“This is delicious!” I said after I’d swallowed it. “Who made them?”
“It’s from a little okazu-ya in Waipahu. If you like okazu snack foods, I can tell you all the best places,” Margaret said.
“Please do,” I said, wondering how, if the food was take-out, it was so very hot and crisp. The answer came when I glanced at the stove and saw a deep pan of oil. The snacks had been refried at home, making them even unhealthier.
“Eat more!” Margaret urged. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t do much around the house, ever since the kids got big and I started working.”
“Ah! Do you work nearby?” Uncle Hiroshi asked, smiling.
“Quite near. I’m director of housekeeping at the hotel.”
The smile on Uncle Hiroshi’s face froze, and I imagined the calculator in his banker’s brain had made a judgment on the family. And I too was recalling all the Japanese maids in the old novels I was reading about Hawaii, and how in the newspaper article I’d read, activists had rued that the proposed new jobs in the area would be mostly in the service industry.
“I’m too tired after work to do much cleaning around here-and I have to admit that I’m not much of a cook, especially of complicated Japanese dishes. I’m not full Japanese like you; I’m hapa, mixed with Hawaiian. Edwin calls me mixed plate.”
“I guess Rei is mixed plate, too. Her mother is American,” Tom volunteered.
“Never would have guessed it! Toshiro, did you marry a haole girl?” Uncle Edwin asked in a tone that I wasn’t entirely sure was friendly teasing.
My father looked blank, and I quietly said that yes, my mother was Caucasian. Haole was a Hawaiian term that originally referred to anything foreign, one example being a tree, the koa haole, which resembled a native koa, but was widely regarded as an invasive pest.
Great-Uncle Yoshitsune joined us wearing a short-sleeved blue aloha shirt, his face and hands freshly scrubbed. Even in proper dress, he still resembled a garden gnome.
“Oto-chan used to do a lot of cooking when he was a young man,” Margaret said, nodding her head at Uncle Yosh. “For a while he lived in Honolulu, so he knew the best butchers and fishmongers. He used to take my mother-in-law until she passed away ten years ago, may she rest in peace. Now the only one likely to do any cooking is Courtney, and that’s just because she so obsessed with planning her own bridal reception.”
“Are you?” I asked, smiling at her with curiosity.
“Am not! I just like the pictures, the clothes, the…stuff,” Courtney said with a sigh.
“Between Harry Potter and those bridal magazines, my kid lives in a fantasy world,” Edwin said. “Thank goodness you gotta be twenty-one to get married here-otherwise, she’d be picking out a husband when she start her senior year!”
“Daddy, please!” Courtney was bright red by now, tears starting in her eyes.
“Tell me about where to shop for fish, Uncle Yosh,” I said quickly, to change the subject.
“Tamashiro’s on North King Street, in Palama. I don’t drive no more so Margaret, you should go there,” Uncle Yoshitsune chided. “I hear they sometimes still get opihi.”
“Too far, too much trouble,” Margaret said, smiling easily.
“What are opihi?” I asked.
“A small type of shellfish that clings to rocks. Harvesting it is quite dangerous,” Margaret said. “What they call it in English, Edwin?”
“Limpet,” Edwin said. “It’s scarce, but it sure makes tasty poke.”
Poke, pronounced po-kay, was Hawaii’s version of ceviche; I’d had it with tuna or octopus many times. Suddenly I had a yearning for it. This trip still had potential, at least from a gastronomic perspective.
“We have some things for you.” My father gestured toward the dozen or so gift bags we had brought with us. According to Japanese tradition, I had carefully wrapped each gift, and then put each box in an individual shopping bag.
“Oh, I don’t need nothing,” Uncle Yosh said.
“Presents? Thanks!” Courtney seemed to waken up as she reached for a bag containing her gift certificate to Delia’s, and her parents eagerly leafed through the bags, looking for the ones labeled with their names. Aunt Norie had bought Margaret a beautiful silk scarf, and I’d found a book on new uses for green tea for Edwin.
“Where’s Braden? We have something for him,” I said. Tom had chosen the gift, the very latest Nintendo game from Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district.
“The boy suppose to be here, but running late. We should go ahead,” Edwin said.
Everyone seemed pleased with the gifts my father and I had chosen, and Norie had sent over with Tom and Uncle Hiroshi. The reaction I cared about was Uncle Yosh’s to the album I’d made. He himself on the sofa, turning pages slowly as I stayed nearby, ready to answer questions. A strange expression came over his face after a few minutes of studying the album.
At last he spoke. “I heard a lot about these people. But why don’t you have any pictures of Kaa-chan?”
I felt bad about Harue having been disowned. “It was the turn of the century, and perhaps any family pictures of her didn’t survive, or if they did, weren’t recognized as such by us. I’m so sorry; I want to go back and look again…”
“I have an idea,” Tom said brightly. “Perhaps we shall learn the name of her old schools in Japan, and get childhood photographs that way. We were able to find such photographs for the males in the family.”
“She didn’t go to school.”
“What?” I exclaimed, shocked. The Shimuras were an intellectual family.
“She had a governess, she told me. Learned all these fancy ways of talking-guess it was good over there, but hard here. People laughed at her Japanese,” Uncle Yosh said, shaking his head. “Sorry to say, I was embarrassed many times.”
“Really,” I said. This corroborated everything I knew about the folkways of the Shimura family. I wanted to continue, but Edwin cut in.
“It’s time for eat. Our dining table isn’t so big, so we serving food in the kitchen, and you can bring it out here. Please, come try.”
My father had been ushered to the front of the buffet line, so he was well away from my gaze. I couldn’t possibly cut in front of everyone to supervise his food choices. I could only worry.
An hour later, I realized that my father’s decision to eat barbecued pork, sticky rice and deep-fried vegetable tempura was the least of my problems. As Margaret sliced a coconut cake, Edwin opened his agenda, and pretty much everything I had feared about this trip came to pass.
8
“LET’S TALK ABOUT the meaning of family.” Edwin canvassed the table. “Jii-chan, tell everybody how it feels to suddenly realize you have two nephews and their families to celebrate your birthday? Good feeling, yah?”
There were polite murmurings from everyone.
“I got a whole lot of family history to teach you guys.” Edwin seemed to be pointing his chopstick directly at me. “Things that happened here to us-to this family-you need to know!”
I sat numbly as Edwin narrated the story I’d gleaned from internet news sites: that in the 1930s Harue Shimura owned a small house on one and a half acres of land near Barbers Point, the old naval station. Harue had lived there after she’d retired from work on the plantation, around the time Yosh was starting his first job with the post office in Honolulu. Then, after Pearl Harbor was bombed and Yoshitsune was sent to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Idaho, Harue died of a stroke. When Yoshitsune returned in late 1946, the land and cottage had been taken over.
I interrupted, because Uncle Edwin had casually dropped in some information I hadn’t heard before. “Uncle Yosh, you were interned in a camp for Japanese-Americans?”
Yoshitsune only nodded, and I looked expectantly at him, wanting more. This was a stunning bit of family history, because very few Japanese born in Hawaii had been interned. The plantation owners had convinced the US government that their workers were loyal, and that the sugar industry would collapse if Japanese in Hawaii were taken away.