Letters to Memory

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  It took me many years from that first meeting to get to know your traveling body and its traveling memories. You were born in Bombay, raised in Karachi, educated in Beirut, Durham, and Berkeley, and adopted by a second family in Oaxaca. And by complicated routes that I have no doubt confused, your great-great-grandmother was Chinese from Shanghai, your great-grandfather born in China, and your mother in Yokohama. You speak Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, English, Spanish, and read Sanskrit and Greek. One day you explained how, in the seventh century CE, the Persian Sassanid Empire was replaced by the Arab, and thus the Zoroastrian by the Islamic, which heralded the exodus and diaspora of your people. Pondering this starting place, I asked if your folks ever thought of returning to claim Iran as a homeland. Your response was angry and adamant: Absolutely not! I was taken aback by the fierceness in your voice. It was only later that I understood, not that I had asked a stupid question, but that the idea of a national home is antithetical to everything you believe. You would teach me that there are dreams and memories that make human creation possible, but to dream the memory of home might be the most dangerous. It is, you have insisted, not always where you were born that makes you who you are.

  Toward the end of February 1945, John Yamashita stepped off a train at the Oakland depot, returning home after three years’ absence. Meanwhile Alma Gloeckler had been teaching in the Oakland public schools and had spent the previous summer at Tule Lake Segregation Center. She was at Tule Lake in Christmas 1944, when the closing of camps was announced. As John’s train approached, Alma, a lone stranger, showed up to meet him at the depot. She wrote:

  I can still see John, standing at the Oakland train depot with a small luggage, as I got out of my little black depression Chevy. He was serious. We greeted one another formally and introduced ourselves . . . I told him that Josephine Duveneck of AFSC had informed me of his arrival. John was just a little less serious, and seemed reassured. “Why are you doing this?” he asked right away. That remained a short question and a long time to answering.

  Alma accompanied John to the West Tenth Japanese Methodist Church to begin the work of reopening its doors as a hostel to receive returning Japanese Americans and to distribute the stored belongings—furniture, mattresses, stoves, refrigerators, sewing machines—left behind by some 135 families. Alma gave John that black depression Chevy to pick up returnees and supplies, and daily she and a cohort of what she called settled people came to scrub, clean, and paint the church’s Meader Hall. Old cots used in camp were redeployed, blankets gathered, and Alma’s friend Bernice Cofer organized Lakeshore Avenue Baptist church members to stand in ration lines at Capwell’s to buy sheets and pillowcases, two to a customer. Margaret Utsumi and John’s old Berkeley schoolmate Ish Isokawa returned as those eventually settled people—Margaret to set up the kitchen and dining service and Ish to work long hours at John’s side, shipping trunks and crated boxes of belongings to those who’d never return. Many years later, John would write to Ish: You know I’ve never really thanked you for that year back in ’45 when you ran the Hostel and emptied out West Tenth Gym . . . John got a small stipend from the Methodist Youth Fellowship, but Ish and Margaret worked those years without pay. In the next year and a half, three thousand people would pass through the church into relocated and recuperated lives. In this busy churning of folks there was little time to thank anyone, but perhaps also little will to show gratitude. Mean years had turned people mean; that is also to say terse, speechless, socially closed and, as you can imagine, afraid and mistrusting.

  Alma’s memories emphasized John’s careful protection of the hostel’s feeling climate, protective of the feelings of the returnees as much as of those who offered succor to them. John wanted something back, an emotional generosity that fulfilled his beliefs. He cultivated, Alma described, a heightened awareness that met every person and every contingency. While Alma understood that hostilities had to be thawed out, she was impatient with public ignorance and continuing negative attitudes toward the returning Japanese and said so. She remembered John’s reaction: John listened thoughtfully, head down, and then said softly . . . “Don’t make any enemies for yourself, on account of us.”

