Dixieland Sushi Page 14

  I look at Riley but see no panicked look on his face, and not even the blush of uncomfortable embarrassment.

  “Not nearly long enough,” Riley says, without losing a beat.

  “Aw, that’s so sweet,” Grandma Saddie says, giving Riley’s face a loving pat. He’s won Grandma Saddie’s and Vivien’s approval in under ten minutes and I want to hug him.

  Our conversation is interrupted by what sounds like a gun firing in the yard. Riley jumps. Everyone else barely looks up. It’s the familiar sound of Old Red, driven by Bubba.

  “He still hasn’t given up his truck?” I ask Vivien.

  Vivien rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “And he won’t either, even though that piece of junk barely runs,” she says. “But you know a man and his pickup truck. He’d rather give up his wife than his truck.”

  Bubba has had Old Red, his vintage Chevy, since before I was born. In the South, there’s something sacred about a man’s pickup truck. And there are fierce debates about which brand is better: Chevy or Ford. Bubba won’t even tolerate a discussion of Ford in his presence, so deep is his loyalty to Chevy.

  “The man of the house is home!” Bubba calls, clambering in, wearing an old faded T-shirt and cut-off khaki shorts, and smelling like fish. “And I caught us some sushi.”

  Bubba offers up a line of freshly caught bass. Bubba’s favorite pastime next to working on Old Red is bass fishing.

  Bass fishing is practically a religion in Dixieland. Every year there’s a bass fishing tournament at which hundreds of men from across the state gather to fish on one of many nearby lakes. The team that catches the most fish in three days wins a trophy and bragging rights for an entire year.

  “This must be the boy you were telling us all about,” Bubba says, taking in Riley. Bubba is no slouch of a man. He’s tall, broad, and when angry can be quite intimidating. Riley, however, does not flinch. He simply extends his hand for a shake.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” he says.

  “You’re not from around here, are you, boy?” Bubba asks Riley, hearing his accent.

  “He’s from England,” I say.

  “Brit, eh?” Bubba says. “I was stationed in London for a few months when I was still in the air force. I went to a rugby match or two, and let me tell you, y’all are a bunch of crazy characters, playing football with no helmets.”

  “Well, let me tell you a bit about rugby,” Riley says, his face lighting up at the prospect of discussing his favorite sport. He and Bubba quickly strike up a conversation that involves the ins and outs of rugby.

  “Where’s Kimberly?” I ask Vivien.

  “She flies in tomorrow morning. She got hung up at some mall protest,” she says.

  “But she is coming, isn’t she?”

  “Well, I’ve had Bubba talk to her, and you know he’s the only one who can handle her,” Vivien says.

  Bubba is, in fact, the only one who can really convince Kimberly to do something she doesn’t want to do. Despite all of Kimberly’s feminist ravings, she’s still a little bit of a daddy’s girl.

  * * *

  We make it through dinner with only one attempt by Grandma Saddie to convert Riley, who’s an Episcopalian (who are about as exotic as Buddhists in Dixieland, where the Methodists and Baptists feud almost as heatedly as Catholics and Jews). And after dinner, Vivien shows us our “sleeping arrangements.”

  I’m bunking with Grandma Saddie and Riley gets the couch in Bubba’s “study,” which is his gallery of all manner of bird, deer, and bass caught or shot by him over the last fifteen years. Kimberly calls it The Death Room, but Riley doesn’t seem fazed.

  “Be sure to ask Bubba about Bud,” I say.

  “Who’s Bud?” Riley asks.

  “His prizewinning fifteen-pound bass. It’s on the wall, you’ll see.”

  Bubba caught Bud during a bass-fishing contest five years ago, and it landed him in the list of Top Five Biggest Bass ever caught in Arkansas.

  “Why is the fish called Bud?” Riley asks.

  “’Cause I caught it with a can of Budweiser,” says Bubba, giving us an exaggerated wink.

  Grandma Saddie’s room, where I’m sleeping, is covered in pale pink frills. Everything in the room has a strong perfumed scent, with only the barest hint of Ben Gay. On Grandma Saddie’s bedside table is an oversize picture of Grandpa Frank when he was still young and handsome. This was taken at the internment camp during World War II, and behind him, you can barely make out a fence of barbed wire.

