Сhapter ONE
JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS BEGAN arriving in Canada in great numbers at the end of the nineteenth century, lured by the tremendous abundance of land, fish, and forests that promised money. Small, diligent, smelling of strange foods, speaking heavily accented English, these Asian newcomers seemed to be another kind of human being, willing to live in cramped quarters and squirreling away their hard-earned money. Laws were passed to bar them from voting, purchasing land, and enrolling in universities.
Like many other Japanese, my maternal and paternal grandparents came to Canada less because they wanted to make a new life than because in Japan they were locked into extreme poverty. I cannot imagine the terrible conditions that made them take the chance to come to a country that regarded them and treated them as belonging to a kind of subhuman race. Japan was their home, and their intent was to return to it when they had made their fortune. But it was a journey to a distant land with no assurances they would ever return. After my birth, my father's parents never went back to Japan, and my mother's parents returned only after World War returned only after World War II, disillusioned by their treatment in Canada. They went back to Hiroshima, and both were dead in less than a year.
My grandparents started their lives in Canada with little more than hope and a willingness to work. They had no formal education, spoke no English, and were of a culture totally alien to Canadians of the day, who had different attitudes and perspectives about everything from family to customs. Like the waves of immigrants who have come to this place over the past two centuries, my grandparents saw Canada as a land of opportunity and plenty. There is a story that neatly encapsulates this belief. Two immigrants arrive in Canada on a Sunday and take a stroll together along the street. One of them looks down and spots a twenty-dollar bill, which he bends to pick up. He's stopped by his friend, who tells him, “Leave it there; we'll start work tomorrow.”
Today I watch the Chinese family that operates the corner store, the Punjabi cab driver working long, hard hours, and the Mexican itinerants picking vegetables; all doing jobs that few Canadian-born folks are willing to endure, they are part of the stream of immigrants like my grandparents who have enriched what has become a highly multi-cultural society. They bring to it their vigor and their exotic practices, languages, and beliefs. But in the early part of the last century, there were no constitutional guarantees in this country.
My father and mother were born in Vancouver in 1909 and 1910, respectively, and survived the trauma of the Great Depression thanks to hard work and a strong extended family, which was held together by economic necessity and the forces of racism in British Columbia at that time. Asians, Canadian-born or not, differed from other Canadians in language, physical appearance, and behavior. My parents went to schools with other Canadians, and though Japanese was the first language each acquired at home, they soon were fluently bilingual and had many non-Japanese friends. Education was a very high priority for their parents, and Mom and Dad both completed high school, which was considered a good education in the 1920s. They stoically accepted encounters with bigots at school, in stores, and on the street, whereas only the most rebellious among Japanese Canadians of that time would ever have thought of dating, let alone marrying, a white person. Every one of the nine siblings of my parents' families married Japanese (today, among dozens of their children and grandchildren, only my twin sister, Marcia, is married to a Japanese). Even though their social lives revolved around family and other Japanese, however, my parents felt themselves fully Canadian.
Hard work was a constant part of their lives from childhood on. At about ten years of age, my father was sent to live with a wealthy white family as a “houseboy,” performing small chores for the household and receiving room and board in return. Perhaps the most important effect of that period in his life was that in his time off he read the entire set of the encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge, and he retained much of that information. As a girl, Mom went out picking berries, something at which she became very adept. After the war, when we lived in southern Ontario, she, my sisters, and I worked on farms, picking strawberries and raspberries on piecework (that is, we were paid a set amount for each box we picked), but it was impossible to keep up with Mom.
Dad and Mom met while they were both working with Furuya's, a Vancouver company that until recently still existed in Toronto; it specialized in imported Japanese food and cooking paraphernalia. The company had a rigid rule of nonfraternization between the sexes, but Mom and Dad began to date on the sly. Eventually, Dad had to quit Furuya's to date Mom more openly. His Japanese had deteriorated when he went to school, and when he approached Mom's father to ask permission to take her out, he must have phrased it in such a way that it sounded as if he were proposing marriage. “You're both far too young,” my grandfather replied in Japanese. “If you're serious, then wait, and come back in five years.”
