by George Takei
We got off at Broadway and Fifth Street and started walking east on Fifth. After one block, the street’s character changed. We crossed a tree-shaded street of tall and imposing granite office buildings. There were many stylishly dressed men and only a few women. Daddy told us, “This is Spring Street, the financial center of Los Angeles. This is where men make the big money, and Broadway is where women spend the big money.”
Another block and another change. Here, there were more casually dressed men, and the women wore dresses much tighter than anything I had ever seen before. They had on high-heeled shoes made even higher by thick platform soles. There were lots of soldiers in many different uniforms—Army, Navy, and Marines. But these soldiers weren’t like the guards at camp. These were happy, laughing, relaxed soldiers. In fact, some of them were downright loose. They lurched about and leaned on each other’s shoulders. This street was vibrantly honky-tonk.
From open doorways I heard the sound of jukebox music wafting out, together with the rich, heavy aroma of alcoholic drinks. Neon marquees blazed on this street, too, but in front of these theaters were towering cutout posters of statuesque women with not a stitch on except for sparkley bits of ornaments placed on three strategic points of their bodies. Mama hurried us past these theaters. “Hayaku, hayaku, hurry up, hurry up,” she urged.
Another block farther and there were more changes. I was shocked to see people lying on the pavement, reeking of alcohol. A few more blocks, and we turned the corner onto a messy, crowded street called Wall Street. Disheveled men with bleary eyes stood leaning on building walls. I had never seen people like this before. They were weird—pitiful and scary at the same time. We rushed past a row of garbage cans, some overflowing onto the sidewalk. There was a stench of rotten food, and the smell of urine assaulted us from the dark, narrow recesses between the buildings. “Hayaku, hayaku.” Mama’s whispered exhortations to us now were almost frantic. But her face remained expressionless. We came to a grimy, three-story brick building with a deep orange neon sign that sizzled and flickered. It read, “Alta Hotel.”
“This is it,” Daddy announced. “We’re here. There are lots of other families from camp here,” he said reassuringly. Mama stopped for just the briefest moment, staring at the building, utterly stoic. Then she followed Daddy in.
We staggered down a darkened corridor behind him. Then Daddy started up a flight of stairs. A loud stamp emphasized each rising step he took. We kids were terrified. We had never been in a two-story building before. We had never gone up stairs in our lives. Was I expected to go up to that frightening height at the top of the stairs by myself? And carrying this suitcase to boot? Henry and Reiko flatly refused to go up. So, Mama stayed with us at the foot of the stairs.
We held our breaths as we watched Daddy stomp up and down the stairs, carrying a few pieces of luggage with each trip. After he had delivered them upstairs, he came down, and we all held hands. But Reiko absolutely refused to go up with us. She may have been five years old now, but she insisted on Mama carrying her. Only after Mama pleaded exhaustion did Reiko agree to let Daddy carry her up the stairs. With Daddy carrying our sister and holding my hand, and with me tightly grasping Henry’s hand and Mama holding his other, we started up. Warily, we took step by tentative step. I kept my eyes glued on each tread, but Mama’s were fixed upward. She seemed more apprehensive about what waited for us at the top. Daddy kept saying, “Carefully now. One step at a time. Up we go.” A fearful but reunited family worked its way up to a new home in a skid row hotel.
* * *
For Mama, again it was the noise and the smells—just like at Tule Lake. But it was stinkier and noisier here—constantly, not just at mealtimes. Even I didn’t like it.
Daddy had found for us two connected rooms, with a hot plate for light cooking, at the derelict Alta Hotel. The walls had brown stains so old that they were starting to fade to a fuzzy beige. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and torn. Everything about the rooms was tired and worn out. “It’s not the Biltmore,” Daddy joked, “but, remember, it’s only temporary. I promise.”
“Only temporary,” Mama repeated. I knew she really believed that because all during the time we were at Alta Hotel, she never made any effort to unpack her sewing machine.
