Engagement:
The Westchester
Review, 2008
Engagement:
The Westchester
Review, 2008
“Koga-san?” the operator asks in Japanese. When I tell her yes, she informs the person on the other end of the line in English that the requested party is here. After a mechanical noise, I hear a voice. My heart leaps up. I turn to face the wall so my colleagues at the hospital can’t see me blushing.
“Hi Jeff,” I say, as nonchalantly as possible, “How are you?”
“Not well,” he says.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m not sick physically,” he laughs, “I’m just lonely. I miss you too much.” I feel relieved and want to say that I miss him, too. But I don’t. What good is it to say such a thing? For all I know, he may be calling me to say goodbye.
“Kuniko,” he says, “How would you like to be called Mrs. Katz?”
Me? Mrs. Katz? What does he mean by that? What is he trying to say? I try to unravel his meaning. Then it dawns on me that he is asking me to marry him. I am so happy I want to tell him that this is the moment I have been waiting for. But I can’t. Tears well up in my eyes.
I was in a hospital in Manhattan when I met Jeff. I had been hit by a car three weeks previously and was confined to bed. Trish, my roommate at the time, came to see me every day after work, and one day she brought a young man with her.
“Kuniko, I want you to meet my friend,” she said while leaning over to kiss my cheek. “This is Jeff,” she said. “He teaches at the same junior high school as I do.”
He
soon became my regular visitor. Later he
told me that he came to see me often because his Chinese language class was held
near the hospital and he had time to kill before going to classes.
Whatever the reason, I enjoyed having him around because he made me
laugh. After my discharge, we began
dating. He showed me around the city and
took me to the movies on the weekends. I
never met anyone so kind and funny and it didn’t take long for me to fall in
love with him. I didn’t tell him my true feelings, though. I expected to go back
to Japan in a year or so. The hospital
in Nagoya where I used to work as an orthoptist had sent me to New York Eye and
Ear Infirmary for two years to study American methods.
Knowing that my stay was limited, I
persuaded myself that I should not get overly involved with anyone.
I
always knew that we would part someday. Still,
it wasn’t easy to say goodbye when the time actually came.
I remember crying hard in the plane
going home. I hated him.
I wished he had asked me not to leave.
When I came back to Japan, I realized that how tense I'd been in New York always
feeling different from others. As soon
as I landed in Japan, I began feeling all the stress in my body melting away.
Everyone had black hair and skin like
mine, and nobody questioned where I was from. Nobody
asked me to repeat what I said or commented on how small I was.
I blended in.
At the hospital, I was promoted to chief
orthoptist and in addition to seeing patients, I taught
what I’d learned in New York to other
orthoptists and doctors and often traveled around
Japan giving lectures about American orthoptics.
Everything was going well except I
missed Jeff. I tried to write him
to tell how I felt about him but each time I started, I tore up the pages. We
corresponded through occasional casual letters or postcards, yet I’d never been
able to figure how he felt about us.
About a year or so after I came back to Japan, I finally concluded that we
weren’t going to get back together. I
decided to go out with a Japanese man whom Mrs.
Mizutani, my American English teacher,
introduced to me.
“Forget about a guy who can’t even ask you to marry
him,” Mrs. Mizutani said to me one day, “I have a very nice student in
another class.”
After
going out with him on several occasions,
I grew to like him. I wrote Trish that
I’d decided to settle down in Japan.
Trish
immediately called me from the States. "What!"
she shouted on the phone. "Jeff hasn't asked you to marry
him yet? Oh, that fool!
He loves you!”
Mother
is upset. So are my siblings.
They all look at me dumbfounded.
I am annoyed. What’s
wrong with these people? I ask
myself. Can’t they at least
pretend that they are happy?
It
isn’t that I expected them to exultantly congratulate me, but somehow I
anticipated that they would at least share my enthusiasm. I feel my rapture
withering away.
Mother breaks the uncomfortable silence after a while.
She says, “I was so happy when you called last week.”
She is looking at me from the head of
the low rectangular dining table located in the center of the tatami room in my
brother’s house where she now lives.
