Sansei and Sensibility

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Note: This is a work of fiction based on true events.

  With gracious thanks to Frank Gravier, bibliographer for Humanities at UCSC McHenry Library; Paul Shea, director of the Yellowstone Gateway Museum in Livingston, Montana; and Lucy Asako Boltz, research assistant.

  Colono:Scopy

  You are a sansei. You used to be feisty and youthful and, quite frankly, intolerable. You might still be intolerable, but now they pretend to tolerate you because, well, you’re old. When you turn fifty, they give you an over-the-hill party with black balloons and taunt you about the last half century, but this is just the beginning of the second half of your century, which you decide to embrace because, what the heck, maybe you can finally say anything you want and even speak for your generation since you might outlive them all. But then you realize what the Brazilians call the merda that happens boils down to three significant things: 1. You need reading glasses; 2. You find out you’re the “sandwich generation,” meaning you’re the baloney between your needy, illogical kids and your needy, illogical parents; and 3. You’ll need a colonoscopy.

  Number 1 is a minor bummer because you already had lousy eyes, Coke-bottle goggles in the fifties until contact lenses came around and your high school buddy became an optometrist. Number 2 is what your parents were trying to prepare you for: oyakoko; maybe you missed the lesson in which they explain if it’s the egg or the chicken first, but now you know it’s a deviled egg, and that the egg-chicken conundrum is beyond the point. Stuck between adolescent angst and elder dementia, you might accept the justice of this return to your sansei attitude and the memory of the Quiet Nisei stuck in repeat mode. After all, this is America. Life isn’t a donburi. Trust me, number 3 might be the real turning point.

  Your experienced elders give you the lowdown on the liquid diet and the enema prep, and when they say DON’T LEAVE THE TOILET, they don’t mean don’t leave the vicinity of the toilet; they mean don’t leave the toilet. Bunker in with your books and magazines, your iPhone, laptop, and Netflix, and be glad you don’t have to share a communal potty without partitions. Now the bogey word evacuation takes on a whole new meaning.

  The gastroenterologist asks if you want general anesthesia or conscious sedation; that is, do you want to be knocked out or semialert for the investigative procedure? Someone with experience who stayed awake says it was like watching Fantastic Voyage. You vaguely recall the 1966 film with a crew of microastronauts voyaging through blood cells, though all you really remember is Raquel Welch. To have Raquel swimming around your large intestine doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, especially since you’ve really cleaned it out just for her. O.K., you accept the challenge.

  The gastroenterologist, who is clearly not yet fifty, eyes you with a mixture of pathos and amusement and assures you she has performed hundreds of routine colonoscopies. The pathos is connected to the possibility that a cancerous polyp might be detected; the amusement is connected to your desire to swim with Raquel through your own butt. Raquel Welch, the gastroenterologist queries, is she still alive? You think about all the current gorgeous Hollywood pretenders who are pale copies of Raquel, the original hot cavewoman gunslinger who conquered the West plus the world Before Christ. O.K., as a feminist, you were never into Raquel, but is she still alive?

  From your left side, in a semifetal position, a flimsy blue cotton gown indecorously flapped open down your back, you peer at the gastroenterologist in her scrub cap and face mask, and, in your semisedated dream state, she appears to be an indigenous person with tribal affiliations. Forget Raquel. Think Sacagawea. She launches the colonoscope into your rectum. The colonoscope is a four-foot-long tube with a camera and light source at its tip. It could be la Niña, la Pinta, or la Santa María. Let’s go find India.

  You stare at the monitor, watching the colonoscope snake into your unknown, unmapped territory. Your plumber guide nods with approval at the clean, shiny pink walls, congratulating you on a flushing job well done. The camera spelunks with slow precision. In the dark distance, you see a tiny slim figure in slacks. As the light positions itself, you see a woman with graying hair walking a dog. It’s Donna Haraway. O.K., the dog isn’t a dog but a companion species. Donna points with wonder to the walls of your cleaned-out gut, normally a microbial ecosystem of a thousand species of critters with whom you coexist. And you just spent the previous day shitting the critters while incarcerated with your toilet. You apologize to Donna, but she’s a scientist, no apologies required; just remember who shares this precious space with you. Suddenly, the shepherd companion herds Donna into the tube, and they tumble away like Alice down a rabbit hole. What happened? The doctor plumber articulates some directive to your dream team. Apparently a polyp. We’ll take a biopsy and let you know. If it’s any consolation, it looks benign.

