Obon, Festival of the Dead

Generation I. Executive Order 9066

Pursued by an ever-tightening net, my ancestral fish, twenty-something, singing Red Shoes, Red Shoes, a children’s nursery rhyme:

  “Aka—i—kutsu—ha—ite—a,”   (A young girl wearing red shoes   has gone to America with a foreigner.)   “Only American songs,” her husband says.   “A—E—I—O—U,” she works over a cluster of vowels,

whispering to the infant girl on her back while they wade toward Somerset, Pennsylvania.

No one wants to travel back across a country, yellow-brown despairing, full moon maples rollicking against pebble-pocked shores, my family unharbored and demoored, San Diego wasn’t its imagined paradise in 1942 and fleeing. My grandmother escaping the sea, carmine sandals called geta soaking in a blazing rain, birdsong lost, having so recently exchanged surnames

  Hasebe for Smith,   an island of motherless dark,   clothed by shorelines the color of waves.

Nisei, Generation II. My mother

(the infant girl) sings Momotaroson to me (in a yellow house that smells like red Marlboros and burnt ramen) of a little boy born in the center of a softball-sized peachling, a stray piichi that came bumping down a stream like a present. She sings wholly

gaijin, my grandmother so proud of her daughter’s Japanese-less-ness. We are all proud to celebrate my third birthday at the Hibachi Grill: fire excising from the throat of an onion volcano. Three generations gather around to teach me how to pick kernels of “gohan, gohan, go-han” up off the face of a melamine plate.

Sansei, Generation III. Alone

I am returning to Japan- town, decades later, on an la late summer night on the corner of Rose Street and 1st. Stretched ladders of generations crowd for the festival: lit-up kabuki roam the streets between rows of marinated salmon, baskets piled high with tiny, dry sardines, niboshi and sashimi sliced onionskin thin. Mochi flour litters the air as I pay beneath amber paper lantern light to have another brittle box of Kitsune Udon shipped back to Pennsylvania.

I turn the corner, and in a sake bar a white-face woman stands on stage in red geta, singing:

“Aka—i—kutsu—ha—ite—a,” and for the first time it’s only the English I hear:

  “A young girl wearing red shoes   has gone to America with a foreigner

  She took a ship from the wharf in Yokohama,   Gone to America with a foreigner.

  Now her eyes have turned blue, I wonder   about her as a foreigner in that country.

  Every time I see red shoes, I think of her   Every time I meet a foreigner, I think of her.”

I wonder about her, now, as a foreigner in my country. Widowed images I cannot shake.