Dixieland Sushi Page 3

  I clearly had my mother’s dark hair, but it wasn’t obvious that I had my father’s genes. He was fair-skinned, blond, and blue-eyed. No one in first grade thought I looked like him. I became convinced somewhere there was an Asian or Latino man in a mask with the voice of James Earl Jones who would come tell me he was my real dad.

  My mother says I became so sure of this that in the supermarket I started walking up to complete strangers—usually ones of darker skin tones—and asking them if they were my “real” father.

  Eventually, she sat me down for a talk to tell me about the Nakamuras. Grandpa Frank (short for Fujimara) and Grandma Saddie lived in San Francisco before Pearl Harbor, when the FBI came and arrested them.

  “Were they spies?” I asked, suddenly excited by the prospect of Grandpa Frank having a phone in his shoe like Max on Get Smart.

  “No,” Vivien said, sounding annoyed. “They weren’t spies. They looked like the people we were at war with.”

  While in the camps, Grandpa Frank got a letter from a man living in Dixieland. This man was the father of a soldier who had written home to say he had been saved from a particularly nasty battle on a ridge in Italy by a special regiment of Japanese Americans. The man’s son had written about the particular bravery of Takeo Nakamura, Grandpa Frank’s younger brother, who had died helping the man’s son in that very battle. In gratitude, the father of that soldier offered Grandpa Frank a job in his small country store in Dixieland.

  Without another place to go, Grandpa Frank and Grandma Saddie, then pregnant with Vivien, took up the man’s offer and got on a train to Dixieland.

  He and Grandma Saddie had two daughters, who they named for famous movie stars Vivien (Vivien Leigh) and Bette (Bette Davis). They were both encouraged to be as American as possible; they spoke in thick Southern accents and, on occasion, forgot entirely they were Japanese.

  Vivien dated Bubba, a member of the state championship football team, in high school.

  “So now you see that you’re not Luke Skywalker?” Vivien asked me, as she spread out before my tiny hands all the many pictures stowed in the collection of shoeboxes in the attic. There were black-and-white ones of my grandparents in the camps; then of Vivien as a baby, and then of Vivien and Bubba standing in the courthouse minutes after they married.

  And then, the clincher: Bubba holding me as a baby in the hospital room, grinning from ear to ear. I spent hours looking at the picture of Bubba and looking at my reflection in the mirror.

  “You are so vain,” my sister, Kimberly, declared, catching me in the bathroom. “And dumb, too. It’s obvious to anyone you have his nose.”

  From then on, I was mostly convinced, although it wouldn’t surprise me, even today, to get a call from Jerry Springer for one of his special “Family Secrets” shows. Vivien and Bubba would be sitting on a chair crying, and then they would tell me I was actually the daughter of a circus transvestite and a Darth Vader impersonator.

  But then again, Kimberly always said that I was too dramatic and watched too much TV.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  Man who catch fly with chopsticks accomplish anything.

  “I’m not going to this farce of a wedding,” declares my sister, Kimberly, on the phone. Kimberly now lives in San Francisco and for the past year has been in the process of renaming herself Mitsuko, after our great-grandmother, because she thinks “Kimberly” is another tool of the white patriarchy used to oppress her. She thinks this even though her name was selected with care by Vivien, our third-generation (sansei) Japanese mother.

  “Why do you care about Kevin Peterson?” I ask.

  “Who cares about Kevin Peterson?” Kimberly snaps back. “I’m talking about our cousin Lucy living in that backward town and marrying some guy who can barely read.”

  “Kevin Peterson can read.”

  “He’s a pig farmer, Jen. I don’t think I need to say anything else.”

  “I thought you were a farm workers’ advocate. Sounds like you’re talking down to farmers.”

  Kimberly lets out a long, exhausted-sounding sigh, as she does when she feels she has to explain the complexity of her political agenda, which is somewhere left of Michael Moore’s.

  “Immigrant sharecroppers in this country are oppressed and have very limited educational opportunities. Kevin Peterson chose to be a pig farmer. I think there’s a big difference.”