  Perhaps John was already aware of the disturbed feelings of Lee Mullis who had, with his father Fred, watched over and protected Meader Hall and its contents during the war years. This must have meant constant vigilance against certain vandalism, checking it at night, repairing and boarding up broken windows. It must have also meant incurring the wrath and abuse of neighbors, losing friends, becoming over time isolated and worn with responsibility. Lee Mullis, the only Caucasian member of a Japanese church, had said good-bye to friends and their fellowship, and for that, had taken on an almost impossible promise, the burden of obligation. Miraculously, he kept his promise while so many encumbered others had not, abandoning or selling what was not theirs. When the war ended and relief seemed in sight, Lee opened the church and hoped to welcome home his friends. Who he welcomed home were an unsettled and broken people, refugees in their own country, returned to lives forever changed, psychically contained by a thin veneer of politeness that for many years would hide deep fear, suspicion, and pained resentment. If no one thanked Ish for the next thirty years, indeed, no one thought of thanking Lee and his father. Old friends never returned, never sent word, or sent for their stuff with a few lines in a telegram. Other friends returned, stayed provisionally at the hostel, and silently left.

  In John’s Pastor’s Record of Funerals, the first recorded funeral at Oakland West Tenth was that of Fred Thomas Mullis on January 12, 1946. The Oakland Tribune’s obituary section read

  Death: Mullis—in Clear Lake woodlands, January 7, 1946. Fred Thomas Mullis, husband of the late Fannie K. Mullis, father of Loren Lee Mullis, Mrs. B. W. Payne, and the late Mrs. E. H. Hawkins. A native of Kansas, aged 70 years, 2 months, 21 days. Friends are invited to attend the services at the Japanese M. E. Church. 10th and West Street, Oakland, Saturday, January 12, 1946 at 2 o’clock p.m.

  John presided over the funeral and burial, but who among the original congregation at West Tenth joined Lee Mullis in mourning his father? A sad absence surrounds this event, the details of which have been entirely lost. Some time after his father’s death, Lee also left Oakland without word, headed to New York, never to be thanked and never to be heard from again.

  In another two years, Alma, too, would leave for New York to pursue a graduate degree in education at Columbia. I’m not sure that Alma and John ever met again. It was many years later that I finally met Alma Gloeckler. At the age of one hundred, she remarked with amused disdain that age is not a disease, although dementia is, and Alma to the very end had almost every marble in place. Her hair coiled up in an elegant French braid, Alma looked at me with bright curious eyes, and I knew she searched for and saw her old friend John, that he somehow appeared between us and lived in our moments together, her remembering and storytelling. John saved three letters from Alma that he himself dated around 1946; reading them, after reading all his seminary papers written during the war, finally I sensed what had been absent in his seminary work: a kindred spiritual and intellectual partnership. The letters wander, but with thoughtfulness and spiritual inquisition, a sense of pleasure in thinking a thought through without recrimination, but with expectation and surprise. Though John’s corresponding letters are lost, this insight remains. For John, 1945 to 1947 were years of intense physical and emotional work, the practical labor of rebuilding a postwar community, but it was also a period of intense personal, political, and philosophical questioning. Alma’s correspondence makes it clear that the labor of the period—practical and philosophical—would be the underpinning of John and Alma’s understanding about civil society and civil rights.

  The questions implied in the letters are philosophically enormous and uncontainable. They boggle and pain the mind. Why and how should one choose a spiritual path? What is the church? How does one cultivate a conscience? How do we know we know? Is belief logic
al? What is prayer? What is confession? What about the simplicity of a life lived daily without question? What is suffering? Sacrifice? Giving? What is education? Creativity? What are the laws of nature, and what is human freedom? What is the meaning and danger of giving and receiving? What is love? Alma and John together began with the assumption of a spiritual center and caring social conduct, Alma influenced by her Canadian Mennonite family and cultivated through Quaker membership, and John, being the son of Japanese immigrants and a student of Rollo May, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Howard Thurman.

