Before moving here, Frankie grew up in New York, where he was getting into so much trouble that his parents sent him out West to live with his uncle, hoping California life would tame him some. He could’ve gone back to New York when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 back in February and all those rumors about evacuation started, but he didn’t. He stayed with the boys.
I don’t like him much, but you can’t say he’s not loyal.
He crosses his arms, and his anger flares in his eyes. “Goddamn ketos.”
“But thank God for Chinese guys, huh?” Shig winks at me.
Stan Katsumoto clasps his hands in front of him like he’s in the front pew at Sunday services. Behind his glasses, his smart black eyes shine like a crow’s. “Dear Heavenly Father,” he intones, “we thank you for this day, all the blessings you have given us, and Chinese guys.”
Twitchy laughs. He’s got a great laugh. It shakes you a little at first, and then you feel all the restless bits of your soul settle like grains of rice in a washing pot. “I’ve got half a mind to steal a few of those buttons,” he says, “just so the ketos’ll leave us alone.”
Tommy frowns. “We don’t look Chinese.”
In PM Magazine, Dr. Seuss, the kids’ book author, has been drawing us with pig noses and wiry mustaches, queuing up for boxes of TNT. There are all sorts of cartoons like that. Sometimes we look like pigs, sometimes monkeys, sometimes rats.
We never look like us.
Stan leans back against the banister, spinning one finger like it’s a roulette wheel. “Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino . . . Who wants to guess who the ketos are going after next week?”
Stan’s smart, maybe even smarter than Mas, and he uses his smarts to make jokes, skipping along the surfaces of things like a stone over water, so they barely touch him. But he wasn’t joking the day he helped his father hang the sign at Katsumoto Co.: I AM AN AMERICAN.
“Next week?” Frankie grunts. “There won’t be a ‘next week’ for much longer if they kick us outta here.”
And just like that, the conversation turns, as it always does these days, to the evacuation.
“I heard the Bainbridge Japanese only got six days to pack,” Tommy says.
Bainbridge is this little island in Washington. Last Saturday, their Japanese got the first exclusion order, telling them they’d have to leave their homes.
Their homes.
Our homes.
“What hard-working nihonjin can’t pack up their whole life in six days?” Stan clicks his tongue. “Bad Asians.”
“Maybe we won’t . . .” Tommy doesn’t finish his sentence. We all know we’re going to get that exclusion order one day, even though, at the same time, we hope that day never comes.
“Anybody know where they’re going?” Mas asks.
“Owens Valley got some ‘volunteers’ last weekend.” Twitchy makes quotation marks with his fingers when he says the word “volunteers.”
The Owens Valley Reception Center is near Kings Canyon National Park. I’ve never been there, but at least it’s still in California.
I hate myself a little bit for thinking that. For trying to convince myself the situation isn’t as bad as it is.
Because it is bad. Really bad. That’s why Mas is so angry and so scared. It’s so bad that being an American won’t protect you when you have faces like ours.
I was walking!
I was just walking.
I’ve never broken the law. I’m a pretty good student, despite what Mas will tell you. I keep to myself. I mind my own business.
I’m a good Japanese.
I’m a good American.
But that won’t be enough, will it? To keep me here? To make them leave me alone?
“Think we’ll go to Owens Valley too?” Tommy asks. “That’s not far.”
“It’s far enough,” Stan says.
A silence falls over us, and in my head, I do a sketch of the guys. We’re on Mr. Hidekawa’s steps, and all around us, our eight-p.m. curfew approaches in dark clouds of charcoal.
“Come on.” Mas gestures to Shig and me. “You two have homework to do.” Then he smacks me on the back, harder than he needs to, but now I know it’s not because he’s angry with me.
It’s because the ketos could come back for us.
It’s because we could all be rounded up, no matter how many laws we obey or what grades we have. It doesn’t matter how good we are, because they see only what they want to see, and when they look at us, all they see are Japs.
“Why bother?” Shig laughs. “Where they’re sending us, maybe there’s no school.”
Mas gives him a hard look. “Because we won’t be there forever.”
As we head down the street, we take in the neighborhood: the hotels with lighted signs buzzing in the fog, the churches advertising next Sunday’s services like we won’t be herded off any day now, the smells of hot sesame oil and grilled fish wafting from the nearest restaurants.
Frankie stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Sure gonna miss this place when Uncle Sam kicks us out.”
* * *
That night, after Mom, Mas, and Shig have gone to bed, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, studying my reflection. The skin around my right eye’s purple as an eggplant. It’s so swollen, my eye’s turned into a slit I can hardly see through.
If you cover the left side of my face, I look like the guy from the Sutro’s ad.
When I leave the bathroom, I don’t go back to the room Shig and I share. I sit in the living room, open my sketchbook to a blank page, and begin to draw.
The paper’s wrinkled with water damage, but that doesn’t stop me.
I draw myself, today, on March 26, 1942. It’s an ugly portrait, cobbled together out of scraps: I’m a Seussian sketch; I’m a woodblock samurai; I’m the bruised kid in the mirror.
I draw Japantown, the dry-goods stores, the restaurants, the dentists and beauty salons, the lamps dangling like teardrops in the fog.
I draw Mas, and he looks tired.
I draw the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a burning Hinomaru.
I draw Frankie in his father’s WWI 82nd Infantry uniform, the double-A “All-American” patch sewn onto the left shoulder, fighting boys who could be his brothers.
I draw Twitchy—he’s racing barefoot across Ocean Beach with seagulls flying before him.
I draw my favorite places in this city I call home: the George Washington High School bleachers, Lands End, Katsumoto Co., the Victorians, the Golden Gate . . .
And when I’m done, I tear my self-portrait from my sketchbook and light a match. I set fire to the page and stuff it into the fireplace, where the flames blacken the edges, consuming my Jap skin, my Jap eyes, my family, my friends, my city, my bridge . . . and we all go up in smoke.
II
What Stays, What Gives, What Goes
Shig, 17
April–May 1942
It’s a Friday in April, and me and Twitchy are on our way to school when we see the crowd in front of the Civil Control Station. The building and the Japanese school in it used to belong to the Japanese American Citizens League, but last month they just rolled over and handed it to the War Relocation Authority, the government agency in charge of rounding us up, neat as you please.