We Are Not Free Page 2

  Some people say they’ll take only Isseis like Mom. But what about their American-born kids? We’ll have to go wherever our parents do. Maybe Shigeo and I could stay in San Francisco with Mas, since he’s over eighteen. But none of us would ever leave Mom alone.

  Some people say we’ll only have to go a little ways inland, but Stan Katsumoto told us his Sacramento family has heard rumors they’ll have to evacuate too. They’ll have to abandon their farm at the start of the fruit season—no strawberries, no apricots, no candy-sweet peaches dripping juice. Maybe we’ll all have to leave California.

  I’ve never been beyond the Sierra Nevada. What would it be like, walking down the block and not smelling sunbei baking in the Shungetsu-do confectionary? Going to school and not seeing the rust-colored tips of the bridge jutting out of the fog? Not tasting the salt air of the Pacific Ocean on every breath?

  I don’t want to leave. No one else does either, not Mom, who’s been here for over twenty years, not Mas or Shig or any of our pals.

  Why should we have to, when we’re Americans like anyone else?

  I know the answer, and I hate the answer: because we’re Japs, enemy aliens.

  Because we look like us.

  * * *

  The sounds of yelping and shouting reach me as if through a haze. I barely notice until the weight on my chest eases, and suddenly everything is very sharp and very loud. The ketos are flying away like leaves on the wind.

  Someone grabs me, and at first I try to struggle, but then I realize it’s Mas. He’s half dragging, half carrying me across the street while the other guys run after the ketos, hurling rocks and soda bottles. He’s strong enough to pick me up, but I’m glad he doesn’t. The fellas would never let me live it down if they saw me cradled in Mas’s arms like a baby.

  Mas has had to grow up fast these past two years. Unlike Shig and me, Mas is a brain. He was in his first semester at UC Berkeley when Dad died. After that, Mas had to drop out and take over Dad’s job as a gardener to help Mom with the finances. He tries to be like Dad and keep me and Shig out of trouble, especially now, except Dad was made of warm, soft pine instead of stone.

  Finally, we make it across Webster Street, and Mas sets me down on the steps of Mr. Hidekawa’s apartment. The FBI picked up Mr. Hidekawa the same night they got Mr. Oishi. One of our community leaders, Mr. Hidekawa served in the military in the First World War, hoping he’d get his citizenship. (He didn’t.) When he heard the authorities were coming for him, he dug out his old jacket and trousers, polished his boots, and met them at the door as a uniformed U.S. Army veteran.

  They took him all the same.

  Mr. Hidekawa’s apartment is empty now. His neighbors, the Yamadas and the Tadachis, are looking after his place. Their house is like a lot of the others in Japantown, with decorative cornices and bay windows from the Victorian era. The buildings here are all so similar, but I like the little details that make them different: the fluting on some entryway columns, the ornamented brackets, the turtle-shaped bell over Mr. Hidekawa’s door. It’s those details I’ll miss if we have to leave.

  Mas steps back onto the sidewalk, like he needs some distance to really size me up. He must have just gotten back from his job, because he’s got dirt on his forearms and the knees of his pants. Normally, he showers and dresses in clean, neatly ironed shirts and trousers as soon as he gets home, even if he’s not going out again. That’s something Dad used to do—he took a lot of pride in looking tidy. “What happened? Why’d they attack you?” he says.

  Trust Mas to blame me for getting jumped.

  “Nothing. I was walking home and—”

  “Why didn’t you take a bus?”

  I shrug.

  I must look more messed up than I think, because Mas doesn’t yell at me like I expect him to. Instead, he whips out a handkerchief and begins rubbing my face. “How many times do I have to tell you, Minnow? You have to—”

  I was walking! I want to shout. I was just walking!

  But what comes out is this: “We could do everything right, and they’d still think we were dangerous.”

  Mas stops. His face kind of cracks, and I see that underneath the layer of anger, he’s scared. Really scared. I wish I had my sketchpad right now so I could draw that bright rift of fear that’s running through his core like a vein of silver.

  But he closes up again as Shig comes over to us and takes the handkerchief. “Jeez, Mas! You’re roughing him up worse than the ketos.” He plants the sketchbook in my arms. “Here, Minnow.”

  The covers are bent, and the pages are damp with gutter water. “Thanks,” I whisper.

  He plops down on the stoop beside me and dabs gently at my cheekbone.

  Shig’s not as handsome as Twitchy or Mas, but I think he’s the most well-liked fella in our group. It’s all in his manner—he’s got an easy, crooked smile, and an easy way of talking, like there’s no place in the world he’d rather be than right here, with you. He’s not good at school or sports or anything, but Shigeo is good at people. He could walk down any street in Japantown, greet everybody by name, and ask after every one of their kids, grandkids, gardens, and hobbies.

  “You didn’t bleed on him, did you?” Shig asks me, glancing sidelong at Mas with his heavily lidded eyes. “I got blood on his favorite shirt once and he nearly flipped his wig.”

