Frances Itani - Requiem

That was the beginning wave, the wave that preceded the tide of families that followed, hundreds and thousands arriving month after month. More people than any of us had ever seen in one place. At its peak, Hastings Park was housing and feeding more than three thousand, most of us in animal stalls.

The stall we lived in reeked of horse and cow, of sheep and goat, of lime and urine and mould and dirt. Clumps of manure stuck to our feet when we walked through the building. What we saw from the doorway was a high metal gate, with barbed wire encircling the park. There was no sign of Father. The only men in sight were either RCMP or guards stationed at the gate. Beyond the guards, I could hear streetcars rumbling by outside the park. I had never heard such a sound before, and I was fascinated by the rattle and clang of bells as sparks scattered and sizzled in the wires overhead.

In the bathroom there were ten open showers, no divisions between. A series of taps dripped above a long metal shelf and I remember a row of children’s bums while we were all being washed at the same time. Hiroshi and Keiko and I stood giggling on three wobbling boards while we were soaped and rinsed, and while water ran between the boards into a drain in the floor. The toilets along one side of the room were sheet-metal troughs. There were no seats, no partitions, no privacy. Not at the beginning, not when we arrived. Only when some of the women dared to protest, only then were toilet seats brought in and flimsy partitions erected.

Our mother and all of the other mothers began to scrub. Mother’s hair was damp; she was on her hands and knees and she pushed back the curls on her forehead. Day and night, water flowed past the edge of our stall through a long, connected trough that angled in and around the aisles of concrete. If someone was rinsing clothing farther up the aisle, soap bubbles floated past our stall. Whenever bubbles stuck to the cement sides of the trough, I reached over and popped them with my finger. Makeshift clotheslines were strung everywhere, and I remember running with other children under hanging clothes. We ran in and around sheets, blankets, long underwear and damp towels until our mothers came to collect us and restored order. There was little for children to do, but there was always washing going on, even in the night. Our own mother scrubbed our clothes after everyone else was in bed. When she undressed or changed, she climbed up onto her bunk behind army blankets or had Keiko hold two pieces of towel together in front of her, for privacy.

But it was the maggots that disgusted her the most. I knew they were there; I could see them swarming. And they stayed in memory because Mother talked about them for years. First, she asked for disinfectant and was given some. But even after more scrubbing, the maggots stayed on—in the pallets where we slept and in manure under the boards of the shower room. Once a week, because of damp and mould, we had to drag our straw ticks outside the building so that stuffing could be removed and new straw put in. But the maggots stayed on.

Mother wrapped us in coats to keep us warm and she draped an extra sheet to thicken the partition around our cramped living space. Other families, strangers, lived all around us. It was never quiet at night and we had to listen to the high-pitched, rhythmic sobbing of a woman whose stall was two aisles away from ours. She cried every night. And every morning she woke up with puffed and swollen eyes.

Three times a day, we were led to the poultry building, a large, high-ceilinged area filled with rows of tables made from planks placed end to end over trestles. We ate in that lime-and-poultry smell while an RCMP officer stood on top of one of the long tables and guarded us. I have always wondered who imagined that we were ripe for sabotage, a poultry room filled with women standing in line collecting bowls of food for their children. At the time, I was terrified of that long-legged, uniformed policeman high above us, a man who watched as I chewed porridge that was served in one lump in the morning, as I chewed macaroni for lunch, and chunks of tough stewing beef or fish poached in a tasteless white sauce for dinner. Everything was covered in white sauce. At night, some sort of fast-cooked rice was served, the likes of which no mother we knew had ever prepared.

Because Mother had to spend so much time standing in line to collect food for the three of us, there was often nothing left when she went back for her own meal. She wasn’t the only woman who went hungry. It took numerous meetings and letters explaining conditions before the problem was resolved, and before slightly more palatable food in larger amounts was brought in.

Any news to be had was exchanged and passed on by the women in the dining room. We had not heard from Father since we’d been separated on arrival at Hastings Park, and Mother told Keiko in a flat, worried voice that he might have been taken away to a work camp. One of the rumours was that husbands, fathers, uncles and older brothers had been sent to camps as far away as Ontario and were required to wear circular targets on their backs so that they would be easy to shoot if they tried to escape. Other men were assigned to work crews and were said to be building roads near the Alberta border or in the northern part of our own province of British Columbia. And just as we thought we would never see any of the men again, Mother’s younger brother, Aki, turned up.

Uncle Aki had been living and working as a fisherman on Bainbridge Island in Washington for several years. Only months before we were rounded up, he had moved to Steveston on the B.C. mainland. Now, he managed to get a message to us saying that he was close by and had been put to work as a cook in the kitchen, adjacent to the poultry building. His wife, our auntie Aya, had arrived that day, the message said, and she was in the same livestock building where we were living. Uncle Aki wanted Mother to look out for her, and Mother set out immediately, going up and down the rows of stalls to see if someone new had arrived. We did not know Auntie Aya very well because Uncle Aki had married when he was living in Washington. Whenever he had visited, he’d arrived on his fishing boat. After he’d moved to Steveston, he brought Auntie Aya to Vancouver Island to meet us, but only once. So far, they had no children.

Uncle Aki also told Mother in his message that he’d learned that Father was still in Vancouver, but was being held in a special detention centre in the city. That was why we hadn’t heard from him. Every day, men were being sent away, it was true, but so far Father had not been among them. Father’s brother, Uncle Kenji, had been taken to a road camp; that much had been found out. Father was doing what he could to keep our family together, and he was trying to obtain information about moving us to a self-supporting camp. To do this, he had to prove that money would be coming to him from an insurance policy and from the auctioning of his boat.

And then, one day, when rains were pounding the rooftops and while I was staring out at the barbed-wire fence, Uncle Aki came to the doorway and stuck his head inside. When he saw Mother, he called us over. He was not wearing a cook’s apron and hat, but a dark suit and a long grey coat and fedora. At first, I wasn’t certain who this was. He looked like an imposter who might have slipped into Uncle Aki’s good clothes. But he really was our uncle. He had baked during his spare time between meals, and the guards on duty allowed him to bring a tin container filled with raisin cookies, as well as a parcel for Auntie Aya, who ran to the doorway to greet him.

Auntie Aya was shorter than Mother, and had deep-set eyes and much thinner cheeks. Auntie Aya looked more like our older sister than our aunt. Mother came to the entrance and hugged her brother, and Hiroshi and Keiko and I came running over. Uncle Aki handed us the cookies and told us we were to share with other children in nearby stalls.