Download Farewell to Manzanar and more Exercises Japanese in PDF only on Docsity! *Excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki A Double Impulse WHEN THE sixth-grade teacher ushered me in, the other kids inspected me, but not unlike I myself would study a new arrival. She was a warm, benevolent woman who tried to make this first day as easy as possible. She gave me the morning to get the feel of the room. That afternoon, during a reading lesson, she finally asked me if I’d care to try a page out loud. I had not yet opened my mouth, except to smile. When I stood up, everyone turned to watch. Any kid entering a new class wants, first of all, to be liked. This was uppermost in my mind. I smiled wider, then began to read. I made no mistakes. When I finished, a pretty blond girl in front of me said, quite innocently, “Gee, I didn’t know you could speak English.” She was genuinely amazed. I was stunned. How could this have even been in doubt? It isn’t difficult, now, to explain her reaction. But at age eleven, I couldn’t believe anyone could think such a thing, say such a thing about me, or regard me in that way. I smiled and sat down, suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred. Rather, I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all. During the years in camp I had never really understood why we were there, nor had I questioned it much. I knew no one in my family had committed a crime. If I needed explanations at all, I conjured up vague notions about a war between America and Japan. But now I’d reached an age where certain childhood mysteries begin to make sense. This girl’s guileless remark came as an illumination, an instant knowledge that brought with it the first buds of true shame. From that day on, part of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I couldn’t have defined it at the time, I felt that if attention were drawn to me, people would see what this girl had first responded to. They wouldn’t see me, they would see the slant-eyed face, the Asian. This is what accounts, in part, for the entire evacuation. You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable. It’s an attitude easy for nonwhites to acquire in America. I had inherited it. Manzanar had confirmed it. And my feeling, at eleven, went something like this: you are going to be invisible anyway, so why not completely disappear. But another part of me did not want to disappear. With the same sort of reaction that sent Woody into the army, I instinctively decided I would have to prove that I wasn’t different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse: the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be acceptable. I soon learned there were certain areas I was automatically allowed to perform in: scholarship, athletics, and school- time activities like the yearbook, the newspaper, and student government. I tried all of these and made good grades, became news editor, held an office in the Girls Athletic League. I also learned that outside school another set of rules prevailed. Choosing friends, for instance, often depended upon whether or not I could be invited to their homes, whether their parents would allow this. And what is so infuriating, looking back, is how I accepted the situation. If refused by someone’s parents, I would never say, “Go to hell!” or “I’ll find other friends,” or “Who wants to come to your house anyway?” I would see it as my fault, the result of my failings. I was imposing a burden on them. I would absorb such rejections and keep on looking, because for some reason the scholarship society and the athletic league and the yearbook staff didn’t satisfy me, were never quite enough. They were too limited, or too easy, or too obvious. I wanted to declare myself in some different way, and—old enough to be marked by the internment but still too young for the full impact of it to cow me—I wanted in. *Excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki At one point I thought I would like to join the Girl Scouts. A friend of mine belonged, that blond girl who had commented on my reading. Her name was Radine. Her folks had come west from Amarillo, Texas, and had made a little money in the aircraft plants but not enough yet to get out of Cabrillo Homes. We found ourselves walking partway home together every day. Her fascination with my ability to speak English had led to many other topics. But she had never mentioned the Girl Scouts to me. One day I did. “Can I belong?” I asked, then adding as an afterthought, as if to ease what I knew her answer would have to be, “You know, I’m Japanese.” “Gee,” she said, her friendly face suddenly a mask. “I don’t know. But we can sure find out. Mama’s the assistant troop leader.” And then, the next day, “Gee, Jeannie, no. I’m really sorry.” Rage may have been simmering deep within me, but my conscious reaction was, “Oh well, that’s okay, Radine. I understand. