by David Suzuki
I guess the shot of adrenaline from fear is why little boys do such things, but I did not enjoy being terrified for my life. We bolted out of that room and into my place and under the bed, trembling and trying to stifle our heavy panting. I doubt the farmer even came into the building, but I was absolutely convinced he was going to kill us. A long while later, we finally crept out of the room, and you can bet we never repeated that stunt. Years later, I apologized for the prank to an audience in the Doukhobor Centre in Castlegar and thanked the Doukhobor community for its support of Japanese Canadians during those trying years.
As the war was drawing to a close, those who renounced their Canadian citizenship and were to receive a one-way ticket to Japan were separated from those who chose to stay in Canada. There was strong coercion among camp members to demonstrate their anger at Canada by signing up to “repatriate” to Japan, and more than 95 percent did. Those who did not sign up were castigated as inu, or “dogs.” My mother met regularly with a group of women to socialize and gossip, but after word got out that we had chosen to remain in Canada, someone in the group insulted her, nobody spoke up for her, and she never went back. To her death, she would not tell my father who had made the remark or what had been said. I have never forgotten that. My mother, one of the gentlest, kindest people I have known, a person who had had to work hard all her life, who would never have knowingly hurt another person, had been deeply wounded by people she considered friends. One of my worst characteristics is that I find it hard to forgive and forget insults and hurts, and this expulsion of my mother further estranged me from the Japanese “community.”
Once the first boatloads of people (including my mother's parents and her older sister's family) arrived in Japan, word quickly came back to Canada that conditions were terrible. Japan had been flattened by bombing, and the people were further demoralized by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to finally prompt unconditional surrender. Food, clothing, and shelter were extremely hard to find, and people struggled to survive.
At that point, those who had renounced their citizenship began to change their minds and clamored to stay in Canada. They remained in the B.C. camps for so long as they fought deportation to Japan that the government finally allowed them to stay in Canada and resettle wherever they wanted. Many chose to return to the B.C. coast, and Dad was very bitter about that. He hadn't wanted to leave B.C., yet he had been evicted from the province, whereas those who had said they wanted to leave B.C. and Canada ended up staying. My father contemptuously referred to them as “repats” and said they were gutless. First they did not have the strength to decide to stay in Canada and fight for their rights, and then they chickened out of moving to Japan.
After we said we would remain in Canada, we were moved from Slocan to Kaslo, a small town on Kootenay Lake less than a hundred miles from our Slocan Valley camp. For the first time, I attended a school with lots of white kids. But now they seemed alien, and I shied away from them, content to explore this new area of lakes and mountains by myself. The valley in the Kootenay region was rich in pine mushrooms, and that fall I learned where they were likely to be found and how to recognize the bulges on the ground, beneath trees, that indicated where the matsutake were. We filled potato sacks with them and my mother bottled the fragrant mushrooms. Today matsutake pickers do a thriving business exporting them to Japan. Kootenay Lake had a population of kokanee, which are landlocked miniature sockeye salmon. We took the Moyie, a passenger stern-wheeler steamboat, to Lardo, a landing at the head of the lake, where we witnessed a spectacular kokanee run. Like their oceangoing relatives, kokanee turn bright red at spawning time, and the river bottom was carpeted with undulating scarlet ribbons.
One summer day in Kaslo in 1945, I was in the communal bath with an old Japanese man when bells began to peal. “Damme! Maketa!” he exclaimed, meaning “That's bad! We've been beaten!” I didn't know what he meant by “we,” because as far as I was concerned, my side must have won. I dressed and rushed out to the street, where people were celebrating and setting off firecrackers. I edged closer to the crowd, hoping someone might hand me a firecracker. Instead, a big boy kicked my behind and shouted, “Get lost, Jap. We beat you!” That's why the old man was rooting for the other side. The evacuation and the boy had shown me I was not a Canadian to the government or to him; I was still a “Jap.”
WE FINALLY LEFT KASLOON a long train ride across the prairies, all the way to a suburb of Toronto where Japanese Canadians were kept in a hotel until we found places to go. Dad eventually located a job working as a laborer on a hundred-acre peach farm in Essex County, the southernmost part of Canada. We were supplied with a house, and my sisters and I attended a one-room schoolhouse in Olinda. There were probably thirty students, many of German background, but they were white and had not suffered the kind of discrimination we had felt during the war. My sisters and I were the only non-white kids in the area.
On the first day of school in Olinda, I was so shy that I couldn't look any other students in the eye. When recess came, I was stunned when the other children came up to us and dragged us into games and kept us at the center of all the fun. I later learned that our teacher, Miss Donovan, had told all the other students that my sisters and I were coming and that we were to be welcomed into their midst. What a wonderful gift she gave us.
I loved that year in Olinda, but we moved to the town of Leamington the next year when Dad found a job in a dry-cleaning plant. It was 1946, and when we arrived there, some Leamingtonians boasted to me that “no colored person has ever stayed here beyond sunset.” We were the first “colored” family to move into the town, and we were nervous.