There is a Buddhist altar behind her and our father’s memorial tablet is
visible through the opened folding doors.
The incense sticks are still burning and the faint smoke is floating
through the air.
On the table, there is a huge plate of assorted sushi and sashimi that was
delivered by the nearby restaurant and a few Japanese dishes my sister-in-law,
Kikuko, prepared.
“When you told me that you are coming home to tell us your wonderful news,”
Mother continues, “I was sure that you had found your future husband in Nagoya.”
“We
thought so, too,” my brother, Shigeru, says.
His wife, who sits next to him with their three month-old daughter in her
arms, nods in agreement. “That was exactly what I thought,”
my sister Chiyoko joins them.
She
says she left her two children with her husband because she wanted to hear about
my fiancé without being interrupted by them.
Who cares what you thought?
I grumble, anger simmering inside.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by their reactions because when I called them
last week to say that I was coming home to announce
my engagement, I didn’t say
that my fiancé was an American and that
I was leaving Japan soon.
"Since you seem to have already made up your mind about this, I don't know if my
opinion counts,” Mother says. “Really though, how can you marry an American?
You know what they did to us during the war.
They not only destroyed our town but tried to kill us all by dropping
bombs everyday.”
Shigeru takes over. “They almost killed me,” he says and asks me, “You remember the time I was chased by an American fighter, don’t you?” I do remember hearing his awful ordeal when I was a child. Shigeru was about ten at the time. One day he and his friend were digging for mud snails in a stream running through the rice field. They knew they shouldn’t be there because they were warned about planes called Grummans. These planes, they were told, came from nowhere and shot people randomly. But they were hungry and didn’t want to pass up the opportunity of a free meal. They knew that if they brought those snails home, their mothers would boil them with a little salt.
Standing in the stream, Shigeru heard the sound of machine guns from the planes in the distance and saw one of them flying toward them. They ran as fast as possible to a nearby night soil reservoir to hide themselves - in those days, the farmers used human manure as fertilizer and kept it in large holes in the fields – but the plane was too fast and it began shooting at them. Shigeru knew they could be killed. Bullets could easily penetrate the roof of the reservoir. But to his surprise and relief, the plane left without pursuing them further. They slowly crawled out and looked at the sky where the plane had disappeared. Then they realized how awful they smelled. They had been grabbing the edge of the hole that was filled with human night soil.
“The plane flew so low that I could see the pilot’s grinning face while I ran.” Shigeru says pouring sake into his empty cup. “It was pure luck we survived”
"But
that was a long ago!" I protest. I
didn’t realize that after more than a quarter century, he still kept a grudge
against Americans.
"You can't blame every American for what happened during the war.
Besides, that has nothing to do with
Jeff. He wasn’t even born when
Americans bombed our town."
"I
know he has nothing to do with the war, but still, I can't take an American as
my son-in-law,” Mother says, ’’It will always remind me of our hard times.
I really wish that you'd marry your own kind. "
"Mom, I am sorry, but I’m not here to ask you if you want to take him as your
son-in-law. I am just telling you
about my future plans."
"It's so nice of you not to include your mother before you make such an
important decision,” she says sarcastically.
Then as if to change her tactics, she tells me that she is afraid
I will end up like ChoCho-san.
Is she joking?
I look at her to see if I should laugh.
If she is serious, I don’t want to offend her by laughing, but she looks
stern. I even see her lips begin to
twitch. Her facial neuralgia is beginning to act up.
She’s had this disorder since I was an
infant, but it is unnoticeable when she is calm.
Now the entire right side of her face looks slightly contorted.
I feel pity.
"Mom," I say with a smile, "Please don’t worry about me.
I am not ChoCho san and Jeff is
certainly not Pinkerton."
"Listen to this impetuous modern woman.
This is what happens when a young girl goes to an immoral country like
I
know whom Shigeru is talking about.
During the American occupation after the war, from 1945 to 1953, a large number
of dance halls, cabarets and bars were created to entertain American forces in
our town. Many women worked there
and became GIs’ “girl friends” to earn their
livings or to support their poverty stricken families.
