by Ken Ono
How often must an impressionable child maliciously be called a “Chink,” “Jap,” or “Nip” before suffering permanent damage? Although such incidents were infrequent, they are among the most vivid early memories I have from the early 1970s as one of the few Asian kids in my otherwise all-white neighborhood.
I never thought of those extreme incidents as anything more than our poor luck with a few benighted individuals. Now that I reflect back on those events, I wonder what life must have been like for my parents when they first came to America. I have heard of no extreme acts of hatred perpetrated against them, but I am certain that the minor indignities must have been frequent, and the accumulation of such acts was probably more insidious than those few vicious acts that could be chalked up to a small number of fanatical racists. Perhaps that is why my parents’ behavior often seemed like paranoid fear.
I now believe that the circumstances I have been describing are part of the reason that I was not taught to speak Japanese at home. I can’t even count to fifty in Japanese. My parents always spoke to me in English, and in my presence, they always spoke to each other in English. But in private, they always spoke to each other in Japanese. My parents determined early on that it would be important for my future success to be fluent in English, and they did not press me to learn Japanese. On the contrary, they made no effort whatsoever to teach me to speak Japanese. They wanted me to be an all-American boy for my own good, but they had no idea what that actually meant. They must have been believing and hoping that they could spare me some of the problems they had encountered as Japanese immigrants trying to make a life for themselves in America.
To this day, my parents continue to lock the doors of the house when they are home. They do this out of habit and out of fear. I think it is telling that one of the few Japanese phrases I know is dorobou hairimasu, which translates to “hooligans and burglars might enter.” I heard this phrase thousands of times as a child, each time my mother discovered an unlocked door.
Kaikin Home
Growing up, I never thought about the challenges my parents faced raising a family under such difficult circumstances. What kid in my position would? World War II was in the distant past, and my parents rarely talked about it. I didn’t know anything about the effects of the war and of that widespread belief in Japan that foreigners, and Americans in particular, were racially inferior. I wonder what my parents thought about the prospect of raising three boys in a country they had been taught to despise.
I knew very little about my family’s origins. We had no aunts or uncles or cousins living in America. And we almost never communicated with our relatives in Japan by phone. In fact, I have met my cousins no more than two or three times in all my forty-seven years. My little nuclear family was on its own. We were castaways living thousands of miles away in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language, surrounded by the very people my parents had been brought up to believe were the enemy.
It may surprise you to hear that I first learned of my parents’ arranged marriage when I was in middle school. My parents almost never talked about their personal lives, and without ties to extended family, there was no reason for the topic of their marriage to come up, and it never did. Arranged marriages were common in prewar Japan. Bride and groom were selected by friends or family, and, like my parents, they were often strangers when they wed.
As a young nisei, I knew next to nothing about being Japanese. For me, being Japanese was all about food, the meals that my mother prepared at home, and my physical appearance, so different from that of my neighbors and schoolfellows—straight black hair, flat face, and slanted eyes. With no Japanese friends, I was constantly aware that I was different, unlike almost everyone I knew.
I was troubled by the fact that we were different from all the other families on our block. I viewed our habit of locking ourselves in as world-class paranoia. Indeed, by the early 1980s, our harassing neighbors had moved, and there was no longer any reason to be afraid.
In recent years, I have changed my opinion. I view the locking of all the doors when we were at home not as paranoia, but as a symbol of my having grown up between two cultures: upper-middle-class America and traditional Japan. I went to school on the outside, in America, while at home, I lived bottled up in isolationist Japan, literally and intentionally locked in to prevent outside influences from entering.
In retrospect, my home life seems a small-scale version of isolationist Japan during the Tokugawa period (1641–1853), when the shoguns, leaders of the military government, enforced a policy called kaikin, which largely prohibited contact with foreign countries. The original edict that enforced this policy had seventeen rules, including one that Japanese who secretly attempted to travel abroad were to be executed, and any Japanese residing abroad who returned to Japan were also to be executed.
That isolationism ended in 1853, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s fleet of ships sailed into Tokyo harbor. The Japanese tried to expel the Americans at first, viewing them, as I mentioned earlier, as “wild beasts,” but they eventually acquiesced to the Americans’ presence and signed a treaty with the United States in 1854, bringing an end to the shoguns’ kaikin. Although isolationism vanished as an official policy, its underlying principles lived on in the ideologies of subsequent Japanese leadership, and it was deeply ingrained in Japanese culture when my parents were growing up. Some of its effects still reside in them.
Given this culturally pervasive idea of Japanese superiority and the anti-Japanese racism that my parents experienced in America, it makes sense to me that my parents would, perhaps unconsciously, enforce a kind of kaikin at home in quest of self-preservation and protection for themselves and their children.