  I pick up the picture of Grandpa Frank that I’ve studied a hundred times before. He looks so young and full of life. It’s hard to imagine the Grandpa Frank I knew young.

  “Grandpa was the most handsome man in camp, ya-shee,” Grandma Saddie says, a note of longing in her voice.

  “You’ve mentioned that,” I say. The story is one I love. Grandma Saddie was a beautiful young girl and every guy asked her to dance at the sock hop. Grandpa Frank was the best-looking boy in camp, the one all the girls wanted to date. Grandpa Frank proposed to Grandma Saddie near the mess hall. He got down on one knee and said, “You’d be crazy to marry me, so here’s hoping you’re a little loony toons.”

  “I knew then he was the only man for me,” Grandma Sad-die says.

  If Perv John and I had started dating, what sorts of stories would I have told my grandchildren? “I knew I loved your grandfather the afternoon I found Asian porn hidden under his bathroom sink”?

  “Of course, he always wanted sex, you know,” Grandma Sad-die adds now. “Even to the day he died—he never slowed down!”

  This is Grandma Saddie’s trademark. Despite being born-again, she has no shame in sharing extremely personal details of her life, from sex to bowel movements.

  “I kept thinking he’d get tired of it,” Grandma Saddie continues, oblivious to my obvious discomfort. “But that man was the energizer bunny, even till the day he died.”

  I try, unsuccessfully, to get out of my head the image of Grandma Saddie in her bejeweled jogging suits and Grandpa Frank in his polyester shorts in the throws of passion.

  “That’s more information than I need,” I say.

  “Ya-shee. It’s natural, you know,” she says.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  First learn stand, then learn fly. Nature’s rule, Daniel-san, not mine.

  1986

  After Kimberly and I saw The Karate Kid II in the theater, I asked Grandpa Frank, since he bore a passing resemblance to Mr. Miyagi, if he knew any karate.

  “No,” he said, pretending to look thoughtful. “But I know kick-in-the-shins-run-like-hell. You want me to teach you my technique?”

  This shattered forever my hopes that the knowledge of killer hand-to-hand combat might be hiding within the Japanese half of my DNA, ready to unleash itself at a particularly timely moment, say when Kimberly insisted on stealing my Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker.

  This was the first in a long line of disappointments about my Japanese DNA. It didn’t, as I hoped, give me a proficiency in math, the ability to get A’s without even trying, inherent knowledge of a foreign language, or the skill to remain expressionless and inscrutable.

  It was during this same summer—after I tried, but failed, to convince Vivien to let me take karate lessons—that I refocused my attention on something entirely different: L.A. Gear tennis shoes.

  At that time, anything remotely related to California was cool. There was OP wear (Ocean Pacific), Valley Girl Speak (gag me with a spoon), and the video of Fast Times at Ridge-mont High, which Kimberly had stolen from her boyfriend’s car after she discovered that he liked to watch the topless scene of Phoebe Cates over and over and over again.

  While I dragged Vivien to store after store in search of the perfect L.A. Gear shoes (pink and white with pink and black laces), Kimberly kept trying to convince our parents that she needed a pair of real Ray-Ban sunglasses like the ones Tom Cruise wore in Risky Business, or barring that, the ones Tom Cruise wore in Top Gun. Either one, she
said, would do. Vivien and Bubba, however, were not about to spend two hundred dollars on a pair of anything, much less sunglasses for Kimberly, who had become notorious for losing her valuables (she’d gone through two retainers already, had lost Grandma Saddie’s pearl earrings, and once, when she and Bubba went out to practice driving a car, she misplaced Bubba’s car keys when they stopped for ice cream).

  “Ya-shee,” Vivien would say to me. “You hit fifteen and you lose your brain. Remember that.”

  It was that same summer, while Kimberly tried pulling double babysitting shifts around the neighborhood in order to save up for her Ray-Bans, that Grandpa Frank had a heart attack. He was mowing the lawn on a particularly hot August day, even though Grandma Saddie had warned him to come inside and quit trying to prove he was “stronger than Jesus” that he collapsed and died on the way to the hospital. He was only sixty-one.