  The procedure plods on, gently turning the corner. Oh, lookee here, di-ver-tic-u-lum. Diverticula are pouches in your colon where stuff collects and settles and can cause diverticulitis. Have you been eating your vegetables?

  I’m Asian, you protest. We grow it; we practically invented the stuff.

  The camera points and shoots. Your diverticulosis is recorded. You lookee there and blink in disbelief, because the stuff in your particular diverticulum looks like a bunch of nineteenth-century white guys on locomotives. You squint, and it’s the meeting of the Central Pacific with the Union Pacific and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on Promontory Summit in Utah. Wait, you protest, where are the Chinese who built that railroad?

  Right, says Dr. Sacagawea, on native land, all stolen.

  But, you continue to protest, where are the Chinese critters?

  Sacagawea points and shoots from another angle. You wanna be in that picture too? An accomplice to indigenous genocide? Be my guest.

  Wait a minute, I’m not Chinese.

  So much for solidarity.

  Check out Google Maps and go to central Utah. Right there, Delta, Utah. My people were incarcerated in a concentration camp.

  Boohoo, says Sacagawea. You had no business being concentrated there in the first place.

  My folks were hauled from their homes based on racism and fear with not a single incident of espionage or sabotage to justify their imprisonment.

  We’ve heard that loyalty bullshit; you’re the models that make everyone else’s lives miserable. Considering the path you’re headed down, this diverticulum will eventually assimilate, neoliberalize, get inflamed. You’re in for a lot of pain.

  Look, you say, I eat vegetables, but I diversify my diet. Diversity against diverticulitis! You put up a weak but defiant right fist.

  Sacagawea replies drolly, It might not be your diet. These days, multicultures are overrated, if not cliché. Might just be your genes.

  One diverticulum, two diverticula. Another pouch? Ouch. This one looks a lot bigger, but Sacagawea is unimpressed. There are some human tribes whose colons are truly impressive, pristine environments.

  Pristine?

  No foreign-settler inhabitation. Sacagawea takes the camera in for another shot. Yours is, well, twisted and acculturated.

  You scrutinize this second picture and observe what looks like a battleship sinking into your diverticulum. Oh no, you’ve got to be kidding. Isn’t that—?

  The USS Arizona.

  Pearl Harbor?

  Look, we didn’t invent this infamy. Depose Liliuokalani, set up a plantation system, install the military, start a war.

  What, the war is my fault?

  A high-fiber diet might have prevented this. You know that Spam musubi you love so much?

  Wait, this is my colon. My colon!

  That’s what they all say. Face it, you’ve been colonized. When are you going to take responsibility for this mess? Your habits have destroyed the habitats of hundreds of native cultures.

  You look back again and notice Daniel Inouye in full dress uniform with all his purple medals, waving his one arm from the sinking Arizona. Sayonara, Dan. And through the black smoke and sir
ens, you can see a small floating vessel, a lifeboat with the demoralized faces of yes-yes/no-no Tule Lakers, MIS guys, and go-for-brokers, Nisei artists with communist antifascist affinities, Frank Chin in an inner tube splashing behind it, all drifting out of that pearly harbor in search of the promised land, which is certainly not in your big, capacious colon.

  Finally the colonoscope chugs into cecum Dodge, the beginning of your small intestine and, you think hopefully, the end of the line. This could be India, land of gold and spices. But there on the platform, you see it: a blooming mushroom backlit in a pink aura. Walter Cronkite’s authoritative present-tense voiceover booms through the talking cecum, and you see the Cold War frantically spin around the mushroom. Like Walter says: and you are there.

