Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“So are you going to do it or what?” she asks Joan.

“I said forget about it. And not just because it is a stupid idea or because I am offended, though it is and I am. But because bright ideas like this should have come like a month ago already, while we’re still on Ninetieth Street. But they just don’t think these things through, do they?”

“Well, Mel’s is the total case in point.”

“How horrible that must have been. Well, see. It happened how? Someone got a bright idea all of the sudden. There’s a time to improvise, when you can just go off, and other time when you stick to your script.”

“There was no script,” says Tania. “That was the problem.”

“I have my own script. The pigs come out here, get us surrounded, I go out the door with my arms up in the air. That’s my script. Take me, I’m all yours. What’s jail next to a million years in a hole in the ground? I can get along in prison. I can get along in any place.”

Joan Shimada was from anyplace. She was sansei; her parents had been born in the United States, but did that mean dick all as the Christmas season approached California in 1941? No, by then all eyes were on the coastal skies, looking out for treacherous, crafty, devious, scheming, wily, perfidious Japs in their “Zekes,” “Kates,” and “Bettys,” zooming in for another cowardly sneak attack. None seemed to show up, so by and by Californians had to look closer to home, finding what they sought in the merchants and tradesmen of Japanese descent who’d settled in the state, sometimes several generations previously. FBI men came into the shops and groceries, going through vegetable bins and slitting open sealed cartons, tossing the back offices, looking for transmitters and secret communiques from the Land of the Rising Sun.

President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 had the putative purpose of directing the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” In practice, this was understood to mean excluding people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Usefully, Governor Chase Clark of Idaho suggested before a congressional committee at around this time that Japanese would be welcome in his state if they were confined to guarded concentration camps, thereby helping solve the problem of what, exactly, to do with all those “excluded.”

Thus in March the first of those so excluded began to arrive at “relocation centers,” such as the one at Manzanar, where Joan’s mother and father found themselves one morning after a long and uncomfortable bus ride. Dust flew at them, waves of sandy grit that stung the eyes and coated the baggage that had been dumped from the trucks that had been loaded with belongings of the evacuees (as they were called) at the embarkation points. Joan’s parents were assigned with two other childless couples to share a 320-square-foot compartment in a large barracks. So the first thing to do was to further partition this small space, hanging blankets and improvising with flattened cardboard boxes and the scrap wood remaining from the camp’s construction. Even so, as Joan’s mother later made clear despite her permeative reserve, it had been something of a surprise that they found the opportunity to conceive her.

Born a prisoner. Such was the weight she and her parents were required to pull, for the USA. The loyalty questionnaire asked:

27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

The answers were yes, yes. They had always been yes, yes. Joan’s father had tried to join the army after Pearl Harbor and been rejected. The Japanese emperor was typical royalty, the sort of mute and bloodless enigma both set above and emblematic of his nation that either fascinates or bores the hell out of Americans. Japan itself was a sentimental memory, at best an occasional dreamy riposte to the piston force of American life, which was the only kind of life either of Joan’s parents had any familiarity with. But there they were, in suspense, yoked to this old strange multitude across the ocean. Meanwhile Joan began to grow into the memories her parents tucked away and treasured for her. Inoculated in infancy against the sorts of diseases that flourished in overcrowded conditions, she developed a terrible case of the “Manzanar Runs,” nearly perishing from dehydration. That was one of the indistinct memories she was advised to hang on to: She had nearly died; nearly died living in an American concentration camp . It was the sort of unimpeachable, irreducible, immutable fact that some would turn into a lifetime free pass. But to Joan it didn’t represent some perversion of normal life; it actually was her normal life. “Nearly” died; close, but no cigar. In other words, keep on moving. She had faint memories of her own: the Sierras peaking in the distance, the total lack of privacy, the toilets in the latrine lined up in a row of six back-to-back pairs, the carefully raked rock gardens ornamented by stones the men carried in from the desert, the absurd noise of the mess halls, the carnival-like events regularly held in the firebreak set between the rows of barracks. The soothing regularity of camp life. She was very young indeed.

The camp closed, but there was no returning to the other California. The two Americans packed up their American daughter and went to Japan. Her father got a job working as a translator for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, and the family settled on Eta Jima, off the coast of Hiroshima, former home of the Imperial Naval Academy. Here cadets had meditated upon the Five Reflections each evening:

1. Hast thou not gone against sincerity?

2. Hast thou not felt ashamed of thy words and deeds?

3. Hast thou not lacked vigor?

4. Hast thou exerted all possible efforts?

5. Hast thou not become slothful?

As a matter of policy, the BCOF encouraged the wives and families of servicemen to settle in Japan. Special schools and shops as well as separate housing were constructed for the occupiers. To sort of suggest that the feeling was mutual, Joan’s parents avoided occupation personnel outside work. Joan’s father took a dim view of the BCOF’s stated aim to enable the Japanese “to witness at first hand Western family life.” Most of the units were Australian, and he did not like the Australians: the condescension of the officers, the yahoo bigotry of the rank and file. The cloddish Perth housewives in their housedresses trying to turn everything into a knotted back alley they could holler across, snapping their fingers at him and yelling in his face. To them all he spoke in the clearest English, chiming with the open tones of the native Californian, and got back a guttural mess, totally untransformed by tongue, teeth, or palate in its journey from the throat. They would demonstrate to him “the democratic way of life”?

After BCOF headquarters was moved from Eta Jima to Kure, Joan’s father endured a brutal commute, taking a bus, a ferry, and another bus to get to work. This itself made him irritable, even as the work became less congenial; mostly he had been translating documents, but now that he found himself working often with the military police in Kure he regularly was called upon to interpret in the type of face-to-face situation that he found, in a word, embarrassing. Their pet Jap, pulling usable English sentences into shape for the Australians. What a job. One night the MPs picked up a man, a civilian, for possession of stolen goods. He’d been arrested near one of the many “roads, wharves, railway yards, local markets, villages, stores, or camp perimeters” that had been declared off-limits to civilians and servicemen alike. Your mere presence there got you a mandatory escort back to headquarters for a little chat. Fraternization was strictly out-of-bounds for servicemen, and the locals had to be watched to keep the booming black market under control. This guy was carrying sixty pounds of sugar in a pair of old Samsonite Streamlite suitcases.