Sayonara, ai (Goodbye, love)

by Angela Miyuki Mackintosh
After Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa

I’m eight. My hands are blistered and smell metallic from the monkey bars. On the distant playground, kids shriek and pound tetherballs. The sun warms my neck, and my backpack feels light as I stride out to the parking lot with my new girlfriends. They’re singing “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!”—slanting their eyes up then down with their fingers, grabbing their knees, then pinching their t-shirts and pulling them out like they have boobies. I’m doing it, too. They think I’m Mexican, like them, and it’s better to be Mexican than to be Asian. The girls even initiated me into their gang, punching my ribs, then hugging me when it was all over. I finally feel like I belong.
        I see my mom’s mustard Datsun B210 sputter to a stop in front of the school, pitching exhaust into the sky. My stomach drops and my cheeks flush hot. “Bye!” I scream, and race to the car, hoping they won’t get a good look at my mom, hoping they’ll just see her black hair from a distance and think she’s Mexican. But that doesn’t happen. She’s already out of the car and looking for me, tight jeans painted onto her slim figure.
        “Anjera-chan…Anjera-chan!” She waves to me, smiling with big straight white teeth.
        My mom can’t pronounce the name she gave me: Angela.

There is no one in our family named Angela, so I don’t know why my parents named me that. It was one of the most popular girl names of the 70s, but it didn’t fit well in my mom’s mouth; it rolled around like a gumball on her tongue, twisted her vocal cords like undercooked ramen noodles. Adding “chan” to the end of my name is a Japanese term of endearment reserved for children and female family members. It made Angela less Anglo. Less White. Less like my father and more like her home.

                                                                
~~~

My mother’s name is Etsuko, which means “joy child” in Japanese. She was born in Okinawa in 1942, during WWII, three years before the Battle of Okinawa extinguished one third of the island’s population in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War.
        It is estimated that 149,425 Okinawan civilians were killed, committed suicide, or went missing. The Okinawans had no military. They’d been a peace-loving indigenous people—craft makers, performing artists, farmers, fishermen, and agrarians—unmarred by war for centuries. Okinawan men and schoolboys as young as twelve were conscripted into combat duty by the Imperial Japanese Army. Okinawa was the sacrifice to keep mainlanders safe. Despite not having training or effective weapons, they were forced to defend themselves against US attacks.
        Ninety percent of the island’s buildings and infrastructure were demolished, and my mother’s childhood home was firebombed to a crisp. My grandfather was conscripted and never returned. All that was left of him by the time I visited Okinawa at five years old was a gohonzon, the earthy notes of amber and incense burning on the altar next to his photo. The rest of my mother’s family fled to the forests of northern Okinawa. The battle was known as the “typhoon of steel.”
        I imagine my grandmother clutching a hand grenade issued by the Imperial Japanese Army and driven by tales of what American soldiers would do to women and children if taken captive. Huddled together with her children, she slams the grenade on the ground, but to her dismay, it does not explode. Three months spent hidden in limestone caves, scavenging for scraps while their bodies emaciate, my mother’s family is captured by American soldiers and taken back to their village; the once beautiful tropical landscape of Okinawa turned into a vast field of mud, decay, and maggots.
        My mother grew up wading through mud mixed with the bone fragments and teeth of dead villagers. The air clattered with gunfire. Jets roared overhead.

She was the youngest of seven children and came from a small village nestled between white-sanded Kunigami Beach and densely forested Mount Yonaha. Her family farmed sugar cane and lived in a hut with tatami floors and a thatched roof on which they grew goya or bitter melon. They hunted on tide pool rocks and speared crabs with bamboo sticks, a tradition I would learn at five when I visited. They ate roasted sea snails and crayfish splashed in soy sauce.
        My mom was versed in traditional Ryukyuan folk music and played the sanshin, a three-stringed lute, that she later hid in our guest room closet and I never heard her play. She didn’t share many stories about her childhood, but I’d interviewed her for my sixth-grade social studies project. We tape-recorded our conversation in my parents’ bathroom, our voices echoing off the bare walls. She coughed into a Kleenex and reluctantly told me about the Obon festival in her village, her favorite holiday, where they played tug-of-war with a giant rice-straw rope.
        My mom oil painted, made pottery, and sewed her own clothes. With determination, she broke out of her small village and journeyed south to the city of Naha where she enrolled in college to become a dietitian. Watching her villagers starve to death piqued her interest in the nutritional needs of the human body.

After earning her college certificate, she found work as a dietitian for a company that manufactured food products in a building near Futenma Air Base.
        Futenma was a dilapidated coral runway used as an emergency airbase, and on weekends GIs and Okinawans raced cars on the runway and used a nearby dirt track for motocross.
        My father raced both.

On a sultry Saturday evening, New Year’s Eve 1966, my father stumbled to a bar, an alcohol showroom in the basement of the food manufacturing company where my mother worked. Descending the steps, he bonked his head on the wooden doorframe, a shiny knot forming on his scalp. My mother typically worked in the upstairs offices but was filling in as a hostess that evening. She packed ice cubes into a dishcloth and nursed his head. Her jet-black hair framed her round face and fell over her slender shoulders as she pressed the ice to his scalp.
        My father was smitten—he liked her shy laughter and her bright smile—and my mom fell in love with a man the Okinawans called “Mac” because my father raced cars and had blue eyes and blond hair like Steve McQueen.
        She never told me what she thought of him after that meeting, but I know her favorite movie at the time was Sayonara with Marlon Brando, a story of a GI and a Japanese woman who had a daring interracial love affair that violated every rule, custom, and centuries-old belief. At the end of the movie, the lovers sail off into the sunset together and move to the States, their dream realized.
        What my mother didn’t know was that the James Michener novel the movie was based on has a very different ending—one that implies all interracial marriages are doomed.

                                                                
~~~