In postwar Ontario, Japanese Canadians were sprinkled across the province. In southern Ontario, a handful of families worked on farms, and they kept in touch and became the social circle for my parents. The adults would get together periodically to share stories, offer help, and feast on some of the treasured Japanese food prepared for the occasion. Dad became active in the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, a group that sprang up to help people settle in their new province and to begin the long struggle for redress and apology. Meeting other Japanese Canadians filled me with mixed emotions because I still remembered the way I had been treated in the camps, but the hormones surging through my body spurred me to check out the only possible dating opportunities—Japanese Canadian girls.
Children are wonderful. They are blind to color or race until they learn from their parents or peers what to notice and how to respond. I was playing with one of my chums when my father came along on a bicycle. I called out to him, and he waved and cycled on past. My friend was dumbfounded and asked, “How do you know him?” When I replied, “Because he's my dad, stupid,” he gasped, “But he's a Chink!”
In grade 6 at Mill Street School in Leamington, my teacher was a woman after whom the school is now named. I was an obedient, well-behaved student, so it was a shock one day when, as I was sitting quietly in class, she ordered me to get out. I stumbled into the corridor, stunned and humiliated, and trembled with apprehension as I sat on a seat. After an interminable wait, the teacher came out. “But what did I do?” I stammered. She retorted, “You were smirking at me. I know what you people are thinking. Now get back in there, and don't ever let me catch you looking at me like that again!” I was completely confused but seething with an anger I had to hide.
From that experience, I understood that my physical appearance must be threatening to people like her. Ignorance and the relentless propaganda during the war, portraying buck-toothed, slant-eyed “Japs” in the cockpit of a plane on a kamikaze mission, must have caused mystery and fear just as today's image of a Muslim extremist strapped with explosives. Every time I looked in a mirror, I saw that stereotype. To this day, I don't like the way I look on television and don't like watching myself on my own TV programs.
One of our fellow students at Mill Street School was a Native boy named Wayne Hillman. I often wonder what happen
ed to him, but back then I envied him because he seemed so carefree. He always had a smile on his face, and he was the personification of laid-back. I'm sure he suffered abuse from our bigoted teacher, too.
I graduated from Mill Street School to enter grade 9 in the only high school in Leamington. I think I was the only Asian enrolled; if anything, I was like a mascot or an oddity. I loved the school and begged my parents to allow me to finish my first year there when they decided to move to London, about one hundred miles away. They arranged for me to stay at a farm run by friends, the Shikaze family, some five miles from Leamington. In return for doing chores before and after school and on weekends, I was given room and board. I even learned some primitive Japanese, because Mr. and Mrs. Shikaze were Issei and spoke Japanese at home. At Leamington High, many students were farm kids who were bused to school, so I fitted in.
Just a few years ago, I happened on a Leamington High yearbook and was amazed to find one of my poems in it:
A WALK IN THE SPRING
David Suzuki
(Junior Poem, Phoebus, Leamington High School Yearbook 1950)
Let us take a walk through the wood,
While we are in this imaginative mood;
Let us observe Nature's guiding hand,
Throughout this scenic, colorful land.
Along a rocky ledge there dwells
A fairy with her sweet blue-bells;
Singing and dancing through the day,
Enchanting all things in her delicate way.
A brilliant bluejay scolds a rabbit,
Lecturing him on his playful habit.
A lovely butterfly flits through the air,
As though in this world it hasn't a care.
The many birds give their mating calls,
Lovelier than the Harp in Tara's Halls;
A wary doe and her speckled fawn,
Creep silently along on their moss-
covered lawn.
Water cress line the banks of a stream
That is the answer to a fisherman's dream;
Teeming with trout and large black bass
That scoot for cover as we noisily pass.
The V-line of the geese reappear,
Showing that spring is actually here;
The swampy marshes are full of duck,
In the water and on the muck.
The air is filled with a buzzing sound,
From above and from the ground;
The air is heavy with the scent of flowers,
Of new buds and evergreen bowers.
Thus precedes Nature's endless show,
Of all things, both friend and foe,
Living in her vast domain,
And under her wise rule and reign.
Thus within her kingdom lies,
Filling scenes for hungry eyes;
Also treasures of this natural world,
Which, if watched carefully, will be
unfurled.
DAD'S BROTHERS AND PARENTS had moved to London in southwestern Ontario during the war and missed the incarceration. After the war's end in 1945, they started a construction company that began to do very well in the postwar building boom. They had urged my father to join them in London, where the schools were better and he could work for them. In Leamington, Mom and Dad had managed to make a living, supplemented by what my sisters and I earned working on farms during the summer, but they were just getting by and had precious little to save. When we moved to London, we were still destitute.