Well, they continued to see each other, and five years later, in the mid-1930s, Dad asked for permission to marry Mom and got it. Theirs was not a traditional arranged marriage; instead, they were imbued with the Western notion of romantic love. We kids took it for granted that they smooched, and on occasion we could overhear their active sex life.
After they were married, they received financial help from Dad's parents to start a small laundry and dry-cleaning shop in Marpole, a Vancouver neighborhood near the edge of the city and alongside the Fraser River. We lived in the back of the shop. Mom had a miscarriage early in their marriage, and then Marcia and I arrived in the world on March 24, 1936. Dad says Mom became enormous, and the delivery was long and harrowing. I was born first, weighing in at nine pounds, but Marcia took a lot longer—so long, in fact, that Mom had no strength left and finally the doctor reached in with forceps and dragged Marcia out. As the second-born of twins, she is considered in Japanese tradition to be the elder, who allows the younger one of the pair to exit first. But she was tiny, weighing less than three pounds, and the forceps delivery caused some damage that resulted in a weakened right side.
I was taken home when Mom left the hospital, but Marcia stayed behind. Visiting her daily, Dad was upset that she seemed to be left without any care, whereas I was at home and the center of attention. He told the doctor that if Marcia was going to be left to die, he would prefer to take her home where she could be loved and cared for. The doctor assented, and so this young couple took over responsibility for both babies, one requiring a lot of care and attention. And Marcia pulled through. As she grew up, I always felt Mom and Dad were too hard on her, treating her no differently from me and later our two sisters and demanding that she work alongside us. I learned later from my father that Mom was determined Marcia would grow up to be tough and able to take care of herself. She did; she became a terrific softball pitcher and is competitive in anything she does. She had two children and is a wonderful grandma to her two grandsons.
Mom (Setsu Nakamura) and Dad (Carr Suzuki) on their wedding day, March 21, 1934
Dad and the twins, Marcia (left) and me, in 1936
Aiko arrived a year and a half later. Dad had hoped for another boy and had chosen the name Gerald, so when she was born, she was called Geraldine, or Gerry for short. We all had Japanese middle names, and in later life when she had assumed a more bohemian, artistic life, Gerry dropped her first name for Aiko, her second.
Sibling to twins, Aiko behaved like the stereotypical second child: a trickster, full of mischief, always wanting to explore. Dad had a classic Japanese attitude toward girls: they should finish high school, get a job, and find a husband. We later moved to London, Ontario, and both Marcia and Aiko took off for Toronto as soon as they finished high school so that they could become independent. Soon Aiko was immersed in an artistic crowd. I remember going home to London while I was in college in the United States and meeting her boyfriend, Alex, a big Hungarian with a beard and ponytail. This was the mid-1950s, and a beard was shocking enough, but to us a ponytail on a man was unheard of. To top off the shame, Alex and Aiko were living together in an age when many men still hoped to marry a virgin. Aiko always pushed the edges, and I, Mister Square in a brush cut, was pulled into her exciting, scary world. I was with her when she died on December 31, 2005.
During the war, when we were living in internment camps in the interior of British Columbia, Dad had been separated from the family for a year as he lived in a road camp building the Trans-Canada Highway. He did manage to make his way to Slocan City, where we were imprisoned, for a couple of days before going back to the road camp. Nine months later, our youngest sibling, Dawn, was born. Dawn became Dad's surrogate second son and accompanied him on numerous fishing trips. She did not want to follow her older sisters by going straight to work after high school, and when she said she wanted to go to university, Aiko and I lobbied very hard to support her until Dad relented. She was also a wonderful ballet dancer and, after completing her degree at the University of Toronto, obtained a Canada Council grant to dance with Martha Graham in New York City, a position she held for years.
