Letters to Memory Read online

  At war’s end, the Obata family returned to Berkeley, and Chiura became a professor of art at Cal. Tomi also relocated to Berkeley, and she continued to be a faithful student of Obata, probably almost until her death in 1972. Her sumi-e paintings were saved in large rolls of rice paper that John and I unrolled and perused after her death, spreading them across the tables and floors. What we discovered were repeated attempts at the same scene, but there was always at least one of each that was, well, perfect, and this I assume to have been Obata’s example that Tomi tediously tried over and over to reproduce. John chose the most perfectly rendered and had them framed, and told guests that they were Tomi’s work. They were unsigned, so who knows? Tomi would have been one of Obata’s oldest students, if not the oldest, his senior by three years. After so many years of dogged persistence, Obata granted Tomi some sort of official status as a deshi with a name and hanko. John said, Oh it was honorary. She was never very good. Obata must have thrown in the towel. But what were those unsigned paintings that hung all over the house? Some sort of fiction, I suppose.

  Rolled up in the center of a heavy pillar of Tomi’s artworks was a canvas painting, which for some reason had been stored and forgotten. An oil painting, a still life of yellow flowers with black centers, squash and fruit in the foreground. The painting is signed Hisako Hibi, Topaz 1945 with an inscription in the back of the canvas: Milky Weeds and Sunflowers. Matsusaburo Hibi died only two years after the war in 1947, but Hisako returned to San Francisco and lived a long and productive creative life. The painting was perhaps a parting gift, removed quickly from its wood frame, sent away to wander far from the sadness of camp, to remember friendship.

  What, I ask you, is the true value of art? In Tomi’s precariously kept collection of paintings, there are also original Obatas and this Hibi still life. I will have to pay an expert to refurbish and remount the Hibi. The Obatas are variously dotted with brown spots, evidence of the paper’s acid slowly returning the work to dust. This is even true of the carefully framed unsigned work, assuming it is Obata’s. Everything is slowly fading. Although sold to sustain their lives, neither Obata nor Hibi would have necessarily assigned great monetary value to the product of their art. Not that I don’t feel guilty that this art isn’t better preserved, but like the letters, it’s a bit of clutter and bother. Don’t museums make choices? What to hoard; what not to hoard? But, you may protest, Obata and Hibi would find this dilemma crass. The subjects of their art demonstrate their aesthetics and ethics. Art is a tool and a process. In a time of war and intense hatred, Obata and Hibi sought escape and resistance. Exiled to the desert, Obata sought the meditative solace of nature. Within the confines of barbed wire, Hibi sought the ordinary in daily life. A mindful resistance mediated between life and death.

  As for Tomi, John always said that camp gave his mother a break from constant labor, that being able to spend her days painting was a hidden gift. Leisure in confinement. A cruel truth. How many other of Obata’s and Hibi’s students also came to enjoy for the first time that sense of creative pleasure? Were they not laborers removed from the backbreaking work of harvesting fruits and vegetables, the tedium of slicing and canning fish, washing and cleaning the houses of the rich? Obata, Hibi, and even Tomi had pretensions to another life, and Obata was beaten up by someone who resented that presumption and the arrogance of the mind’s freedom, or perhaps what was perceived to be the blind innocence of intellectuals and aesthetes who did not recognize their basic condition as fodder to exchange for the lives of American POWs. In war, nothing is fair. In the nationalist agenda, you are either for or against. Tomi refused to the end of her life to become naturalized as an American citizen, her stubborn protest of the indignity of incarceration. No questionnaire could define her loyalty. She had sacrificed her youth to raise and educate two children in Japan and five others in America.

  Years later, I’ve separated only those few drawings that Tomi signed and to which she put her red stamp. In fact, there is only one scene on which she imprinted her hanko, that of Yosemite Falls. You can take a look and judge for yourself. Let’s say it isn’t the technique but the spirit of the work, in the spirit of her teacher. Slipped in among those same rolls of paintings on rice paper was the shiny 1960 Life magazine cover featuring Grandma Moses on her hundredth birthday. In 1960, Tomi was seventy-eight, camping out with us in Yosemite, hiking to the falls and Half Dome. Undoubtedly, she and I, then a nine-year-old kid, walked together in noisy meditation.

