by Traci Chee
Below, people are milling about like ants. All those people who’re gonna be gone.
There’s my girl, Yum-yum, and her friend Hiromi, who’s wearing a blond wig, on their way to school. There’s Mr. Tanaka, who works at the YMCA—he’s trailing a cloud of smoke because he wants to get in one last cigarette before he clocks in. There’s Jim Kitano and his brother, Shuji, those bullies who used to pick on Minnow in elementary school. There’s Tommy Harano—you can recognize Tommy anywhere, he’s so short. The kids used to call him ebi—you know, like “shrimp”—but that was before me and Mas adopted him into our group. No one’s called him that in years because they all know they’d have to answer to us.
“Hey, Tommy!” Twitchy jumps up, waving his arms like he’s bringing a plane in to land. “Tommy!”
Tommy looks around, but so do Yum-yum and Hiromi and Mr. Tanaka and the Kitano brothers. Yum-yum frowns up at us, and I blow her a kiss before I pull Twitchy back down. “You wanna get us caught?”
“Nah, but Tommy—”
“You got anything to throw?” I turn out my pockets. I’m carrying: the homework I won’t be turning in, my student ID, thirty-eight cents, a candy-bar wrapper, and the key to our apartment, which won’t be our apartment soon, I guess.
Together, we peer over the edge of the roof. Below, Tommy’s already crossing the street.
Twitchy wads up some of my homework and hurls it at Tommy’s back. It falls short by a yard.
Quickly, I take the first page of an English essay and fold it in half lengthwise. The paper’s crisp. The creases are clean.
“Hurry up, Shig.” Twitchy jiggles my shoulder. “He’s getting away!”
“Quit shaking me!” I make a couple diagonal folds and bend the flaps into the shapes of wings.
Then, standing, I let it fly.
The paper airplane soars out over the street, turning and wheeling almost like it’s alive. It strikes Tommy in the neck before he’s even made it to the other side of the road.
“Direct hit!” Twitchy laughs.
Tommy turns again, rubbing the back of his neck, and this time he sees us beckoning him up to the rooftop. His big eyes widen, and he beams up at us, waving, as he runs back toward the Toyo Hotel fire escape.
“What’re you doing up here?” he asks as he scrambles onto the roof. “Aren’t you going to school?”
Twitchy and I glance at each other. Tommy always takes things harder than the rest of us. How do we break the news that he’s getting kicked out of the only place he’s ever lived?
We sit him down between us and tell him about the exclusion order. “Your family’s in the first group,” I say as gently as I can, because right now, Tommy looks like someone’s kicked him in the teeth.
“At least this way, you don’t have to go to school either,” Twitchy adds.
Tommy just stares down at the rooftop between his sneakers.
Gently, I crumple the second page of my essay and press it into his hands. “Here,” I say, pointing at Bob Tomioka, who’s standing on the street corner in those oxford shoes he keeps shined up like mirrors. “Bet you can’t hit Bob over there.”
Tommy’s hand closes around the ball of paper, and he gives me a weak smile. “How much?”
The rest of the morning, we throw things at passersby, laughing when they spin around, trying to find us.
Goodbye, student ID. It’s not like I’m gonna need you anyway.
Goodbye, last three pages of my English essay.
Goodbye, candy-bar wrapper.
Goodbye, biology notes I was supposed to study.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
* * *
That night, Mas tells me and Minnow to start making lists. The evacuees can take only two suitcases each, he says, so we’ve got to be smart about what to bring when it’s our turn to go.
“Smart?” I laugh. “Have you met me? ‘Smart’ isn’t in my vocabulary.”
He fixes me with one of those stares, you know, the ones where he tries to act like our dad instead of our older brother. “You’d better study up, then,” he says.
So here goes, I guess.
THINGS TO BRING WHEN IT’S OUR TURN TO LEAVE
money
clothes
more money
Over the weekend, signs pop up all around the neighborhood. EVACUATION SALE. FURNITURE SALE. CLOSING OUT SALE. BIG SALE. PRICES SMASHED. Some are printed, but most are handwritten in squashed block letters.
