Aunt Emily Kato Character Analysis

“Write the vision and make it plain. Habakkuk 2.2”

Dear Aunt Em is crusading still. […] For her, the vision is the truth as she lives it. When she is called like Habakkuk to the witness stand, her testimony is to the light that shines in the lives of the Nisei, in their desperation to prove themselves Canadian, in their tough and gentle spirit. The truth for me is more murky, shadowy and gray. But on my lap, her papers are wind and fuel nudging my early-morning thoughts to flame.

The Custodian’s reply to Aunt Emily must have been the same to anyone else who dared to write. “Be good, my undesirable, my illegitimate children, be obedient, be servile, above all don’t send me any letters of inquiry about your homes, while I stand on guard (over your property) in the true north strong, though you are not free. B. Good.”

Out loud I said, “Why not leave the dead to bury the dead?”

“Dead?” she asked. “I’m not dead. You’re not dead. Who’s dead?”

“But you can’t fight the whole country,” I said.

“We are the country.”

Obasan was not taking part in the conversation. When pressed, finally she said that she was grateful for life. “Arigati. Gratitude only.”

[…] “In the world, there is no better place,” [Uncle] said.

The house in which we live is in Marpole, a comfortable residential district of Vancouver. It is more splendid than any house I have lived in since. It does not bear remembering. None of this bears remembering.

“You have to remember,” Aunt Emily said. “You are your history. If you cut any of it off you're an amputee. Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you’re bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene. […]”

All right, Aunt Emily, all right! The house then––the house, if I must remember it today, was large and beautiful.

“What a serious baby––fed on milk and Momotaro.”

“Milk and Momotaro?” I asked. “Culture clash?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Momotaro is a Canadian story. We’re Canadian, aren't we? Everything a Canadian does is Canadian.”

All Nisei are liable to imprisonment if we refuse to volunteer to leave. At least that is the likeliest interpretation of Ian Mackenzie's “Volunteer or else” statement. […] Why do they consider us to be wartime prisoners? Can you wonder that there is a deep bitterness among the Nisei who believed in democracy?

None of us, [Aunt Emily] said, escaped the naming. We were defined and identified by the way we were seen. A newspaper in B.C. headlined: “They are a stench in the nostrils of people of Canada.” We were therefore relegated to the cesspools.

“Why can’t we go home, Stephen?”

“Because. That’s why,” Stephen says crossly, and tells me no more. His eyes are like Father’s, searching.

The orders, given to Uncle and Father in 1945, reach me via Aunt Emily's package in 1972, twenty-seven years later.

The delivery service is slow these days. Understanding is even slower. I still do not see the Canadian face of the author of those words.

The crowd stands aside, waving steadily, bowing, touching arms here and there, and then they are out of view and I’m clambering up the train steps again as I did three years ago.

We sit in two seats facing each other once more, exactly like the last time. Where is Father? […] Where are we going? Will it be to a city? Remember my doll? Remember Vancouver? The escalators? Electric lights? Streetcars? Will we go home again ever?

And I am tired, I suppose, because I want to get away from all this. From the past and all these papers, from the present, from the memories, from the deaths, from Aunt Emily and her heap of words. I want to break loose from the heavy identity, the evidence of rejection, the unexpressed passion, the misunderstood politeness. I am tired of living between deaths and funerals, weighted with decorum, unable to shout or sing or dance, unable to scream or swear, unable to laugh, unable to breathe out loud.

(Keep your eyes down. When you are in the city, do not look into anyone's face. That way they may not see you. That way you offend less.)

All of Aunt Emily’s words, all her papers, the telegrams and petitions, are like scratchings in the barnyard, the evidence of much activity, scaly claws hard at work. But what good they do, I do not know––those little black typewritten words––rain words, cloud droppings. They do not touch us where we are planted here in Alberta, our roots clawing the sudden prairie air. The words are not made flesh. Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again. All my prayers disappear into space.

Is it so bad?

Yes.

Do I really mind?

Yes, I mind. I mind everything. Even the flies. […] It’s the chicken coop “house” we live in that I mind. […] It’s the bedbugs and my having to sleep on the table to escape the nightly attack, and the welts all over our bodies. […] Or it’s standing in the beet field under the maddening sun […].

[…] I mind the harvesttime and the hands and the wrists bound in rags to keep the wrists from breaking open. […] I cannot tell about this time, Aunt Emily. The body will not tell.

I can remember since Aunt Emily insists that I must and release the floodgates one by one. […] I can cry for Obasan, who has turned to stone.

But what then? Uncle does not rise up and return to his boats. Dead bones do not take on flesh.

What is done, Aunt Emily, is done, is it not? And no doubt it will all happen again, over and over with different faces and names, variations on the same theme.