AS A BOY, I would stand for hours behind a steam-operated machine that Dad used to press shirts and pants, asking him a steady stream of questions as he worked. He was able to answer me with what he remembered from The Book of Knowledge. He would take me along when he delivered clothing to customers, and I would patiently wait for him in the car. He was a garrulous man, and toward the end of the deliveries his visits with customers got longer, probably because he was having a social drink or two while talking. Dad was a great friend, and I hope he found my companionship as much of a delight as his was for me.
He was also a dreamer. His parents were constantly nagging him to go out and make money and save for a home and security. As the eldest in a family of seven children, he was expected to be a role model for his brothers and sister, but he wasn't the kind his parents had in mind. He was not afraid of work and labored hard to earn enough to buy the necessities in life, but he didn't believe that we should run after money as an end in itself. He taught us it was bad manners to talk about money with others; we learned to pity the person who bragged about money, new cars, or fancy clothes. Dad loved fishing and gardening, and he was fascinated by plants. To my grandparents, he was a failure, and they constantly berated him to do better, but to me, he was my great hero and role model.
Dad loved to go on fishing, camping, and mushroom-hunting trips in the mountains, where he often encountered First Nations people. He would easily strike up conversations and often ended up being invited for dinner or to stay with them. In the mid-1960s, when he had returned to Vancouver, he became close friends with a Native family near Boston Bar along the Fraser River. On fishing trips he would often stop off to stay with them, and when they came to town, they and their children would drop in to visit and stay with him and Mom.
Once, I accompanied him on a trip to hunt for matsutake, aromatic pine mushrooms that are highly prized by Japanese. On that trip, I met this First Nations family. I was surprised at how uptight I was in contrast to my father, who felt right at home. I, a young professor in genetics, had never met Native people and only knew about them from snippets in the media. I knew nothing about Dad's friends or their background, and I didn't know how to relate to them in conversation. Dad was relaxed and simply accepted them as people who shared his interest in fish, trees, and nature, so he easily raised subjects of mutual interest about which they could converse for hours. But I felt alien and was especially afraid I might say something that would be insulting or patronizing. I was overwhelmed by the fact that they were Indians, and I never allowed our basic humanity to be the main point of interaction. They probably wondered about this guy who had a great father but was too snooty to say much.
Dad's great characteristic was that when he met people, he was totally open, because he was genuinely interested in what they could tell him about their experiences and their world. Naturally, people loved him, because everyone loves to talk about him- or herself, and he was a terrific listener. I realize now that he automatically exhibited the quality that First Nations people tell us is so critical in order to communicate: respect. It would be a long time before I realized how much our shared genetic heritage—that is, our physical features—made First Nations people immediately more receptive to me.
Mom was a traditional Japanese wife, never arguing with or contradicting Dad in front of us or company. Her entire life was circumscribed by work. She was the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night, but I never heard her complain or nag my father. She took care of the family's finances, and as each of her kids began to babysit, waitress, or do farm work or construction, all of our earnings went to her. We didn't get an allowance; Mom and Dad bought our clothes, books, and other things we needed and from time to time doled out a little change for a treat, but I was never overwhelmed by a need for anything. I never acquired an interest in clothing fashions, perhaps because my parents bought my clothes for me. To this day, my wife tells me I don't know about color coordination when my socks clash with my shirt, something I still can't figure out. What on earth has the color of my socks got to do with the color of my shirt?
Mom's greatest gift to me was her unfailing interest in what I was doing. My sanctuary as a teenager when we lived in London was a swamp, and I would go home soaking wet, often covered in mud, but triumphantly brandishing jars of insects, salamander eggs, or baby turtles. She never scolded me but would ooh and aah over each little treasure as she helped me take off my clothes so that she could launder them.
Marcia and me on our first day of kindergarten, September 1941
In Vancouver, our next-door neighbors were the McGregors, steadfast friends to my parents. Their youngest son, Ian, was my playmate. The issue of race is not something I remember from those carefree days. On my first day of kindergarten, in 1941, I happily undressed to my undershorts in front of all the parents and without any sense of self-consciousness climbed onto a table to be examined by a doctor, although my parents told me later they were embarrassed that I undressed in front of the white parents.
