Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  She did her duty without complaint, but by the end of the week she was determined that there had to be more to her life than this. Her father lived and breathed farming. But she would never be more than a workhand here. At night she pored over the classified advertisements in the Sacramento Bee and the Japanese New World-Sun, looking for work, any kind of work. But their pages were bleak with heartbreaking pictures of long breadlines and places like “Pipe City” in Oakland, where the homeless lived inside six-foot-wide construction pipes—men, women, and children sleeping on cold concrete, eating only a thin mulligan stew made with water and whatever castoff or half-eaten vegetables could be salvaged from garbage cans.

  The day after high school graduation she put on a pretty dress and began pounding the pavement—though in Florin the “pavement” was still largely wood and dirt. The town’s business district was small, but she doggedly went from store to store, inquiring about work at Akiyama’s Fish Market, Kato’s Grocery, Tanikawa’s General Store, Nishi Basket Factory, Noda’s Ice Cream Parlor, Sasaki Tofu Shop, Ogata’s General Store, and finally Nakajima Restaurant, where lunch patrons were eating dishes of steaming noodles, teriyaki, rice, and vegetables.

  She noted a tall, lanky Nisei man in his early twenties, wearing a newly starched white shirt and black trousers, standing behind the cash register; she worked up her resolve, approached him, and asked to see Mr. Nakajima.

  The young man said, “I’m sorry, he’s not in just now. Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a job.”

  “Ah,” the Nisei said sympathetically, “I thought I recognized the look.”

  “What look?”

  “No offense, I just meant that I’ve been in your situation myself. But I’m sorry to say we have all the staff we need.”

  Ruth sighed. “Are you sure? Do you need anyone to wash the dishes? Mop the floor?”

  “No. Sorry,” he said gently. Then: “Been doing this all morning?”

  She nodded.

  “Why don’t you take a load off your feet. Would you like a cup of coffee? On the house.”

  She hadn’t expected that. “Yes, thank you, that’s very kind.”

  “Have a seat at that table for two by the wall and I’ll get it for you.”

  Dispirited, Ruth went over to the table and slumped into the chair. The morning had been a total waste, and by the time she got home, word would probably have traveled back to her parents that she was out shaming them by looking for work. She was weighing whether to get a cab to Elk Grove’s business district when the young man came over and put down a cup of hot black coffee in front of her along with a slice of strawberry pie.

  “Thought you might like something to eat after your travels,” he said.

  She looked up at him. “That’s really very nice of you, but—I’m not destitute, I can pay. I’m just looking for a job, that’s all.” That pie did look awfully good, though. “Thank you, Mister—”

  “Harada. Frank Harada.” He smiled. There was a kindness in his eyes, and a pleasing symmetry to his features.

  “I’m Ruth Watanabe. You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “No, I hail from Fresno.”

  “Wow, you’re a long way from home.” She took up a forkful of pie. “What are you doing marooned in Florin?”

  He laughed, then gestured to the chair opposite her. “May I?”

  “Yes. Sure,” she said, surprised but a little pleased.

  He sat down and said matter-of-factly, “My parents had a farm outside Fresno—fifteen acres. We raised peaches, almonds, grapes. We lost it in the stock market crash. Bank foreclosure.”

  “Oh,” she said softly, “I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It’s worked out okay. Better than for most folks these days. My otōsan and my oldest brother got work at a vineyard in Visalia. My sisters were already married. The rest of us scattered like birds, finding work where we could. I’ve worked on farms in Salinas, Stockton … got jobs in hotels and restaurants in Walnut Grove, Loomis, and now here.”

  His voice was a mellow baritone, and it softened the hard edges and lonely spaces of the story he was telling.

  “But you’re so far from your family.” Suddenly the notion of getting away from her father’s old-fashioned ideas didn’t seem quite so important.

  “That was the hardest thing to get used to. I miss them every day. But you’ve got to go where the work is, not where you’d like it to be.” He lowered his voice. “And I’ve managed to save some money. When the economy’s a little better, I’d like to open my own restaurant.”