For us kids, it wasn’t so much the grimy rooms or the noise or even the stench of urine that wafted up to our window from the alley below—our hardest adjustment to life at Alta Hotel was the stairs. Each trip up and down those stairs became a dreaded journey. Going down filled me with even greater trepidation than climbing up. I hugged the railing for dear life while feeling for the next precarious tread with my foot. My eyes were closed to keep from looking down that frightening height. When I sensed solid footing, I would shift my weight down, never letting go of the railing, then feel for the next solid footing below. I still recall the feeling of great accomplishment and even greater relief at the end of each harrowing descent.
Reiko never traversed the stairs by herself. She insisted on being carried. But even while being so royally transported, she kept her eyes tightly closed.
* * *
When Daddy returned to Los Angeles from Tule Lake, his most daunting challenge was to find a job. It was the immediate postwar period, and unemployment was starting to creep across the country. Finding a job in Los Angeles was next to impossible. To make matters worse, the hostility toward Japanese Americans was still at fever pitch. The only place where Daddy and his friends could find work was in Chinatown. Daddy had celebrated Christmas 1945 and the New Year’s Eve following in the kitchen of a chop suey restaurant in Chinatown washing dishes.
Even so, he had to consider himself fortunate. He had a job. There were others who were totally bereft. Many couldn’t speak English. Others were fearful for their safety and paralyzed with apprehension. These people appealed to their old block manager for help. So, Daddy found himself spending all his time off from his dishwashing job trying to find employment for others who were coming back from the internment camps. For the men, he found positions as gardeners, heavy laborers, or janitors. He placed the women as household domestics, kitchen helpers, and garment workers. Anything for survival.
By the time we joined him in Los Angeles, Daddy had left his dishwashing job in Chinatown and had opened a small employment agency on East First Street in Little Tokyo. I remember Mama and us kids walking from Alta Hotel on Wall Street all the way over to Daddy’s little office to help out. While Mama dusted and cleaned and arranged papers for Daddy, we sprawled on the floor and drew pictures on the back side of used employment forms.
Daddy was always either on the phone talking in English or talking in Japanese while handing slips of paper with job leads to the people who were seated in his office or waiting in the corridors outside. I remember wondering why the people were so profuse in their thanks to him. They bowed more deeply and longer than any Japanese etiquette required. Others clasped his hand with both hands, tighter and longer than a normal handshake. Some even had tears in their eyes.
Mama told us that these people were grateful because Daddy sacrificed so much to help them. But she herself didn’t sound too grateful for Daddy’s sacrifices. One day, she told us he had been sacrificing too much for too long. He would have to quit this business. It wasn’t until we were much older that we learned Mama had made him close up the employment business because Daddy was not collecting the commission for his services. He understood too achingly well the circumstances of the people he was assisting. He simply could not bring himself to ask for his fee from these desperately poor people just out of camp. Mama understood, too. She, however, could bring herself to demand of Daddy that he sacrifice for the family instead. Most of the returning internees by this time, she insisted, had found some kind of employment, however temporary. Somehow they were eating. Now, she said to Daddy, it was time to work at something that could have us eating as well. Mama insisted he make some money.
That money-making pursuit was to be the dry clea
ning business, familiar to Daddy from before the war. He borrowed some money from his older brother and a few friends, putting together the necessary capital. Mama said she could contribute with her sewing.
Daddy found an established dry cleaning store on North Soto Street in East Los Angeles with a small one-bedroom apartment attached in the back. We could live in that apartment; Daddy and Mama would save time and money on transportation getting to work, and the family would be together. It was an ideal arrangement. So, after six weeks on skid row in downtown Los Angeles, we moved again, this time into the largest Mexican American barrio in the United States.
GROWING UP DIFFERENT
5
Tacos and Mariachis
FROM THE NOISE, STENCH, AND the terror of the stairs of Alta Hotel, we moved into a seemingly boundless environment in East Los Angeles, to our modest new home at 1400 North Soto Street. The sprawling yard to the side had wide-leaf banana trees, fruit-bearing kumquat trees, and a big, old, gnarled apricot tree in which Henry and I built a secret tree house. A wide bed of ice plants tumbled down the side embankment from the yard to the sidewalk. Across Soto Street we had a sweeping green municipal park named Hazzard Park, so named not as a warning for the kind of as activities that took place there, but after a long-forgotten city father, a councilman named John Hazzard.