Me, Mas, Minnow, Twitchy, and Frankie get together to help out the guys who have to leave. At Stan Katsumoto’s family grocery, we sort through the shelves, marking down prices on rice and kombu and tea. When Mas isn’t paying attention, I tag him with a 50% OFF sticker, and Twitchy adds a 5¢ tag to the seat of his pants. One of the other fellas snickers. Mary, Stan’s younger sister, glowers at us. Me and Twitchy smother our laughter and stick Mas with six more tags before Mrs. Katsumoto looks up from the counter and goes, “Aiya, what are you doing? Masaru’s a handsome boy—we can get at least a dollar for him!”
I wish I could tell you what Mas’s face looks like, but me and Twitchy are already out the door, running down the block as Mas roars after us.
When we break for lunch, Mrs. Katsumoto posts a note on the door beneath the words, I AM AN AMERICAN. It’s a message to their customers, thanking them for twenty years of patronage.
Stan stares at it for a second, then cocks his eyebrow. “You sure about this, Ma? We don’t want them to get the wrong idea about us.”
“What wrong idea?” Mrs. Katsumoto asks.
“That we’re decent people or something.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Decent people don’t kick out other decent people, so if we’re decent, they can’t be decent.” He fans out his hands. “You’re going to cause an existential crisis, Ma! If white people aren’t decent, are they anything?”
She sighs and presses down a bit of tape with her thumbnail. “It’s the right thing to do,” she says, “for us.”
For us? The buzzing returns, sharp and metallic. You thank other people to make them feel good, and good is the last thing anyone should feel about what’s happening to us.
Mr. Katsumoto says nothing. He lowers his head over the counter, silently marking down packages of umeboshi.
After lunch, we go to help Tommy’s family lay out their belongings on the sidewalk: dishes they brought from Japan when they immigrated, kitchen appliances, extra towels, desks, Tommy’s record player and all his beloved records, their washing machine, lamps, rugs, books.
The bargain hunters descend before we’ve even got half the Haranos’ things out of the apartment. They come with pinched faces and tight fists, offering ten cents to every dollar’s worth of stuff.
For a while, we try to entertain Tommy’s three younger sisters. We let Aiko, who’s thirteen, hop and chatter around us as we move pieces of furniture onto the ketos’ trucks. Twitchy makes faces behind the bargain hunters’ backs for the littlest ones, Fumi and Frannie, who laugh and clap. But things get harder as the day wears on. Aiko accidentally drops a lamp and has to sit out the rest of the afternoon on the stoop. The twins start crying when their kokeshi dolls are sold, and nothing us or Tommy or their mom does can make them stop. Mr. Harano is stonefaced when their sofa goes for three bucks; their beds, for two each.
At the end of the day, they’re left with a few hundred dollars. A few hundred dollars for a lifetime of things that can’t go with them.
THINGS YOU CAN’T PUT A PRICE ON
the most perfect sand dollar I ever found at Ocean Beach, wrapped in a handkerchief Yum-yum gave me on our third date
The first families move out on Tuesday, April 28. They line up in front of the Civil Control Station in their Sunday best—the men in suits, the women in veiled hats and gloves—like they’re going to church instead of an internment camp. I wonder why they bother.
From the stoop across the street, me and Twitchy watch the bags stack up o
n the curb: first the steamer trunks, then the suitcases, and the canvas bundles expertly knotted at the top. The piles grow so high in places, you can’t see over them to the keto guard and his Springfield rifle posted by the doors of the Civil Control Station.
We say goodbye to Tommy, who promises to write, and to the rest of the Haranos. As they board their Greyhound bus, Fumi and Frannie start crying and grabbing at Mrs. Harano’s hair, and she shoves one of the twins at Tommy, who bounces her gently in his arms.
We can still hear them wailing as they drive away.
When the day’s over, there’s still bits of baggage left on the sidewalk: duffle bags, crates tied with rope, trunks painted with English and Japanese names. Relatives and friends are lugging away what they can, but there are people without relatives or friends, and their things are still on the pavement when the street lamps go on.