  “Maybe Mr. Nakajima will sell you this one,” Ruth suggested. “He’s about a hundred years old, isn’t he?”

  Frank laughed. “And he’ll probably still be here in another hundred. But I don’t want a restaurant like this. Look around this town, at how many Nisei there are—do they only want to eat Japanese food? No, they like hamburgers and hot dogs and milkshakes, just like their hajukin friends.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “I was just thinking how I feel sometimes like I’m living in nineteenth-century Japan.”

  “So what about you? What do you want to do?”

  Ruth started to say one thing, then decided on another:

  “I’d like to … work at a restaurant like yours,” she said with a smile.

  “You’re hired!” he declared with a smile and a snap of his fingers.

  She laughed. It was the first time she’d laughed all day.

  “Well. Thank you for the coffee and the pie, it was delicious. Are you sure I can’t pay you?”

  “Like I said, on the house.”

  She thanked him again and stood. He got to his feet as well.

  She thrilled to realize that she was looking directly into his eyes.

  * * *

  They saw each other, surreptitiously, for several months before Ruth worked up her nerve to tell her parents—neither of whom, as it turned out, had been fooled. “We were wondering, butterfly, when you were going to tell us,” Etsuko said with a smile, and Ruth was pleasantly reminded that although her parents may have been traditional in some ways, they were open-minded in other, more important ways.

  Frank wore a brand-new suit to dinner and, coming from a large family, clearly felt at ease with the extended Watanabe clan: Stanley was away at school, but there were Horace and Rose and their two sons; Jiro and Nishi; Akira and Tamiko and their children; and Ralph. Jiro was gregarious, as ever, and Ralph joked, “So, the mystery man finally appears. I was beginning to think Sis was dating The Shadow.” Ruth’s parents mostly listened—to Frank’s stories about taking work up and down the coast for the past four years—with expressions that were friendly and cordial. But Ruth had seen the same cordiality on the faces of Freddy Kurahara’s parents, and she couldn’t help fearing what hidden feelings might be lurking behind them.

  But at the end of the meal, Taizo spoke up.

  “It is not an easy thing to walk away from everything one knows and make a life for oneself far from family,” he said to Frank. “I did the same in coming to America.”

  “I hope to make a new life—and family—with Dai,” Frank replied boldly, “should that meet with your approval.”

  Ruth was afraid to breathe in the short silence until her father spoke.

  “Dai is our only daughter,” Taizo said, “and a daughter by choice. We feel we could not have chosen better.”

  He glanced at Etsuko, then back to Frank.

  “It is good for us to see that she too could not have chosen better.”

  Her father smiled with more pride and happiness than Ruth had ever seen on his face, and her heart soared.

  The wedding took place at Florin Buddhist Church, with Frank in his new suit and Ruth wearing a white American-style wedding dress her mother had sewn using bolts of imported Japanese silk—something they could not have dreamed of affording ten years before. The wedding colors were green and white, reminding Ruth of strawberry blossoms in April. />
  The wedding banquet was held, fittingly, at Nakajima Restaurant.

  Within a year, Mr. Nakajima had some new competition in town.

  Chapter 7

  1941

  “Frank’s Diner” may not have met the dictionary definition of a diner—“a prefabricated restaurant in the shape of a railroad car”—but it measured up in every other respect. Prefabs were pricey, at least ten thousand bucks; it had been cheaper for Frank to rent a narrow, one-story building in downtown Florin and remodel it with the help of Ruth and her brothers. Frank painted the sign himself, red letters on white, and below the name, that ubiquitous imprimatur of the modern age, the Coca-Cola logo. Inside it boasted a modern curved marble service counter ringed by stainless steel stools with red vinyl cushions; behind the counter were gleaming panels of patterned chrome, a soda fountain, toaster, Sunbeam Mixmaster, glass displays showcasing five flavors of pie, and a blackboard listing the day’s specials:

  BREAKFAST SPECIAL, SERVED ALL DAY: BACON OR HAM & EGGS 30¢

  BLUE PLATE LUNCH SPECIAL W/FRENCH FRIED POTATOES & COFFEE: RIB STEAK 55¢

  LAMB OR PORK CHOPS 40¢, HAMBURGER STEAK 30¢

  DESSERT SPECIALS, FROSTED MALTED 10¢, FRUIT PIES 20¢ (A LA MODE 30¢)

  On this busy afternoon, the first Saturday of December, the diner was packed: every seat at the counter was taken, as were the half dozen red vinyl booths along the wall, the patrons a mix of Nisei and Caucasian. The radio announced some rare good news from Europe: Hitler’s offensive against Moscow was failing and German forces were in retreat. Frank was working the cash register as two Nisei waitresses took customers’ orders and called them out to the fry cook in back, his ruddy, sweaty face intermittently visible through a small window behind the counter:

  “Adam and Eve on a raft, java with sand, hold the cow!”

  “Bowl of red, dog biscuits in the alley!”

  “Zeppelins in a fog!”

  The cook, Vince, swiftly prepared two poached eggs on toast with coffee, sugar, no milk; a bowl of chili, crackers on the side; and sausages in mashed potatoes.

  Ruth sat at a small table in the back of the kitchen, going over the books—she served as the diner’s purchase and inventory manager. She and Frank had found Vince in the desolation of Oakland’s Pipe City, where they had gone looking to hire a couple of busboys. “If we’re going to give someone a job,” Frank reasoned, “I’d like to give it to someone who really needs it. Wouldn’t you?” This was one of the reasons Ruth loved him, and she readily agreed. After they’d found two suitable busboys, the grizzled, unwashed Vince came up and mentioned he’d been a damn good short-order cook before the Crash. They brought him home, cleaned him up, and let him loose in the empty restaurant’s kitchen, where he expertly juggled half a dozen common menu items simultaneously—and they tasted good too. They quickly found him a room in a nearby boardinghouse. The only thing he couldn’t make well was coffee, so it fell to Frank to put on a decent pot of java before he opened up each morning.

  Ruth closed the books and went up to Vince as he was sliding the chili bowl into the order window: “Vince, you make this look so easy.”

  “Yeah, I’m a regular Fred Astaire. So where the hell’s my Ginger?”

  She laughed and went to join Frank at the cash register.

  “Profits up another three percent this week,” she told him. “I’m beginning to think this may be a going concern.”

  “Yeah? Can I get a raise?”

  “Sorry. All the revenues have already been invested in children’s shoes.” She gave him a goodbye kiss. “Speaking of which, I have to pick up Donnie and Peggy at my folks’ place. See you at closing time.”

  “Y’know, lots of diners are open twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Honey, we’ve been operating in the black for two years; adding a third shift would put us right back in the red.”

  He shrugged. “Someday,” he said wistfully.

  Ruth drove their 1937 Oldsmobile to her parents’ farm. Etsuko was standing on the edge of a strawberry field, holding one-year-old Peggy in her arms as three-year-old Donnie ran up and down the irrigation ditches—chased by none other than his Uncle Ralph, taking a break from work.

  “Hard to say which one’s the bigger kid,” Ruth said. Etsuko laughed.

  “Mama, mama!” Peggy cried, arms outstretched upon seeing Ruth.

  Ruth took her from Etsuko and cooed, “Hey, sweetie pie, how are you? Did you have fun with Obāsan today?”

  “Mom! Mom!” Now that he had seen her, Donnie came blowing like a gale toward her, followed close behind by Ralph, who arrived breathless.

  “You’ve got yourself a budding Jesse Owens here, Sis,” he said.

  “Don’t I know it.” Ruth turned to Etsuko. “You and Otōsan are still coming for lunch Sunday?”

  “Yes, of course. Church services start at nine-thirty. We will be at your house by eleven-thirty.”

  “Our services start a little earlier, we’ll be back by ten-thirty.” Ruth heard her mother’s unvoiced sigh of disappointment that her grandchildren were being raised not as Buddhists but in Frank’s Methodist faith. To them it represented another step away from Japanese tradition, but they were mollified that the children had at least been given Japanese middle names—Peggy Mei and Donald Naoki—and even respected Ruth and Frank’s preference that the children be addressed by their American names. “They are Americans, after all,” Taizo had told his wife, “and because they are, life in America will be easier for them than it has been for us.”