  It looks like we’ve a got a live occupation! Sacagawea scrutinizes the situation. In the future, she announces, we’ll have nanodrones to take care of nuclear waste like this. But for now, we’ll be old fashioned and do some preemptive surgery. Remember? You signed that treaty, a binding contract that allows us to proceed with impunity.

  You ask, Why me?

  Too much Kool-Aid. Refined plantation sugars. You’re an accomplice, collaborator, and coconspirator in your own destiny.

  You watch the surgical removal of your polyp morphing into serial versions of Godzilla, dumped memories and revised history screaming into the tube’s void. Never mind that Sacagawea has ripped out the last polyp of your precious dignity; maybe she’s saved your life for another half century. Why settle for less? Good luck. She snorts through the disposable face mask. I recommend a strict diet of native grasses, acorn meal, pine nuts, foraged blackberries.

  The colonoscope backs out, retracing its path with the same intensive scrutiny. No diverticulum, adenoma, or cancer will go undetected. The good news is there’s a four-foot limit to this tether, and it’s anchored to nothing except that camera and Sacagawea’s judgment, which you’ll just have to trust. Sacagawea recommends a repeat procedure every five years. If you live another fifty years, that means Sacagawea will have ten more chances to whip you into shape before you die.

  KonMarimasu

  Your relationship to popular culture and its discontents is on a need-toknow basis. This isn’t because you’ve risen above it, but because you’re too busy with the past (history) and the future (speculation) to pay attention to the present. What you don’t know about the past is an endless forking back road, but it might give clues to the future, so you continually run back there to catch up, and it’s impossible to catch up with today. O.K., this might be a big lie. Generally speaking, you’re clueless and always lagging at least a decade behind. You tell your son you’re on season two of The Wire. “That’s great, Mom,” he says with encouragement. You say, “I’m skipping to the last season. I get it; it’s about drugs. French Connection in Baltimore.” He says, “No, no, each season is different, a whole new cast. You have to see them all, or it won’t make sense.” “Oh.” You pause, then say, “It’s a little dated,” and look for the date on the DVD box. 2002. He probably wants to say, “Duh,” but he doesn’t. He’s a nice kid, and this was his generation’s version of your generation’s first generation of Star Trek. Even then, you didn’t really watch Star Trek when it was Star Trek; you let it seep into your conscious present at the time because otherwise you’d have looked really dumb when everyone else was beamed up.

  So when your sister comes over to your house and finds you cleaning and discarding stuff, she mentions something about Marie Kondo and hoarding. You query, “Marie who?” “Kondo,” she says, and you think about how maybe you knew a sansei named Kondo way back when. But then she says, “You don’t know who she is?” And to rub it in, “She’s translated into maybe forty languages, published all over the world.” When did this happen? “Geeze, it’s gotta be a couple a years ago.” She doesn’t say, Where have you been? She could, but she knows. You’ve been right here all this time with all your junk.

  Your sister opens a New York Times Magazine and points to a cute Japanese woman on a pink background in a pose with her finger pointed up and her foot raised behind her in a small kick. It’s the J pose, translated as “joy.” You both imitate what you figure is the pose for the kanji: joy. You scan the article. A book on tidying? “It’s great literature.” You smirk. “Say,” your sister reminds you, “that woman is laughing all the way to the bank.” Right; when have you ever laughed on your way to the bank? So you ask, “You’ve read it?” “Yeah,” she says, “picked it up in a pile at Costco for nine forty-nine.”