The rest of my childhood memories are filled with fishing and camping excursions with Dad. We would make trips past Haney, then very rural but now on the eastern outskirts of Greater Vancouver, to fish in Loon Lake, a small lake so full of trout that most were stunted, growing to perhaps seven or eight inches at best. That's where I caught my first trout, for a limit of fifteen, while Dad practiced his fly-fishing. Today Loon Lake is part of the University of British Columbia's Demonstration Forest.
On other occasions, we would drive out to the Vedder Canal near Chilliwack in the Fraser Valley, where Dad arranged for horses so we could ride several miles upstream and camp. I was always fascinated that we could let the horses go at the end of our ride, and they would find their way home. Dad would catch steelhead and Dolly Varden trout as we fished down the river. The first time we went, I accidentally slipped off a rock and into the water. Looking up at Dad, I expected him to chastise me to be more careful. Instead, he told me to go ahead and jump into the creek and have fun—with my clothes on! It was wonderful.
Thinking back on my childhood, I understand that children live in a world of their own making, a fantasy life of real experiences, dreams, and imaginings that are jumbled together in the early state of coalescence into the filtering lenses through which we will see the world as adults. Even as an elder, I find those recollections changing as, more and more, I find my “memories” really are created by priceless photos, like the one of me dripping wet, rather than actual recall of the events.
Buffered from the world by my parents, I didn't know Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and I didn't sense any fear or consternation in Mom or Dad. Many years later, my father told me that when he heard the announcement of the attack, he immediately went to a barber and had his hair restyled into a crew cut, which he retained for the rest of his life. “I knew we were going to be treated like ‘Japs,' so I figured I might as well look like one” was the way he put it. Cutting his hair was an act of both defiance and submission to what he knew was inevitable. The treachery implicit in Japan's “sneak attack” against the United States Navy and the terrible war that followed threw my family and some twenty thousand other Japanese Canadians and Japanese nationals into a turbulent sequence of events, beginning with Canada's invocation of the iniquitous War Measures Act, which deprived us of all rights of citizenship.
In 1941, Canada was still a racist society. In Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, First Nations people existed under conditions akin to apartheid in South Africa: they were not allowed to stay in most hotels, they were refused service in restaurants, and they were forced to sit in certain designated sections of theaters. There were also prohibitions against any First Nations person in pubs. (My uncle Mar, who was quite swarthy, was once asked in a bar what tribe he was from. He replied, “The Jap tribe.”)
Canada boasts of its high ideals of democracy and all the rights that are guaranteed by its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but many have been hard won—for example, the right of visible minorities to vote, own property, attend university, or even to drink in a pub—and some have yet to become part of the accepted rights of all citizens. Even today, we are grappling with the recognition that gay people, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites as human beings deserve full legal rights, including the right to marry. Canadians have been prepared to fight and die for those principles. Yet by invoking the War Measures Act in 1942, the government declared that race alone was a sufficient threat to Canadian security to revoke all rights of citizenship for Canadians of Japanese descent.
One of the terrible dilemmas of democracy is that only under conditions of duress or crisis do those cherished rights even matter, but that's when they are often rescinded in the name of national security. What good are high ideals if we guarantee them only when times are good? We now know there was not a single recorded case of treachery among Japanese Canadians during the war, despite the conditions to which they were subjected.
But to the white community we looked different; we looked just like the enemy and thus deserved to be treated like the enemy. Most Japanese Canadians were totally loyal to Canada, and many young Japanese Canadian men signed up and willingly fought and died for Canada. Sadly, the evacuation of Japanese nationals and Canadians from the coast of British Columbia and their incarceration in internment camps generated enormous resentment within the community, and many Japanese Canadians gave up citizenship and abandoned Canada for Japan after the war. Under the War Measures Act, property was confiscated and sold at bargain-basement prices, possessions were looted, bank accounts were frozen, and people were warned they would be removed from coastal British Columbia, where they were thought to pose a threat. Within months we were sent to other provinces or relocated to hastily constructed camps deep in the interior of B.C.