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Sure. I’ll meet you at the stoplight.” I didn’t hold this against her, any more than I associated her personally with the first remark she made. It was her mother who had drawn the line, and I was used to that. If anything, Radine and I were closer now. She felt obliged to protect me. She would catch someone staring at me as we walked home from school and she would growl, “What are you looking at? She’s an American citizen. She’s got as much right as anybody to walk around on the street!” Her outbursts always amazed me. I would much rather have ignored those looks than challenged them. At the same time I wondered why my citizenship had to be so loudly affirmed, and I couldn’t imagine why affirming it would really make any difference. (If so, why hadn’t it kept me out of Manzanar?) But I was grateful when Radine stuck up for me. Soon we were together all the time. I was teaching her how to twirl baton, and this started a partnership that lasted for the next three years. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d learned in camp. My chubby teacher had taught me well. Radine and I would practice in the grassy plots between the buildings, much as I used to in the firebreaks near Block 28: behind the back, between the legs, over the shoulder, high into the air above the two-story rooftops, watching it, timing its fall for the sudden catch. We practiced the splits, and bending backward, the high-stepping strut, and I saw myself a sequined princess leading orchestras across a football field, the idol of cheering fans. There happened to be a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps located in the housing project next to ours. They performed in local parades, and they were looking for some baton twirlers to march in front of the band. That fall Radine and I tried out, and we suited them just fine. They made me the lead majorette, in the center between Radine and Gloria, another girl from the seventh grade. Those two wore blue satin outfits to accent their bright blond hair. My outfit was white, with gold braid across the chest. We all wore white, calf-high boots and boat-shaped hats. We worked out trio routines and practiced every weekend with the boys, marching up and down the streets of the project. We performed with them at our junior high assemblies, as well as in the big band reviews each spring, with our batons glinting out in front of the bass drums and snares and shiny bugles, their banners, merit badges, khaki uniforms, and their squared-off military footwork. This was exactly what I wanted. It also gave me the first sure sign of how certain intangible barriers might be crossed. The Girl Scouts was much like a sorority, of the kind I would be excluded from in high school and later on in college. And it was run by mothers. The Boy Scouts was like a fraternity and run by fathers. Radine and I were both maturing early. The boys in the band loved having us out there in front of them all the time, bending back and stepping high, in our snug satin outfits and short skirts. Their dads, mostly navy men, loved it too. At that age I was too young to consciously use my sexuality or to understand how an Asian female can fascinate Caucasian men, and of course far too young to see that even this is usually just another form of invisibility. It simply happened that the *Excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki being asked, I often simply made myself unavailable for certain kinds of dates. If one of them had asked me, of course, I would have been mortified. That would mean coming to Cabrillo Homes to pick me up, and the very thought of one of his daughters dating a Caucasian would have started Papa raving. He would have chased the fellow across the grass. This was my dilemma. Easy enough as it was to adopt white American values, I still had a Japanese father to frighten my boyfriends and a Japanese face to thwart my social goals. I never wanted to change my face or to be someone other than myself. What I wanted was the kind of acceptance that seemed to come so easily to Radine. To this day I have a recurring dream, which fills me each time with a terrible sense of loss and desolation. I see a young, beautifully blond and blue-eyed high school girl moving through a room full of others her own age, much admired by everyone, men and women both, myself included, as I watch through a window. I feel no malice toward this girl. I don’t even envy her. Watching, I am simply emptied, and in the dream I want to cry out, because she is something I can never be, some possibility in my life that can never be fulfilled. It is a schoolgirl’s dream, one I tell my waking self I’ve long since outgrown. Yet it persists. Once or twice a year she will be there, the boyfriend-surrounded queen who passed me by. Surely her example spurred me on to pursue what now seems ludicrous, but at the time was the