They were called "panpan" and those who
chose to be kept by one person were called "onlies."
Our neighbor Yoshiko became an "only" when she was around twenty.
She had to support her war-widowed mother who had to raise her family.
When Yoshiko worked in the cabaret in
the center of the town, her mother desperately tried to hide her daughter's
occupation, but all the neighbors soon found out about it because Yoshiko went
out every evening in heavy makeup and a gaudy dress. The grownups nudged each
other as if to say, "Look, there goes our panpan,” when she passed by our
houses. One day, I heard my mother
whispering to one of our neighbors that she’d heard
Yoshiko had moved away from home because she became a GI's "only" and now lived
in an apartment where he came when he was off duty.
About
a year or so after she moved away, Yoshiko threw herself into a nearby river.
There was such a commotion in the neighborhood afterward that she was the
topic of conversation for months to come. Nobody knew why Yoshiko had decided to
die, but rumor had it that she was abandoned
by her G.I. boy friend when he left Japan.
"What
does Yoshiko have to do with me?" I
ask my brother angrily.
"It
has a lot to do with you because Yoshiko's fate may be yours.
Americans had no respect for Japanese women.
They used our women as if they were toilet paper.
How many Yoshikos do you think they simply threw away?"
How can
Shigeru generalize about Americans this way when he only knew them through the
American forces that occupied our town?
As a boy, he might have seen many arrogant American soldiers or heard
more sad stories such as Yoshiko's.
Still, that happened so long ago.
Where has he been all these years?
I ask myself.
“What about children?” Shigeru asks suddenly. “What about children?” I repeat
his question harshly.
“Do you realize that you will produce
ainoko if you marry a gaijin,
foreigner?”
“So
what if I produce ainoko? We are not
going to raise our children in
“You will have them someday and you know how they will be treated. Don’t you
remember those ainoko who used to
live in Tensien-orphanage?”
“Of course I remember.”
During the occupation period, a large number of out of wedlock babies between American service men and Japanese women were born throughout Japan. Many of them were abandoned when their American fathers went home.
I first saw such children when a
group of first graders from an orphanage enrolled in our elementary
school in April of 1953. I was in
the fifth grade then and remember the commotion at school that day.
“Hey, look at those gaijin children!” someone shouted in the
schoolyard when they, accompanied by two nuns, entered the gate.
They stood out because their hair color was completely different from
that of ordinary Japanese children. Some were brunettes and others were blondes.
“They are not gaijin,” someone said, “They are ainoko.”
Then I remembered overhearing one of our neighbors talking to my mother a
few days earlier. “I heard the children of Panpan from Tenshien-Orphanage
are enrolling in our school this year,” she said.
The word ainoko literally means a child of two things put together,
regardless of whether human or animal. In this case, it meant that the
children were born of American GIs and Japanese women,
mostly the prostitutes they called panpan. Ainoko were a natural
target for prejudice and discrimination not only because of how they looked but
also because of their birth origin.
"Mother
is absolutely right," Shigeru says putting sashimi in his mouth.
"Why risk your life? You should
stay in Japan and marry a nice Japanese man and make Mom happy."
"What
good is it saying such a thing when Kuniko has already decided to marry
Jeff?" my sister Chiyoko snaps at Shigeru.
From her initial surprised look,
I know she isn’t keen on my engagement either, but after listening to Mother and
Shigeru, it seems that she has decided to take my side.
"Kuniko knows what she is doing,” she says. “We should congratulate her instead
of giving her a lecture." Then she
looks at me with a smile. "Omedeto,
congratulations," she says, “I am sure Jeff is a wonderful man."
After suppressing my anger for so long, I am moved to tears by her words.
“Chiyoko
is right,” Mother says quietly after a while. “This is Kuniko’s life after all.
I hope she knows what she is doing.”
"Let's
toast her happiness," Chiyoko says raising
her cup of sake and everybody follows her lead grudgingly.
Facing
my family, I am consumed with sorrow by their inability to share my joy.
I’ll ask Jeff to come to Kumamoto with me before I go back to New York,
I tell myself after a while. I know he’ll change their minds about Americans.