They had no idea that their actions presented us children with challenges in our lives on the outside, our lives in America. Why would they? My mother didn’t interact with many Americans. Apart from her housewifely errands, she spent all of her time occupied with housework and the raising of three boys. My father was completely engrossed by his mathematics. They knew next to nothing about the country they lived in, as if they were tourists in a foreign country who never ventured beyond the gates of their all-inclusive resort.
As a kid with no knowledge of my family’s history, I had no way of knowing all of the forces at play in their parenting. I could only compare our family with the others in the neighborhood, and it seemed to me and my brothers that we had gotten a raw deal.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_3
3. My Childhood (1970–1984)
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Lutherville, Maryland, is a hilly network of twisted streets dotted with nearly identical 1960s-era single-family split-level homes. Our neighborhood was home to baseball legends Mark Belanger, Jim Palmer, and Brooks Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles. I loved the Orioles. Their victory over the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1983 World Series is one of the most cherished memories of my life in Lutherville. Little else from my childhood resembles anything that would have been considered normal in my neighborhood.
Ken-chan, Lutherville, Maryland (1970s)
When no one was practicing music, our house was silent. You could hear the compressor of the fridge unless the dishwasher was running, and once in a while, you would hear the scraping of Igor the dachshund’s paws as he wandered about, or the quiet thud of my mother’s slippers as she did chores. All five of us were probably at home—my mother at her chores, we boys in our bedrooms, and my father in his study doing math all day. We always had to be quiet so as not to disturb my father’s concentration.
My mother, Sachiko, was raised to be a model Japanese housewife, invisibly running the household in the background. Her educa
tion included such refinements as flower arrangement and meal presentation, and for a brief period in America, those skills were channeled into portrait painting. She has devoted her entire adult life to Takasan and her three sons.
I know very little about my mother’s childhood; she never talked about it. What I do know is that she ran our home like clockwork. She is the most dependable person I have ever known, and she never let time get the better of her. For example, even though a permission slip for a school field trip might be due in two weeks, she would nevertheless sign it the day she received it. She would pay bills on the day she received them out of fear that something might go wrong if she waited a few days.
She took her role as a traditional Japanese mother very seriously. She cooked our meals, did our laundry, and cleaned the house. She performed those chores almost single-handedly. None of us boys ever had any chores. Every morning, without fail, I awoke to find a delicious breakfast waiting for me on the kitchen table. Although my father worked late and slept in, his breakfast was also already nicely set out for him bright and early, a meal that he would enjoy two or three hours later. My mother ate her breakfast alone after we boys left for school. After school, I came home to find that my bed had been neatly made, as were all the beds. My mother’s habits of waking up hours before everyone else and preparing breakfast and of making all of our beds is indicative of her commitment to the family’s affairs.
The dinners she cooked consisted of delicious Japanese fare, such as chicken tonkatsu, shrimp tempura, or beef curry, which appeared like clockwork at 6:00 p.m. every day. We would all gather as a family for dinner, often the first and only time any of us would have seen my father all day. After dinner, he would retreat to his office and return to whatever mathematical problem was on his mind.
Taking care of the home and the family’s affairs was my mother’s full-time job. She took her role so seriously that she never had time for much of anything else. In a good year, she might go out to the movies once or twice. She almost never watched TV. We almost never went out to eat, because it was her job to feed the family. I have just a couple of memories of her going on an outing with friends. Apart from her hobby of copying famous paintings, which she pursued only when I was young, she didn’t seem to participate in any activities other than housework and parenting.
She rarely bought new clothes, and she never went to the beauty salon. Despite the fact that she had been close to her sisters, she rarely phoned them in Japan. The long-distance charges were too expensive. She spoke with them at most once or twice a year.
I can’t imagine how she managed to live such a life. It would have driven me mad. It seemed to me that my mother had no identity and independence apart from the family. For her, serving the family was her job, her duty.
But it annoyed me terribly that she constantly reminded us how much she was giving up. She presented herself as a martyr who had sacrificed all self-interest for the family. I think that this was perhaps her way of instilling in us a sense of duty to succeed in the lives that they had planned for us. I certainly didn’t want to feel guilt for not doing my part. But I thought that she should enjoy a better life and do something for herself once in a while, like all the other mothers in the neighborhood.
For twenty years, I also misunderstood my father’s role. I thought that his disinterest in me was somehow a reflection of his low opinion of me. By comparison, my friends had very different relationships with their fathers, loving relationships. They would play catch in the yard, go for bike rides, attend baseball games, and do other normal things. I could see it all from my house, from behind the windows of my bedroom.
As the only Japanese-American family in our “All-American” neighborhood, I had no way of knowing that I was trapped at the confusing and frustrating intersection of incompatible cultures. I understand my family dynamics much better now. In traditional Japanese families, it is quite common for fathers to be almost entirely absent and removed from their children’s lives. The fact is that Japanese fathers are expected to spend so much time at work that they often have little time and energy to spend with their children. Japanese companies place heavy demands on their employees, and as a result, the culture has adapted by placing the responsibility for raising children and overseeing education almost entirely on the mothers. The Japanese father is the breadwinner; it is his duty to provide for the family.