  Mas crosses his arms. “Blood, huh? I could’ve sworn it was paint, because you thought it would be funny to change the color of my outfit right before the Senior Ball.”

  “Oh yeah.” Shigeo grins. “That was funny.”

  Before Mas can reply, the rest of the guys come sauntering back across Webster Street. They’re all between sixteen and twenty years old, and, except for Frankie Fujita, who moved here when he was ten, they all grew up together in Japantown.

  “Got this for you, Minnow.” Twitchy Hashimoto unfolds the crumpled drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge, smoothing it a couple of times on his thigh, and hands it back to me.

  “Thanks.” As I take it, I notice that the other side is filled with sketches of him doing tricks with his butterfly knife. I guess I draw Twitchy a lot.

  Blushing, I slide the page into the sketchbook and clap the covers closed.

  “That’s a nice shiner you got,” Twitchy says.

  Gingerly, I touch the side of my face, where the skin is warm and swollen. “You think so?”

  He just laughs, ruffles my hair, and skips up a couple of Mr. Hidekawa’s steps before sliding down the banister again.

  “You’re all right now, Minnow,” says Tommy with a small grin. “We’ve got you.”

  Seeing Tommy smile cheers me up a bit. Tommy’s sixteen, but looking at him, you wouldn’t know it. He’s small and nervous, with round eyes that are too big for his face. If he can smile at a time like this, so can I. “How’d you guys know I was in trouble?” I ask.

  “Some Chinese guys came running over, saying the white boys were at it again,” Mas answers.

  I remember their buttons—I AM CHINESE—and the backs of their heads. I guess they didn’t abandon me after all.

  Frankie Fujita strolls up then, hands jammed in his pockets. I’ve got a few drawings of Frankie, and in them he always looks like he’s spoiling for a fight: blazing comets for eyes, high cheekbones, hair he wears long and messy like the guys in Mom’s woodblock prints. Sometimes I think he should’ve been born into another era, when he could’ve made fighting his whole life. That boy likes fighting more than almost anything. He’ll fight ketos, Chinese, Mexicans, Blacks, anybody. He’s nineteen, and after Pearl Harbor, he wanted to sign up to fight the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians, but the government reclassified us from A-1 to C-4, making us all “enemy aliens” (even though people like Frankie and me and the guys are Nisei, second-generation Japanese-American citizens), so he couldn’t fight anybody.

  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 u
ncle, 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.

  You’d think the JACL would’ve put up a fight or something, but they’ve been doing all sorts of wacky stuff to help Roosevelt and his cronies. After the attack, they helped arrest Issei leaders like Mr. Hidekawa and Yum-yum’s dad, Mr. Oishi. They told us all to cooperate when the WRA started packing us off to desert camps. I bet they’d bend over and kiss their own asses if Washington asked them to.

  “You see this?” I elbow Twitchy as we head toward the crowd. “What’s the government want now, our used underwear?”

  “No one wants your dirty drawers, Shigeo.” Twitchy elbows me back. “Maybe Mike Masaoka’s resigning in disgrace or something.”

  Mike Masaoka’s the JACL executive secretary. What d’you wanna bet a big shot like him isn’t going into camp with the rest of us?

  I scoff. “Nah, I checked the weather report. Hell’s showing no s
igns of freezing over.”

  We shoulder our way through the wall of hats and backs toward some official-looking notices pasted to the Civil Control Station walls. I end up sandwiched between Mr. Inouye, who always wears a flat cap because he’s embarrassed about losing his hair, and Mrs. Mayeda, who always smells like coffee breath and Chantilly perfume.

  Through the crowd, I catch a glimpse of the notices—CIVILIAN EXCLUSION ORDER NO. 20—and I know. I know even before I read the rest of it.

  Mike Masaoka’s not resigning.

  The JACL’s not protesting.

  The evacuation has come to Japantown.

  Halfway down the page, there’s a paragraph describing the borders of the evacuation area—it’s the whole north half of the neighborhood, only missing my apartment by a block.

  “Tommy’s family lives up there,” Twitchy mutters.

  “And Stan’s,” I add. Two of our best friends in the world are going to be torn from their homes, and no one’s doing a damn thing about it.

  Between my teeth, I can feel a low buzz, like a power line inside me is busted and I’m going to start breathing sparks if I open my mouth.

  I shake my head, and the humming subsides—you can’t fight the federal government, not unless you want to end up in prison—and I glance back at Twitchy with a lopsided grin. “You know, all of a sudden I don’t feel like going to school.”

  He chuckles. “You never feel like going to school.”

  “Yeah, but why bother now?” There’s that buzzing again. I taste electricity on my tongue. “They’re going to kick us all out in a couple weeks anyway.”

  * * *

  When no one’s looking, we climb the fire escape three stories to the roof of the Toyo Hotel, where we always go when we ditch because no one will find us up there. It’s even got a couple bottles of soda and a bunch of comic books we stashed in a box near the ledge overlooking the intersection at Post and Buchanan.