  Three million copies sold. A NYT Best Seller. You size up the title: the life-changing magic of tidying up: the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing. Everything is in lowercase, like it’s in hiragana, except the J in Japanese. Translated from the Japanese by Cathy Hirano. Where have you been? While you were dozing, the Japanese invented the art of tidying. And it’s not just an art; it’s a method. The KonMari method. Like the Suzuki method. Or Kumon, the math method. It’s like Zen and the art of fill-in-the-blank, except Kondo was a Shinto shrine maid. You think about Shinto shrines completely rebuilt every twenty years. Why not? A complete package for transformation. In the first pages you discover that satisfied clients of the KonMari method have realized dramatic changes in their lifestyle and life perspective, every sort of transformation from the loss of ten pounds to divorce. You read that the average amount of stuff discarded by Kondo’s clients can be from twenty to forty-five garbage bags per person. In a family of three: seventy bags. At some point she writes that the sum of all the stuff discarded by her clients would exceed twenty-eight thousand bags and the number of items, over one million. Knowing garbage (gomi) collection in Japan, this staggering number of garbage bags makes you reel. Where did it all go? Into the Tokyo Bay?

  You glance at the corner of the study that could be your Tokyo Bay, boxes filled with letters, photographs, artifacts, and piles of supporting documentation—a massive dumping place of the thing called your family archive. Since the death of all your dad’s siblings, your cousins have been KonMari-ing the last effects of saved memorabilia into boxes and mailing them to you. You open boxes that exude the musty air of basements and flutter up dust that could be a hundred years old. On page 115, Kondo writes, “People never retrieve the boxes they send ‘home.’ Once sent, they will never again be opened.” Of photographs, she suggests you remove them from their albums, look at each one by one, then toss. You handle the crumbling spines of old-fashioned, obsolete albums, and you understand the urge to never open these boxes, but it’s your own fault. Didn’t you agree to this noble preservation of family history? Besides, there could be treasure in them there boxes or the missing code to some family secret. You collate by date the old correspondence, handwritten letters often five pages long, and read through that period when your folks were shipped off to concentration camps with only what they could carry. Kondo says, “Letting go is even more important than adding,” but you know no one said, Thank you for bringing me joy or I love you before saying sayonara to all the rest of the stuff they couldn’t carry to camp.

  So you fly into Providence, Rhode Island, where your niece Lucy has packed seven humongous UPS boxes of her possessions acquired over eight years for send-off to L.A. The back of her Honda Fit is packed with more stuff, including a hand-built crate with a painting, an official USPS plastic box of sewing material, and a giant stainless steel bowl for kneading bread. You don’t ask about the KonMari spark of joy thing, but you figure, if you hold the bowl, you will feel it. There is some room left in the Fit for your rollerbag, backpack, rice cooker, and you. Your sister has charted a course across the country through seven of the ten Japanese American internment camps. The goal is to bring the Fit and Lucy home, but you’re calling this “the incarceration road trip.”

  First stop: DC. You meet Noriko Sanefuji, museum specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Noriko will curate the Executive Order 9066: Japanese Incarceration & WWII exhibit sche
duled to open in 2017 on the Annual Day of Remembrance. She shows Lucy and you the room and corridors, currently displaying an exhibit on guano, that will house the incarceration exhibit, explaining the complications of limited space, flow of information, and the politics of presentation. Then, you get special entry into the back rooms and basement of what’s known as America’s Attic. Noriko has arranged a small array of objects on a table she hopes to put on display. She pulls on black gloves and carefully caresses the pink crochet of a child’s dress, aged by wear and years. This dress was handmade by a mother in camp, and it is accompanied by a portrait photograph of a little girl in the same dress, standing with her extended family arranged formally in their barrack home. Noriko pulls forward another object, a cotton cloth embroidered with a thousand red knots, nickel and dime secured in the threads, and the words God Bless. An issei mother made this sen nin bari for her soldier son to be worn around his waist to protect him in battle. Each item is handled with gloved care and stored with protective cellophane in acid-free paper and boxes. You remember the ceremonial observance of Kondo’s method, plus her practical advice for storing the stuff you don’t toss: Don’t hang; fold. “Folding is fun.” She writes on page 74, “Japanese people quickly grab the pleasure that comes from folding clothes, almost as if they are genetically programmed for this task.” You note the sen nin bari, each fold remembered in a yellowed tinge, the sweat and grime of battle, the unspoken story of a soldier’s survival, a mother’s prayer.