We now had the space to have pets again. Our first dog was a frisky, short-haired stray the color of peanut butter. We named her Skippy after the brand name of our favorite food. But, abruptly, she was taken from us by an auto accident on busy North Soto Street. As if by fate, another dog came into our lives—a dog we just could not turn away. She was a mongrel that had the bearing of a pedigreed breed. She had the long coat and bone structure of an Irish setter, but she was black with streaks of brown on her side. And over her soulful eyes, she had two brown dots the color of peanut butter. She was the spitting image of Blackie, our dog in camp!
Henry, although he was seven years old and should have known better, really believed that this dog was Blackie and had followed us all the way down from Tule Lake. But Daddy, Mama, and I could see that this dog was a bit younger and smaller than our old beloved pet. We all tried to think of a name for this new addition to the family, but, despite our best efforts, we always found ourselves calling her Blackie. We decided to accept destiny: She became our new Blackie.
Almost as if to make up for all the years before Blackie with no pet, Daddy and Mama let us continue to add to our growing menagerie. For Easter, they bought us a pair of bunny rabbits. A neighbor gave us a giant land turtle. Our uncle, who had relocated in Salt Lake City after camp but had subsequently moved back to Los Angeles, gave us a pair of ducklings. We even added two baby sparrows that Daddy rescued when a windstorm brought down their nest. We kids took turns feeding their voracious appetites. We had just been taken to the Clyde Beatty Circus when the two baby sparrows joined our family, so we named our two birds Clyde and Beatty. Rather than a circus, we could have named our little menagerie the Takei Family Zoo.
* * *
Daddy and Mama tried to create as normal an environment for us as they could. But “normalcy” was, for us kids, a constant series of new discoveries. When Reiko was given a nice, yellow banana and told it was a delicious treat, she bit into the whole, unpeeled fruit and decided she didn’t like it. Cheerios breakfast cereal, “shaped like little letter O’s,” as the radio commercials touted, was as fascinating to play with as it was good to eat. Henry and I pasted them onto some of our school assignments, and Reiko made edible bracelets and necklaces out of them.
The chore of creating yellow butter out of white margarine by mixing the reddish-orange liquid from tiny cellophane packets was something we were all eager to volunteer for. And the wonder of all “normal” wonders was that goodies were brought right to the front door by vendors in trucks, some of them musical.
I remember how anxiously we looked forward to the tinkle of the music from the Good Humor ice cream truck or the cheery whistle of the Helm’s bakery truck carrying treats like chocolate cupcakes and flaky raspberry tarts. The iceman actually came stomping into the kitchen with a giant block of ice balanced on his back held by a big steel tong, always seeming to know when the old block in the icebox was almost melted down.
An extra special treat of “normalcy” was Sunday morning. That was when Daddy and Mama didn’t have to get up early. They stayed in bed, and we all got to crawl in with them. Daddy read the funny pages of the Los Angeles Examiner to us. Then, while Mama got breakfast ready, Henry and Reiko walked on Daddy’s back. Henry was small for his age, even smaller than Reiko, so he got to walk on Daddy with her. I didn’t, because Daddy said I was too big and too heavy. Daddy would lie there on his stomach, grunting and groaning in pleasure with each wobbly step they took. After the “walk on Daddy” ritual, it was a Sunday breakfast of pancakes with syrup poured from a tin container shaped like a little log cabin. I remember those Sunday mornings so fondly. I know they were Daddy’s and Mama’s efforts to get us back to normal living, but to me those Sunday mornings were abnormally special.
But try as they might to create a “normal” environment for us, we knew that we were different. When we enrolled at Murchison Street School, we were the oldest ones in our grades. All three of us were behind in our schooling because of camp—I was almost nine years old and in the second grade.
