the gods. One of us stopped talking. Another of us went out early one morning to water the horses and hung herself in the barn. Fubuki was so anxious that when the evacuation orders were finally posted she let out a sigh of relief, for at last, the waiting had come to an end. Teiko stared at the notice in disbelief and quietly shook her head. “But what about our strawberries?” she asked. “They’ll be ready to pick in three weeks.” Machiko said she wasn’t going, it was as simple as that. “We just renewed our lease for the restaurant.” Umeko said we had no choice but to do as we were told. “It’s the President’s order,” she said. And who were we to question the President? “What will the soil be like there?” Takiko’s husband wanted to know. How many days of sun would we get? And how many days of rain? Kiko just folded her hands and looked down at her feet. “It’s all over,” she said softly. At least, Haruyo said, we would all be leaving together. Hisako said, “Yes, but what have we done?” Isino covered her face and wept. “I should have divorced my husband years ago and taken the children back home to my mother in Japan.”
FIRST they told us we were being sent to the mountains, so be sure to dress warmly, it would be very very cold. So we went out and bought long woolen underwear and our first warm winter coats. Then we heard we were being sent to the desert, where there were poisonous black snakes and mosquitoes the size of small birds. There were no doctors there, people said, and the place was crawling with thieves. So we went out and bought padlocks and bottles of vitamins for our children, boxes of bandages, sticks of moxa, medicinal plasters, castor oil, iodine, aspirin, gauze. We heard that we could only bring with us one bag apiece so we sewed little cloth knapsacks for our youngest children, with their names embroidered on each. Inside we put pencils and ledgers, toothbrushes, sweaters, brown paper bags filled with rice we had left out to dry on tin trays in the sun. In case we get separated . “This is only for a while,” we said to them. We told them not to worry. We talked about all the things we would do when we came home. We would eat dinner every night in front of the radio. We would take them to the picture show downtown. We would go to the traveling circus to see the Siamese twins and the lady with the world’s smallest head. No bigger than a plum!
PALE GREEN BUDS broke on the grapevines in the vineyards and all throughout the valleys the peach trees were flowering beneath clear blue skies. Drifts of wild mustard blossomed bright yellow in the canyons. Larks flew down from the hills. And one by one, in distant cities and towns, our older sons and daughters quit their jobs and dropped out of school and began coming home. They helped us find people to take over our dry cleaners in J-town. They helped us find new tenants for our restaurants. They helped us put up signs in our stores. Buy Now! Save! Entire Stock Must Be Sold! They pulled on their overalls in the countryside and helped us prepare for the harvest one last time, for we had been ordered to till our fields until the very end. This was our contribution to the war effort, we were told. An opportunity for us to prove our loyalty. A way to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the folks on the home front.
JUNKMEN SLOWLY DROVE their trucks down the narrow streets of our neighborhoods, offering us money for our things. Ten dollars for a new stove we had bought for two hundred the year before. Five dollars for a refrigerator. A nickel for a lamp. Neighbors with whom we had never exchanged a word approached us in the fields and asked us if there was anything we wanted to get rid of. That cultivator, perhaps? That harrow? That plow horse? That plow? That Queen Anne rosebush in our front yard they’d been admiring for years? Strangers knocked on our doors. “Got any dogs?” one man asked. His son, he explained,
FIRST they told us we were being sent to the mountains, so be sure to dress warmly, it would be very very cold. So we went out and bought long woolen underwear and our first warm winter coats. Then we heard we were being sent to the desert, where there were poisonous black snakes and mosquitoes the size of small birds. There were no doctors there, people said, and the place was crawling with thieves. So we went out and bought padlocks and bottles of vitamins for our children, boxes of bandages, sticks of moxa, medicinal plasters, castor oil, iodine, aspirin, gauze. We heard that we could only bring with us one bag apiece so we sewed little cloth knapsacks for our youngest children, with their names embroidered on each. Inside we put pencils and ledgers, toothbrushes, sweaters, brown paper bags filled with rice we had left out to dry on tin trays in the sun. In case we get separated . “This is only for a while,” we said to them. We told them not to worry. We talked about all the things we would do when we came home. We would eat dinner every night in front of the radio. We would take them to the picture show downtown. We would go to the traveling circus to see the Siamese twins and the lady with the world’s smallest head. No bigger than a plum!
PALE GREEN BUDS broke on the grapevines in the vineyards and all throughout the valleys the peach trees were flowering beneath clear blue skies. Drifts of wild mustard blossomed bright yellow in the canyons. Larks flew down from the hills. And one by one, in distant cities and towns, our older sons and daughters quit their jobs and dropped out of school and began coming home. They helped us find people to take over our dry cleaners in J-town. They helped us find new tenants for our restaurants. They helped us put up signs in our stores. Buy Now! Save! Entire Stock Must Be Sold! They pulled on their overalls in the countryside and helped us prepare for the harvest one last time, for we had been ordered to till our fields until the very end. This was our contribution to the war effort, we were told. An opportunity for us to prove our loyalty. A way to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the folks on the home front.
JUNKMEN SLOWLY DROVE their trucks down the narrow streets of our neighborhoods, offering us money for our things. Ten dollars for a new stove we had bought for two hundred the year before. Five dollars for a refrigerator. A nickel for a lamp. Neighbors with whom we had never exchanged a word approached us in the fields and asked us if there was anything we wanted to get rid of. That cultivator, perhaps? That harrow? That plow horse? That plow? That Queen Anne rosebush in our front yard they’d been admiring for years? Strangers knocked on our doors. “Got any dogs?” one man asked. His son, he explained,
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