My father’s name is William, which means “resolute protector” or “strong-willed warrior.” He was born in Oklahoma in 1937 into a family of engineers, his Scotch father and grandfather earning their degrees from Cornell in New York. My father broke that tradition and went to Oklahoma A&M. He received his engineering degree in ’64 after a slight diversion, spending two years in the army stationed in Germany.
        After college, he moved to Los Angeles and worked for North American Aviation, engineering the flight control system for the XB-70 Triple Sonic Bomber. The work was tedious, so when he heard Hughes Aircraft was hiring field engineers for their air defense equipment in Germany, he applied. He had fond memories of his army days, the lush pine and fir of the Black Forest, malty chocolate beer and schnitzel, the scratch of wool and chill on his cheeks, the heated truck he drove while infantrymen slept in the snow. He interviewed, and they hired him on the spot, saying he’d learn the equipment for twelve weeks during a training class, and then they’d send him to Germany.
        Halfway through the class, however, Hughes announced that they’d filled all the requirements for Germany, but not to worry because they’d found a place for him in Korea. My father’s heart sank. He’d heard about Korea from friends who’d served in the Korean War, and their stories always concluded at the end of a dirt road, wading through six feet of mud due to heavy seasonal rains. But within a week, Hughes needed five guys to work in Okinawa, and my father shot up his hand.
        In the summer of ‘66, he started working at Naha Air Base in Okinawa rebuilding the master radar tracking station equipment that the army, navy, and air force used in a joint defense center. This equipment gathered information from long-distance radars on both points of the island and four missile battalions, which was processed into pictures and then copied by hand. Men climbed ladders and wrote backwards with grease pencils on illuminated plexiglass two stories high, mapping the location of all aircraft within a hundred miles of the island. Military personnel seated in the amphitheater would view the diagrams and decide whether to send aircraft or deploy sea ships to fire at these planes.

When my father first arrived in Okinawa, he needed transportation, so he trekked to the Honda dealer where he purchased a 250cc motorcycle from a Japanese man named Tommy. Tommy stood 5’4” and spoke English well enough to sell bikes to GIs, and on their first meeting, he said, “We have races every weekend. Do you want to go? I’ll show you around.”
        Tommy stood tippy-toe when his bike was stationary. When he raced, he carved the track and exploded over jumps, globs of red mud splattered from his knobby tires. After my father watched him for two weeks, Tommy said, “You ought to get out and race!” My father raced terribly at first but built up a name for himself as he accumulated gold trophies.

My father didn’t know how to talk to girls. In high school, his friend set him up on dates, but to my knowledge, he’d never had a steady girlfriend. Tommy was from Tokyo, married to an Okinawan woman and had kids, but also had a girlfriend on the side. Tommy’s girlfriend worked in a basement bar, and he invited my father to go with him one evening to meet her friend. That friend was my mother. She didn’t speak much English, but that didn’t matter because I imagine my father liked her petite figure, the shy way she giggled at his jokes, and, because of the language barrier, she could be anything he imagined her to be.

My parents got married in Okinawa in 1967, the same year that the
US Supreme Court declared interracial marriage legal. They had a modest ceremony, where my grandmother, obachan, attended, and some of my mother’s brothers and sisters. I don’t know why more of my mom’s family didn’t attend; I imagine they disapproved—she was the only one in her entire village who’d ever dated an American, let alone married one.