* * *
The night the last families are evacuated from the north side of Japantown, me and Frankie Fujita walk through the neighborhood together.
The deserted streets.
The abandoned businesses.
The boarded windows.
The darkened homes.
Half of this community amputated, the people I’ve grown up with shipped off to who-knows-where.
There’s hardly anyone around now—just me and Frankie and the shadows and the streetlights haloed in fog. We walk down the middle of the road like the kings of a hollow kingdom.
He’s practically humming with anger. I can feel it like a current coming off him.
Hell, I can feel it coming off me, too, growing stronger with every vacant house we pass.
My fists are electric.
We break into a noodle house. There’s not much left. The tables and chairs have all been sold off. There are a few blank spaces on the walls where wood carvings used to hang, but the rest is papered with menus in kanji and hiragana and English, peeling at the corners.
We rip it apart. We tear the daily specials from the walls. We throw napkin dispensers and empty tubs. Frankie shreds a string of paper cranes, sending them limply into the air like confetti. In the kitchen, I find a maneki-neko, a ceramic good-luck cat—big eyes and calico spots—and drop-kick it into the dining room, where it shatters.
One of the neko’s red ears skids to a stop in front of Frankie. He stares at it for a second. Then he laughs. It’s a horrible, humorless laugh, and his open mouth looks desperate and hungry, like he wants to devour the whole world.
* * *
When we make our way outside again, we find the Kitano brothers, Jim and Shuji, smoking on the corner of Bush and Laguna. Beside me, Frankie picks up the pace. He’s practically running at them, shouting, “Hey, Jimmy, you ugly son of a bitch, where’s that two dollars you owe me?”
I don’t remember Jim owing Frankie money, but he is a son of a bitch, and I’m itching for a fight, and who the hell cares anyway?
Before either of the Kitano brothers can say anything, Frankie slugs Jim in the jaw. Not hard. I’ve seen Frankie hit like a hammer, and this is nothing. This is a love tap.
He wants Jimmy to fight back.
And he does. Jim comes up swinging, and then they’re grunting and grappling on the curb, stumbling into the street.
Before Shuji can do anything, I clobber him. It feels good to hit something. To make something hurt.
We’re throwing punches. We’re getting bloody. The Kitano brothers are yelling, but me and Frankie are stern and fierce and the only sound we make is our breathing. Exhaling anger.
Shuji gets me good in the mouth, but I hardly feel it. No, I welcome it. I eat up the pain like breakfast.
Lights go on down the street. Someone’s shouting at us. Sirens wail in the distance.
We scatter into the night—Jimmy and Shuji in one direction, me and Frankie in the other—swallowed up by the empty street.
We finally come to a stop in an alley. We’re doubled over, breathing hard. When he stands, I see he’s got a black eye and a bloody nose—backlit from the street, he looks like a young samurai, glowing and wrathful.
“Goddamn it all,” he says.
I straighten, tonguing my split lip.
Yeah.
I spit blood.
Goddamn it all.
THINGS I’M HOLDING ON TO
my anger
When I get home, Mom’s waiting up for me. She’s wearing her old robe, fraying at the cuffs, as she kneels in the living room, sorting our things into piles.
What stays behind: the carpets, the coffee table, boxes of Dad’s old clothes I didn’t know she’d kept.
What goes with us: sheets, blankets, cups and bowls and silverware for each of us, a hot plate, a kettle.
She looks up at me, pursing her lips, and for a second, I think she’s going to scold me. But she doesn’t. She just pats the bare floor until I sit next to her. “What happened to you, Shigeo?” she asks, turning my chin to the light.
I don’t meet her gaze. “Got in a fight.”
“With who?”
“The Kitano brothers.”
She clicks her tongue. “Those bad boys.”
I laugh—quietly, because Mas and Minnow are sleeping.
“You shouldn’t be fighting.”
“I know, Mom.” I sneak the last of Mas’s yearbooks from the “stay” pile. It’s filled with notes from his friends: Chinese friends, hakujin—white—friends, friends who have been evacuated. “But I wanted to fight something.”