  Ruth kissed Etsuko on the cheek. “See you tomorrow. And thanks for watching the gremlins.” She smiled at Ralph. “Get back to work, you bum.”

  “I think I liked it better,” Ralph said, “when you called me Niisan.”

  Frank and Ruth were renting a two-bedroom house close to downtown Florin, in a neighborhood home to both white and Nisei families. As Ruth pulled into their driveway, their amiable next-door neighbor, Jim Russell—a salaried manager at the Florin Fruit Growers Association—was draping strings of Christmas lights from his eaves while his two young kids chased each other around the front yard, dueling with water pistols.

  As Ruth got out of the car, Jim waved and unexpectedly broke into song: “On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me—” And he held up a tangled snarl of wires and lights.

  Ruth laughed. “Frank’s getting that for Christmas too.”

  Donnie had nodded off in the backseat but awoke upon hearing the enthusiastic barking of their dog, Slugger. Ruth let the kids out of the car, then opened the gate in the fence, and watched with amusement as their sixty-pound black Labrador—as tall as Donnie and twice as heavy—leaped happily up and down while knowing enough not to tackle him to the ground.

  “Okay, everybody inside!” Ruth gave Donnie a quick bath and tucked him into bed. Peggy was already fast asleep in her crib. Slugger was stretched out between them, a sentinel guarding them as he did every night. She gazed at her children’s sleeping faces, still marveling that they were hers—that she now had a husband, a son, a daughter, a home of her own. Things that once had seemed so out of reach, now safely in her embrace.

  * * *

  As Etsuko finished dressing for church, Taizo, in his Sunday suit, looked out their bedroom window at the lush acres of green surrounding them, the house rising like an island on a placid inland sea. Two very different cycles of life coexisted in those fields, and this past week had been spent carefully tending each: pruning and weeding the slow-growing grapevines, whose life was counted in years, not months; and cutting back the strawberry plants’ prolific runners that, left unchecked, would propagate new plants like weeds, leeching water and strength from the mother plants. It was a delicate balance, but if you maintained it correctly, the land flourished and repaid your stewardship richly. Taizo’s heart swelled with pride: this was his land not by deed but by deeds, by right of the labor and love he put into it.

  After church services, Taizo drove the t
ruck to Ruth and Frank’s house. He noted a car carrying several young white men coming from the opposite direction; as they passed the men glowered at them and one yelled:

  “Goddamn Japs!”

  The words, dripping in vitriol, hung in the air like an electrical charge after a lightning strike. Such overt racism was rare in Florin these days; even the elementary school had been reintegrated two years ago.

  “Hooligans from Sacramento,” Taizo said dismissively.

  But when they entered the Haradas’ home, Ruth and Frank’s ashen faces shook Taizo even more than the racial epithet.

  “Papa,” Ruth said, “there’s bad news. It just came over the radio. Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  Etsuko gasped. Taizo was incredulous: “Pearl Harbor? In Honolulu?”

  Frank gestured for them to sit down in front of the console radio in the living room. “Where are the children?” Etsuko asked Ruth.

  “Peggy’s napping and Donnie’s in the backyard playing with Slugger. I asked him to stay out there while we talked with Grandma and Grandpa.”

  The four of them sat listening as the CBS program The World Today brought the latest news from its correspondent in Washington, D.C.:

  “… attack was apparently made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of O’ahu. A Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor naturally would mean war…”

  Taizo sat, disbelieving, as the correspondent went on to report that Japanese warplanes were also bombing Manila in the Philippines and the Japanese Navy was invading Thailand. Taizo was not naive; he had read about Japan’s brutal aggression in China and the South Pacific. But this was almost unimaginable. The country of his birth attacking not just his adopted home but the islands that had welcomed him with aloha and opportunity.

  Yet just as frightening to him were the words of the young white men who had passed them on the road.