  On the day of Grandpa Frank’s funeral, all the California Nakamuras flew in to pay their respects. They were the branch of the family (descendants of Grandpa Frank’s sisters and brothers) who moved back to San Francisco after World War II. I had never seen so many Japanese people in one place before. There were enough to start our own Little Tokyo right in the heart of Dixieland.

  I later learned that many of them came to help pray for Grandpa Frank’s spirit. While Born Again Christian Grandma Saddie believed only in Christian doctrine, many of my Buddhist California relatives believed that you needed to pray to help guide the spirit of the dead in the right direction. That’s why so many Nakamuras descended on Dixieland: to hold a Buddhist prayer vigil.

  I remember Vivien’s kitchen being overrun with homemade Japanese goodies. Mochi, sticky rice cakes that were usually reserved only for New Year’s celebrations, were stacked in trays in our refrigerator. There was enough sushi and pickled radish to last us months.

  I’m sure that the First Baptist Church had never seen so many Japanese visitors in one place. Some of them who were still practicing Buddhists lit incense at Grandpa Frank’s grave site, and, apparently, there was some commotion among California relatives because Grandma Saddie chose not to have Grandpa Frank cremated.

  At the funeral, several of the California Nakamuras spoke about Grandpa Frank. Until then, I had known him mostly as a man who never missed an episode of Wheel of Fortune. But it turns out he had a lot of other events in his life that didn’t include Pat Sajak.

  His brother, Sam, told a story about him before World War II. In 1941, six months before Roosevelt signed the order to intern all Japanese Americans, Grandpa Frank had graduated from high school and had been accepted to study at Berkeley with a full scholarship. His father, proud of his eldest son’s accomplishments (the first of his family to go to college), offered him a choice of graduation gifts: either a convertible car or a trip to Japan. Grandpa Frank, as any young American boy would, took the car.

  Six months later the FBI seized it, along with all other major Nakamura assets, including the family’s house and grocery store. And Grandpa Frank, who had dreamed of being an architect, never went to Berkeley—since his four-year internment forced him to forfeit his scholarship—and he never saw the convertible again.

  “But he never complained, not once,” Sam said.

  I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like for Grandpa Frank and Grandma Saddie, who are as American as I am, to have been suddenly rounded up like criminals and locked away because of what they looked like. It made me angry to think about, but a diffuse, aimless kind of anger, the same thing I felt when something unjust happened that I couldn’t control, like when a kid on the playground discovered my middle name was Nakamura, and started the chant “Nakamura, Sakahura, makes me wanna hurla.”

  If I had lived at that time, I would’ve been interned, too. The War Relocation Authority took anyone who had more than one-eighth Japanese blood. Even seven-eighths white was not white. The smallest concentration of ethnic chromosomes turned a whole person that color, sort of like highly concentrated food dye.

  During and after the funeral, I realized that I had a lot to learn about my Japanese half. For instance, I couldn’t wield chopsticks with half the skill of my California cousins. And every time I spoke, they made fun of my drawled a’s and the use of the word “ya’ll.” None of the California Nakamuras had the distinctive drawl; in fact, the Dixieland Nakamuras stood out like sore thumbs. I swore I could hear Vivien’s sharp twang from across the lawn. Not to mention, every five seconds, inexplicably, Vivien kept saying “I’m just a good old southern belle” even though I don’t know of any southern belles who look like Vivien, and neither did the California Nakamuras, who would nod politely but say nothing.

  Then, of course, there was blond, blue-eyed Aunt Teri, who was decked out in her best Chinese attire and kept asking everyone their Chinese zodiac signs, and offering them fake paper money to burn at Grandpa Frank’s grave. Given that Japanese Buddhists don’t adhere to the Chinese tradition of giving spirits of the dead money for their travels, and that Teri was about as ethnic-looking as Loni Anderson, none of the California Nakamuras were quite sure what to make of it. Then there was Aunt Bette, who came back to Dixieland after three failed attempts at college (at age twenty-five she decided she probably wasn’t going to graduate), during her Early Madonna Phase, when she had her hair teased and wore large spandex leggings over a thin, lacy skirt and rubber bracelets up and down each arm.

