Gift of the Golden Mountain (13 page)

Sam took a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator and straddled the chair, facing her at the table, where she had the newspaper spread out before her.

     "I hear you're filthy rich," he said before tilting the bottle to take a long swig.

     When she didn't answer, he went on, "Does this mean the beer is on the house?"

     "Be my guest," May said, still not looking up.

     "Should I take that literally?" he asked.

     "Would you?" May came back, and without waiting for an answer added, "Playing word games is one of your least appealing traits, Sam."

     He looked at her hard. "What would you say are my more appealing traits?"

     "I wouldn't," she shot back, glancing up.

     "Would you say it is my directness?" he pushed on.

     "God no," she answered, "look what happened at Faith's, you blasted those poor, unsuspecting photographers."

     "Fools."

     "Beg your pardon," May said. She had been ready to laugh with him but hesitated because of the bitterness of his tone.

     "I said they were fools, jerks. Her especially. They've read a couple of books and suddenly they are your typical Anglo, pseudo—they don't know anything."

     "Anglo," May repeated. "That's the first time I've heard you use that term."

     "Is it?" he asked, taking another hard swig of beer.

     "It sounds as if it's you against them," she answered.

     "Me against them," Sam repeated, then asked, "What about you? Which are you—Asian or Anglo?"

     May studied him, trying to find some clue in his face that would tell her what it was he was trying to say, what he wanted to find out.

     "I'm both," she finally answered, trying not to sound defensive, "but you know that."

     "Your mother was Chinese, your father one-fourth Chinese. Did you know that if you had been an American citizen with one-sixteenth Japanese blood, you would have been sent to one of the concentration camps during the war?"

     She shook her head, wanting to hear what he clearly planned to tell her, but determined to be careful too, not to be drawn into one of Sam's verbal traps.

     "What happened to your family?" she asked, hoping it was the question he wanted her to ask.

     He tilted back on the chair and observed her, making a show of deciding whether or not he would confide. Just as suddenly he brought the chair down again, hitting hard on the floor, and spread his hands before him on the table, as if the answer could be found there.

     "My family," he began, "had a flower farm on the Peninsula. They sold cut flowers, you know—carnations, mums. They owned it with my uncles and my grandparents. The country was just coming out of the Depression and things were looking up. When the war broke out, they had more than half of the mortgage paid off. Naturally, the bank foreclosed and they lost it all." He stopped,
"God," he said, "listen to me, I even tell the story their way, I've heard it so many times."

     "That's okay," May encouraged him, "I haven't heard it at all."

     He nodded, intent now. "My grandparents were Issei—that means first generation. They'd lived in this country for forty years, but they had never been able to get citizenship. Their children, my father and his brothers, were second generation—Nisei—and American born, so they were automatically citizens. To complicate matters a little, one of my uncles was 'Kibei,' which meant he was born here but had been sent back to Japan to be educated. The old school tie thing, you know," he added, sarcastically.

     "But your father wasn't sent back?"

     "No, not Pop. He didn't have the drive. Pop was what they called the 'gentle' son, which translates to 'weak.' When Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Pop, 'Pack your bags for the concentration camp, Boy,' Pop said, 'Yassir, Boss.'"

     She looked at him coldly. "If you blame your father for going along with it, you would have to blame the rest of the Japanese community too."

     "No," he said, "it was too personal for that. Too wrong. I had to blame one person, and he was it. He was my father and he let it happen. To me, to my mother. I'll always hold that against him."

     She could feel the heat on her neck, climbing to her face.
Why was he telling her this? Was it a trap, was he calling her out, showing her up?

     She stared at him and for a time he stared back. Then he said, "Look, I know he was no more at fault than anyone else. I guess I really blame all of them for accepting it so goddamned easily. Not just accepting it, but for continuing to try to convince everybody they were one-hundred-percent, patriotic, flag-waving Americans. After all the shit they were forced to take." He stood and paced the length of the kitchen three times. The light was almost gone, but neither moved to turn on the electricity. It was talk for the half light, talk that would wither in a searching brightness. Sam
stopped, faced her, his voice betraying the pain that lurked behind his anger: "Christ, May—there was an Oklahoma Congressman who wanted to sterilize all the Japanese in the camps. But the truth is, they had already emasculated them. And the truth is also that I don't know what I would have done in my father's place—and maybe that's what goads me, I don't know."

