Sansei and Sensibility

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  The twins talked together constantly. They began to leave Moto out. In fact, they began to wish he might disappear. Moto had at first confused one twin for the other. The initial humor of these confusions long past, he had continued, either due to the growing schizophrenia of his perceptions or a need to release nervous energy, to re-create confusions and ensuing jokes. Her sister wasn’t one to conceal boredom or disgust, and Moto couldn’t conceal his now-obvious immaturity. The swaggering self-confidence had dissipated into an insipid amiability, and jokes, amusing once because the Japanese had been simple enough to understand, now fell flat.

  A typhoon was reported. There was a possibility it would head their way. The resort season had virtually ended. They seemed to be the only people in the area, and the rain threatened to trap them inside the cottage. They prepared for the long, stormy night, setting boards up over the windows.

  She cooked, and her twin slept. Moto prepared a bath. Turning from the sink, she heard a huge BOOM! And Moto’s body flew backward out of the bathroom. He was stunned and wide-eyed, babbling about fire, about gas. He had lit leaking gas. The burnt ends of his eyebrows crinkled over his forehead. Fortunately his arms had been covered. He wasn’t hurt, but she was becoming nervous about this enterprise. And the rain fell steadily.

  The twins stepped into that same bath together. Her sister talked constantly and animatedly about all subjects, seemingly unaware of the steady and increasingly loud sound of the rain. The wind blew fiercely outside the boarded windows of the bathroom. Rain pounded intermittently against the thin walls, clanging madly at the tin shielding. Inside that closet of steam and hot water, they splashed soap and bubbles around. Her twin bent over her squatting back and scrubbed, entertaining her with stories and events from the past year, and she could hear the rising scream of the storm against their steaming closet, and the violent chaos was becoming her own fears. She thought of the precarious wedging of the cottage against the hill and the slippage of land and mud and trees; she thought of the deluge and the mass of land that might bury two naked, soapy bodies.

  Her sister said of Moto, “You’re always getting screwed. He’s just like all those other immature Japanese dudes who think they’re such hot shit. What a baby. And since I got in that car accident, I’m paranoid about cars, and he can’t drive a stick shift. It’s murder to try to drive with someone like that.”

  She turned her twin around, crouching behind, and poured water down her back, peeling the tenugui from her shoulders, trying to work as Yae had. She admitted Moto must be a fool, and foolishly wanted to hear her sister’s voice echo forcibly against the tile and wood, harsh or tender but louder than the raging storm. Yet she saw in her mind the crushing weight of a mud wall bursting through that closet and the wild treachery and insipid irony of that disgusting death.

  As she emerged from the steam closet, Moto looked up and said, “The typhoon will pass very near. Perhaps it will swerve off, but then again, we may be at the center.” He drew the standard shape of Japan on a small scratch pad, marking where they were, where the typhoon was, where it would or wouldn’t pass and at what time, with all the authority of a radio broadcast. Then he looked at her; his face looked comically severe and then, just comical.

  “Maybe this house will fall down the hill … no, the house is probably stronger than that. What I’m more worried about is the car at the bottom. If it slipped off, we would never be able to leave.” He smiled, wild-eyed. “Perhaps we’ll die!”

  She looked at him in disgust.

  He continued, “But, in any case, I’ll be happy. It’ll be like dying with you in a double suicide.”

  V

  She received a letter today from her sister, who is still in Japan. Now she too is traveling alone. She writes that she has found a small beach in Kyushu called Ibusuki, and that she has tried the sand baths there. When the tide recedes, old women come to bury her in the sand. Deep, deep from secret sources beneath the sand, the warm springs rise.

  And Mother went out early this morning to weed the garden and came in hot and muddy. She retired to the thing that gives her the most pleasure, her bath. Now she stands in her towel with wet hair, adjusting her glasses.

  “Oh,” she says, “a letter from your sister. Now what does she say?”