As a child, I was not aware of any of these events apart from our relocation, and I can only marvel at how my parents shielded us from the turmoil they must have undergone. Much later, as a teenager, I realized that we—Japanese Canadians—had not been deemed worthy of full membership in the nation. It was an alienation not so much from my country, Canada, as it was from Canadian white society. In my teen years, my identity was based on the consciousness that in the eyes of white Canadians, I was Japanese first, Canadian second. All my life as an adult, my drive to do well has been motivated by the desire to demonstrate to my fellow Canadians that my family and I had not deserved to be treated as we were. And if that was the psychic burden I carried as a result of our experiences during the war, just think of the consequences for First Nations people from the terrible treatment they have been subjected to since first contact.
Of course, Japanese Canadians still held strong ties to Japan. Like those of English heritage who had lived in Argentina for generations yet felt enormous turmoil when Britain attacked the Falkland Islands, the Japanese who came to Canada (called Issei, or first generation) still had family and friends back in the “old country.” Like all immigrant people, the first generation of Japanese-heritage kids born in Canada (called Nisei, or second generation) had to grow up without grandparents or an extended family here. This was a sharp break from traditional values surrounding family and elders, and Issei were especially concerned about the loss of those values. As a Sansei (third generation) born of Canadian-born parents, I did have grandparents living in Vancouver and saw them regularly, but, being unilingual, I was almost as cut off from them as I would have been had they lived on the other side of the Pacific. Most of those among the first wave of Issei were like my grandparents: desperately poor, lacking formal education, and in search not of freedom or democracy but of opportunity. They accepted the bigotry they encountered and the restrictions on their entry into society. The War Measures Act consolidated their belief that in Canada, equality and democracy didn't apply to everyone, only to certain privileged racial groups.
Ironically, it was in the internment camps that I became aware of the pain and irrationality of discrimination, and from the Japanese Canadian community at that. It was my first experience of alienation and isolation, and it gave me a lifelong sense of being an outsider. Soon after Pearl Harbor, my father had volunteered to go to that road camp where Japanese Canadians were helping to build the Trans-Canada Highway. He had hoped that by volunteering, he would demonstrate his good intentions, trustworthiness, and willingness to leave his family as hostages to ensure his continued good behavior, therefore ensuring we would be allowed to remain in Vancouver. But it wasn't to be. I am amazed that somehow my parents, still in their early thirties, were able to shield my sisters and me from the pain, anger, and fear that must have threatened to overwhelm them, as the only country they had ever known branded them enemy aliens who could not be trusted.
One day in early 1942, my father was gone. Yet I don't remember feeling any anguish leading up to his sudden departure, nor during the prolonged absence of the one male in my life, who also was my best buddy, hero, and role model. Left with three young children, my mother had to sort through our possessions, winnowing the necessities from everything else, which then had to be sold, given away, or discarded before we made the long train ride to our eventual destination in the Rocky Mountains. I didn't wonder why everyone on the train was Japanese. I just played games with Martha Sasaki, whose family was seated next to ours, and we had a delicious time.
Our destination was Slocan City, a ghost town. Built during the silver rush of the 1890s, when thousands of people mad with silver fever flooded into the beautiful, isolated Slocan Valley, the town was abandoned when mining declined. Now another wave of people poured into the mountains. I found myself surrounded by hundreds of other Japanese Canadians housed in rotting buildings with glassless windows. We lived in a decaying hotel that must have been quite impressive when Slocan City was booming but had become so derelict that I had to learn to avoid the hazardous floorboards on the porch that encircled the building. My mother, my two sisters, and I were placed in one of the tiny rooms, which were still reeking from past generations of occupants, and we would wake each morning covered in bedbug bites. Cleanliness for Japanese is like a religion, and I can imagine the revulsion my mother must have felt in those first weeks.