     At that moment May wanted to get up, walk out of the room, do anything but continue to listen, but she knew she could not leave. She would have to hear it all, she had no choice.

     "Your family was at the Tule Lake camp?" she heard herself ask. "That's up north, isn't it—on the Oregon border?"

     "First we were sent to what they called an 'assembly center'—the county fairgrounds. I was born there, in a horse stall. Sound familiar?"

     "You mean no room at the inn?"

     "Japanese version, without wise men. We could have used some of those."

     May thought for a while. "How much do you actually remember?"

     "Not much," Sam agreed, "and yet it seems . . ." He started over, "There were all the stories, growing up. You hear them so much they become your memories, you actually think you remember. I have dreams about walking up to the barbed wire fence and looking out at armed guards, but I know I couldn't have done that. Hell, I was four years old when we got out."

     "Four years. That's a terribly long time," May said. "I was in San Francisco, and I don't remember anything about those years, either."

     "You didn't remember about the boat—the one the old Japanese guy made for you in Manzanar. You didn't remember going there with Kit?"

     She shook her head.

     Carefully then, in a voice that lay soft on the evening air, he asked, "What about your mother? Do you remember anything at all about her?"

     May looked at him. Her throat was too dry, too tight. She could not have answered if she had wanted to, could not have told him how she used to stare at the snapshot of her mother and father on the day they were married. They were standing on a small bridge in a formal garden, he was wearing his uniform, she was in a Western dress of white crepe with a peplum and wore a tiny hat with a veil. She smiled into the camera, and May used to pretend she was smiling at her. Nor could she have told him about the other, the dream . . . her mother sitting under a mimosa tree, reading, her face turned away.

     Tears rose, she couldn't stop them. Sam reached across the table, took her hand, and inspected the fingers, long and narrow fingers, the nails filed short. He rubbed the ragged nail of her ring finger, broken on a field trip the day before, and told her, in a voice grown husky, that he understood, that he really did.

     After a time he cleared his throat and went on, talking because he knew she could not. "Would you like to hear about the 'yes-yes' and the 'no-no' boys?" He made it sound as if he were about to tell a slightly lewd joke.

     May nodded gratefully.

     "Well, the WRA—that's the War Relocation Authority, the agency in charge of the so-called 'relocation' camps—they put out a form which everybody seventeen and over was expected to sign if they wanted leave clearance. It had an official name, but in the camps it was called the loyalty questionnaire. It turned the camps upside down. Two questions on the form caused all the trouble. One asked if you were willing to serve in the armed forces of the U.S. in combat duty. And the other asked if you would forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Nice, huh? A real Catch-22. The people in the camps—the draft-age men especially, but the Issei too, because they had no citizenship—got it coming and going. If you said Yes, I forswear allegiance to the emperor, it would sound like you had pledged loyalty to the emperor in the first place, which in almost every case was not true. And if you said
no, it would sound like you weren't loyal to the U.S. government. If the Issei said 'yes,' they would be stateless, with no country, no place at all to go."

     May asked, "What happened to the draft-age men who said 'no'?"

     "You mean said 'no-no'—to both questions—that they would not serve in the U.S. Army and that they would not forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Remember that. There were plenty of them, including my kibei uncle—the one who had been sent back to Japan to school. He considered himself a loyal American, but he said to hell with a government that would put his family in a concentration camp and then expect him to go off ready to kill Germans and Italians to keep America 'free.' He was thrown in the stockade as a troublemaker, and after the war 'repatriated' to Japan. Actually, he did pretty well—came to see us a few years ago, got himself a room at the Mark Hopkins and hired a limo to get around. But my other uncle, my father's second-youngest brother, Uncle Hideo, he was the one-hundred-percent All-American boy; he answered 'yes-yes' to both questions, and went to Europe with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and died in a burst of glory."

