Julie Otsuka - When the Emperor Was Divine

These were a few of the things the boy knew about China.

LATER, HE SAW CHINESE, real Chinese—Mr. Lee of Lee’s Grocers and Don Wong who owned the laundry on Shattuck—on the street wearing buttons that said, I AM CHINESE, and CHINESE, PLEASE. Later, a man stopped him on the sidewalk in front of Woolworth’s and said, “Chink or Jap?” and the boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout, “Jap! Jap! I’m a Jap!”

Just to set the record straight.

But by then the man was already gone.

Later, there were the rules about time: No Japs out after eight p.m.

And space: No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes.

Later, the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden.

Later, the signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY went up all over town and they packed up their things and they left.

ALL THROUGH OCTOBER the days were still warm, like summer, but at night the mercury dropped and in the morning the sagebrush was sometimes covered with frost. Twice in one week there were dust storms. The sky turned suddenly gray and then a hot wind came screaming across the desert, churning up everything in its path. From inside the barracks the boy could not see the sun or the moon or even the next row of barracks on the other side of the gravel path. All he could see was dust. The wind rattled the windows and doors and the dust seeped like smoke through the cracks in the roof and at night he slept with a wet handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the smell. In the morning, when he woke, the wet handkerchief was dry and in his mouth there was the gritty taste of chalk.

A dust storm would blow for hours, and sometimes even days, and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it would stop, and for a few seconds the world was perfectly silent. Then a baby would begin to cry, or a dog would start barking, and from out of nowhere a flock of white birds would mysteriously appear in the sky.

THE FIRST SNOWS FELL, and then melted, and then there was rain. The alkaline earth could not absorb any water and the ground quickly turned to mud. Black puddles stood on the gravel paths and the schools were shut down for repairs.

There was nothing to do now and the days were long and empty. The boy marked them off one by one on the calendar with giant red X’s. He practiced fancy tricks on the yo-yo: Around the World, Walk the Dog, the Turkish Army. He received a letter from his father written on thin lined sheets of paper. Of course we have toothpaste in Lordsburg. How else do you expect us to brush our teeth? His father thanked him for the postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle. He said he was fine. Everything was fine. He was sure they would see each other one day soon. Be good to your mother, he wrote. Be patient. And remember, it’s better to bend than to break.

Not once did he mention the war.

HIS FATHER HAD PROMISED to show him the world. They’d go to Egypt, he’d said, and climb the Pyramids. They’d go to China and take a nice long stroll along that Great Wall. They’d see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they’d glide through Venice in a black wooden gondola.

“The moon above,” he sang, “is yours and mine….”

THE DAY AFTER THE FBI had come to the house he had found a few strands of his father’s hair in the bathtub. He had put them into an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there— no peeking, was his rule—his father would be all right. But lately he had begun waking up every night in the barracks, convinced that the envelope was gone. “I should have taken it with me,” he said to himself. He worried that there were large messy people now living in his old room who played cards night and day and spilled sticky brown drinks all over the floor. He worried that the FBI had returned to the house to search one more time for contraband. We forgot to check under the floorboards. He worried that when he saw his father again after the war his father would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees. He worried that his father would be bald.

FROM TIME TO TIME they heard rumors of spies. Takizawa, people whispered, was a government informer. Possibly a Korean. Not to be trusted. So be careful what you say. Yamaguchi had close ties to the administration. Ishimoto had been attacked late one night behind the latrines by three masked men carrying lead pipes. They say he was providing the FBI with the names of pro-Japan disloyals.

“WHAT DO I miss the most? The sound of the trees at night… also, chocolate.”

“And plums, Mama. You miss plums.”

“That’s right, I miss plums. I’ll always miss plums.”

“Maybe not always.”

“True, maybe not. There’s something that’s been bothering me, though.”

“What is it?”

“Did I leave the porch light on or off?”

“On.”

“And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?”

“You always turned off the stove.”

“Did I?”

“Every time.”

“Did we even have a stove?”

“Of course we had a stove.”

“That’s right. The Wedgewood. I used to be quite the cook once, you know.”

SLOWLY THE BOY SPUN the dial. He heard organ music playing on the Salt Lake City station. Then rhumba music. A swing band. An ad for Dr. Fisher’s tablets for intestinal sluggishness. “Folks,” a man asked, “do you feel headachy and pepless in the morning?” “Nope,” said the boy. Then the news came on, and the Western Task Force was landing in Morocco, and the Central, at Oran, and in the Pacific Islands the American forces were dying all over the place.

He closed his eyes and imagined himself fighting with Hank and the Raiders down in the Solomon Islands. Or flying reconnaissance over Mindanao. Maybe he’d take a direct hit over Leyte and he’d have to eject. He’d float slowly down to earth beneath a flaming silk parachute and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. “You did your best, son,” he’d say, and then they’d shake hands.

NOW WHEN THE GIRL UNDRESSED — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse—she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. “It’ll be red, ” she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete’s foot—“He showed me”—and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.

“What did it look like?” the boy asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.

The boy said, “I know.”

One night he found her squatting outside beneath his window with a tin spoon from the mess hall.

“I’m digging a hole to China,” she said. On the ground beside her lay the tortoise. Its head and legs were tucked up inside its shell and it was not moving. Had not moved for several days. Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul. Night after night he had lain awake waiting to hear the sound of the scrabbling claws but all he had heard was the banging of a loose door in the wind.