All during high school and college, I worked for Suzuki Brothers Construction as a framer. I worked on houses, framing the footings, shoveling and pouring concrete, and then framing the house all the
Dad's Model A decked out for my campaign to be student president in 1953 (note the box on the back where we carried leaves to use for compost) way to the roof. It was hard physical work, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to watch a house emerge from a hole in the ground. The structure we framers put up was later covered with shingles, siding, plaster, trim, and paint, until there was no outward sign of the work we had put into it.
In many ways, that house was like our childhood experiences. Over time, we acquire a veneer of personality that enables us to move among and interact with others, but beneath it remain all the unremembered experiences with family and the fears, hurt, and insecurities of childhood, which others cannot see. For me, the alienation that began with our evacuation from the coast of British Columbia and continued through high school has remained a fundamental part of who I am, all my life, despite the acquired veneer of adult maturity.
TWO
COLLEGE AND A BURGEONING CAREER
I ATTENDED COLLEGE IN the United States as a result of a chance encounter with John Thompson, a former classmate in London. His father headed the business school at the University of Western Ontario, in London, and John, an American citizen, left London after completing grade 12 to enroll at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. I met him on the street while he was home visiting, and he raved about Amherst and suggested I apply. He had application forms sent to me, so I filled them out and sent them off. I hadn't taken the SATS or AP courses that many Canadian students now do, and I didn't have the extracurricular or athletic experiences that applicants to top universities usually have. All I had was my academic record. I learned later that John had made a strong pitch for me to the dean of admissions, Eugene Wilson, and I was accepted with a scholarship of $1,500, which at that time was more than my father earned in a year.
In the 1950s, the same grade 13 exams were written by all students in Ontario and acted as an academic filter. Most students left high school at the end of grade 12, and grade 13 was for those intending to go to university. But many of those who flunked grade 13 ended up going to American universities, so it was our common perception that U.S. universities had much lower academic standards than Canadian institutions. Not only that, Americans went only to grade 12 before entering university, and I had had an extra year of schooling. I thought Amherst would be a piece of cake.
Boy, did I learn in a hurry that there is a vast range among post-secondary institutions in the U.S. Yes, there are some universities and private colleges where academic standards can be pretty low, and state colleges and universities vary tremendously in academic stature and standards. Private schools also range in quality, but there are many top-rated liberal arts colleges throughout the U.S., including Amherst, Swarthmore, Reed, and Smith. The best and/or well-off students in the U.S. often attend private preparatory high schools, where the goal of the program is to gain admission into a leading academic institution. Over a quarter of my class at Amherst had been valedictorians in their high schools. Students with poor records wouldn't even bother applying, and of the students who did apply, fewer than one in ten was accepted. So these were pretty impressive students. As a scholarship recipient, I had to remain in the top 20 percent of my class to retain the support. No problem, I thought, since I'd had that extra year of a Canadian high school, which we knew was superior to begin with.
I sure had my comeuppance with the first midterm exams. I was not going to coast through Amherst as I had through high school. Suddenly I had to develop efficient study habits, learn to use the library, and write thoughtful essays. Amherst honed my academic skills, and I am grateful that I was able to attend a top-notch undergraduate school and receive an elite education that had no counterpart in Canada. I admire and support the enlightened policy that funded a foreign student like me in the belief that we added to the education of all at Amherst. I can't help contrasting that with Canadian universities that now accept foreign students merely to exploit them by charging exorbitant tuition fees.
I was the first person in my family to graduate from a university. Although my grandparents had not intended to remain in Canada, their Canadian-born children — my parents — had no interest in moving to Japan, because Canada was their country. They pounded home the importance of education as a means for us to escape the extreme poverty we found ourselves in after the war. The biggest fear I had during my youth was that my father might yank me out of school and put me to work.
Most of the students at Amherst came from families whose members had attended university for generations. They were well traveled, many having spent summers abroad. They went to concerts and listened to classical music. They read books for pleasure and attended the theater. These students were cultured, experienced, self-confident, and very bright, and I have never felt more of a yokel than when I first arrived on campus.
At Amherst I also found that most Americans knew almost nothing about Canada. If, on rare occasions, they thought about the country, they regarded it as an annex to the U.S. Nevertheless, I was classed as a foreign student and in my freshman year took advantage of the foreign-student program to stay with an American family for the Thanksgiving holiday. I was shocked when, during the traditional turkey dinner, the conversation became very serious and political and the mother began a loud and animated argument with her husband. In my family, women did not get into discussions in which there might be disagreements. My mother would leave the serious talking in public to my father (although I learned after her death that she was quite outspoken and influential with Dad when they were alone). And she would most certainly never confront him or disagree with him when there were others around. That Thanksgiving was my first intimation of what equality of the sexes might mean.
In London, puberty in a time of straitlaced attitudes toward sex, fear of pregnancy, and “shotgun marriages” was difficult enough, but as a Japanese Canadian scarred by the war and internment, I had a small potential field of girls to consider. Restricted by my father's edict that I must find a mate who was Japanese, I protested there were too few teenage Japanese girls in all of London, so Dad allowed me to consider dating a Chinese Canadian. “Dad,” I pleaded, “there are only three Chinese families here and I don't know any of them.” “Okay, okay,” he relented, “a Native girl is all right.” When I pointed out that there might be First Nations reserves on the outskirts of town, but I certainly did not know any Native girls, he added a black girl to the list of acceptables. The only black girl I knew was Annabel Johnson, and she certainly was not interested in me. “All right, I'll allow a Jewish girl,” he said, grudgingly, having run out of visible minorities. Dad's descending order of potential mates was based on ethnicity and the extent to which he felt the women themselves would have experienced prejudice, but he failed to recognize that he implicitly accepted the stereotypes and limitations of the bigots.