My name is Angela, which is derived from the Greek word ángelos and means “messenger of the gods.” I was born in 1972 in Anaheim, California, the year of Watergate and Nixon, the year Okinawa reverted to Japan’s control after 27 years of US military occupation.

        I was thirteen when my mom started teaching me how to be a woman. She stood in our kitchen chopping carrots rangiri style, rotating them a quarter turn while slicing them diagonally.
        “It good for taste,” she said, and cranked the stove’s electric burner to high, a smattering of onions crackling in a pop of oil.
        The kitchen window overlooked a fifty-foot-high hill in our backyard. When I started to walk, my mom said I’d slip out of her arms and scramble up it with my plump legs, and she’d hitch up her skirt and climb after me.
        “You fast and slippery,” she said, “like fish.”
        “Like my first word,” I laughed.
        She told me my first word wasn’t “mama” or “dada,” it was “fish.”

My mom prepared fish for lunch sometimes, but never for dinner. She cooked Japanese food only when my father wasn’t home, hiding it like a secret. The back of the cupboard was stuffed with weird things like dehydrated squid and furikake, a mixture of dried fish, sesame seeds, chopped seaweed, and monosodium glutamate. I’d shake MSG crystals onto my hand and lick them off greedily. I always craved salt more than sugar.
        At night, Mom cooked American meals for my father: porkchops, mac ‘n cheese, T-bone steak. When I didn’t want to eat a briny bowl of spinach or black-eyed peas that tasted like dirt, my father made me sit at the dinner table until I finished my meal. I’d sit for hours, kicking my legs, pushing food into a mountain.
        Like most fathers of the ‘70s, my dad believed in corporal punishment. He’d roll up a newspaper and hit our dog when she snuck food off the table. When I was younger, he’d often put me over his knee and slap my bottom until my skin turned scarlet. My mother would watch, but never wanted to participate. She was raised with a practice in honor and empathy rather than discipline. So when my father asked her to spank me, it went against her culture. She would put me over her knee and I would barely feel her tiny hand as she feathered my clothed bottom. I wouldn’t flinch or cry, which wasn’t the reaction my father had hoped for.
        “Do it again,” he would instruct, until her hand made a slapping noise. I would let out a pretend cry to get it over with.
        My father’s anger was different. Veins pulsed from his red face and balding scalp. When he taught me math and I didn’t get an equation right, he’d start by putting me over his knee; then later, we’d end up in the hallway with the pale-yellow paint with his hands around my neck, strangling me, my feet dangling over the carpet, my back against the wall while my mother screamed: “Prease, no! Let go of Anjera!”
        He would ignore her and keep squeezing, his eyes intensely blue and steely, his eyebrows like two chopsticks coming down into a V.

Mom scraped vegetables into the pot, then grabbed her Bible and waved me over. “When you have question,” she said, “ask the Bible.” She explained that you could open the Bible to a random page and find your answer, as if it were a Magic 8-Ball.
        “Anjera-chan have good trip?” she asked the Bible. My eighth-grade history class was traveling to Washington D.C. in the spring.
        The Bible was warped from moisture and smelled like glue. I thumbed open a page, and it said something about walking with a light under my feet.
        “Jesus watch over you,” Mom said.

Mom’s earliest memory was of a missionary coming to her village. Even though Japan’s ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873, in the ‘40s, it was still taboo, and believers hid their faith, practicing Ryukyu Shinto, a religion generally characterized by ancestor worship. There is no absolute God in Shinto, and my mom must’ve found it comforting to have one God to pray to, but secreted her beliefs until she came to the States.
        One Sunday before church when I was ten, my mom picked me up from my friend’s house after a sleepover. She lingered in the doorway, staring at the ground.
        “Your hair’s so pretty,” my friend’s mom said. “It’s thick and black. Mine is turning gray!” she laughed, cradling a cup of coffee.
        “I dye it,” my mom snorted, unsmiling.
        I was embarrassed by my mom’s seriousness, how she shuffled off without staying to chat.
        We attended a Japanese Baptist Church forty minutes from home. My Sunday school teacher spoke Japanese, and I didn’t know any words besides the common ones like kudasai (please) and arigato (thank you), and the ones the Japanese kids taught me, like oshiri (butt) and unko (poop).
        The church was a dilapidated shack with peeling paint on a patch of grass at the end of the Caucasian Baptist Church’s parking lot, which we called the “Big Church.” Every year we visited the Big Church for a Christmas celebration, all of us Japanese standing at the back of the chapel like outcasts. My mom told me the Big Church let our congregation rent the shack, and I was unaware of what that meant, but I felt the power imbalance and my mother’s acceptance of it.