The massive upheaval, movement, and incarceration of twenty-two thousand Japanese Canadians who were supposed to be a threat to the country posed an immense logistical challenge. Camps made up of hastily thrown together tents and shacks were soon filled. Food had to be supplied by a nation already preoccupied with war across the oceans. There were shortages, especially of trained personnel like nurses, doctors, and teachers. There was no school for the first year, and for a kid suddenly plunked down in a valley where the rivers and lakes were filled with fish and the forests with wolves, bears, and deer, this was paradise.
I had lots of time to play. One of my playmates was a girl named Daisy, who was about my age and who had ended up in Slocan along with her Japanese Canadian mother. Her father was a Caucasian who was serving in the army, defending the democratic guarantees denied his family. Daisy was one of the few kids I felt comfortable playing with, but she was set upon cruelly by the other children, who would reduce her to tears by taunting her as an ainoko, which can be roughly translated as “half-breed.” She was my friend, and I would never participate in harassing her, but I have felt shame that I didn't have the courage to stand up to the others and defend her. Years later, when we were teenagers, I met Daisy in southern Ontario. She was breathtakingly beautiful but filled with rage toward Japanese Canadians for the torment she had experienced in the camp. I understood the terrible psychic repercussions of discrimination, because I too was on the receiving end of that prejudice.
Although Dad had been taken to Japan for a month when he was about five, Mom had never visited that country. They were Canadians. Both my Nisei parents were bilingual, but they spoke English at home
Displaying my catch (with unidentified man) at Beatrice Lake in what is now Valhalla Provincial Park
unless they didn't want us to know what they were saying. Almost all the other children in the camps were Nisei, so they were fluently bilingual and could switch into Japanese at will. I as a Sansei didn't speak Japanese and often could not understand what they were saying. Because of my linguistic deficiency, I was picked on by and isolated from the other children.
About a year after we arrived in Slocan, a school was built in a settlement called Bayfarm, perhaps a mile away. I had to knuckle down and start in grade 1. I loved school and was a good student. Dad and Mom would grill me on what I had learned each day, patiently listening to me prattle on. I thought what I had to say was riveting, but now I know their quizzing was a very effective way of going over lessons and helping to correct or guide me along.
I was seven when I enrolled in grade 1, but I was soon skipped through three grades and passed into grade 4 in a year. My father said that at one point I seemed to lose interest in studies and began to complain about having to go to school. He and Mom were very worried, because our education was one of their highest priorities, so one day Dad decided to go to the school to find out what was going on. As he walked along the railroad track that connected Slocan to Bayfarm, he saw a group of kids in the distance chasing a boy. It was winter, and there was a thick blanket of snow on the ground. The victim would slip and fall and the kids would catch up, kicking and hitting him as he struggled to his feet to flee again. The boy was me. Mercifully, I have no recollection of that particular mode of harassment, although I do remember much taunting in the school yard. It took a long time for me to overcome my mistrust and resentment of Japanese Canadians as a result of the way I was treated in those camp days.
White kids we saw rarely, and those we did encounter were Doukhobors accompanying their parents, who visited the camps to sell fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables. I am ashamed of one incident in which I took part as a result of ignorance and childhood stupidity. I have always felt grateful to the Doukhobor farmers, who perhaps were motivated in part by their own memories of repression and injustice in Russia, but to me at that time they seemed alien and mysterious as they rode into Slocan on their laden, horse-drawn carts. One day, a chum told me a “bad word” in Russian, giggling as he made me repeat it until I had it memorized. We didn't know what it meant, and I have no idea how he knew the word or even whether it was a curse or a sexual term. We leaned out of a second-floor window when a farmer's cart came trundling down the alley and stopped below us. My friend and I shouted out the word. When the farmer ignored us, we kept chanting until he picked up the knife he used to cut the tops off vegetables, shouted something at us, and climbed off the wagon.
I guess the shot of adrenaline from fear is why little boys do such things, but I did not enjoy being terrified for my life. We bolted out of that room and into my place and under the bed, trembling and trying to stifle our heavy panting. I doubt the farmer even came into the building, but I was absolutely convinced he was going to kill us. A long while later, we finally crept out of the room, and you can bet we never repeated that stunt. Years later, I apologized for the prank to an audience in the Doukhobor Centre in Castlegar and thanked the Doukhobor community for its support of Japanese Canadians during those trying years.