     "He died in Italy, you said the other night."

     "Actually not. I bent the truth a little—otherwise the little witch wouldn't have got the point. He really died in France. In a famous battle in the French Vosges the 442nd rescued the "Lost Battalion"—about 300 Texans who had been surrounded for a week. It took the 442nd half an hour to wipe out a Nazi stronghold that other Allied forces had been up against for five weeks. In the process, however, the Japanese unit took sixty percent casualties— the Germans killed more Japs than the Japs saved Texans. There's a little irony there, wouldn't you say? My Uncle Hideo was one of the dead Japs. The U.S. government gave my grandmother a silver star with an oak leaf duster to remember him by. Some glory, huh?"

     Sam got up, put his empty bottle in the trash can under the sink, and stood looking at his reflection in the darkened window. His
intensity made him both darkly handsome and powerful. Suddenly he said, "Do you know that during the war, the government passed out leaflets telling people how to tell a Chinese from a Japanese?"

     She looked at his reflection, but could not see his eyes.

     He went on: "There was this girl in the camps—she was only about twelve when she went in, and she was all alone. Her mother was Irish and her father had been Japanese, but he had died before the war and her mother remarried a Caucasian and had two more kids. When the relocation notice came, Emerald had to go alone. A twelve-year-old kid. My mother took her in with us—I guess she helped out with me a lot. She still sends me a birthday gift every year."

     "How good of your mother," May said.

     "Yeah, well, my mother's heart is almost as soft as her head. And she has this habit of taking in other people's kids."

     "Where is she now. Emerald I mean?" May asked.

     "Married. A Japanese guy, I think he has a grocery store in Mountain View, someplace like that." He shook his head. "She could have passed, but she wouldn't. Dumb."

     "Was it?" May said cautiously.

     "You have to ask?" he came back.

     "Yes, I have to ask."

     "Don't be so damned coy, May," Sam said. "You know you pass, and why the hell shouldn't you? What law says you have to proclaim your parentage? Who asks Hayes Diehl what percent of his blood is German and what percent is Swedish or Scottish or whatever else mix is in there, as long as you can't see it on the surface? The only possible clues are your eyes and the black hair. I mean, I know some Jews who have darker skin than yours."

     "I'm part Chinese. I've never tried to hide it," May interrupted.

     "You never talk about it either."

     "Why should I?" she demanded.

     "That's the point," he came back, "you have a choice, not to tell. If I had that choice, I'd take it in a minute. This country may
be a goddamned melting pot, but the folks with the black skin and the big lips and the slanty eyes seem to need to bubble in the pot a whole hell of a lot longer than the fair-skinned folks. If you think racial hatred is going away in this grand land of the free, just think about what happened in Watts and in Detroit and all the other big city ghettos . . . and it's not over. Burn, Baby, Burn, that's the current slogan—they've begun to understand that holding hands with white college kids and singing 'We Shall Overcome' isn't going to do it for them."

     She stood abruptly, scattering papers over the table and the floor. Words churned inside her, heaved and rolled and tumbled, contradicting each other and herself.

     "I don't know," was all she could manage to say. She wanted to believe he was wrong, but she didn't know.

IF MAY'S FASCINATION with volcanoes had begun on the Greek isle of Thera, it reached the level of obsession on the island of Hawaii, where she and Kit tramped through the desolate lava fields of the active volcano called Kilauea, hiking down into the caldera and as close as they could come to the steaming firepit called Halemaumau, where the Hawaiian fire goddess called Pele is said to live. That spring May decided that volcanoes would become her major field of study.

     In the months to come, May would learn to read the signs of an impending volcanic eruption: the swelling of the mountain along a rift zone, the seismic swarms—hundreds of earthquake tremors—that mark the movement of the magma, the churning molten rock deep within the earth that from time to time works its way up through the mountain mass, to explode in primitive violence.