Book #24: Impounded Images

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had archive fever. I’ve been reading a pile of history books on the Japanese Internment. I’m looking to gain insight into what my grandparents experienced as internees as part of my attempt to write an historical novel, centred on a secret romance in one of the camps. The idea is loosely based on snippets of stories and half-disclosures that my grandmother let slip over the years, giving me certain ideas (fantasies, really) about how she met my grandfather. The beginning of their strange, turbulent marriage.

But the problem with reading history books, I’ve come to realize, is that “facts” only get you so far as a writer. They’re full of quotations by politicians and statistical data, whereas I’m interested in accessing the taste (or lack of taste) of the camp food, the sounds and smells of the barracks, the feel of the floorboards against our heroine’s bare feet as she sneaks out at night.

So I decided to read something different. Or not read at all. The other day, I came across a collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange, who is best known for her portraits of U.S. migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers during the Depression. What is not so well known about Lange’s career is that she was commissioned by the U.S. government to document the Japanese Internment. She toured many camps in California and took a slew of stunning photographs: bewildered, beautiful girls clinging to the slip of shade outside a mess hall; the Inyo Mountains rising pale and ghostly behind the camp at Manzanar, barely visible through the dust haze; and internees gardening with the materials at hand – to describe just a few of Lange’s moving images.

More than simply documenting the group’s degraded condition, Lange’s photos distill a timeless, universal sadness to their plight. There appears something almost mythic about their suffering. Since these images were seen as so obviously sympathetic to the internees’ perspective, they were impounded by the U.S. government and not published until recently.

These photos are a wonderful source of inspiration. Looking at them, I’m able to imagine how the dust would feel sticking to my skin and mixing with my sweat and from there … the thoughts of my heroine start to come alive in my head. I can feel her yearning for some escape and becoming susceptible to the advances of a certain stranger who pushed his way into her life.

Photo from: here

Book #23: Decaying Family Ties

“Kiyo and I were too young to run around, but often we would eat in gangs with other kids, while the grownups sat at another table. I confess I enjoyed this part of it at the time.” -Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar

It’s a story that’s both familiar and strange to me. It might have been my mother’s story if she’d been born ten years earlier or my grandmother’s story if she hadn’t been embarrassed to tell all.

Farewell to Manzanar is Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s fascinating memoir about coming of age in an internment camp during the Second World War. The camp, situated in Manzanar, California, housed over 110,000 Japanese Americans in 36 blocks of hastily constructed barracks on 540 acres of sultry desert land. Jeanne goes overnight from being a carefree seven-year-old to an internee. Her father, a fisherman, is seized one day by the FBI under suspicion that his radio is being used to transmit information to Japan. By the time her father is released, her mother and the rest of the family have been forcibly relocated to cramped, dirty quarters at Manzanar, where the communal toilets are not even partitioned and the food is so terrible that most everyone falls ill.

I wonder to what extent my own family members suffered such indignities upon being interned at camps in Minadoka, Idaho, and Sandon and Kaslo, BC.

But what I find most interesting and unsettling about the tale is the erosion of communal family life. We hear of children and teenagers left to their own devices, allowed to eat in the mess hall with their friends everyday - running from one mess hall to the next in search of more palatable food - and all the while their parents are either absent (interned elsewhere) or languishing in depression and alcoholism. Gangs form, governed by violence and their own secret hierarchies. And covert romances, too (one might speculate). Although the author only touches on these aspects (as a child, she was too young to be sucked into the group dynamics that led to the infamous Manzanar Riot), she is clear about the fallout – the loss of parental authority. It was in this kind of no man’s land that my own grandparents fell in love against their elders’ wishes and ran away after the war.

Photo from: here

Book #19: Memories of War

"In recalling your past there is precious little knowledge, which remains our most difficult quarry. In memory there are simply shapes that appear before the eyes of who you are now, and who you might've been, the shapes as incomplete and changeable as the times."     -Dennis Bock, The Ash Garden

What would be the most extreme, life changing experience you could have?  Losing half your face to disfigurement from the atomic bomb surely ranks at the top of the list.  In The Ash Garden, Dennis Bock explores this predicament from the perspective of a Japanese woman named Emiko.  An innocent child when defaced during the war, she is now a celebrated filmmaker who looks back on her life using her scars as a kind of lens for trauma and memory. 

But the fascination and beauty of this novel is that Bock never lets it descend into an all too easy tale of victimization.  For as much as Emiko has been hurt by history, we discover that her trauma bears a striking - ironic - resemblance to that of the man responsible.  Anton Boll, the inventor of the atomic bomb, provides the other half of the novel, told from his peculiarly guilt-ridden perspective.  I say "peculiarly" because guilt for him is no simple matter of confessing to a horrific act.  When he and Emiko are brought face to face, she asks, "Do you believe you need absolution?"  All he can reply is, "That is what my wife believes."

As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that the Second World War is no less muddled for my own family.  "They rounded us up," my grandmother would blurt out at Christmas dinner, "and put us in Hastings Park, where the horses were usually stored."  She made no bones about the fact that we - and all Japanese-Canadians living in BC - had been imprisoned and dispossessed.  She would tell her story to anyone who would listen.  Shopkeepers, strangers on the bus.

I love my grandmother and identify with her rage and sorrow, but in recent years I've discovered that there is another more complex side to our family history.  I don't understand this aspect and so it haunts my mind.  It turns out that my father's side of the family was never interned because it seems that my great-grandfather agreed - in exchange for their freedom - to be the camp doctor.  He uprooted himself and his family from Vancouver and moved to Kaslo, a ghost town in the interior of BC, where he provided medical services to the internees, who must have both revered and resented him.  He was free, where they had lost everything.  I don't know whether a sense of guilt got under his skin, but I've heard from certain relatives that he was regarded with jealousy and gratitude in equal measure. 

