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  Weedflower

  Weedflower

  CYNTHIA KADOHATA

  Ann Zeak

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  978-0-689-86574-9

  0-689-86574-0

  CYNTHIA KADOHATA

  Ann Zeak

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  2006 Cynthia Kadohata

  Weedflower

  Also by Cynthia Kadohata

  Kira-Kira

  Weedflower

  CYNTHIA KADOHATA

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is based loosely on the internment of Japanese Americans in the Colorado River Relocation Center during World War II. Except for the end note, it is a work of fiction and should be viewed as such.

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS · An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division · 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 · This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. · Copyright © 2006 by Cynthia Kadohata · All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. · Book design by Ann Zeak · The text of this book is set in Berling. · Manufactured in the United States of America · First Edition · 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 · Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data · Kadohata, Cynthia. · Weedflower/Cynthia Kadohata.—1st ed. · p. cm. · Summary: After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from their flower farm in southern California to an internment camp on an Indian reservation in Arizona, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop. · ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86574-9 · ISBN-10: 0-689-86574-0 · [1. Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945—Juvenile fiction. 2. Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939-1945—United States—Fiction. 4. Mohave Indians Fiction. 5. Indians of North America—Arizona—Fiction. 6. Arizona—History 1912-1950—Fiction.] I. Title. · PZ7.K1166 We 2006 · [Fic]—dc22 · 2004024912

  for my father

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people aided me in the writing of this novel—more people, I’m afraid, than I will be able to remember.

  My friends George Miyamoto and Caitlyn Dlouhy sustained me in ways that I can only hope to repay.

  And thanks to everyone at Atheneum, in particular Susan Burke, Ginee Seo, and Emma Dryden.

  Donald H. Estes, Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego City College, read the manuscript twice, talked with me on the phone, provided much-needed advice and corrections, and tolerated it when I hounded him for help. I was also inspired and moved by “Hot Enough to Melt Iron: The San Diego Nikkei Experience 1942-1946” and “Further and Further Away—The Relocation of San Diego’s Nikkei Community—1942,” the articles cowritten by Professor Estes and his son, Matthew T. Estes. Professor Estes passed away in the spring of 2005.

  A number of former internees, including Mas Inoshita, Tom Miyamoto, and Robert Wada, volunteered their time for interviews that provided many fascinating and particular details.

  The Reverend Marvin Harada of the Orange County Buddhist Church set up interviews with former internees Harry Koide, Nami Okada, and Connie Shimojima.

  Naomi Hirahara, author of A Scent of Flowers: The History of the Southern California Flower Market, 1912-2004; Summer of the Big Bachi; and other books, set up interviews with 1940s flower farmers Arthur Ito, Frank Kuwahara, Larry Nomura, Hideo “Jibo” Satow, and Mas Yoshida.

  Former internee Ruth Okimoto spoke with me both about her experiences in camp and about her trenchant piece of research, Sharing a Desert Home: Life on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, which explores the relationship between the Japanese Americans incarcerated at Poston and the Native Americans living on the reservation. She also read the manuscript twice, for which I am eternally grateful, for in many ways this is her story.

  Elders Gloria McVey, part Chemehuevi, and Henry Little, Mojave, both grew up on the reservation and talked to me about life in those days before and during the war.

  Endless thanks for the generosity and knowledge of Jay Cravath, PhD, of the Colorado River Indian Tribes Education Department. Dr. Cravath put me in touch with Gloria McVey and also found answers to many of my questions about life on the reservation during the war.

  Reiko Lee generously read the whole manuscript and also consulted with her friend, the translator Yoshie Takahashi, to advise me on my Japanese usage. In addition Keith Holeman and Jeannette Miyamoto provided much invaluable advice on usage.

  A tremendous resource for anyone studying the internment is the collection of interviews at the Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton.

  Dr. Kenneth William Townsend, author of World War II and the American Indian, advised me on the Poston section of the manuscript.

  The amazing National Archives-Pacific Region (Laguan Niguel) holds many original documents pertaining to the Colorado River Relocation Center.

  Many people took the time to answer my e-mailed queries, including Judy Hamaguchi of the Japanese American Historical Society, Karen Leong of Arizona State University, Teri Kuwahara of the Go For Broke Educational Foundation, and members of the IRRIGATION-L.org listserv. I’d also like to thank RJ Long, Donald Coffin, Charles Wiggins, C. J. Hobijn, and some other members of the greyhoundthroughexpress Yahoo group, although the lengthy section about a bus trip was cut from the final manuscript.

  I am profoundly grateful and fortunate.

  1

  THIS IS WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO BE LONELY:

  Like everyone was looking at you. Sumiko felt this once in a while.

  Like nobody was looking at you. Sumiko felt this a lot.

  Like you didn’t care about anything at all. She felt this maybe once a week.

  Like you were just about to cry over every little thing. She felt this about once daily.

