“I’m going to kill those kids,” she muttered sourly.
The room was littered with empty glasses that oozed the smells of brown liquor and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts left from the party the night before. A wave of nausea swept over me. I can’t speak for Grace, but I may have had one drink too many. I steadied myself and turned on the radio. I heard President Roosevelt’s voice. The Japanese aggressors had just bombed Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack. Ships were sinking or on fire. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were dead. I started to shake. Grace grabbed me, and we staggered to the couch. We held hands, bent our heads together, and cinched our shoulders. Grace was trembling as badly as I was.
“What does it mean?” Grace whispered, terrified.
“War,” I answered numbly. “We’ll be going to war.”
“Do you think my mother’s heard yet? Should I call her? My father… Could the Japs reach Ohio?”
Under my skin, my muscles rearranged themselves until my face was mask tight. I’d never heard her use that word before.
“My parents and my brothers live in Honolulu.” My words shot from my mouth like iced bullets. “I’m a little more worried about what might have happened to them than I am for people who live thousands of miles away from the attack. And what about me? I’m Japanese.”
Grace recoiled. She’s a Jap. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“Oh, Ruby. I’m so sorry,” Grace managed with some effort. “What can I do? What can we do?”
I called the Chinese Telephone Exchange and asked to put a call through to Hawaii, but already the lines were clogged. With each unsuccessful attempt, I became increasingly frantic. The radio was no help either. News of civilian casualties and the extent of the damage-whether in the harbor or in Honolulu-trickled out impossibly slowly. Each passing hour brought more frightening news: the FBI had been watching “certain Japanese nationals” around the country for a year, and now rounded them up. In Nashville, the Department of Conservation put in a requisition for six million licenses to “hunt Japs” at a fee of two dollars each. The purchasing department vetoed the requisition with a note: “Open season on Japs-no license required.” Every tear that fell from my eyes, rolled down my cheeks, and dripped off my chin was a physical reminder of the love-and fear-I felt for my mother, father, and two brothers. Were they all right? I dialed the telephone exchange again.
“We’ll put the call through to you as soon as we get a connection,” the operator told me tersely.
In the afternoon, we heard someone in the hall, banging on doors again. Chilling terror. What now? We opened the door to find Jack Mak announcing to all our neighbors that Charlie had canceled the show for the night. Around eight, Grace heated a can of soup. We stayed glued to the radio. I called the telephone exchange every fifteen minutes, with no result. At midnight, Grace and I crawled into bed. We slept together, hanging on to each other, believing that somehow the warmth of our flesh huddled in a cocoon would save us from our drowning fear.
The next morning, we immediately turned on the radio. President Roosevelt announced that we had declared war on Japan. All members of the armed forces in the area were called to duty and sent to battle stations.
Around noon, Joe arrived, wanting to check on us. He looked just as unsettled as we felt: This is bad, very, very bad.
“If the Japs could strike Pearl Harbor, could they hit San Francisco too?” I asked. The inside of my head was ringing. I’d succumbed to the same apprehensions as Grace, and I’d crossed a line by uttering the word Jap. “Is that possible?”
“No way,” Joe answered staunchly.
“Why can’t they come here?” Then I repeated something I’d heard a commentator warn on the radio. “Submarines could be submerged just offshore.”
“Do you think New Yorkers are worried that Germany, which is only three thousand or so miles away from them, will mount an assault?” He spoke in his college voice-determined, smart, and encouraging. He answered his own question. “Of course not. So we shouldn’t be worried that San Francisco-or any city on the West Coast for that matter-will be attacked by Japan five thousand miles away.”
That boy was full of more shit than a Christmas goose, because the United States wasn’t at war with Germany, nor had the Nazis mounted a sneak attack on us.
At 8:00 that night, the lights in our apartment went out. We were plunged into darkness. This is it!
“Grace, are you there?” My voice shook.
“I’m here,” she answered, sounding as if that father of hers had his hands gripped around her throat.
“Joe?”
“Do you have candles?” he asked. Never before had I heard a man sound so petrified.
Peeking out the windows, we could see that our neighbors in Chinatown-and maybe the whole city-had also lost electricity. We had no idea about what had happened or what was about to happen. Maybe we had only minutes to live. We stayed inside, too afraid even to go into the hall. The entire building was silent with people preparing to die. When the lights came on three hours later, I burst into tears. Grace tried to comfort me, but I was in too much turmoil-worried about my parents, and afraid of what could happen tomorrow or the day after that. I stared at Joe, wishing he would do something, but there was nothing he could do. We stayed together in the living room. None of us slept. The entire city had a bad case of the sweats and the jimjams.
Joe went home at dawn. Not long after he left, the radio reported that the previous evening two squadrons of fifteen enemy planes had left a carrier off the coast and entered U.S. airspace above San Jose. From there, some flew north and some flew south. After midnight, they returned. Just before dawn, they came again. We were scared out of our pants, especially when Lieutenant General DeWitt, who was in charge at the Presidio, declared, “You people do not seem to realize we are at war. So get this: last night there were planes over this community! They were enemy planes! I mean Japanese planes!” His panic increased our panic. In response to the sortie, over one thousand households in Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Carmel were evacuated and moved inland. Some reporters claimed that the planes flew too high to have dropped bombs. The Japanese aggressors must have been on a reconnaissance mission. Other reporters dismissed the whole thing as a hoax, calling the citywide blackout and the stories that had swirled around it an example of “invasion fever,” to which DeWitt angrily responded that the planes had been tracked out to sea. “You think it was a hoax?” he demanded. “It is damned nonsense for sensible people to assume the Army and the Navy would practice a hoax on San Francisco.” And still, I hadn’t reached my parents.
A little after two in the afternoon, the phone rang. An operator told me to hold for my call. I waited and waited. Grace came to me. I’m here with you. Then I heard Yori’s voice.
“Kimiko?”
“Yes, it’s me,” I answered in English.
My brother didn’t say anything, but I could hear him breathing. Even over so many miles, I felt myself in our house by the shore. Behind the sound of my brother raggedly drawing air into his lungs as he tried to collect himself, I heard an empty well of silence. He shouldn’t be the one speaking to me.