That, plus world-known Mazda passenger cars were produced there and distributed the world over.
Joan forgot her English. This was pretty hard to believe. The language was all over the place. But her parents had dropped the use of it at home, mostly for her benefit; Joan had her hands full just trying to be Japanese. Some schoolgirls told her that she had a wave in her hair; she must be part white. There was a certain impertinence to her that her teachers claimed to discern, chalking it up to some residual Americanness. But after a while she stopped being exotic, and to others she became just another kid with a funny way of talking who kept to herself. She got good at art. A light touch she had, delicate.
The language left her gradually, until what remained was her knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sort of simple expertise with which children flatter themselves. She was a Japanese girl. A Japanese girl. A Japanese girl.
She was basically happy. She had a few friends. She kept to herself. She had a cat named, in English, Bunny. A light touch that pleased her art teacher in school. Unusually precocious ability with watercolors. Basically happy.
The usual mixture of excitement and dismay when they moved. Her friends gave her a sendoff. She spent time recording the green peaks of Eta Jima in a sketchbook. They were going to a place called Fresno, which was supposed to be very flat, and she wanted to get these mountains down, these mountains that just came right up and joined you for breakfast. Trunks and suitcases were taken out of storage. Her parents made gifts of household goods to friends and neighbors, as mementos. Nothing too big or too practical, lest they be insulted. They just happened to be some of Joan’s favorite things. Joan came home one day to find that Bunny was gone. It was a big rush. Their home filled with boxes. The rooms echoed strangely. Her parents began speaking to each other in English again. They tried it out on Joan, but who knew what they were saying? Then the family was gone. It had been such a slow process, cumulative, but ultimately they reached the threshold, crossed it, and no longer were there. The difference was one inch, one door shut and locked for the last time, but it was all the difference that was needed. Joan’s equanimity crumbled. She sat on the bed her last night in Japan and cried. They were in a hotel near the airport, no place at all. Early the next morning they would begin their long journey to San Francisco. She cried.
It was, finally, the no-place of where they’d come to rest at the end of that final day, the random placement of all the familiar shapes that she could see out the window, the streetlights and white lines and the grassy rises, leading nowhere, packed behind retaining walls, the feeling that no one really belonged there or could possibly miss it once they had gone, that this, at the end, was what she was left with to say goodbye to: That’s what got to her, and she cried. These were the shapes people invented so they would never forget loneliness, so that it could greet you anywhere, vast and numbing and repetitive, one anonymous landmark succeeding another, each standing alone. Her father stood over her. “You stop that. I don’t need this. Just stop it right now.”
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Shimada,
We have evaluated your child, Joan, for English language competency. This evaluation was performed by Mrs. E. Darer and Mr. J. Shemalian. For the purposes of this evaluation, the student has been tested in English both orally and in writing.
The scope of this standard test has been devised so as to determine a student’s abilities in reading, writing, and comprehension, as well as in necessary auxiliary skills. Specifically, the test requires a student to:
• Recognize, state, read, and write statements and questions.
• Listen to short conversations and answer questions orally.
• Read and comprehend silently and aloud and answer questions.
• Determine the main idea in a simple paragraph.
• Demonstrate sequential ordering of events.
• Use a dictionary and other essential reference books.
• Demonstrate a basic knowledge of punctuation.
• Write legibly upper- and lowercase letters and properly use capitalization.
Our finding is that the student is unable at this time to meet the minimum standard of competency that would enable placement in Grade 8, the level at which a child of this age ordinarily is placed. The student will be required to demonstrate increased proficiency in all areas prior to placement at this level. In the interim, the student has been placed in Grade 2, which will provide a better opportunity to learn at a more unhurried pace.
Should you have any questions concerning this matter, please do not hesitate to contact my office.
My very best wishes,
Louis F. Longcrier
Principal
Just the briefest portrayal of those Fresno Years, which began so inauspiciously. When Joan finally did get to high school at seventeen, the big deal of the thing evaded her. The Choklit Shoppe ethos reigned supreme, fifties swan song ringing out from the angular Seeburg jukes all the stiffs swayed to. Who’dja rather be, Betty or Veronica? Bro-ther! Joan rolled her eyes. The Little Jap in Black hung out with the strange ones, all the oddballs, misfits, loners, eccentrics, screwballs, nonconformists, and cranks. She smoked pot in someone’s dad’s pickup truck in a field outside Porterville. The smell of manure all around. For a minute she believed that what she was smoking actually was cow shit. She read a copy of The Subterraneans someone had lent her. Filled her head up with ideas; it seemed easier than she might have expected to wholly identify with, to imagine herself as, a Negro woman. What it filled her up with was the idea of leaving.
Throughout all this she’d kept winning prizes for her artwork. People were very reassured by this Japanese girl and her delicate touch. A dedication to the old traditional values of the Orient, all the gentle ceremony that seemed to be getting pushed out of the way in this startling new era of entrenched, highly motivated East Asian enemies. She enrolled at Fresno State—
“Well, I’ll say one thing for the Japs,” a grocer said one morning, as Joan entered his store. “I’ll say one thing for them.”
“What’s that?” asked the man he was waiting on.
“At least they ain’t Communists. They understand this system good. They make it work for them. They got it fixed so they got quotas there in all the state colleges. They steal all our inventions to send on back home and then the Japs there send them right back to us, in cheaper versions. They ain’t Communists.”