  But not today! Sumiko jumped off the school bus and ran behind her house. Her family was working; she saw their small forms surrounded by bursts of color in the flower fields. “Jiichan!” she shouted to her grandfather. She waved an envelope at him. “I’m invited to a party!”

  “Can’t hear!”

  “I’m invited to a party!”

  Everybody was looking at her, but nobody seemed to understand what she was saying. Oh, forget it! She ran into the stable to look for her little brother, Tak-Tak, but he wasn’t there. Baba just looked at her expectantly. She patted the old nag’s yellow nose and said, “I’m invited to a party.” Baba didn’t change expressions.

  She hurried inside the house to change into her work clothes. That morning Sumiko and some other kids in her sixth-grade class had received invitations to a birthday party this Saturday. One of the popular girls was holding a party and had decided at the last minute to invite everyone in the class. The invitation was embossed, and the lettering inside was gold. Sumiko had read the inside about a dozen times:

  We are pleased to invite you

  to a birthday party for

  Marsha Melrose

  12372 La Mirada Terrace

  Saturday, December 6, 1941

  1-3 p.m.

  The invitation reminded Sumiko of the expensive valentines her cousin Ichiro gave to girls he especially liked.

  She changed clothes be
hind the blankets her aunt and uncle had strung across the bedroom. She shared the room with Takao, a.k.a. Tak-Tak. Auntie and Uncle had strung the blankets up three weeks earlier when Sumiko turned twelve. She felt guilty because she actually liked the blankets, even though Tak-Tak had cried over them. He was almost six and he followed her around day and night. She loved him like crazy. But she still liked the blankets.

  Sumiko stuck the invitation into her shirt pocket so that she could look at it now and then while she worked. This was the first class party she’d ever been invited to.

  Through a fluke, Sumiko lived in a school district with few Japanese. She was the only Japanese girl in her class, whereas if she’d lived a few miles away, several Japanese girls would have been in the same class. The white girls were nice enough to her during recess, but she had never been invited to play on weekends or sleep over at anyone’s house or anything like that.

  She didn’t used to worry about it as much as she did lately. The way Jiichan told the story, Sumiko had been born cheerful, had become sad when her parents died when Tak-Tak was a baby, had begun to get cheerful again, and now was just “starting to act like a female.” He’d said that because she had asked for a mirror for her bureau so she could decide when it was time to start curling her long hair. Instead of a mirror, she’d gotten the blankets.

  “Hurry!” Tak-Tak called out. “Or we won’t have time to brush Baba.”

  She stepped around the blanket divider and saw that her brother had come in. “I’m invited to a party.” She waved the invitation at him.

  He looked at her blankly. He wore black-framed glasses that stayed attached to his head with an elastic band Auntie had made. The lenses were so thick, his eyes always looked big.

  Tak-Tak clearly didn’t understand the significance of her invitation. Finally he said, “We have to brush Baba. You promised me before you went to school.”

  He looked a little forlorn over the thought that she might have forgotten what she promised him. “Did you clean Baba’s brush?” she asked.

  He held up a clean horse brush. “I’ll race you!”

  She let Tak-Tak stay one step ahead of her as they ran outside to the stable. “You beat me!” she cried as they fell into some hay.

  Sumiko smiled as Tak-Tak jumped up from the hay to brush the horse. Tak-Tak really adored Baba. Her nose dripped all the time, but that worked out fine because Tak-Tak liked gooey things. Sumiko sat up and looked out the stable door. Her cousins Bull and Ichiro were still tending the flowers, nineteen-year-old Bull wide and strong and twenty-three-year-old Ichiro slender and lean, graceful even in his farm clothes. Uncle was working at the far end of the fields among the carnations, which he always liked to take care of himself. The carnations grew in a makeshift, open-field greenhouse, where they were protected from extremes of sun or wind. Uncle was cutting some for tomorrow’s wholesale flower market. Ichiro and Bull were pulling weeds among the stock. Local flower farmers called flowers grown in the field kusabana—“weedflowers.” Stock were weedflowers that emanated an amazing clovelike fragrance. Of all the flowers her family had ever grown, Sumiko loved them most.

  Ragged white cheesecloth rippled above parts of the fields. Last spring Sumiko and Auntie had sewn cheesecloth tarps for the men to hang over the fields to protect the flowers—except the stock, which didn’t need protection.

  Uncle dreamed of setting up a glass greenhouse someday and growing perfect carnations, but so far that was just talk. Only the wealthier Japanese farmers owned glass greenhouses. Uncle said you could control the elements better with a greenhouse. Perfection was the Holy Grail to Uncle. Sumiko thought that a lot of the flowers were perfect, but Uncle often looked critically at his carnations and said things like, “They would be perfect if we had a glass greenhouse.” He never even considered whether the stock could reach perfection—after all, they were just weedflowers.

  Most of the greenhouse growers came from families who’d moved to America before laws were passed preventing those born in Asia from becoming citizens. Uncle and Jiichan had both been born in Japan. People born in Asia were not allowed to become American citizens, and those who weren’t citizens were not allowed to own or lease land. Because her cousin Ichiro was born in the United States, the farm’s lease was in his name instead of his father’s.