  The Dentist and the Dental Hygienist

  Dr. Hashikin’s dental office was situated at the very mouth of Gardena. For a town with no obvious boundaries (at least to the unaccustomed eye), over a rambling suburban landscape of fast food stops, asphalt runways leading to shopping centers, and Merit tract homes (vintage sixties), to be at the mouth of Gardena is hardly descriptive enough to locate anything at all. One might point out the dental office’s proximity to three major Los Angeles freeways or to the Pacific Square, branch offices of Little Tokyo and therefore a surrogate way to the East. Of course, this attempt to locate the coordinates of Dr. Hashikin’s dental office in the disjointed Gardena grid is nothing more than a cheap ploy to throw the Gardena aficionado off track. In the continuing soap opera of tribal life, the ultimate compliment to the author can only be the gossip generated by such stories.

  Dr. Hashikin had always lived in Gardena, except for during his adolescence, which had been spent in camp. Some say adolescence is the period in growth when one acquires the cultural attributes that remain for the rest of one’s life. It might also be true to say that many people spend their adulthood trying in one way or another to deal with the legacy left by adolescence. Dr. Hashikin had never thought of this seriously, but, going through adolescence in camp, under the close inspection of so many other Japanese Americans at such close quarters, had been memorable. Dr. Hashikin had observed, enviously, that his son could close the bathroom door.

  Perhaps it was such an adolescence that prepared Dr. Hashikin better than others to live in Gardena. Dr. Hashikin had never thought of living anywhere else. After finishing his studies, he married one of the Sato daughters and quickly set up his practice in Gardena. In a short time, his business swelled with the mouths of a Japanese American generation brought up on sugar-frosted flakes and Doublemint gum.

  Dr. Hashikin and his wife, Betty, began to raise three baby boomers of their own and to weave the spreading floss of their lives through the community. By the time Dr. Hashikin could afford to take every Wednesday off for golf, had joined the Kiwanis, and sent his mother to visit Japan, their first son, Steve, was in the Key Club at Gardena High School. The second son, Craig, hung out at the beach and made part-time money at Shig’s service station, and their daughter, Kathy, wore nylons on Fridays in junior high. Dr. Hashikin watched his kids run in a huddle of sansei through life. His house had been toilet-papered six times, twice for each kid. “The only thing left is to flush us away,” he remarked with irritation to Betty. The multicolored stuff had been wrapped around his recently trimmed lollipop bushes, which again looked like huge spitballs. But the adolescence of his children seemed to sweep by more quickly than his own, and Dr. Hashikin and Betty were soon left alone to spend most of their time in one corner of a four-bedroom house watching old movies on a video cassette recorder.

  It was at this bridge in life that Dr. Hashikin discovered the roots of a canal yet uncharted in all his fifty-seven years. Candy Yuasa was the twenty-four-year-old daughter of his friends and regular patients. Dr. Hashikin had cleaned and treated Candy’s teeth ever since she had started kindergarten. Over the years, a relationship of trust develops between a dentist and his patient. Many people continue to see their childhood dentist, often driving great distances over L.A. to keep an appointment with the only person for whom they might condescend to climb into a high chair, wear a bib, and open wide. At twenty-four, this relationship of trust clearly established, Candy kept her appointment with Dr. Hashikin, not for her teeth, but for a job.

  Dr. Hashikin was the same kind, congenial man with nice manners and clean breath. Everything in the office, from the white shirt buttoned at his shoulders to the free toothbrush samples, smell
ed slightly of peppermint.

  “Hi, Candy.” Dr. Hashikin smiled. “When can you go to work? I’ve got a full schedule Monday, and I need someone right away. By the way, how are your folks?” There was no interview to speak of, and no question that he might not hire her. If he didn’t, it would be extremely embarrassing in light of his personal friendship with the Yuasas. Besides, Dr. Hashikin thought, like most of his Japanese American patients, a Japanese American could always be trusted to do the job. He thought so despite the fact that over the years, he had seen a stream of nisei and sansei dental assistants and hygienists, some of whose temperaments and talents left something to be desired. Despite the stress caused by conflicting personalities and petty office politics, Dr. Hashikin had never had to fire anyone for incompetence. Anyway, he always hired nisei and sansei, and he wouldn’t have had the guts in a small community to fire anyone.

  Candy Yuasa was right out of the USC dental hygiene program. She had good grades and recommendations. She seemed very quiet and didn’t have a great deal to say. Her quietness was slightly discomforting to Dr. Hashikin, but his clientele wouldn’t complain. Japanese Americans were used to Japanese Americans.

