Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from a short story by R. A. Sasaki in The Loom and Other Stories (©1991 by R. A. Sasaki).

She had grown up in San Francisco, wearing the two faces of a second-generation child born of immigrant parents. The two faces never met; there was no common thread running through both worlds. The duality was unplanned, untaught. Perhaps it had begun the first day of school when she couldn't understand the teacher and Eleanor Leland had called her a "Jap" and she cried. Before then there had never been a need to sort our her identity; she had met life headlong and with the confidence of a child.

Her world had been the old Victorian flat in which her mother took in boarders一the long, narrow corridor, the spiral stairway, the quilts covered with bright Japanese cloth, and the smell of fish cooking in the kitchen. She had accepted without question the people who padded in and out of her world on stockinged feet; they all seemed to be friends of the family. She never wondered why most of them were men, and it never occurred to her child's mind to ask why they didn't have their own families. The men often couldn't pay, but they were always grateful. They lounged in doorways and had teasing affectionate words for her and her sister. Then they would disappear, for a month, for six months, a year. Time, to a child, was boundless and unmeasurable. Later, crates of fruit would arrive and be stacked in the corridor. "From Sato-san," her mother would say, or "Kudoh-san kara."

The young men sometimes came back to visit with new hats set jauntily on their heads, if luck was good But often luck was not good, and they came back to stay, again and again, each stay longer than the last; and each time they would tease less and drink more with her father in the back room. The slap of cards rose over the low mumble of their longing and despair. All this she accepted as her world.

The Victorian house which contained her world was on Pine Street, and so it was known as "Pine" to the young adventurers from her parents' native Wakayama prefecture in Japan who made their way from the docks of Osaka to the lettuce fields and fruit orchards of California. "Stay at Pine," the word passed along the grapevine, "Moriwaki-San will take care of you."

It was a short walk down the Buchanan Street hill from Pine to the flats where the Japanese community had taken root and was thriving like a tree whose seed had blown in from the Pacific and had held fast in this nook, this fold in the city's many gradations. When she was a little older her world expanded beyond the Victorian called Pine. It expanded toward the heart of this community, toward the little shops from which her mother returned each day, string bag bulging with newspaper-wrapped parcels....

When it came time for her to go to school, she was not sent to the same school as the other Japanese-American children because Pine was on the edge of Japantown and in a different school district. She was the only Japanese in her class....

She did her best to blend in. Though separated from the others by her features and her native tongue, she tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. If she didn't understand what the teacher said, she watched the other children and copied them. She listened carefully to the teacher and didn't do anything that might provoke criticism. If she couldn't be outstanding she at least wanted to be invisible

She succeeded. She muted her colors and blended in. She was a quiet student and the other children got used to her; some were even nice to her. But she was still not really a part of their world because she was not really herself.

At the end of each school day she went home to the dark, narrow corridors of the old Victorian and the soothing, unconscious jumble of two tongues that was the two generations' compromise for the sake of communication. Theirs was a comfortable language, like a comfortable old sweater that had been well washed and rendered shapeless by wear. She would never wear it outside of the house....

In the outside world一the hakujin world一there was a watchdog at work who rigorously edited out Japanese words and mannerisms when she spoke. Her words became formal, carefully chosen and somewhat artificial. She never thought they conveyed what she really felt, what she really was, because what she really was was unacceptable. In the realm of behavior, the watchdog was a tyrant. Respectability, as defined by popular novels and Hollywood heroines, must be upheld at all costs... She could admit to no weakness, no peculiarity. She would be irreproachable. She would be American.