On the first day of school in Olinda, I was so shy that I couldn't look any other students in the eye. When recess came, I was stunned when the other children came up to us and dragged us into games and kept us at the center of all the fun. I later learned that our teacher, Miss Donovan, had told all the other students that my sisters and I were coming and that we were to be welcomed into their midst. What a wonderful gift she gave us.
I loved that year in Olinda, but we moved to the town of Leamington the next year when Dad found a job in a dry-cleaning plant. It was 1946, and when we arrived there, some Leamingtonians boasted to me that “no colored person has ever stayed here beyond sunset.” We were the first “colored” family to move into the town, and we were nervous.
In postwar Ontario, Japanese Canadians were sprinkled across the province. In southern Ontario, a handful of families worked on farms, and they kept in touch and became the social circle for my parents. The adults would get together periodically to share stories, offer help, and feast on some of the treasured Japanese food prepared for the occasion. Dad became active in the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, a group that sprang up to help people settle in their new province and to begin the long struggle for redress and apology. Meeting other Japanese Canadians filled me with mixed emotions because I still remembered the way I had been treated in the camps, but the hormones surging through my body spurred me to check out the only possible dating opportunities — Japanese Canadian girls.
Children are wonderful. They are blind to color or race until they learn from their parents or peers what to notice and how to respond. I was playing with one of my chums when my father came along on a bicycle. I called out to him, and he waved and cycled on past. My friend was dumbfounded and asked, “How do you know him?” When I replied, “Because he's my dad, stupid,” he gasped, “But he's a Chink!”
In grade 6 at Mill Street School in Leamington, my teacher was a woman after whom the school is now named. I was an obedient, well-behaved student, so it was a shock one day when, as I was sitting quietly in class, she ordered me to get out. I stumbled into the corridor, stunned and humiliated, and trembled with apprehension as I sat on a seat. After an interminable wait, the teacher came out. “But what did I do?” I stammered. She retorted, “You were smirking at me. I know what you people are thinking. Now get back in there, and don't ever let me catch you looking at me like that again!” I was completely confused but seething with an anger I had to hide.
From that experience, I understood that my physical appearance must be threatening to people like her. Ignorance and the relentless propaganda during the war, portraying buck-toothed, slant-eyed “Japs” in the cockpit of a plane on a kamikaze mission, must have caused mystery and fear just as today's image of a Muslim extremist strapped with explosives. Every time I looked in a mirror, I saw that stereotype. To this day, I don't like the way I look on television and don't like watching myself on my own TV programs.
One of our fellow students at Mill Street School was a Native boy named Wayne Hillman. I often wonder what happened to him, but back then I envied him because he seemed so carefree. He always had a smile on his face, and he was the personification of laid-back. I'm sure he suffered abuse from our bigoted teacher, too.
I graduated from Mill Street School to enter grade 9 in the only high school in Leamington. I think I was the only Asian enrolled; if anything, I was like a mascot or an oddity. I loved the school and begged my parents to allow me to finish my first year there when they decided to move to London, about one hundred miles away. They arranged for me to stay at a farm run by friends, the Shikaze family, some five miles from Leamington. In return for doing chores before and after school and on weekends, I was given room and board. I even learned some primitive Japanese, because Mr. and Mrs. Shikaze were Issei and spoke Japanese at home. At Leamington High, many students were farm kids who were bused to school, so I fitted in.
Just a few years ago, I happened on a Leamington High yearbook and was amazed to find one of my poems in it:
A WALK IN THE SPRING
(Junior Poem, Phoebus, Leamington High School Yearbook 1950)
DAD'S BROTHERS AND PARENTS had moved to London in southwestern Ontario during the war and missed the incarceration. After the war's end in 1945, they started a construction company that began to do very well in the postwar building boom. They had urged my father to join them in London, where the schools were better and he could work for them. In Leamington, Mom and Dad had managed to make a living, supplemented by what my sisters and I earned working on farms during the summer, but they were just getting by and had precious little to save. When we moved to London, we were still destitute.
Leamington was a town of perhaps ten thousand people, so when I arrived in London, which had close to one hundred thousand residents in 1950, it seemed a huge metropolis. I really felt like a hick. My cousins had attended elementary school there and were fully accepted into the community; Dad, though he himself hadn't wanted to leave his beloved B.C., had advised his kin to go east when the war started and thus had saved them from much of the distress of being Japanese in Canada. Out east, Japanese were rare, more of an oddity than a perceived threat. Dan and Art, my cousins, hung out exclusively with white kids and even went to parties where, they told me, they played spin the bottle! Wow, kissing a white girl was inconceivable to me, and I was so envious of them.