  Among these heady inquiries, I am drawn to Alma’s conscientious struggle with her fluctuating position as giver and receiver, her understanding of the uneven power and privilege of the giver. She wrote

  It seems that if we are going to deal affectively with one another, helpfully and with understanding and strength—we need to know something more about just what that relationship between giver and receiver can be at best. Love itself is a wonderful enlightener because it adds patience and kindliness—hope and faith to a relationship, but it too needs all the enlightenment it can get in a complicated conflicting social order. So back I am at the question of self—to lose it and yet to find it—more viably. I do think that we must realize that at best it involves repeated failures even in the realm of giving—suffering and a feeling of futility at times . . .

  John asked Alma: Why are you doing this? It was not, as Alma knew, a simple question. Perhaps it was a forewarning. Homer would say that the nature of true charity is much like taxes, an understanding that this is how a civil society is paid for. Charity must be its own reward. But what about love? Perhaps Lee Mullis held forth with the expectation of love and family, but he got stuck at home with all the old stuff that, finally preserved and saved, did not really matter. How could he know? It’s difficult to think clearly ahead about why you might do anything—why take on love, why risk heartbreak? The only other thing I’ve been able to learn about Lee Mullis is that he died at the age of eighty-two in Glen Cove, Nassau, on Long Island, in 1987. Forty years lived after the war, although the resilience of bitterness is unpredictable; hopefully, as John and Alma would have wished, love intervened.

  Vyasa, you have said that truth is not the fact of history or a story’s memory but its accountability. What then are these letters? Being written on a certain day and near or at the time of the events, are they less unstable and closer to being true? Or are events, written about in contemplation after they have occurred, more true? There are John and Alma’s letters written in their mid-thirties, and then there are those written in old age in precarious handwriting, the mind grasping for clarity, privileging simplicity. Here I am plunged close to the hearts of my folks, the raw stuff, and yet despite the immediacy, so much has gone unexpressed, flowing away under that bridge. Now we meet at this temporal distance, and all is speculation. There are letters without corresponding replies. There are gaps between paragraphs and sentences. Someone left writing to brew a cup of coffee, to answer the phone, to leave that thought for another day. There is thinking without continuity, history without continuity, but if continuity could be reconstructed, what would be recuperated? Pressed against the evidence of real penned letters, I am wary of my propensity for dishonesty or, as you say more kindly, fictionalizing. And I have become weary of continuity’s plodding plot. I long for a bounding, energetic leap to knowledge, as if wisdom should appear with age. I, too, grasp for clarity and simplicity, the simple truth. You shake your head.

  On December 4, 1946, John wrote to sister Kay that he’d taken his brother Tom’s gift of two Big Game Cal/Stanford tickets for a foursome with Ish and Osa Isokawa, and Asako Sakai.

  The game was very bad, but date was rather nice. She seems to know you pretty well—Very neat unobtrusive person—congenial—and of course college girl. Have seen also 2 plays with the Party—“Glass Menagerie” and “State of the Union”—popular productions so I caught up on the theatre and I’m not sure how much more. I’d be interested in your reactions.

  This note was followed a week later by a second letter to Kay, a long, rambling, four-page, single-spaced typewritten letter, pontificating on the nature of love. While Kay kept carbon copies of every letter she wrote to the family during the camp years, much of her letter writing in the postwar has disappeared. The lost letter Kay wrote to John, encouraging his long response, likely related her college relationship to Asako at Cal Berkeley and her opinion about John’s romantic interest. Kay’s letters must have also voiced her discouragement with her own prospects of marriage, and, upon the closing of the wartime services of nisei student relocation, a sense of loss of purpose or relevance in her life’s work, along with the hardship in finding and relocating to a new job.

  From that distance, John’s letters to Kay are a funny mixture of brother, counselor, and confessor, giving counsel based on the confessions of his own experience. And this is further complicated by his romantic, philosophical, and religious thinking, by which he justified his living practice and still thought to give encouragement to Kay.