  Sumiko turned her attention back to the stable to check on her brother. Tak-Tak had climbed a stool and was brushing Baba’s mane. Tak-Tak loved Sumiko best of anything in the world. But Sumiko thought maybe he loved the horse second best.

  Now she saw her grandfather walk into the outhouse. That was always the first thing he did when he finished working. “I have to start the bathwater,” she told Tak-Tak, who barely noticed as she hurried away. In the bathhouse she got kindling from a pile and placed it under the big tub. She lugged a few logs off the woodpile and placed them atop the kindling and started a fire. As soon as the bathwater started steaming, she would place a wooden platform in the tub so the bottom wouldn’t be too hot to step in.

  “Sumiko-chan!” her grandfather called from the outhouse. There was a crack in the wood that he always peered out of. Sometimes he liked to talk to the family right through the outhouse wall! He had no dignity because he was so old. Still, he made Sumiko smile a lot. She ran to the outhouse.

  “Yes, Jiichan.”

  “When is party?” he said.

  “I thought you didn’t hear me.”

  “Whole neighborhood hear you,” he said.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  He didn’t speak. Sometimes he just stopped talking, and you didn’t know whether you were supposed to wait at the outhouse or not. If you asked him if he wanted you to wait outside, he would snap that you had interrupted his train of thought. If you waited without asking, he would look surprised when he came out.

  “I thinking, maybe it better I drive you to party instead of your uncle,” he suddenly said. “I wait in car nearby in case you get hurt.” Though Jiichan had lived in the United States for several decades, he didn’t sound like it. Sometimes he spoke chanpon, which was a mix of Japanese and English; sometimes he spoke Japanese; and when he talked to Sumiko and Tak-Tak, he spoke mangled English.

  Jiichan already seemed as obsessed with this party as Sumiko was.

  “Jiichan! I’m not going to get hurt at a birthday party!” she said to the outhouse.

  “I just thinking. But if you got no respect for old man opinion, never mind, never mind.”

  Sumiko laughed. “I’m going to be fine. Maybe they’ll ask me to sing a song!” Was that what they did at birthday parties? She liked to sing. Once she’d even been chosen to sing a song alone during a school assembly. She’d gotten a little flustered and sung the same verse twice, but otherwise, she’d done great. She imagined a crowd of classmates surrounding her at the party.

  “Sumiko!” Jiichan said. “Are you listening?”

  “Sorry, Jiichan. What did you say?”

  “I say go get your uncle!”

  She shouted out, “Uncle! Jiichan wants you!” Uncle looked up from the fields and headed in.

  “You break my eardrum,” Jiichan said.

  Sumiko returned to the bathhouse to check the water (not hot enough yet], went into the stable to check Tak-Tak (still brushing Baba), and hurried to the shed to grade the cut carnations Ichiro had just brought in from the field. He smiled as she passed.

  The shed was yet another drafty building on the farm. Empty taru—barrels—that soy sauce came in were piled on top of one another along the walls, waiting to be filled with carnations for tomorrow morning’s market. Sumiko was supposed to grade the flowers and put them into the taru. That was one of her main jobs.

  Flower farmers charged more for their most beautiful, biggest, nearly flawless flowers. Sumiko graded the best carnations #1 and the next best #2. Only carnations were graded inside the shed. The stock were graded right out in the field.

  The worst carnations that farmers sold were splits—flower
s where the calyx didn’t hold the petals together right. They were still pretty, but they were bought by funeral parlors or else cheap markets like street-corner flower vendors. Jiichan said men bought street-corner flowers on the way home from work on days when their wives were mad at them. He said someday he was going to write a book of all his theories.

  Sometimes Sumiko slipped a #1 flower into the splits because she felt sorry for the poor dead people who were getting defective flowers. But she also felt guilty that a good flower might be wasted on dead people who wouldn’t even notice. So either way she felt a little bad.

  As she picked up the first stem from the pile, Sumiko remembered proudly how Uncle had said she was the only one in the family whose hands were both quick and gentle—perfect hands for grading. In fact, she was the only one in the family allowed to grade the carnations. That was one reason she knew how important she was to the farm. From the beginning, Uncle and Auntie had never asked her to work, but she still remembered lying in her new bedroom after her parents died, worrying that she and her brother would get sent to an orphanage. So the next day she’d gotten up and scrubbed all the floors. Jiichan still brought it up sometimes. “I remember when your parents die, all you do is scrub floor for week. We thought you crazy.” And she had not stopped working since then.

  She placed a batch of #1s into the taru. Tak-Tak came in and watched her for a moment. “Do you think Baba loves me or Bull or you more?” he asked.

  “Maybe she loves all of us for different reasons.”

  “Why does she love me?”

  “Because you brush her.” He was silent, and she glanced at him. He was smiling to himself. Then his eyes grew curious. “Why does she love Bull?” he said.

  “Because he was her first friend.”

  “Does she love you?”