“Wash first.” Mom rinsed a pot of Calrose rice under running water, swishing it around with her hand until it turned milky white, then drained the cloudy water and repeated. She explained the 1:2 ratio using her fingers as measurements: your fingertip to the first joint is proportionate to the rice, your fingertip to your knuckle is proportionate to the amount of water.
        She’d been teaching me how to be a homemaker for a month now, even though I hadn’t had my period yet. I’d learned how to scrub the tub with Comet, use the oven, do laundry. She took me shopping for a week straight and let me buy anything I wanted. I bought off-the-shoulder tops and gladiator sandals for my Madonna look. I sprayed Sun-In into my bangs and heated them with a blow dryer until they turned blonde. I plucked my thick Okinawan eyebrows I’d inherited from my mom into a thin line. Everyone thought I was White. I smoked clove cigarettes and scammed with boys at Studio K, a dance club for teens at Knott’s Berry Farm that smelled like Aqua Net.

One night, Mom and I fought about where I was going, and I blurted, “I’m running away and never coming back!”
        My mom, who never laid hands on me unless my father made her, pounced on me right as I grabbed the doorknob and pulled me to the floor. We wrestled on the linoleum, crawling and scratching, grunting and kicking, until we both got so tired we stopped, sweaty, dried tears on our cheeks.
        During that time, Mom started accusing Dad of sleeping with other women. Every night their arguments became more and more intense, my father stayed at work later, and she’d suspect more and more. I didn’t think he was cheating.

One afternoon, Mom bent down with wild eyes, trembling, grabbed my shoulders and said, “The house is going to freeze over. You need to leave this weekend. Spend the night at a friend’s.”
        I told her she was being silly. It was 80 degrees, sunny and warm, and it never snowed. I knew something was wrong because of my parents’ fights, and my instincts told me to stay home.
        She had planned to do it that weekend.

Mom handed me the Minolta and asked me to take photos of her. She sat at our dining room table—her fuzzy cream-colored sweater, a hair barrette, an empty smile. Flash.
        This was our last lesson.
        “Take care of daddy,” she said.
        What she didn’t teach me was how to deal with her death after she’d gone.

                                                                
~~~

On the morning of April 17, 1985, I walked into our home’s garage and found my mother hanging from a noose that was tied to the rafters. She was wearing her blue robe, head tilted, toes dangling at eye level, a ladder beside her.
        Dad cut her down from the noose and her body let out a groan. My father called an ambulance while I sat beside Mom on the floor, holding her limp hand, and begged her to stay with me. My orange cat paced across her stomach, and I shooed her away. But Mom was already dead.
        She was forty-three. I was thirteen.

My mom gave me the Japanese middle name Miyuki, which means “beautiful snow.” After the police questioned us and the coroners arrived, they put my mom on a stretcher and wheeled her out onto our driveway while the entire neighborhood stood on the sidewalk and watched. Neighbors who’d never befriended my mom. Some were in bathrobes, some held cups of coffee and whispered in hushed voices, some smoked cigarettes. After my mother’s death, my father and I didn’t speak to each other. The house grew calm and silent, like a blanket of beautiful snow.

My mother wrote her suicide letter in Japanese characters, and I had it translated by a teenage girl who lived up the street. When looking for answers, I refer to this passage:

When I feel lonesome, I try to overcome it with my strong religion. I lived a happy life ever since my childhood till marriage, surrounded with the love of my parents and friends.
        Then, marriage brought me here. To this unfamiliar foreign place.
        It took me a few years to get used to the different culture and different lifestyle. Once in a while, language barrier and my characteristics of unsociability put me in an empty world.

There are no cases of mental illness in my mom’s family. Sometimes I believe suicide was a way out of the isolation she felt, in part from being separated from her family, in part because of the individualistic nature of American society. She was accustomed to the close relationships with relatives and villagers typical in Okinawa and was surprised to find that many neighbors didn’t even speak to each other in America. When she first arrived, she had no acquaintances besides my father, and even though she tried to overcome the language barrier, she often felt culturally inept.
        I wonder how different my mom’s life would’ve been if she would have communicated with her daughter in her native tongue. I don’t know why she never taught me, other than she wanted me to be American. Maybe it was growing up under the US military’s colonial mindset, the idea that locals should learn another country’s language and how English was taught in her schools. Maybe she didn’t want me to struggle with bilingualism the way she did. Maybe she didn’t want me to experience racial prejudice the way she had. But what she didn’t realize was that by not teaching me Japanese, by hiding her Okinawan-ness—her food, her customs, her traditions—she was teaching me how to hide that part of myself, too.
        I was ashamed of my heritage.
        She left her heritage behind.
        She crossed an ocean to live in a country she’d never seen and knew nothing about for the sake of love. When her marriage failed, she bobbed alone in an empty world.

In my mother’s letter, she writes the closing to my father:

To loving husband, Bill,
Please take good care of Angela.
I was one of the happiest people
because I could love you so much
and feel your love, too.
I am deeply, deeply in love with you.
You know that, don’t you?
Goodbye, love.

                                                                
~~~

