Sometimes I thought about my future, because Lynn said I should. She said it was hard to tell at this point, but someday, if I didn't go to Africa to study animals, I might be a beautiful genius tennis player. I didn't worry about it one way or another. I didn't care if I was a genius or if I was pretty or if I was good in sports. I just liked to listen to Lynn and to talk to Bera-Bera and to eat rice candies. The lady who used to live down the street could take all of her top teeth out of her mouth. She wasn't allowed to eat chewy candy. I could eat any kind of candy I wanted because I still had my baby teeth. If they rotted, I would simply grow more teeth. That was pretty great.
From the car Georgia didn't seem so different from anyplace else. But when we got out of the car and talked to people, we couldn't understand them because of their southern accents. They talked like their mouths were full of rubber bands! People stared at us when we went into their restaurants. The restaurant signs said things like colored in back. The white people sat at the front. We didn't know where to sit, so we always ordered to-go. We didn't see another Japanese person anywhere. We got stared at quite a bit. Sometimes a white lady would lean over us and exclaim, "How cute!" Some of them touched our faces, as if they weren't sure we were real.
Georgia had many claims to fame. During our driving Lynn read me all the signs: gordon, chicken capital of the world; vidalia, home of the sweetest onions in the world; cordele, watermelon capital of the world; milton, the world's best peaches; and templeton, where peanuts are king. We also saw seven different restaurants that claimed to have the world's best BBQ.
Several times we drove by an antebellum mansion. "Antebellum" means "before the Civil War." Lynn taught me that. She had tried to read the whole dictionary once, so she knew the definitions of a lot of words that started with "a." An antebellum mansion was not as beautiful as, say, a mountain or the sky, but for a house it was pretty darn nice. Before the Civil War really rich white people lived in the mansions and owned slaves. I didn't know who lived in them now.
Our new town was called Chesterfield. Uncle told us the population was 4,001. Six other Japanese families lived in Chesterfield. Including us, that made a grand total of thirty-one Japanese people. All of the fathers worked at the hatchery in a nearby town.
We had ridden most of the day in the truck with our uncle because he wanted to talk chess with Lynn. I mostly just stared out the window the whole time. Shortly before we arrived in Chesterfield, I took a nap. When I woke up, I saw I had wet my pants. I didn't tell Lynn or my uncle. We were going to Uncle's house, where he planned to throw a little welcome party for us that night. I thought maybe I could sneak inside his house without anybody noticing. We rolled down a curvy road. Here and there I saw a small frame house with chipping paint. Old rusted cars or piles of tires sat in the yards. Chickens ran loose. We saw a dead chicken in the road, and Lynn and I screamed. Finally we stopped at a small house just like all the others.
Uncle Katsuhisa's family came out to greet us. He was the only Japanese in town who owned a house. The front yard was composed of gravel with bits of yellow grass, and the paint on the house was chipped. Still, it seemed okay to me. My own family would be living in the same cheap apartment building as the other Japanese who worked at the hatchery. Uncle Katsuhisa lived in a house because he was different. He had big plans. First of all, he had inherited two thousand dollars from a man whose life he'd saved during World War II. So while he wasn't rich, he was better off than most of us. Second of all, he was studying with a friend to work as a land surveyor, which is where you measure and study land. He knew a lot about soil and mud and things like that. He did not want to work in a hatchery all his life.
When we arrived at his house, my six-year-old twin cousins, David and Daniel, were waiting with Auntie Fumiko. Auntie was a round woman, with a round face, round tummy, and round calves. Even her hair was shaped into a big round thing on her head. Someday I planned to knock it over and see what was inside it. Uncle popped his horn and waved at them. We got out of the car, and almost the first thing that happened was my auntie Fumi started shouting at the top of her lungs, "Katie wet herself! Katie wet herself!" I was so embarrassed that I burst into tears. Everybody laughed, and David and Daniel shouted out, "Katie wet herself!" My mother said, "Katie wet herself!" My father looked proud of me. He was proud of us no matter what we did.
Later, when the other Japanese families arrived, we ate all night long: salted rice balls, fish cakes, rice crackers, rice candies, and barbecued chicken. Rice balls are called onigiri, and they were the only thing I knew how to make. To make onigiri, you wash your hands and cover your palms with salt. Then you grab a handful of rice and shape it into a lump. My mother made fancy triangle-shaped onigiri, with seaweed and pickled plums, but I just made the basic kind. Someday when I got older, I would have to learn to make fancy onigiri too, or nobody would marry me.
We picked fruit off a peach tree nearby and listened to our parents talk about business. My father would be working as a chicken sexer, which he told us is where you separate the male chicks from the female chicks when they're still wet from being inside the egg. From what I could gather, you had to separate them so that the male chickens could be killed.
They were useless since they couldn't lay eggs. Uncle Katsuhisa said that it might seem sad to kill them, but eventually, we would learn to be kind of like farm kids—farm kids understood the meaning of death. They understood how death was part of life. When he said that, my mother and Auntie Fumi frowned at him. They did that all the time when he was talking. That meant he had to stop talking.
After they frowned, there was a silence. I looked around and saw Lynn playing with some kids closer to her age. "Come on!" she called, and I ran after them. Sometimes older kids didn't like me around, but Lynn always made them play with me. We played until bedtime, and that night Lynn and I slept on the floor in the living room. There seemed to be a million crickets singing around us. The half-moon shone through the windows. My sister and I practiced our howling and barking so we would be able to talk to our dogs if our mother ever let us get any. Our mother came into the room to quiet us down. She looked tired and worried for some reason. In fact, she looked as if she might cry. So we settled down immediately.
Seeing my mother like that made me remember Iowa. Here are the things I already missed:
1. The view. When I used to look outside my bedroom window on summer mornings, I saw nothing but corn and blue sky. In winter I saw snow and blue sky.
2. The Iowa State Japanese-American Bowling League. Every Saturday all the Japanese Americans for many miles around met at a bowling alley in the middle of the state. My father's friends always gave us coins and told us what songs to play on the jukebox.
3. Mrs. Chan, the Chinese widow from down the street. We'd helped her plant tomatoes in her yard earlier that summer. By the way, she was the one who could take out her top teeth.
4. Snow. Making angels and snowmen was fun. Sometimes our father played with us. Once, our mother came outside, and Dad actually threw a snowball at her. I thought she would faint, but after a long pause she smiled slightly.
5. My parents. They worked regular hours in Iowa. Here in Georgia they planned to leave for work every day very early in the morning. Our father would work two jobs, and our mother would work overtime if it was available. I already missed them.
chapter 4