  “If you say so,” I say. “Anyway, Vivien says it’s not just a farm. He runs an enormous plant that partners with Hormel.

  Vivien says he’s rich.”

  “Even worse. I’m definitely not going,” Kimberly says, sounding resolute. “That girl needs to get her head on straight. She could’ve at least had the courtesy to get pregnant first. Otherwise, I just don’t see the point of marriage. She is barely twenty years old.”

  “She’ll probably be pregnant in a year.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.” Kimberly sighs. “It was bad enough when she was trying to be Miss Arkansas. But even that was better than this.”

  Last year our cousin Lucy made it to the top five finalists of the Miss Arkansas contest. She left with a parting gift of a year’s supply of Dove soap. Lucy is our dad’s niece, the only daughter of his oddball sister, Teri, and has the Taylors’ blond hair and blue eyes.

  “I suppose this means you aren’t going to send her your bridesmaid’s dress measurements?” I ask.

  Kimberly lets out a snort.

  “So what am I supposed to tell Aunt Teri?”

  “Tell her she ought to get her daughter to a college, stat.”

  Mentally, I’m trying to think of how I’m going to explain to Vivien and Aunt Teri that Kimberly isn’t going to play ball.

  Kimberly is always doing this to me—putting me in the middle. Case in point: Christmas 1981, when Kimberly refused to play with the doll Vivien bought her for Christmas: Oriental Barbie. She came holding a folding fan and with the slogan “Learn About the Orient” emblazoned on her box.

  Now, Kimberly claims she objected to the use of the word “Oriental,” even though all the Dixieland Nakamuras used that word until the summer Kimberly came back from her first year at Brown to inform us that “Oriental” is a term used only for rugs.

  Kimberly refused to play with Oriental Barbie and pitched such a fit Christmas morning that neither she nor my mother spoke to each other for a full day. I was the one who intervened, offering up my Paint the Town Red Barbie (inspired by Nancy Reagan) as a kind of truce.

  Then again, Kimberly has always had a difficult relationship with Barbie. Two years ago, Kimberly helped organize a boycott of Mattel after the company’s 2000 Barbie for President doll came in only three races: Caucasian, African American, and Latin American. A Barbie spokesperson apparently went on the record as saying Mattel decided not to make an Asian American Barbie because their research showed Asian girls prefer to buy white dolls.

  Kimberly called this “another example of oppression by the white patriarchy.” I called it good luck.

  The way I figure it, I can’t think of anything scarier than Barbie—of any race—being president. Would she drive around on official government business in her pink Corvette? And during important State of the Union speeches, would Barbie be barefoot—since everybody knows none of her shoes ever stayed on? These were the questions we should’ve been asking about Barbie for President. I couldn’t have cared less what color she was.

  Not Kimberly. In general, I think Kimberly (who is four years older than me) is angry because she had a relatively happy childhood in a town that was largely white. She realizes now the horrible injustice of this: she didn’t find out until she left home that she was part of an oppressed minority and therefore not supposed to be happy.

  “So, I signed your name on the petition. I hope you don’t mind,” Kimberly says, after she’s spoken for fifteen minutes about how she’s in the middle of organizing another protest of Abercrombie & Fitch for their production of Wok-N-Bowl T
-shirts.

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “By this point, I can sign your signature better than you can,” Kimberly says.

  “Remind me not to let you near my checkbook.” I imagine suddenly all of my hard-won savings going to a poor family in Vietnam. “Anyway, that’s fine. But what I want to know is are you bringing a date to Cousin Lucy’s wedding?”

  This is vital information. If Kimberly—who is objectively the prettier sister—doesn’t bring a date, then I won’t feel so bad about showing up solo.

  “Is that all you care about?” Kimberly sighs. “Well, if I were going—which I’m not—I’d bring Matt, since he’s been bugging me about meeting Vivien and Bubba.”