Leamington was a town of perhaps ten thousand people, so when I arrived in London, which had close to one hundred thousand residents in 1950, it seemed a huge metropolis. I really felt like a hick. My cousins had attended elementary school there and were fully accepted into the community; Dad, though he himself hadn't wanted to leave his beloved B.C., had advised his kin to go east when the war started and thus had saved them from much of the distress of being Japanese in Canada. Out east, Japanese were rare, more of an oddity than a perceived threat. Dan and Art, my cousins, hung out exclusively with white kids and even went to parties where, they told me, they played spin the bottle! Wow, kissing a white girl was inconceivable to me, and I was so envious of them.
My uncles helped my family get on its feet. I don't know what the financial arrangements were, but Dad worked for his younger brothers as a trimmer, doing the fine carpentry of hanging doors, trimming along the floor and windows, and building kitchen cabinets. Years later, his outgoing personality made him perfect to sell insurance on the homes built by Suzuki Brothers Construction. In the first months after our family moved to London, my parents and sisters lived with my Uncle Minoru's family. I missed out on that by remaining with the Shikazes near Leamington, but I heard that it was cramped in that house in London and that the inevitable tensions arose between the families.
By the time I arrived in London, my parents had purchased a lot and the brothers had pitched in and helped to build a small house. When I moved in, the roof had been shingled, but the outside walls were sheathed only with raw plywood, the partitions inside were bare, and the floor was simply subfloor. The house was still being built, but the family had already moved in, covering the partitions with cardboard from boxes. Over the months that followed, as we all worked and contributed our earnings to the family coffer, we gradually bought the materials needed to complete the interior and then the outside. I had begun working as a framer for Suzuki Brothers Construction and loved it, working on weekends, holidays, and during the summers. I learned enough to frame, make sidewalks, build a fruit cellar, and pour a concrete slab at the entrance to our house. It took about two years to complete the dwelling. My sisters and I were embarrassed to be living in an unfinished house and would never invite anyone over.
Dad finally bought a car, the first in the family after the end of the war—a 1929 Model A Ford. It was in good shape, and today anyone would be thrilled to own one, but in the early 1950s, it was humiliating for a teenager. Whenever we drove anywhere, I would slump down, hoping no one I knew would see me. To make matters worse, in the autumn Dad went out to collect the leaves that had piled up on the streets and then been squashed into thick clumps as cars drove over them—perfect mulch for the garden. He made a box that could be hung on the rear bumper of the old car, and after dinner I would have to accompany him as he drove around to find an especially rich area of crushed leaves. We shoveled them into the box, drove home, and dumped the leaves in a pile in the front yard. The next day, after school, it was my task to wheel the leaves to the back of the house, where I would dig trenches in the garden and bury the soggy mess as compost. I lived in fear that I would be recognized as I toiled beside Dad under streetlights, piling leaves into the box at the back of the Model A. I admire Dad's gardening obsession now, but as a teenager, I found it excruciating. Like any boy going through puberty, I had sex on the brain, but I was too shy to talk with others about it. Encountering fellow students on buses or walking along a street, I would do my best to avoid having to make conversation by sitting alone or crossing the street.
At Leamington High School, I had felt comfortable in the student body and had even won the junior oratorical contest. But London Central Collegiate Institute was a different matter. Most students move to high school with friends from elementary school, and in the first year, old friendships are solidified, new ones are formed, and cliques coalesce. By the time I arrived for grade 10 at Central, social circles were pretty well established and I was a total stranger, a hick from a farm, an outsider. As adolescent hormones coursed through my body, I became consumed by thoughts of sex, but I was totally incapable of doing anything about it. It never occurred to me to ask a white girl out on a date, because the fear of refusal was too great. Of the ten Japanese Canadian teenage girls in London, three were my sisters.
In a civics class, we were asked what our parents did. To my surprise, I was the only person in the class whose mother worked; all the other students' mothers were full-time parents, and at that tim
e, that was an indication of social status. To exacerbate my isolation, I was a good student, which in that era was like having leprosy. I was horrified when a teacher once asked each of us to tell what our grades had been the year before. I was ashamed to have to say all my marks had been first-class. “But I did get a second in one exam,” I offered in a vain effort to soften the scorn. As well, for my sisters and me, weekends and summer holidays were not times to play and take vacations; they were opportunities to work and contribute income to the family. I was stunned to discover in another class that my fellow students spent the entire summer on holiday—that is, not working. Again, the situation set me apart from my classmates.
The only Japanese Canadians at London Central Collegiate Institute were my sisters and cousins. My cousins were well integrated, and my sisters had formed friendships in elementary school because they moved to London earlier than I, so for them the transition to high school was easy. Students at Central were pretty homogeneous, and there were even fewer Chinese Canadians than Japanese Canadians. I didn't realize the differences between gentiles and Jews were very important at London Central; to me, they were all whites who happened to go to different churches. When I was in grade 12, one of the candidates for president of the student council was Jerry Grafstein, now a federal Liberal party wheeler-dealer and senator. I voted for him since I admired his talkative disposition and tremendous popularity,
A carp caught in the Thames River in London, Ontario