On the phone, my father said to me, “I should’ve gotten married earlier. Before I went to Okinawa. I just didn’t know how to talk to women.”
        Apparently, my father still doesn’t know how to talk to women. He doesn’t realize what he’s saying—if that happened, I wouldn’t exist. But I understand where he’s coming from. If he’d been married, he wouldn’t have gone to work on a US military base in Okinawa; he wouldn’t have met my mother and whisked her away from her village, her family, her friends, and brought her to this foreign land—and she never would’ve killed herself.

It is romantic to believe that two people from very different worlds, from opposite sides of the war, could find love. My mom and dad had wanted the Hollywood ending of Sayonara, the one where the lovers move to the States and live happily ever after, the ending Marlon Brando insisted upon; not Michener’s ending of Sayonara where the interracial couple part ways forever because of their differences.
         An article in the Okinawa Encyclopedia attributes the large number of interracial marriages between GIs and Okinawan women to the prolonged
US military presence. The article asserts that the failure rate of these marriages was high “because of the differences in language and culture.”
        As a product of these two very different cultures, I think about my father’s words, and my stomach tightens with grief for this inherited history within me.

In 1972, the year I was born, Japan paid $685 million to regain control of Okinawa after 27 years of United States military occupation.
        Okinawans held ceremonies and waved flags. They thought they were free of the US military bases. But the bases stayed.

Since then, over 6,000 crimes committed by the US Military have been reported in Okinawa, including robbery, rape, and murder. Traffic accidents by the US Military, including aircraft crashes and emergency landings, have caused more than 4,000 casualties. The number of court-martial cases in Okinawa for sexual assault by US military personnel is higher than at any other US base in the world.

In 1995, three US servicemen rented a car and kidnapped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl wearing her school uniform. They threw her in the back seat, beat her, bound her wrists and ankles, duct-taped her eyes and mouth shut. They drove to a secluded field and gang-raped her. Following a conviction in a Japanese court, they were sentenced to seven years in prison.
        That year, 91,000 Okinawans protested to get rid of US military bases.

There are over 4,000 Amerasian children born on the island to Okinawan mothers who were abandoned by servicemen. These Amerasian children in Okinawa endure discrimination, bullying, and often drop out of school. Most of their mothers need public assistance to make ends meet.

Today, 20 percent of Okinawa’s land is occupied by US military bases. No other country in the world has more land under foreign military control.
        That percentage is growing. Construction has begun at Henoko, a new base that will replace my father’s old racing track at Futenma, which is dubbed “the most dangerous base in the world” because it’s located in a crowded residential area where plane crashes, pollution, crime, rape, and murder are linked to the US military. Okinawa is just 0.6 percent of Japan’s landmass, but 75 percent of US military personnel in Japan are stationed there. Okinawans have been protesting for 52 years and are still protesting, the number of opposition votes cast is currently the largest on record.

                                                                
~~~

I am five. I’m hunting on the mossy rocks with my mother in Okinawa. Her beige pants are rolled up over her knees and she’s wearing a big floppy sunhat. We peer into tide pools and watch hermit crabs shuffle, shimmery fish dart and wiggle. A sea anemone grabs me with its sticky fingers. The tide splashes in and foams out. Water snaps my toes. A candy-apple-colored crab creeps sideways across the rocks. We arch our arms back and hold our bamboo spears steady. Just as I’m about to stab, my mother grabs my arm and stops me. Following closely behind the big crab is a smaller crab.
        “It her baby,” she says, pointing.
        “Her baby,” I repeat.
        Even though I’m only five, I understand that if we killed the mother crab, her baby would be forced to grow up alone.
        We sit in silence and watch the two crabs scuttle off together over the black rocks and make their way down the shore.