  Matt Chang is one of Kimberly’s many admirers. My sister, who believes that marriage is a tool of the patriarchy, does not believe in monogamy, strictly speaking. Somehow this, her random body piercings, her Buddha tattoo, and the fact that she doesn’t shave her armpits, manages to attract eligible men in swarms. Granted, Kimberly has always been pretty, even during her phase when she boycotted all makeup tested on animals. She has the dark, shapely look of a Lucy Liu or a Salma Hayek. I’m a little shorter, a little less dramatic and exotic-looking, and irony of ironies, I have freckles on my nose. I’m always the runner-up in cases when we’re both in the room. If Kimberly and I are sitting at a bar and two men approach us, the man who gets stuck with me always looks slightly disappointed. It never helps to point out the fact that I’m supposed to be the “smart” sister. This is one of many reasons I’ve chosen not to live in the same city as Kimberly.

  “I assume you don’t have a date?” Kimberly asks me.

  “Who said I didn’t have a date?”

  “You never have a date.”

  “That is not at all fair.”

  “What? It’s a compliment. You’re putting your career first. As all women should.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better,” I say. “I’m going to be forty-five and on Oprah, talking about how my life is empty because I missed my child-bearing window and now I have to make do with the baby I adopted illegally from Cambodia.”

  “You’ll adopt legally and you’ll be doing a great service to that baby from Cambodia,” Kimberly says. “Anyway, I have to go. Matt’s here and we’re going to go picket Abercrombie.”

  Great. Kimberly who doesn’t believe in monogamy has a date for the wedding she doesn’t even plan to attend. Now I have to have one or I’ll look like the pathetic sister, the one in need of pity blind dates.

  Before I can think more on this, my phone rings. My caller ID says it’s a number I don’t recognize. If it’s a telemarketer, maybe he’s single, I think.

  I pick up.

  “Jenny! It’s John. Remember me?” John is a guy I met a month ago on Daybreak Chicago. He was a guest on the show, an expert in video games, who had advice for parents worried that their kids were exposed to too much video game violence. He asked me out for drinks and we went—two weeks ago. There were no major catastrophes or major sparks, and I have not heard from him since.

  “Oh, hi,” I say, caught off guard. I have forgotten what John looked like.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you,” John says. “Jenny, the time just got away from me.”

  “It’s Jen, actually.”

  “Right—sorry—my bad.”

  There’s a small pause.

  “So, I ran into your assistant, Anne, the other day,” John says. “And it came up that you were Japanese. I had no idea.”

  I wonder how my race came up in a casual conversation but I don’t ask.

  “Half, actually,” I say, thinking that I should wear a name tag on all my dates—one that reads “Hello, I’m half-Japanese” for all the boys who are too polite to ask.

  “You know I once visited Tokyo,” John is saying.

  “Really?” I have never been. In college, I once considered studying in Japan for a semester. I abandoned this plan, however, after an awkward exchange with Hashimoto, our resident Japanese exchange student, who told me that in Japan people like me who are half-white and half-Japanese are thought to have large sexual appetites and do not care about protecting their virtue. He could have been lying, but even so, I figured maybe he knew something I didn’t. Maybe people who look like me in Japan walk around with giant red E’s on their chests for Easy.

  “Listen, this is going to sound weird, but I was wondering if maybe you want to get together sometime.” John asks. “Watch a movie maybe?”

  I agree to meet John the following Saturday, even though I suspect he has an AO blood type, meaning Asian Obsessed. It explains why he started to take more of an interest in me after he discovered my part-Asian heritage. That happens with a lot of guys.

  AO blood types can be all right. After all, I’m not going to attract the same kind of guy whose dream date is Anna Kournikova. At the same time, you want to be sure that the guy you’re dating doesn’t just see you as a two-dimensional sex fantasy. But given my lack of current dating prospects, an AO blood type is as good as any.

  When I arrive at John’s apartment a little after seven the following Saturday, my suspicions are confirmed. I discover his apartment is littered with Asian artifacts, which I suspect came from Pier One. Above his fireplace, there’s a giant scroll filled with Chinese characters. John is wearing a shirt with Japanese animation on it—which is a scantily clad Asian beauty who is wielding two swords. I am beginning to think that John might not only be an AO blood type, he might also suffer a bit from Nerd Lust. Nerd Lust should not be confused with your garden-variety Man Lust (topless strippers, Man Show Girls on Trampolines).

