Frances Itani - Requiem

When Ba was finished, she patted the pocket of her dress and pulled out a letter and showed it to Mother and Keiko. It was from an internment camp in California. The name of the place sounded peculiar and magical on her tongue: Manzanar, Manzanar . Ba’s daughter, Sachi, and her husband, Tom, had been moved to this camp, which Sachi wrote about. She said it was a large and lonely place, with barbed wire around the edges and guards with guns in towers to keep watch over the inmates inside. Thousands of Japanese Americans had been taken there from the coastal regions, and thousands more were to come. Sachi and Tom were sharing a small apartment in a barracks building with another young couple. The two couples were not entitled to more space because, as yet, they had no children. They ate their meals in a mess hall. The camp was surrounded by desert, and there were mountains in the distance.

Mother and Ba sat together in our kitchen and drank green tea and went over and over the letter, discussing every detail of the place that Sachi described as Manzanar. There were a few censored lines in the letter, but Ba now had an address to write to, and she was going to answer the letter this very day.

Ba returned to our place every day for a week to apply egg white to my forehead and to change my dressing. Each time she came, she made sure Father was there so that she could give him a tongue-lashing because he had injured his child. Father did not argue with an elder; he looked away and waited for her to finish. The rest of us had never heard Father spoken to in such a way, and I was secretly glad to hear Ba scold him. I was happy to have the attention of Mother and Ba while they patted the dressing to my wound. But what I remembered most from that time was Father being punished for his bad temper.

For a week of sunny days, I sat outside on my stool with my head tipped back, egg white running down my forehead. In time, the wound healed and everyone, including me, continued to believe the story that I had called my father an arsehole. The scar, of course, remained.

Two weeks before the new school opened for classes, a Chinese grocer drove his truck across the bridge from town and arrived, unannounced, on our side of the river. The slanted boards on the side of the truck shook and rattled as he turned off the dirt road and entered the lumpy, muddy grounds. Because it had been raining early in the day, he had thrown a canvas overtop of the boards to make a temporary roof to keep his supplies dry. People came out of their shacks and crowded around. The man told us his name was Ying. That was his last name, but everyone called him Ying, he said. He lowered the back of his pickup and showed what he had for sale. He told us he had a new store at the end of town near the bridge, and he promised to drive to the camp every Monday so that people could put in their orders. On Wednesdays, he would return with the deliveries.

In the back of the truck and on display were ginger root and Chinese cabbage, yeast and green tea. He even had shoyu , our kind of soy sauce, along with rice and flour, sugar, buckets of lard, oatmeal, baking powder, sesame seeds, crackers and eggs. He had a few oranges, and he had nails, cast-iron skillets, brooms, pails and chicken wire. People began to buy, and the items in his truck were soon gone. When Ying drove away, the noise left behind sounded as if the muffler on his truck had fallen apart.

The following Monday, he returned, as promised. The women came outside and placed their orders. Ying put on small, round glasses and recorded every order in his notebook. There was an air of gaiety about the occasion.

“One pound chimpo sausage,” a woman piped up from the crowd around the truck. “Don’t forget to add chimpo sausage to my order when you come back. A big one, too.”

The other women began to laugh.

“ Chimpo sausage, Ying,” they called out. “ Chimpo sausage! Don’t forget!”

Ying laughed, too, and Hiroshi and I looked at each other and grinned. We could tell from Ying’s expression that he didn’t know chimpo was a slang word for penis . I smiled to myself and backed away. After Ying left, Hiroshi said, “ Chimpo . He doesn’t even know what it means.”

Every Monday, when Ying drove his truck to collect the orders, the women continued to make a joke of chimpo sausage. When Ying found out what it meant, he carried on with the joke. I guess he was enjoying it, too.

One afternoon, Ji came to our shack and began to build a wooden sink for our kitchen. He also built a shelf beside it to hold the small bucket of water that we kept just inside the door. Mother often helped Ba and Ji. She sent baked treats to their place; she helped Ba to hang her wash outside; sometimes she helped them in their garden plot. She knew that Ji was trying to help her in some way, too. He built the sink from cedar and made it with smooth and beautiful joints. Mother rubbed her hands over the surface and bowed slightly to Ji to thank him. She couldn’t wait to try out the sink, and they each poured a glass of water through the drain, but not before setting a pail underneath to catch the same water again. They laughed as if they had shared a great joke, and then poured the captured water back into the bucket.

After the sink was in place, Ji became more ambitious, and suggested that he and Father build a bathhouse to be shared by our two families. The bathhouse, raised in an enclosed wooden shelter, became a separate structure between Ji’s shack and ours, with short paths leading to it from both homes. The wood that lined the bath was as smooth and beautiful as the wood in the sink. The bath had a galvanized metal floor and a wooden platform across the bottom to keep us from being burned. Ji had designed it so that a wood fire could be kept going in a chamber beneath the tub.

Now that we had our own private bathhouse, we were able to have a real bath every night, an improvement over standing or sitting scrunched up in the galvanized tub. After Hiroshi and Keiko and I scrubbed with soap and rinsed and climbed in for a hot soak, it was our parents’ turn. Even during the winter months, we soaked every night in our newly built tub.

Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya wanted a bathhouse, too, and Ji showed Uncle Aki how to build one. There were many such projects going on in the camp, along with logging and chopping and sawing wood for the coming winter. Like hauling water, wood gathering was a never-ending job, because no one could survive winter without a large supply.

But we had survived so far. We would never have running water; we would never have electricity or refrigeration. But produce from our garden fed us, and Mother pickled and preserved beans and cucumbers and tomatoes for the cold months. Our root cellar, dug out of the earth, was stuffed with carrots and cabbage and squash. Many families had begun to raise chickens, and the men caught fish in the Fraser and shared it out. Every two days, Mother and Keiko and Auntie Aya made bread together. Auntie Aya, who had stayed inside so much when we’d first arrived in the camp, was expecting a baby the following summer. Uncle Aki ordered wool from the Eaton’s catalogue, and Auntie Aya began to knit and sew. She wanted a baby boy. She wanted their first child to be a son.

All the while, Father was reading about the war whenever he managed to get a newspaper in his hands. He was never in a good mood after reading about bombings and invasions and the sinking of ships. The more he read, the more he scowled and said that we would be in the camp for a long time. At the dinner table, he railed on about the war and snapped at us if we weren’t paying attention. Mother did not comment. She did not argue with Father; nor did she stick up for us when he was in a bad mood.