We were the only Japanese—in fact, the only Asian—family in a practically all Mexican neighborhood. My friend across the street and down a ways was named Onorato. In the house across the empty lot from him lived the three brothers Chi Chi, Lata, and Pelon. The Gonzales family lived next door to us. We shopped at a neighborhood grocery store called Venegas’. We heard Spanish spoken all around us. To be normal in our neighborhood was to be Mexican.
I loved this normalcy of our new barrio neighborhood. Every experience was a constant procession of new sensations and wonderful discoveries. Once, walking home from school with Onorato, I was invited over to his house to be shown his collection of dog cards. These were cards of various breeds of pedigreed dogs that came wrapped in each loaf of Langendorf bread. “I got one that looks just like your Blackie,” he said. “You wanna see?”
Onorato’s house was only half a block away from ours, but I’d never been in it. I followed him to the back of his house, and he held the screen door open for me. He ushered me into a kitchen warm with enticing aromas. We were greeted in Spanish by a short, plump lady. I knew she was his mother because he called her Mama—the same name we called our mother. But unlike us, he said “Mama” with the emphasis on the second “ma.” Then he pointed to me and said something in Spanish that ended with “George.” I guessed that he had introduced me, so I extended my hand and said, “Hello, Mrs. Moreno.” Wiping her hand on her apron, she chortled and said something that sounded happy and welcoming and shook my hand.
The kitchen was redolent with the comforting smell of food cooking, something made of corn, I guessed, and something else more savory. Onorato brought out his cards and spread them on the red Formica table. “Here,” he said, pointing to one card. “Don’t he look like your Blackie?” He did, but he was the wrong color. It was a picture of a silky-haired dog like Blackie, but it was completely reddish brown, not black.
“He’s not black like Blackie, but, yeah, he sorta looks like him,” I agreed.
“The card says ‘Irish setter,’ ” he noted. “So that means Blackie’s part Irish. Eee ho,” Onorato exclaimed, singing out the last part slowly, almost lyrically.
“Eee ho” was an expression I heard frequently among my new friends. From the way it was used, I guessed it suggested something impressive or admirable. “Eee ho wale,” I learned, was an even stronger version.
Then his mother said something I couldn’t understand. The way she spoke sounded so melodic. The words just rolled off her tongue as if she were singing.
Mrs. Moreno set down a plate in front of us containing a single steaming pancake. But t
his wasn’t a pancake like my mama made on Sunday mornings. It was steamy with the fragrance of corn. This must be what I had smelled when we walked in. “Tortilla,” Onorato informed me. Then his mother dipped a big spoon into a bowl containing a thick brownish paste. “Frijoles,” Onorato announced. I realized that, actually, he was repeating for me what his mother had already said in her musical, accented Spanish.
She plopped a spoonful of the pale brown paste on the yellowish pancake and spread it around. Then she dropped on a dollop of red liquid. “Salsa roja,” Onorato repeated. Two words in Spanish this time. This red liquid chili, this salsa roja, smelled pungently spicy. Then she rolled up the pancake and with a knife cut it through its plump middle. A little bit of the brown paste oozed out both ends. With a genial smile she held up the plate with her exotic creation. I took one piece and waited so I could watch Onorato manage his. He bit down with gusto and with a deft contortion of his tongue caught the overflow oozing from the opposite end just as it was about to drop off. I wasn’t as quick, and the overflow dribbled onto my fingers.
The taste was fantastic! The soft earthiness of the frijoles was delicious with the spicy-sweet tang of the salsa roja, all wrapped in the warm corn flavor of this wonderful pancake called “tortilla.” Onorato told me this delicious concoction was a “burrito.” I loved it, and I couldn’t wait to tell my family about it. Better yet, I had to get my mama to cook like Onorato’s Mamá.
It wasn’t long before our kitchen was exuding the same earthy aromas that I first came across in Onorato’s mother’s kitchen. And Mama became a wonderful cook of various Mexican dishes. Her tacos became our favorite. Henry, Reiko, and I had contests to see who could eat more of Mama’s tacos than anyone else. I usually won with four.