Perhaps this is why decades after the war had ended, he returned to Kaslo as an old man.  Disoriented and probably in the early stages of Alzheimer's, he crashed his car and was found wandering on the side of the road.  It seems that he had dreams of returning to Kaslo and starting his medical practice anew.  I picture him mumbling about wanting to making amends for something he'd never managed to accomplish.  But shortly after he died of a heart attack.


Photo from: here

Book #17: Wayson Choy's Phantom Homeland

"I close my eyes: older, long-ago faces, a few of them barely smiling, push into my consciousness. I hear voices, a variety of Chinatown dialects, their sing-song phrases warning me: 'You never forget you Chinese!'" -Wayson Choy, Paper Shadows

Wayson Choy's memoir Paper Shadows opens with the startling discovery that he was adopted. The woman whom he buried eighteen years earlier turns out not to be his mother - sparking a series of vivid flashbacks. Sometimes idyllic, other times frightening, his childhood growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown appears a mishmash of half-remembered fragments: a violent father, who was away for long stretches building the Canadian Pacific Railway; a vivacious mother, who liked to play mah jong until the wee hours, despite her husband's dark moods; and bachelor uncles and aunties who claimed to be family, for lack of any real blood ties in Canada. As the secrets of this community come to life in Choy's memory, the past appears ever more mysterious, estranged. Despite the warnings of the Chinatown elders, what it means to be "Chinese" seems to be slipping away, even as they speak.

Mother, motherland. Both are elusive. The woman he thought was his mother appears in his memory as a ghost - "a length of warm shadow stretched out along the far edge of the bed." She was his last tie to his ancestral homeland, but even that tie turned out to be based on a concealment, a lie.

Although I'm not adopted, Choy's feelings of loss and disorientation are familiar. There must have been a moment when I came to view my Asian heritage with this mix of fascination and fear. Growing up in Toronto as a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, my connection to Japan never seemed to go much further than dinners at sushi bars - where California roll was always my favourite - and the annual Japanese New Years celebration when we would all crowd around the Formica table in my grandmother's tiny kitchen, the oily stink of tempura and daikon radish filling the air.

And yet, my grandmother insisted that I was Japanese. We all were, in her mind.

The idea of our Japanese homeland was replete with meaning for her. I could sense it in her excitement, as she talked about growing up in Vancouver's Japantown, where she had run her father's restaurant and grocery store, before the place was razed during the Second World War. As she reminisced, her black curls quivered over her pointy ears, the skin smeared with indelible streaks of dye. She longed for the rugged beaches of the Queen Charlotte Islands, where she had been born, shortly after her father immigrated to Canada working as an "explorer" for the Japanese government. Supposedly, the government wanted information about the ways and lives of the Haida Indians.

Years later, I thought back to her stories and wondered whether they were entirely true, but at some level it didn't matter, for her words had caught hold in my imagination. Her memories were charged with the sadness and magic of a place that no longer existed.


Photo from: here

Book #13: Dreaming of Asia....

My boyfriend, Chris, is presently away in Hong Kong tending to his family affairs. He has been away for the past two months leaving me all by my lonesome to read and blog about that turbulent time in my life two years ago, when I was lovelorn, in the midst of a breakdown and desperately searching for a new career. Missing Chris (and perhaps feeling a bit left out of his adventures in China), I started reading Linda See's Shanghai Girls. My pulse quickened. Five pages in and I was hooked.

This tale of an upper crust family in 1930s Shanghai - where the daughters wear "complementary cheongsans to show harmony and style" - has an exotic appeal, no doubt. But what really draws me in is the fact that, despite the far-flung setting, I can identify with the thoughts, feelings and deepest aspirations of the heroine, Pearl. She is an independent, yet secretly insecure woman, who has always been a little too tall and clever to be considered beautiful in conventional terms. Especially compared to her cute-as-a-button, flirtatious sister, May.

Pearl doesn't understand men at all. The man whom she has secretly been in love with for years - an artist who paints her and her sister for calendars and soap ads - doesn't seem to care when she arrives on his doorstep in tears. Her father has sold her and May in arranged marriages to Chinese-American men in order to cover his gambling debts. Contrary to her expectation that this man will save her, his Bohemian airs melt away, and he reminds her of her obligation to filial piety. Devastated, Pearl and May attempt to resist the arranged marriages on their own, but then their father disappears, the Japanese attack the city and the girls suddenly find themselves refugees on the run, vulnerable to attack and rape. As their situation gets increasingly dire, it becomes clear that their best hope for survival is to get to America to their would-be husbands. Pearl reflects:

"Many people wish to go to America. Some will do anything to get there, but going to America was never my dream. For me, it's just a necessity, another move after so many mistakes, tragedies, deaths, and one foolish decision after another. All May and I have left is each other. After everything we've been through, our tie is so strong that not even a sharp knife could sever it. All we can do now is continue down the road we're on, wherever it takes us."

These passages capture the essence of how it feels as Pearl's girlish longings and desire to find love curl inward and die stillborn. Now, she's in survival mode and finding the man of her dreams seems as frivolous and unreal as a soap opera. I have never experienced losing everything in war and being uprooted (as my grandmothers have). Shanghai Girls gives me a glimpse of how it might feel by magnifying 100 times the experiences that are vividly real to many readers - deception and desertion by an old lover, drifting through life with no place to go, feeling like an outcast who just can't go on.

But Pearl does go on. Her strength and resourcefulness in the face of adversity are inspirational.


Photo from: here