  Nerd Lust involves lusting after women who are largely fictional characters, typically in comic books or cartoons, who have ridiculously unrealistic features (size double-D boobs, but a twenty-inch waist) and who know martial arts or some other sort of deadly hand-to-hand combat. They can also be fairies, vampires, Star Trek aliens, or any additional otherworldly creatures, as long as they wear spandex or leather and can fight while wearing stilettos. Nerd Lust has the added feature of putting women on pedestals (i.e., having them kick a ridiculous amount of ass, like Trinity in The Matrix). I haven’t decided whether putting a woman on a pedestal is better than putting her on a trampoline.

  John interrupts my thoughts by handing me hot sake in a cup without handles that has more Chinese characters on the side.

  A friend from college once traveled to Japan for a semester in college. She said that half the people walking around were wearing shirts with English words on them like “Toast” or “Hand” or “Spoon.” Things that made no sense whatsoever. It’s probably the same with all the Chinese letters. The giant framed picture above John’s fireplace probably says nothing more inspirational or profound than “Lamp Shade.” His shirt might even say something equally meaningless like “Elbow.”

  I think about Britney Spears, who got a Japanese tattoo on her hip that she thought said “Mysterious” but its actual translation was “Strange.”

  After I’m settled on his sofa, John immediately presents the DVD box set of Shogun starring Richard Chamberlain.

  I’m not sure what to say. I haven’t seen this since I was ten. All I can think is I could be at work. I have a million things to do and I’m going to watch Shogun?

  “I thought you loved this miniseries,” he says.

  I don’t think I said “love” exactly. I think I said I thought it was “funny.” What I remember of it involves a lot of grunting samurai, giggling geishas, and ritualized suicide.

  “I thought we could watch it tonight,” John says.

  “Okay, great,” I say, not at all sure it is.

  For dinner, John serves sushi he’s bought from God knows where. Sushi these days is as common as hot dogs. He’s gotten all the most gruesome raw varieties, too: octopus, eel, squid. Despite being half-Japanese, I am strictly a cooked-meat-only sushi eater (your cucumber rolls, your California rolls) with the minor exception of
tuna, which, for some reason is the only fish that doesn’t make me gag. The thought of eating anything with suction cups makes me feel a bit queasy. When he offers me a slab of white and purple octopus, I politely decline.

  The sushi is stale. Probably bought from a chain grocery store. The rice is hard and the seaweed wrap is far too chewy. John, however, doesn’t seem to be aware of the bad taste. If the rice is stale, I can only imagine how the octopus is. I think of Grandma Saddie, who likes to talk at length about how sushi is a gourmet delicacy that shouldn’t be consumed casually like French fries.

  As I watch, John digs into the worst sushi specimens while I nibble on a few pieces of pickled ginger.

  Halfway through the first DVD (of a set of five) John leans over and asks me what one of the samurais who is speaking Japanese is saying. Apparently this miniseries never bothered with subtitles. The idea, I guess, is to view the whole story from Richard Chamberlain’s point of view. He is the English sailor who finds himself marooned on the island of Japan in the eleventh century.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “I thought you were Japanese.”

  “Half,” I correct. “Only my grandma speaks Japanese.” Vivien, I don’t add, speaks in a thick Southern twang. “But I did take Japanese classes in college.”

  I omit the fact that I dropped out after only two weeks. I had to learn the hard way that my DNA didn’t give me a leg up on Japanese.

  “Are you sure you’re really Japanese?” he asks me, part-teasing, part-serious.

  This time I don’t bother to correct him.

  I decide then and there to start making up answers when he asks me to translate again.

  “He did not just call Richard Chamberlain a white devil,” John exclaims, catching me on my fake translating.

  “The Japanese words for ‘white devil’ and ‘more sake please’ are very close in sound,” I say.

  John looks at me as if he’s not sure whether I’m kidding. But he doesn’t ask me to translate anymore.

  I decide not to comment when John yells, “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about,” when Richard Chamberlain is offered a simpering Japanese consort to fulfill all his household and manly needs.