She sighs. “You can’t change our situation with your fists.”
“But it has to change, Mom. Doesn’t it?”
She tugs at a stray thread on her sleeve. It unravels. “No, Shigeo, it doesn’t.”
Angry tears fall onto the pages of Mas’s yearbook, and I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Then what do we do?”
She puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes once. “Gaman.”
The word means something like persevere or endure. It’s a word for when you can’t do anything to change your situation, so you bear it patiently . . . or as patiently as you can, I guess.
I think of Mrs. Katsumoto and her thank-you note. I think of the people dressed in their best for their own eviction.
But I can’t do it. I can’t suffer nobly while we’re displaced. I can’t not feel this electricity inside me. I can’t not be hurt and angry and want to wrench things from the walls.
I don’t think “gaman” is in my vocabulary, either.
* * *
When CIVILIAN EXCLUSION ORDER NO. 41 tells us we’re being forced to leave, Twitchy steals one of the flyers. We sit behind the YMCA, where we know Mr. Tanaka won’t come chase us off, because Mr. Tanaka’s gone. Together, we read the instructions over and over, like the next time we read them, the words will be different.
We won’t have to evacuate.
We’ll be allowed to stay.
But nothing changes.
“I bet we’re going to Tanforan,” Twitchy says finally.
The Tanforan Assembly Center’s an old racetrack fifteen miles south of the city. That’s where Tommy and Stan ended up.
I don’t say anything as I tear the evacuation order into a square, ripping away the signature at the bottom—J. L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command. He’s convinced we’re all a bunch of Jap spies, and I guess he’s convinced everyone else of it too, because, well . . . here we are.
I toss his name in the trash, where it belongs.
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Twitchy continues. “It’s not that far from home, and at least we’d be together . . .”
I’m hardly listening. I’m creasing and pleating and bending the notice into something different, something other than what it is: the piece of paper that’s going to uproot us.
Under my hands, it becomes a square, a diamond, a crane with a long neck, a sharp beak, and the words “alien and non-alien” visible on one wing.
They can’t even use the word citizen for us Nisei, can they?
> I want to crush the paper bird in my palm, like that would unmake every sentence of the exclusion order and all the men who wrote it.
“Hey, where’d you learn to do origami?” Twitchy asks, interrupting my thoughts.
I twirl the paper bird by its pointed tail. “Kinmon Gakuen,” I lie.
He makes a disbelieving sound. “Where was I that day?”
“In time-out,” I tell him with a smirk, “like usual.”
“Ha ha.” He eyes me like he knows I’m fibbing, but he doesn’t push me.
We don’t stay out, not like last time, because now we’re the ones who’re leaving. We have to go home. We have to help our families pack.
On the step next to me are black smudges where Mr. Tanaka used to stub out his cigarettes. I leave the crane perched next to them like a temple offering.
THINGS NO ONE KNOWS I HAVE
one of Dad’s hats
Don’t tell anyone, but Dad’s the one who got me into paper folding. He used to do it when he was happy, or when he was working through something he wasn’t ready to tell Mom about, but mostly when he was happy. I can remember Sundays when we went to Ocean Beach to fly kites and look for shells, and he’d be sitting in the sand, folding a piece of newspaper.
He didn’t make a fuss about it, either. You’d see him toying with a candy-bar wrapper or something, but you’d never see it take shape. He might leave it somewhere for you to find, if he was especially proud of it, but usually, it would just be gone. I don’t know if he threw them away or what.
Now I do it too, even though no one really knows about it, not even Twitchy. It’s kind of private, you know? It’s something just between me and Dad, even though he’s gone, too.
* * *
On Wednesday, Mas comes home with a fistful of ID tags. We have to mark all our luggage, and on the day of the evacuation, we have to wear them. Like we can’t be trusted to remember our own names.
I’m Ito, Shigeo.
NO. 22437.
INSTRUCTED TO REPORT READY TO TRAVEL ON: Saturday 5/9, 11:30.