  Granma, what does your name Tomi mean?

  Means rich. Tomi rich.

  What about my name Tei?

  Means happy. Means you are very happy girl.

  Studying in Japan years later, I look up the word tei and find the meaning: chastity. I also discover that my American name has basically the same meaning. She was right. I am very happy girl.

  I bet she was still wearing her corset.

  Ananda, you have referred me to Buddha’s sacred biography of multiple rebirths in the Jataka Tales. If there are 547 tales, one assumes that Siddhartha Gautama’s journey to enlightenment took 547 cycles of life folding into death folding into life. In one tale, he is the wealthy and altruistic prince Vessantara who, from the moment of his birth, gives alms to the poor and likely all his toys and other princely possessions. But finally he gives away a magical white elephant that brings rain to the kingdom, and losing rain is too much. What about the public good? So he’s sent into exile. In preparation for this, he gives away seven hundred slaves, seven hundred chariots, seven hundred this and that. You wonder if he had seven hundred pairs of shoes or seven hundred bracelets, but no doubt there were seven hundred bling. Then he leaves with his wife and two children on a chariot with four horses. Along the way, he gives away the horses and chariot, and the family makes the arduous trip across rivers, through forests, and up mountains on foot, fed and protected by the kindness of people, devas, animals, and trees. Now there’s a bad guy, a Brahmin, Jujaka, who knows Vessantara’s inability to refuse a request. Of course, the tale never says this inability is a weakness or an obsession or a personal rule that can’t be broken or that Jujaka is a foil to test Vessantara. The journey to enlightenment is a stubborn path of faith. Plus, there must be some reason here to stick it to the faithless Brahmins. In any case, taking advantage of this opportunity, Jujaka asks for the prince’s two children, whom Vessantara finally gives away. Then, the god Sakka, disguised as another Brahmin, comes around and asks for the wife as well, so she’s also sent packing. The good news is that the kids are sold to the old king, the grandfather; a subsequently wealthy Jujaka dies from overeating; and Sakka removes his disguise to return the wife to her husband. Since the wife is a gift, Vessantara can’t refuse. You have to wonder how she was his to give away in the first place, but this is the fourth century BCE. The old king goes into the forest to retrieve his exiled son, but the exclamation of their reunion is too much, and they all collapse—one supposes, in blissful death. But there’s a happy ending: a red rain falls and revives the family; the white elephant is returned; seven kinds of gems fall from the heavens so that Vessantara can store them and always have gifts to give away; and Jujaka goes to hell.

  As a story, the happy-ending denouement seems unnecessary since a blissful reunion should be its own reward, and it seems excessive to return to Vessantara his seven hundred slaves and seven hundred chariots, magical elephant, and a storehouse of gems so that he can be charitable to his heart’s content. A story about a rich prince divesting himself of everything including his children and wife had to be a story not only for the greedy Brahmin and the rich, but also for the ordinary and the poor. A poor man could divest himself of three things that might be everything, and that would be enough. And a happy ending could soften the additional step that’s actually required beyond generosity of things: the relinquishing of desire. Even if his children and wife were not his to give away, Vessantara’s willingness to leave behind his emotional and sensuous desire represents a higher id
eal. All this leads, you remind me, to an ascetic existence, disengaging the body from the spirit, disencumbering the preoccupation of self from wisdom. It reminds me of Gandhi’s autobiography, a story that reads like a contemporary Vessantara, as he makes a series of sacred vows to give up everything: animal flesh, sex, cooked food, milk, clothing, medicine, and formal education for his children. The body is a vessel for action and must be primed with physical truth; no kind of abomination can enter a body prepared to enact or receive truth. Ahimsa and satyagraha cannot be attained except via a stubborn and rigid control of the body. And Gandhi reminds you that the thing you are giving up has to become disagreeable to you in order for this to work. It goes without saying that this is not a recipe for every body.