  Dr. Hashikin hadn’t always used the talents of a dental hygienist. In the old days, he had done all the teeth cleaning himself. A lot of his old colleagues still preferred to work this way. They liked to keep their operations small and turned away new patients. Most of them, Dr. Hashikin included, weren’t much in the way of businessmen or managers and didn’t care to take on added responsibilities. Having to deal with a staff of hygienists and assistants, receptionists, bookkeepers, and insurance people, and treat teeth besides, was an uncomfortable ordeal to men who had gone into the profession mostly because they were good with their hands. It was difficult to juggle the artistic talents of capping a tooth with doling out competitive salaries and charging the going rate. Dr. Hashikin had been forced to take one hygienist on staff besides his receptionist, who sided as an assistant, but he was reluctant to let his business grow out of hand. He had realized, however, that he was getting along in years, and a hygienist would lighten his workload considerably.

  Candy Yuasa, despite her youth and inexperience, stepped into her position with a certain quiet command. She set up her own tools and cleaned up after herself, and she didn’t even mind assisting from time to time. Some hygienists, Dr. Hashikin knew, felt above the tasks of the dental assistant. Candy was agreeable and always quiet.

  “Candy is quiet.” That’s what Dr. Hashikin told Betty in the beginning, but, after a while, he wasn’t so sure that was the proper description. It wasn’t as if Candy was the sort who required a period of warming up to get to know her. She never really warmed up, and there never seemed to be some hidden someone to get to know. She was always the same person of few words, except when she was cleaning teeth. Dr. Hashikin could hear her talking animatedly above the buzz and squizz of the Cavitron. But, as soon as the cleaning was finished, the bib removed, and the chair lowered, Candy’s chatter stopped. Dr. Hashikin would meet her in the corridor with her sweet, placid smile, ushering a patient out with a wordless nod.

  Dr. Hashikin didn’t remember exchanging more than two or three sentences with Candy and only on matters of work. That Candy could carry on extended monologues over her captive patients yet have little, if anything, to relate to Dr. Hashikin, even in the normal day-to-day office routine, was curious.

  Dr. Hashikin began to slough off the sensation of being slighted and disliked. He chided himself for his childish reaction, as if he had been denied membership into an exclusive club. But, as the days passed, Dr. Hashikin found his thoughts occupied by only one question: Who was Candy Yuasa, and what did she have to say in such abundance to everyone else that she didn’t say to him?

  Betty laughed at her husband. “She’s a young girl, just out of school. You’re her boss. She’s probably afraid of you.”

  Dr. Hashikin nodded and returned to the office, trying to assume an unconcerned air with the idea of making Candy relax and feel more at home. “What do you do in your free time?” he tried to ask nonchalantly. “Any hobbies?”

  Candy shook her head. “No.”

  Dr. Hashikin soon ran out of icebreaker questions and began fumbling through the re-runs. “Any hobbies?” he repeated hopelessly. A tiny but perceptible tingle began to nag his lower left molars. Dr. Hashikin crunched down and contracted his jaw, mashing the icebreakers in disgust and near anger. But he was quickly repentant over his hostile attitude. After all, years ago, one former assistant had resigned from his office after complaining, in so many words, that Dr. Hashikin was a poor communicator, that he didn’t talk or explain things enough. Dr. Hashikin had always been completely baffled by the complaint. He thought he was certainly better at expressing himself than some of his colleagues were. After that incident, however, Dr. Hashikin had become somewhat self-conscious about projecting himself in the office. He wavered between trying to assume his position as the boss and resorting to democracy. Nothing quite worked. Now, here was Candy Yuasa, haunting him for obscure and even, he imagined, sinister reasons, none of which he could prove, for his own lack of communication.

  Linda, Dr. Hashikin’s longtime receptionist and dental assistant, didn’t confirm Dr. Hashikin’s feeling of rejection. “She’s shy,” was all Linda could suggest. Dr. Hashikin sighed. He himself had chosen Linda for her diplomacy and her inability to entertain catty or inconvenient ideas about anyone. Linda was the most, and probably the only, generous soul in Gardena. Most people considered her naive, but she was, undeniably, the perfect receptionist. In this situation, however, Linda was of no aid to Dr. Hashikin, whose growing sense of insecurity groped about in its solitary and imagined madness.