  Since writing you I have been very sure of my mind . . . I am quite impulsive and hardly rational when it comes to my likes . . . I hold to this because I believe one’s prejudices should be basically emotional . . . I don’t care for understanding that is not immediate and uncalculated . . . This which is termed FAITH enters largely into my picture, and I have a notion it is the dimension which should enter more widely into every and all adventures of matrimonial designs . . . Well, the short of all of this—is, I like the gal a lot . . .

  John further confessed his difficulty in having a romantic interest while also running a church.

  . . . I sure have had to devise ways and means to develop my private interest. Boy, never get into a spot like I am (that is, having a Church, supposed degree, and being a Protestant most normally should be married to do the best work). You can’t pursue your personal interest without being tabbed as a flighty playboy; and just how can you be charming without being free . . .

  But then John returned to his general pontification on love, eros woven with agape, or as you’d point out from Sanskrit, kama with sneha, reading like a run-on rendition of Khalil Gibran speaking Corinthians.

  I do not think you have the right apprehension of that which is Love or that which should be Love. True love never regrets, it’s given without a price, it doesn’t think in terms of returns, it doesn’t expect to be understood, it tries to understand; true love is extravagant, it overflows and if unreciprocated it only seeks the fulfillment not of one’s own desire but of the one it concerns. Thus, it respects the other’s choice, the other’s lack of choice, the other’s humor or lack of humor, the other’s lack of industry or ardor—whatever it is—it respects. When people mourn—or they have too many regrets—I take it that their love was closer to infatuation—to self-love and geared to the ego, because it is the tearing of the ego which they feel the pain of—and they do not feel thankful for the pain of knowing love.

  John wanted Kay to lose herself to the plunge, but he probably also wanted Asako to do the same.

  I say this . . . love freely, love extravagantly, love unreservedly but give your whole heart and being everything—or it isn’t worth giving—and you insult the receiver . . . to love without being loved, to love without concern of return, to love because it’s good to love—that’s worth more—infinitely more. I say to a woman if you want to be worth your weight in gold—love first and love in the faith that it is love which will resolve all shortcomings, prejudices, and circumstances whether in the lover or the loved and this will lead to growing adventures. It is this sort of love which spurs a man to believe that he can remove mountains, that makes him change, that makes him understand there is something else worth building for.

  Okay, Dad. The story that we heard again and again was that some time after the Big Game and maybe two more theater dates later, John proposed to Asako, and for the next twelve months, Asako kept John’s ring without makin
g a decision. So the letters between John and Kay continue on for months with comments such as, one can never know how a woman’s mind really works—I shall not try to identify its reasons any more, or more urgently,

  I need good advice now not later. The gal took ill with flu and I won’t see her for a couple of weeks. There seems to be a great mental or spiritual conflict—and I’ve decided to back away—because I sure wouldn’t want anything on the basis of being just a good guy—My paths are going to be too rough for any uncertain compromises or sentiments. One can never trade a soul for a bit of pottage.

  Sprinkled into John’s letters were the haiku of Rabindranath Tagore, but by May of 1947 he was quoting George Bernard Shaw and Plato, while still preaching about great philosophical and idealistic, yet down-to-earth, love. Plus, he had a series of recommendations of bachelor men for Kay to meet, and in the background of the letters was the constant reference to “B,” Kay’s ex from college who never seemed to disappear. Poor Kay, with her literally fluttering heart and graying hair. As the years passed, John referred to Kay as his spinster sister, as if he’d escaped becoming a spinster brother, but Asako remembered: Kay and I ate lunch together at Cal every day, and all she ever talked about was Bobby. Bobby this and Bobby that. She held a torch for him. As for John’s pursuit of a chain and a ball, by June, the entire project seems to have gone sour.

  Yesterday I finally pressed the point why she did not wear my ring and she wouldn’t explain again (over 3 months) and wanted to call everything off. I decided that was for the best for she can’t see her way clear—she is closemouthed and finally told me without reasonable information that it was impossible . . . I have no regrets—I gain wisdom . . .