  By 1936, when he’d pared down his living to a pair of sandals, a homespun cotton wrap, a pocket watch, and his glasses, Mahatma Gandhi met Howard and Sue Thurman under a tent in Bardoli, Gujarat. At the end of their meeting, Gandhi asked if the Thurmans would sing a particular gospel song: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” Howard wrote that Gandhi explained his feeling that the song expressed the root of the experience of the entire human race under the spread of the healing wings of suffering. I confess my antipathy for the image of the crucifixion, my agnosticism regarding the resurrection, and my instant feeling of strangeness about Gandhi’s request of his African American visitors. You remind me that Gandhi’s spiritual foundations were profoundly Jainist, thus non-violent, fasting, celibate, and that his very physical presence—the shrunken, half-naked, baldheaded brown man that has become our iconic memory—was itself a spiritual and political statement. Then you point to another twentieth-century representation of the sacrificial body, that of the burning monk Thich Quang Duc, self-immolating at a Saigon crossroad in 1963. Now then, it’s possible to imagine the Thurmans and Gandhi, their three voices singing that gospel song under a tent in Gujarat, and the resonance of its meaning. Years later I find Paul Robeson in John’s record collection, and I hear Robeson’s voice. An old recording, his deep bass baritone blessing the depth of the song’s sorrow—there, I find myself present under the hovering shadow of those healing wings of suffering.

  Vyasa traces the root meaning of memory: to be mindful, to care for something. Thus memory is practical, creating and re-creating, re-membering, the process by which anything is cared for. Memory is passed on so that we may continue to care. But what about unwanted memory, the traumatic and violent memory of horrific and terrible deeds, of genocide, torture, imprisonment, irrevocable loss? Gently you remind me that to suffer is the human condition, and attachment is its cause. Trauma means to hold on to anger. Memory and loss must be cared for in order to lose anger.

  In the mid-1940s Howard Thurman published two essays, “Deep River” and “The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death.” Decades previous in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois also published a book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. Both the mystic theologian and the materialist social historian recuperated the sorrow songs as the ineffable force of a collective memory, captured subversively, minded fiercely and tenderly, and cultivated despite the assumed erasure of history, identity, culture, and family. To both scholars, searching for artifacts that have traveled over time and generations, these songs bore witness to suffering and are psalms that continue to resonate the persistent promise that a social and political future can be forged. Were you there? Tremble. Tremble.

  Howard Thurman died in 1981. Three years later, John died as well. I don’t have a memory of ever meeting Thurman but knew of him through John and also Kay, who hosted Dr. Thurman on his visits to Chicago. Having visited Boston University to view Thurman’s collected papers, I know the correspondence, books, letterpress meditations, and recordings saved by Kay and John are but a miniscule archive, the significance of which is small but very personal. It was Kay who, after many years, brought the two men back together via correspondence, but it was not a fluid correspondence. John’s file of saved copies show that he may have never sent what he drafted, that he felt tentative before the task, wanting to be honest but also to impress his friend and mentor. Thurman, for his part, scribbled notes of encouragement:

  I keep your letter of October 1966 always in my desk. At least twice a month I read it for sheer joy and keen delight. Please please my friend will you write—You have so much to say and your thinking runs so deep transcending much of Western & Eastern provincialism. Why not get a manuscript ready let me honor yourself by writing a foreword. Also let me send it to Harpers my publishers.