Despite the fact that the father spends little time at home, he is highly regarded and respected by all members of the family. Children’s positive views of their fathers are often the result of their mother’s efforts to portray their husbands as someone to be respected and revered. Japanese fathers are often held up as role models for their sons.
This makes sense to me now. I was indeed brought up to revere my father as the world-class mathematical genius that he is. Everything we had, we credited to the importance of his work. And as a theoretical mathematician, most of his work was done at home, closeted away in his study on the first floor of our house. He would spend hours on end in his office, behind a closed door, scribbling crazy-looking formulas on yellow pads of paper. That was his duty. When I was discussing this recently with my mother, she said, “Ninety-nine percent of his life has been devoted to mathematics, with one percent spared for his family and hobbies. Make sure to tell people.”
This may seem shocking to Westerners, but from the viewpoint of traditional Japan, it makes sense. As a kid living in America, it made no sense to me. Over time, I would conclude that the whole unsatisfactory situation was my fault, that I had done something wrong, and my father had rejected me.
While my brothers had other gifts, it was clear that my gift was mathematics. And as tradition would have it, this meant that my father was to be the role model for his budding mathematician son. Although my relationship with my father was emotionally detached by Western standards, he was actively involved in my mathematical education when I was a young boy. All of my cherished memories from early childhood are related to the bond that mathematics forged between us.
My parents like to tell the story of how I “discovered,” at the age of three, that there are infinitely many numbers. I argued that if it were not so, then there would have to be a largest number. But that makes no sense, because one could always add 1 to that largest number to obtain an even larger number. Therefore, there must be infinitely many numbers.
I have fond memories of sitting at a little kiddie desk in my father’s office working on geometry problems while he, scribbling at his large steel desk, worked on his grownup math problems. My father taught me beautiful theorems by making use of the fun I had in calculating large numbers. When I was still in elementary school, he taught me Fermat’s little theorem in this way, and he presented it to me like a magic trick. It went something like this.
“Ken-chan, pick a number that isn’t a multiple of 7.” I’d pick a number, such as 13. “Now raise it to the sixth power and subtract 1.” I’d run around the corner of his giant steel desk, to my little kiddie desk, and I’d work it out by hand. After a minute or so, I’d arrive at the answer: 4,826,808. “I bet that it is a multiple of 7.” I’ll take that bet, I thought. He has only a 1 in 7 chance of being right, and I’ll take those odds any day. And I’d run back to my kiddie desk, and I would divide 7 into this large number, and I found that he was right: 4,826,808 = 7 × 689,544. I’d say something like, “You got lucky. Let’s do it again.”
“Ken-chan, pick another number that isn’t a multiple of 7. Raise it to the sixth power and subtract 1. I bet the number you get is a multiple of 7.” Now I knew there had to be a catch, because this time he knew the answer even before I picked my number. I’d then pick a number anyway to humor him, like 29, and I’d run around the big steel desk to my little kiddie desk, and after a few minutes, I’d figure out that 296 −1 = 594,823,320 = 7 × 84,974,760, a multiple of 7, as expected.
I then asked him why the number 7 is so special. And he’d respond by picking ano
ther magic number. “Ken-chan, pick any number that isn’t a multiple of 13. Raise it to the twelfth power and subtract 1.” I’d immediately be able to guess what came next. But I’d let him say it anyway. “I bet the number you get is a multiple of 13.” I liked manipulating large numbers, but not the supersized ones that you get by raising to the twelfth power. Sensing that I’d figured out the rule, he then told me Fermat’s little theorem: If p is a prime number and a is not a multiple of p, then a p−1 − 1 is always a multiple of p. Then he explained a proof. After all, what we had done only offered evidence of the assertion. For it to be categorized as a theorem, an undeniable truth, it needed a watertight explanation, a proof, that showed that the statement holds for every prime number p, not just 7 and 13, and for every number a that is not a multiple of p.
My father enjoyed telling me stories about great mathematicians. I learned about Euclid, Euler, Descartes, Fermat, Galois, Gauss, Weil, and others. These giants had written great books, and it seemed that we had all of them. I loved holding those old books, flipping through the pages, and enjoying their sweet vanilla scent. Those books were filled with strange symbols and Greek letters like τ (tau) and ϕ (phi) that seemed freighted with a significance that I could only guess at. Although I couldn’t understand a word of those books, I dreamt that one day I would be able understand them, and perhaps even write one myself.
My most vivid memory from that time is of my father playing a special cassette tape on his boombox, a static-filled recording of David Hilbert giving a talk in the 1930s. Hilbert is generally regarded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
