Stanford. There was a girl who left knowing she would have been valedictorian at Calexico High. There were children who left still baffled by decimals and fractions. There were children from Mrs. Crozier's eight-grade English class in Escondido who left relieved that they wouldn't have to take next week's big test. I didn't do the reading. ..There was a girl in long pig-tails from a small town in Tulare who left carrying a thick stick of pink chalk. She stopped once to say good-bye to the people lined up on the sidewalk and then, with a quick flick of her wrist, she waved them away and began skipping. She left laughing. She left without looking back.

♥ The Japanese have disappeared from our town. Their houses are boarded up and empty now. Their mailboxes have begun to overflow. Unclaimed newspapers litter their sagging front porches and gardens. Abandoned cars sit in their driveways. Thick knotty weeds are sprouting up through their lawns. In their backyards the tulips are wilting. Stray cats wander. Last loads of laundry still cling to the line. In one of their kitchens-Emi Saito's-a black telephone rings and rings.

..Murata Florist is now Flowers by Kay. The Yamato Hotel has become the Paradise. Fuji Restaurant will be reopening under new management by the end of the week. Mikado Pool Hall is closed. Imanashi Transfer is closed. Harada Grocery is closed, and in its front window hangs a handwritten sign none of us can remember having seen there before-God be with you until we meet again, it reads. And of course, we cannot help but wonder. Who put up the sign? Was it one of them? Or one of us? And if it was one of us, which one of us was it? We ask ourselves this as we press our foreheads to the glass and squint into the darkness, half expecting Mr. Harada himself to come barreling out from behind the counter in his faded green apron, urging upon us a stalk of asparagus, a perfect strawberry, a sprig of fresh mint, but there is nothing there to be seen. The shelves are empty. The floors, neatly swept. The Japanese are gone.

♥ There are certain members of our community, however, who were more than a little relieved to see the Japanese go. For we have read the stories in the papers, we have heard the whispered rumors, we know that secret caches of weapons were discovered in the cellars of Japanese farmers in towns not far from ours, and even though we would like to believe that most, if not all, of the Japanese here in our own town were good, trustworthy citizens, of their absolute loyalty we could not be sure. "There was just so much about them we didn't know," says one mother of five. "It made me uneasy. I always felt like there was something they were trying to hide," When asked if he had felt safe living across the street from the Miyamotos, a worker at the ice factory replies, "Not really." He and his wife were always very careful around the Japanese, he explains, because "we just weren't sure. There were good ones and bad ones, I guess. I got them all mixed up." But most of us find it difficult to believe that our former neighbors could have posed a threat to our town. A woman who used to rent to the Nakamuras says they were the best tenants she's ever had. "Friendly. Polite. And so clean, you could practically eat off their floors." "And they lived American, too," says her husband. "Not a Japanese touch anywhere. Not even a vase."

♥ With each passing day the notices on the telephone poles grow increasingly faint. And then, one morning, there is not a single notice to be found, and for a moment the town feels oddly naked, and it is almost as if the Japanese were never here at all.

♥ People begin to demand answers. Did the Japanese go the reception centers voluntarily, or under duress? What is their ultimate destination? Why were we not informed of their departure in advance? Who, if anyone, will intervene on their behalf? Are they innocent? Are they guilty? Are they even really gone? Because isn't it odd that no one we know actually saw them leave?

..The mayor urges us all to be patient. "We'll let you know what we can when we can," he tells us. There was disloyalty on the part of some, time was short, and the need for action was great. The Japanese have left us willingly, we are told, and without rancor, per the President's request. Their spirits remain high. Their appetite is good. Their resettlement is proceeding according to plan. These are, the mayor reminds us, extraordinary times. We are part of the battlefront now, and whatever must be done to defend the country must be done. "There will be some things that people will see," he tells us. "And there will be some things that people won't see. These things happen. And life goes on."

♥ New people begin to move into their houses. Orkies and Arkies who've come out west for the war work. Dispossessed farmers from the Ozarks. Dirt-poor Negroes with their bundles of belongings fresh up from the South. Vagrants and squatters. Country folk. Not our kind. Some of them can't even spell. They work ten and fifteen hours a day in the ammunitions plants. They live three and four families to a house. They wash their laundry out of doors, in tin tubs in their front yards. They let their women and children run wild. And on the weekends, when they sit out on their porches smoking and drinking until late in the night, we begin to long for our old neighbors, the quiet Japanese.

♥ In autumn there is no Buddhist harvest festival on Main Street. No Chrysanthemum Feast. No parade of bobbing paper lanterns at dusk. No children in long-sleeved cotton kimonos singing and dancing to the wild beating of the drums until late in the night. Because the Japanese are gone, that's all. ..Sometimes several days go by and he doesn't think about the Japanese at all. But then he'll see a familiar face on the street-it's Mrs. Nishikawa from the bait shop, only why won't she wave back hello?-or a fresh rumor will float his way. Rifles were found buried beneath the Koyanagis' plum tree. Black Dragon emblems were discovered in a Japanese house in Oak. Or he'll hear footsteps behind him on the sidewalk but when he turns around there's nobody there. And then it will hit hit all over again: the Japanese have left us and we don't know where they are.

♥ By the first frost their faces begin to blend and blur in our minds. Their names start to elude us. Was it Mr. Kato or Mr. Sato? Their letters cease to arrive. Our children who once missed them so fervently no longer ask us where they are. Our youngest can barely remember them. "I think I saw one once," they say to us. Or, "Didn't they all have black hair?" And after a while we notice ourselves speaking of them more and more in the past tense. Some days we forget they were ever with us, although late at night they often surface, unexpectedly, in our dreams. It was the nurseryman's son, Elliot. He told me not to worry, they're doing all right, they're getting plenty to eat and playing baseball all day long. And in the morning, when we wake, try as we might to hang on to them, they do not linger long in our thoughts.

..and whenever we walk past his window it is easy to imagine that everything is as it was before. But Mr. Harada is no longer with us, and the rest of the Japanese are gone. We speak of them rarely now, if at all, although word from the other side of the mountains continues to reach us from time to time-entire cities of Japanese have sprung up in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, Japanese in Idaho have been put to work picking beets in the fields, and in Wyoming a group of Japanese children was seen emerging, shivering and hungry, from a forest at dusk. But this is only hearsay, and none of it necessarily true. All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall probably not meet them again in this world.