height of my post-Manzanar ambitions. It didn’t happen in Long Beach. There I felt defeated. I watched Radine’s rise, and I knew I could never compete with that. Gradually I lost interest in school and began hanging around on the streets. I would probably have dropped out for good, but it was just about this time that Papa decided to go back into farming and finally moved us out of Cabrillo Homes. A few months earlier he had almost killed himself on a combination of whiskey and some red wine made by an Italian drinking buddy of his. He had been tippling steadily for two days, when he started vomiting blood from his mouth and nose. It sobered him up permanently. He never touched alcohol again. After that he pulled himself together, and when the chance came along to lease and sharecrop a hundred acres from a big strawberry grower up north in Santa Clara Valley, he took it. That’s where he stayed until he died, raising premium berries, outside of San Jose. I was a senior when we moved. In those days, 1951, San Jose was a large town, but not yet a city. Coming from a big high school in southern California gave me some kind of shine, I suppose. It was a chance to start over, and I made the most of it. By the spring of that year, when it came time to elect the annual carnival queen from the graduating seniors, my homeroom chose me. I was among fifteen girls nominated to walk out for inspection by the assembled student body on voting day. I knew I couldn’t beat the other contestants at their own game, that is, look like a bobbysoxer. Yet neither could I look too Japanese-y. I decided to go exotic, with a flower-print sarong, black hair loose and a hibiscus flower behind my ear. When I walked barefooted out onto the varnished gymnasium floor, between the filled bleachers, the howls and whistles from the boys were double what had greeted any of the other girls. It sounded like some winning basket had just been made in the game against our oldest rivals. It was pretty clear what the outcome would be, but ballots still had to be cast and counted. The next afternoon I was standing outside my Spanish class when Leonard Rodriguez, who sat next to me, came hurrying down the hall with a revolutionary’s fire in his eye. He helped out each day in the administration office. He had just overheard some teachers and a couple of secretaries counting up the votes. “They’re trying to stuff the ballot box,” he whispered loudly. “They’re fudging on the tally. They’re afraid to have a Japanese girl be queen. They’ve never had one before. They’re afraid of what some of the parents will say.” He was pleased he had caught them, and more pleased to be telling this to me, as if some long-held suspicion of conspiracy had finally been confirmed. I shared it with him. Whether this was true or not, I was prepared to believe *Excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki that teachers would stuff the ballot box to keep me from being queen. For that reason I couldn’t afford to get my hopes up. I said, “So what?” He leaned toward me eagerly, with final proof. “They want Lois Carson to be queen. I heard them say so.” If applause were any measure, Lois Carson wasn’t even in the running. She was too slim and elegant for beauty contests. But her father had contributed a lot to the school. He was on the board of trustees. She was blond, blue- eyed. At that point her name might as well have been Radine. I was ready to capitulate without a groan. “If she doesn’t make carnival queen this year,” Leonard went on smugly, “she’ll never be queen of anything anywhere else for the rest of her life.” “Let her have it then, if she wants it so much.” “No! We can’t do that! You can’t do that!” I could do that very easily. I wasn’t going to be caught caring about this, or needing it, the way I had needed the majorette position. I already sensed, though I couldn’t have said why, that I would lose either way, no matter how it turned out. My face was indifferent. “How can I stop them from fudging,” I said, “if that’s what they want to do?” He hesitated. He looked around. He set his brown face. My champion. “You cant,” he said. “But I can.” He turned and hurried away toward the office. The next morning he told me he had gone in there and “raised holy hell,” threatened to break this news to the student body and make the whole thing more trouble than it would ever be worth. An hour later the announcement came over the intercom that I had been chosen. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it. But, for the classmates who had nominated me, I had to look overjoyed. I glanced across at Leonard and he winked, shouting and whooping now with all the others. At home that evening, when I brought this news, no one whooped. Papa was furious. I had not told them I was running for queen. There was no use mentioning it until I had something to mention. He asked me what I had worn at the tryouts. I told him. “No wonder those hahajin2 boys vote for you!” he shouted. “It is just like those majorette clothes you wear in the street. Showing off your body. Is that the kind of queen you want to be?” I didn’t say anything. When Papa lectured, you listened. If anyone spoke up it would be Mama, trying to mediate. “Ko,” she said now, “these things are important to Jeannie. She is...” “Important? I’ll tell you what is important. Modesty is important. A graceful body is important. You don’t show your legs all the time. You don’t walk around like this.” He did an imitation of a girl’s walk, with shoulders straight, an assertive stride, and lips pulled back in a baboon’s grin. I started to laugh. “Don’t laugh! This is not funny. You become this kind of woman and what Japanese boy is going to marry you? Tell me that. You put on tight clothes and walk around like Jean Harlow and the hakajin boys make you the queen. And pretty soon you end up marrying a hakajin boy...” *Excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki He broke off. He could think of no worse end result. He began to stomp back and forth across the floor, while Mama looked at me cautiously, with a glance that said, “Be patient, wait him out. After he has spoken his piece, you and I can talk sensibly.” He saw this and turned on her. “Hey! How come your daughter is seventeen years old and if you put a sack over her face you couldn’t tell she was Japanese from anybody else on the street?” “Ko,” Mama said quietly. “Jeannie’s in high school now. Next year she’s going to go to college. She’s learning other things...” “Listen to me. It’s not too late for her to learn Japanese ways of movement. The Buddhist church in San Jose gives odori class twice a week. Jeannie, I want you to phone the teacher and tell her you are going to start taking lessons. Mama has kimonos you can wear. She can show you things too. She used to know all the dances. We have pictures somewhere. Mama, what happened to all those pictures?” I had seen them, photos of Mama when she lived in Spokane, twelve years old and her round face blanched with rice powder. I remembered the afternoon I spent with the incomprehensible old geisha at Manzanar. “Papa,” I complained. “Don’t make faces. You want to be the carnival queen? I tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. You can be the queen if you start odori lessons at the Buddhist church as soon as school is out.” He stood there, hands on hips, glaring at me, and not at all satisfied with this ultimatum. It was far too late for odori classes to have any effect on me and Papa knew this. But he owed it to himself to make one more show of resistance. When I signed up, a few weeks later, I lasted about ten lessons. The teacher herself sent me away. I smiled too much and couldn’t break the habit. Like a majorette before the ever-shifting sidewalk crowd, I smiled during performances, and in Japanese dancing that is equivalent to a concert violinist walking onstage in a bathing suit. Papa didn’t mention my queenship again. He just glared at me from time to time, with great distaste, as if I had betrayed him. Yet in that glare I sometimes detected a flicker of approval, as if this streak of independence, this refusal to be shaped by him reflected his own obstinance. At least, these glances seemed to say, she has inherited that. Mama, of course, was very proud. She took charge and helped me pick out the dress I would wear for the coronation. We drove to San Jose and spent an afternoon in the shops downtown. She could take time for such things now that Papa was working again. This was one of the few days she and I ever spent together, just the two of us, and it confirmed something I’d felt since early childhood. In her quiet way, she had always supported me, alongside of or underneath Papa’s demands and expectations. Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival. Her support and Papa’s resistance had one point in common: too much exposure was unbecoming. All the other girls—my four attendants—were going strapless. Mama wouldn’t allow this. By the time we finished shopping, I had begun to agree with her. When she picked out a frilly ball gown that covered almost everything and buried my legs under layers of ruffles, I thought it was absolutely right. I had used a low-cut sarong to win the contest. But once chosen I would be a white-gowned figure out of Gone With the Wind; I would be respectable. On coronation night the gym was lit like a church, with bleachers in half-dark and a throne at one end, flooded brightly from the ceiling. The throne was made of plywood, its back shaped in a fleur-de-lis all covered with purple taffeta that shone like oily water under moonlight. Bed sheets were spread to simulate a wide, white carpet the length of the gym, from the throne to the door of the girls’ locker room where, with my attendants, we waited for the PA system to give us our musical cue.