Obasan Quotes

There is a silence that cannot speak.

There is a silence that will not speak.

Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.

[…] Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound I hear is only sound. White sound. […]

If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply.

Such an old woman she is. She opens her mouth to say more, but there is no further sound from her dry lips.

The language of her grief is silence. She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances. Over the years, silence within her small body has grown large and powerful.

What will she do now? I wonder.

What choices does she have?

“What a beauty,” the RCMP officer said in 1941 when he saw it. He shouted as he sliced back through the wake, “What a beauty! What a beauty!”

That was the last Uncle saw of the boat. And shortly thereafter, Uncle too was taken away, wearing shirt, jacker, and dungarees. He had no provisions, nor did he have any idea where the gunboats were herding him and the other Japanese fishermen in the impounded fishing fleet.

The memories were drowned in a whirlpool of protective silence. Everywhere I could hear the adults whispering, “Kodomo no tame. For the sake of the children…” Calmness was maintained.

All our ordinary stories are changed in time, altered as much by the present as the present is shaped by the past. Potent and pervasive as a prairie dust storm, memories and dreams seep and mingle through cracks, settling on furniture and into upholstery. Our attics and living rooms encroach on each other, deep into their invisible places.

“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.

It is always so. We must always honor the wishes of others before our own. We will make the way smooth by restraining emotion. Though we might wish Grandma and Grandpa to stay, we must watch them go. To try to meet one’s own needs in spite of the wishes of others is to be “wagamama”—selfish and inconsiderate. Obasan teaches me not to be wagamama by always heeding everyone’s needs. That is why she is waiting patiently beside me at this bridge. That is why, when I am offered gifts, I must first refuse politely. It is such a tangle trying to decipher the needs and intents of others.

The Yellow Peril is a Somerville Game, Made in Canada.

It was given to Stephen at Christmas. On the red-and-blue box cover is a picture of soldiers with bayonets and fists raised high looking out over a sea full of burning ships and a sky full of planes. A game about war. Over a map of Japan are the words:

The game that shows how
a few brave defenders
can withstand a very
great number of enemies.

There are fifty small yellow pawns inside and three big blue checker kings. To be yellow in the Yellow Peril game is to be weak and small. […] I am not yellow. I will not cry however much this nurse yanks my hair.

“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.

I know Obasan is praying. I’ve seen her before––the time Stephen leapt out of bed in the middle of the night yelling, “I’ve got to get out of here,” and ran down the road away from the farm in the dark. Obasan sat at the table and prayed till he returned. He said when he came back he’d had a nightmare. Something about a metallic insect the size of a tractor, webbing a grid of iron bars over him. (Later, he told me he had the same nightmare again, but escaped the web by turning the bars into a xylophone.)

The comments are so incessant and always so well-intentioned. “How long have you been in this country? Do you like our country? […] Have you ever been back to Japan?”

Back?

[…] Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh, Canada, whether it is admitted or not, we come from you we come from you. […] We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

[The Grand Inquisitor’s] demand to know was both a judgment and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned [Mother], the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.

How the Grand Inquisitor gnaws at my bones. At the age of questioning my mother disappeared. Why, I have asked ever since, did she not write? Why, I ask now, must I know?

Did I doubt her love? Am I her accuser?

She and my mother, [Grandma Kato] writes, were unable to talk of all the things that happened. The horror would surely die sooner, they felt, if they refused to speak. But the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable for Grandma and she hoped that by sharing them with her husband, she could be helped to extricate herself from the grip of the past.

Obasan is small as a child and has not learned to weep.

Back and forth, back and forth, her hands move on her knees.

She looks at me unsteadily, then hands me the ID card with Uncle’s young face. What ghostly whisperings I feel in the air as I hold the card. “Kodomo no tame—for the sake of the children––gaman shi masho––let us endure.” The voices pour down like rain but in the middle of the downpour I still feel thirst. Somewhere between speech and hearing is a transmutation of sound.

This body of grief is not fit for human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song.

Father, Mother, my relatives, my ancestors, we have come to the forest tonight, to the place where the colors all meet––red and yellow and blue. We have turned and returned to your arms as you turn to earth and form the forest floor.

Tonight we picked berries with the help of your sighted hands. […] See how our stained fingers have read the seasons, and how our serving hands serve you still.

My loved ones, rest in your world of stone. Around you flows the underground stream.