  And, last but not least, there was Born Again Grandma Saddie, the only person who wore more crosses around her neck than Aunt Bette in her Early Madonna Phase. Grandma Saddie kept trying to convert the California Nakamuras to Christianity at every available opportunity, going on and on about hellfire and damnation and about how Grandpa Frank’s soul was safe “at the right hand of Jesus” because he’d taken the Lord into his heart two days before his death.

  The California Nakamuras, on the other hand, were well dressed, dignified, and decidedly Asian. It was clear when the Dixieland Nakamuras stood next to the California Nakamuras that we were the poorer, less dignified side of the family.

  This was further proven after Grandpa Frank’s funeral, when my great-aunt Yuki’s husband apparently told Grandma Saddie that all the Dixieland Nakamuras held their chopsticks like peasants. We, apparently, moved both chopsticks simultaneously to grab hold of food. In Japan, only the peasants did this. Samurai and noblemen would hold one chopstick completely stationary, moving only the other.

  Then, to make matters worse, I poured a heaping helping of soy sauce on great-aunt Yuki’s rice, which made her cry for an hour, since adding salt or soy sauce to cooked rice, I would later learn, is one of the most dire insults you can inflict on a Japanese cook. But how was I supposed to know? Dixieland Nakamuras put soy sauce on everything, even chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes.

  While I was feeling less Japanese, Kimberly started to feel more. At the susceptible age of fifteen, she became enamored of one of our older male cousins, Mitch, who wore his hair in a ponytail and talked incessantly about his work with PETA and a small political group that had helped lobby Congress to get reparations for Japanese Americans from the U.S. government. Mitch also discussed his prolonged trip to Asia, where he found our distant relatives still living on a rice farm in Japan. Apparently, despite the fact that he didn’t speak Japanese (aside from the single phrase he’d learned, “I’m your cousin from America”), the Japanese Nakamuras put him up for an entire week.

  “The Japanese value family above all else,” he told us.

  Cousin Mitch opened our eyes to a lot of things we never knew. For instance, L.A. Gear was not cool in Los Angeles. And OP was practically on the way out. Rumor had it that Kmart would soon be selling it, and while not the kiss of death in Dixieland, it was in California.

  Kimberly hung on Cousin Mitch’s every word, even going so far as to take down all her posters of Rob Lowe and replace them with the racially intriguing Benetton ads she cut from magazines, as well as a Rising Sun Japanese flag.

>   Kimberly later told me that Cousin Mitch said the crane kick in my beloved Karate Kid movie was not based on any real martial arts, and that the role of Mr. Miyagi reinforced all the worst stereotypes about Asian Americans, since Pat Morita could speak flawless English, but in the movie Mr. Miyagi spoke with a thick accent and incorrect grammar and was, amazingly, the only Asian person seemingly living in California, where the movie was supposed to take place. Cousin Mitch also pointed out that Mr. Miyagi would never have used “Daniel-san” since “san” is a suffix of respect only attached to last names in Japanese society.

  “Technically, it should’ve been LaRusso-san,” Cousin Mitch said with some disdain. In fact, first names are used in Japan only between lovers, which led to a long line of jokes from him about the real nature of the relationship between Daniel and Mr. Miyagi.

  Kimberly listened, rapt, but I thought it was all a bit ridiculous. I couldn’t see why Mr. Miyagi was the problem. I couldn’t see what was wrong, exactly, with a Japanese character who was wise, funny, and could kick serious butt. But I never shook the feeling that maybe by liking Mr. Miyagi I was somehow selling out my roots.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid II

  Not matter who stronger. Matter who smarter.

  I’m awakened the next morning by the indignant voice of Kimberly demanding to know why Vivien has not stocked Second Generation recycled toilet paper in the house.

  “Do you know what global warming is doing to our planet?” Kimberly shouts.

  “That stuff is too rough for Grandma Saddie,” Vivien counters.

  When I make my way down the stairs, I see Kimberly, wearing cutoff jeans, a faded Greenpeace shirt, and flip-flops. She has highlighted her jet black hair so that there are a few streaks of red in with the black. She’s wearing her staples: a nose ring, her Buddha tattoo over her left ankle, and something new—a red string Kabbalah bracelet around her wrist.

  “Can you believe these people?” she asks me, giving me a big hug. “I’ve forgotten how antienvironment this place is.”