Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

The things we carry
You have 30 minutes and two garbage bags: How do you pack for a disaster?
By Cynthia Gorney
[09/16/99]

Backtalk
"Ophelia Speaks," a book by teens for teens, talks back to adults who think they know what's up. This teen says it doesn't speak to her.
By Lillie Wade
[09/15/99]

The sound of soda
Last year I attended Rosh Hashanah at a race track -- this year my religious experience is carbonated, thanks to my son.
By Barbara Field
[09/14/99]

My nanny, myself
Is it any wonder that some days I love my nanny more than I love my husband?
By Jennifer Bingham Hull
[09/13/99]

My prom date, the spy
I thought my Russian boyfriend's parents were journalists. My bureaucrat dad was convinced they were spies. Of course, they did have that wall-size transmission device in the living room ...
By Lisa Zeidner
[09/10/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Standing at the center of "Why She Left Us" is Emiko Okada, the only daughter of an immigrant Japanese sharecropper and his picture-bride wife who are eking out a meager living in Southern California. From the time she is sent away at 12 to work as a maid, Emi becomes an enigma to her family, most pointedly when she returns home just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- unmarried, pregnant and having already given up an earlier child, a baby boy named Eric, for a adoption. Though family pride compels Emi's mother to retrieve her grandson from his adoptive family, she cannot force Emi to become Eric's mother any more than she can control the historic events unfolding beyond their house.

Four members of the Okada family -- Emi's mother Kaori, son Eric, daughter Mariko and brother Jack -- alternately narrate Rizzuto's novel, moving back and forth in time and space, from the converted horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack where the Okadas and many others were assembled before being bussed to the hastily constructed camps, to a two-room sharecroppers' shack in 1925, where Kaori gives birth on the floor, unassisted but for a frightened 4-year-old girl; from the muddy mountains of Italy in 1944, where Jack is fighting with the 442nd Battalion, the all-Japanese-American unit assembled from young men willing to fight for their country while their families remained behind barbed wire at the camps, to contemporary Hawaii, where the now-grown Mariko is struggling to piece together her shreds of memory into a family story she's not sure she wants to hear. Through it all, Rizzuto's spare, precise language acts in concert with the patchwork of fateful decisions, misremembered details, family apocrypha and painful truths, creating a poignant portrait of a family caught in a parallel universe of shame, pride and the longing to belong.

Why did Emi Okada choose between her children, leaving behind a little boy who would spend his childhood waiting for her return and taking with her a little girl whose only protection against the guilt of being chosen was to forget her past? Rahna Reiko Rizzuto doesn't answer that question in her interview by phone with Salon Mothers Who Think, but she does talk about the internment's legacy of forgetfulness, how delving into the intricate power structures of family has affected her choices as a parent of young children and the responsibilities, desired or not, that come with writing about race.

Tell us about your mother's story.

My mother's story is a big blank. She was born just before the evacuation in 1942, and with her entire family was sent first to the Santa Anita racetrack and then interned at the Amachi camp. But she doesn't remember -- she left the internment camps when she was about 5 and she spoke only Japanese until she was about 6 and then her family moved to Hawaii and that was the end of it for her. It was locked out of her mind so effectively that one day when she was in high school they were talking about the Japanese internment and she came running home to her mother and said, "Hey Mom, did you know that people were interned during the war?"

Also Today Eric: Hold your breath, 1946 An excerpt from the novel "Why She Left Us."

So that's where it started for me, both the internment and the silence around the internment, because I too didn't know growing up. The first time that I heard of it was also in high school, but it was actually through my grandmother. A teacher of U.S. history found out that my grandmother had come for a visit and invited her to the class. My grandmother came and told the story of the evacuation. She said the family had a piano -- I think it was a player piano -- and they were given a week to sell everything they couldn't carry. A guy offered them the full amount they were asking for the piano, but when he came to pick it up the day they were to leave, he only gave them $5 for it, which they took, because what else could they do? I played with that story a little bit and gave it to the family in the book.

Looking back on it now, the odd thing is that when I learned about the internment as a teenager, I didn't grab it even then. I was quite a minor celebrity in school shortly after my grandmother's appearance but somehow there was something in my mind that said, "Yes, but it didn't happen to me and I'm not Japanese." It wasn't really until my mother applied for the redress in the 1980s, 10 years later, that it came up in our family again. My mother called one day and said, "We're going to Amachi. Do you want to come?" And I said, "Yes."

You're playing with that idea of revisionist memory and selective memory in the novel, too. Have you ever talked to your mother about why she didn't tell you earlier in your childhood about the camps?

No, but in her case, I think, it's because she still doesn't know very much about it. For years, most camp internees didn't talk about it, maybe because it's too painful, maybe because they feel, "Well, it's in the past. We did our best and now we have moved on." One of the things that was so interesting for me when I went to the camp was that this silence was also physical. Everything is gone. There's a graveyard. There are a couple of concrete foundations. There's a monument that's been defaced. The place itself is a big silence as far as what you can see but it was the first time that I heard people talk about their experience, and the way that they talked about it was so strange. There was a table of older ladies sitting and talking about an old Issei, or immigrant, woman who would put a bag over her head when she went to the bathroom in the public latrine, which I used in the book. I think the reason that it finally hit home to me was that I was so outraged by the idea that this poor woman had to put a bag over her head to get some privacy and these women were laughing. You know, it was just another thing: "Oh gee, I hadn't remembered that until now, but oh yeah ..." However they have processed it, for a lot of these people, it's simply gone.

I talked to several sets of sisters. In one particular set, the first sister I spoke with told me about terrible things that happened to their family that she had never spoken about before and had never told even her children about. Her father almost died and her sister had been separated from the family; her sister's husband was taken away in the sweep. Right after Pearl Harbor there were these "sweeps" where the FBI took the leaders of the community, the Buddhist ministers, the Japanese language teachers. They were jailed for longer than everyone was interned, in much worse conditions for no supportable reason. It was a heartbreaking, heartbreaking story. And then I spoke to her sister and her sister told me about the church groups and teaching bonsai and making macramé and it was -- you know, as if they were not even related. It was fascinating and definitely this is where the book came from, but it does make you think, "Well, is it healthy to remember so selectively?" And maybe it is. I mean, maybe picking up and moving on is sometimes all you can do.

Next page | Writing as a way to exorcise one's adamantly childless demons