  The event of John’s massive stroke in 1964 forced him into retirement, finally blessed with time to read and to think but without the physical and mental energy to fully accomplish the complex articulation required of that intellectual exercise. I knew that because of John’s disability, we as a family were given his complete presence as full-time father and house husband, but I also recognized that we had lost the possibility of knowing his original and capacious intellect, his sharp wit and finely tuned social sensitivity. John’s post-stroke writings indicate that he thought perhaps that the stroke had filtered away the unnecessary, as if wisdom could be held in the perfection of a haiku—a poetic excuse that I’m willing to embrace, except that I’m a prose writer who likes to carefully connect the dots before I erase them. I mourn the loss of John’s mind because the man who remained for me was prodigious, the space of my growing years filled by his generous and contagious spirit. This archive of letters and papers recovers something, but it is filled with gaps and John’s procrastination; that is to say that, when his mind was truly alert, he had no real time to write, and he did so at the last moment and without the concerted care and editing that writing requires. Perhaps Howard Thurman knew something I have not discovered, and this trust must have given John energy. On the occasion of Thurman’s seventy-fifth birthday, John joined others to write articles in his honor for the festschrift Common Ground. John’s odd title is “The Creative Stature of Genus Homo Sapiens.” I hesitate to critique the article. I’ve read it over and over, and I still don’t know if you need to assume the premises of belief in a Creator first, or if the argument requires the careful assistance of a meticulous and knowledgeable editor. To me it is classic John, consisting of the stuff of his preoccupations and exhibiting the influence of Thurman’s personal and revelatory mysticism while reconciling the philosophical repercussions of Darwin, Freud, and Einstein with contemporary world politics, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the inequities of global resources. His key words: life abundant, elation, joy and laughter, verve and vitality, the creative dimension of man. John is heavy-handed with the use of the word man to mean all human beings, but in those days, I guess we were all men. Whatever the end product of his only published writing, I have to smile that I lived in a home where someone held forth over dinner to say in so many words: We are finite creatures with minds to wonder and explore imaginatively and infinitely . . . If we can discover the way to steer society to serve the best and creative interests of man, we will rightly liberate him . . . If we are freed from basic poverty, we must be able to grow in an atmosphere that nurtures beauty, harmony, and peace—essential for free and full growth . . . One’s soul has to live forever untrammeled and unshackled to any fixed era or culture, if it is to be free and fluid in that era. Perhaps it is beyond editing; it is a meditation framed between life and death.

  One day in New York City, I took the #1 to 125th to meet Olive Thurman Wong. She greeted me from her open apartment window and tossed the key down to the street. She’d prepared a table of tuna fish salad and banana bread, and we toasted our meeting with ginger ale. She had recently retired as a librarian specializing in costume studies. She was an accomplished designer and theater director. I don’t know what Olive thought, but there’s a kind of understanding that passes between preachers’ kids. I think what may have been true for both Olive and me is that our fathers were very busy if not consumed by their calling and the needs of others, their time and c
oncerns beyond their immediate families, and that suddenly we grew up and were a curious and rebellious exception and unexpected challenge. I also think that our presence humanized and made practical the practice of their ideals, but in the bother of it all, I wonder if they did not consider Vessantara’s divestiture or Gandhi’s asceticism. From the point of view of the kids, whatever our messy fates with an imagined Jujaka, I think Olive and I came out okay. The one thing I can say about Howard and John is that, whether they fully approved or not, they were each the foundation for our independence.

  I want to show you something, Olive said. She pointed to a Japanese doll on her kitchen shelf. Your father gave that doll to my sister Ann and me. Then she recalled her happiness in moving to San Francisco in the summer of 1944, when she scuttled the plan to leave early for college in order to remain in the Bay Area as her parents founded the Fellowship Church on Octavia and Post. The family lived on the top floor, and the church functioned below. Down Post Street lived a communal group of activist Quakers and conscientious objectors who supported the church’s work. This group called themselves the Sakais, after the previous owners of the house they occupied. Among the Sakais were Kay’s friends and colleagues, some working for Nisei Student Relocation, in particular a young man named Caleb Foote. And just across the street from the Sakais was a boarded-up grocery and fish market under an old Victorian house where Asako and all her eight siblings had been born. The center of the old Japantown, vacated by one community and housing another. Olive recalled that they had decorated the walls in the church with Japanese art while through the window you could see the racist images of war propaganda on posters and billboards. Olive sighed, and I contemplated our intersecting paths. I studied Daoism, she said. I think it’s true that everything is integrated. For dessert she served baklava, and as we licked the honey from our fingers our conversation wandered, and Olive had a thought. Lillian Smith. Had I read this author, her novel, Strange Fruit?