  “I see you’ve got a new hygienist,” said Mrs. Shimizu.

  Dr. Hashikin nodded and ran his mirror under her upper molars.

  Mrs. Shimizu waited, then offered, “She’s an interesting girl.”

  “Oh?” said Dr. Hashikin, trying not to sound too eager. “What did she say?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Shimizu hedged, “she mentioned Betty. She knew we went to school together. She even knew Betty and I were in camp together …” Mrs. Shimizu’s voice trailed off. She decided she wouldn’t bother to tell Dr. Hashikin how she had known Betty when Betty was in love with Shig Tanaka, and that Betty had started to date Dr. Hashikin on the rebound from Shig. The strangest thing was that Candy seemed to know all about it too. Mrs. Shimizu waited for Dr. Hashikin to complete the story and explain that he himself had told it to Candy.

  But Dr. Hashikin dropped the tiny mirror inside Mrs. Shimizu’s mouth, recovering it awkwardly near her chin. “Why would she know about you and Betty?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d know,” Mrs. Shimizu suggested meekly, her mind immediately punching in all the wild possibilities offered by daytime soaps. “Do I know her folks?” Mrs. Shimizu wondered.

  “Yuasa?” said Dr. Hashikin. “Sam and Mary.”

  “I don’t believe so.” Mrs. Shimizu shook her head. “That’s funny. She was quite accurate about Betty and me,” she said more boldly, in part because she was beginning to form a hypothesis in which she might have to defend her old girlfriend Betty, and because Candy’s unfortunate opinion of dear Betty was embarrassingly similar to her own. Mrs. Shimizu concluded, by the end of her appointment, that the only person who could have told Candy that Betty hadn’t married Dr. Hashikin for love but because of a pessimistic vision of the future must have been Dr. Hashikin himself. “Now,” Mrs. Shimizu snapped to her own husband, “you don’t go telling a young girl in her twenties personal things like that unless you’re trying to make a pass. Imagine, at his age. It’s disgusting. Poor Betty. And besides,” she pouted, “he let the anesthetic wear off. He hurt me.” Mrs. Shimizu discreetly spread the plaque about Dr. Hashikin to a few mutual friends. It got into those hard-to-brush crevices of Gardena, and Mrs. Shimizu and some others took their dirty teeth to other dentists.


  Dr. Hashikin rubbed his jaw near that lower left-hand molar. Strange that a dentist had need of a dentist himself. He’d have his colleague Harry check it out for him one of these days. He yawned. He hadn’t gotten much sleep, struggling with insomnia and the continuing saga surrounding his hygienist.

  Betty quipped, “It’s Candy isn’t it? I don’t understand. Are you hiding something from me?”

  Dr. Hashikin shook his head. “I’ve told you everything. I don’t understand it myself. It’s uncanny. No, she’s downright weird!”

  “Maybe you should ask her to leave,” Betty suggested.

  “I can’t do that,” Dr. Hashikin wailed. “Sam does my taxes for nothing. We’ve got season tickets to the Dodgers this year.”

  So Candy stayed on, scraping the plaque and calcium deposits off row after row of teeth in dozens of mouths every week. There was no doubt that she was an excellent hygienist. Dr. Hashikin recognized the skillful cleaning job, the well-polished tooth, the sparkling new pearly grin. Everything Candy did was technically perfect, except something about the grin. How could he fire Candy for the imperfection of the grin?

  One patient after another slumped into Dr. Hashikin’s high chair with an expressive grin that seemed to describe every sort of emotion from titillating embarrassment to wretched self-flagellation. Before, they had all had some manner of confronting possible pain—the prick of the needle and the flow of Novocain or the whizzing grind of the drill—but lately, no one seemed especially concerned about whether the dentist would hurt them or not. Instead everyone seemed to be cogitating some private and often shocking discovery. One woman burst into tears, and a young man flew into a rage, screamed incoherently at the dentist, then stomped off, slamming the door and leaving the movement-sensitive bell sweetly ding-donging behind him.

  And then there were those who barely got as far as walking across the corridor at the dental assistant’s kind invitation. Linda would return after having said, “Dr. Hashikin will be right with you,” to find an empty chair and no one to bib down. One anxious girl left in the middle of the x-rays.