As the war was drawing to a close, those who renounced their Canadian citizenship and were to receive a one-way ticket to Japan were separated from those who chose to stay in Canada. There was strong coercion among camp members to demonstrate their anger at Canada by signing up to “repatriate” to Japan, and more than 95 percent did. Those who did not sign up were castigated as inu, or “dogs.” My mother met regularly with a group of women to socialize and gossip, but after word got out that we had chosen to remain in Canada, someone in the group insulted her, nobody spoke up for her, and she never went back. To her death, she would not tell my father who had made the remark or what had been said. I have never forgotten that. My mother, one of the gentlest, kindest people I have known, a person who had had to work hard all her life, who would never have knowingly hurt another person, had been deeply wounded by people she considered friends. One of my worst characteristics is that I find it hard to forgive and forget insults and hurts, and this expulsion of my mother further estranged me from the Japanese “community.”
Once the first boatloads of people (including my mother's parents and her older sister's family) arrived in Japan, word quickly came back to Canada that conditions were terrible. Japan had been flattened by bombing, and the people were further demoralized by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to finally prompt unconditional surrender. Food, clothing, and shelter were extremely hard to find, and people struggled to survive.
At that point, those who had renounced their citizenship began to change their minds and clamored to stay in Canada. They remained in the B.C. camps for so long as they fought deportation to Japan that the government finally allowed them to stay in Canada and resettle wherever they wanted. Many chose to return to the B.C. coast, and Dad was very bitter about that. He hadn't wanted to leave B.C., yet he had been evicted from the province, whereas those who had said they wanted to leave B.C. and Canada ended up staying. My father contemptuously referred to them as “repats” and said they were gutless. First they did not have the strength to decide to stay in Canada and fight for their rights, and then they chickened out of moving to Japan.
After we said we would remain in Canada, we were moved from Slocan to Kaslo, a small town on Kootenay Lake less than a hundred miles from our Slocan Valley camp. For the first time, I attended a school with lots of white kids. But now they seemed alien, and I shied away from them, content to explore this new area of lakes and mountains by myself. The valley in the Kootenay region was rich in pine mushrooms, and that fall I learned where they were likely to be found and how to recognize the bulges on the ground, beneath trees, that indicated where the matsutake were. We filled potato sacks with them and my mother bottled the fragrant mushrooms. Today matsutake pickers do a thriving business exporting them to Japan. Kootenay Lake had a population of kokanee, which are landlocked miniature sockeye salmon. We took the Moyie, a passenger stern-wheeler steamboat, to Lardo, a landing at the head of the lake, where we witnessed a spectacular kokanee run. Like their oceangoing relatives, kokanee turn bright red at spawning time, and the river bottom was carpeted with undulating scarlet ribbons.
One summer day in Kaslo in 1945, I was in the communal bath with an old Japanese man when bells began to peal. “Damme! Maketa!” he exclaimed, meaning “That's bad! We've been beaten!” I didn't know what he meant by “we,” because as far as I was concerned, my side must have won. I dressed and rushed out to the street, where people were celebrating and setting off firecrackers. I edged closer to the crowd, hoping someone might hand me a firecracker. Instead, a big boy kicked my behind and shouted, “Get lost, Jap. We beat you!” That's why the old man was rooting for the other side. The evacuation and the boy had shown me I was not a Canadian to the government or to him; I was still a “Jap.”
WE FINALLY LEFT KASLOON a long train ride across the prairies, all the way to a suburb of Toronto where Japanese Canadians were kept in a hotel until we found places to go. Dad eventually located a job working as a laborer on a hundred-acre peach farm in Essex County, the southernmost part of Canada. We were supplied with a house, and my sisters and I attended a one-room schoolhouse in Olinda. There were probably thirty students, many of German background, but they were white and had not suffered the kind of discrimination we had felt during the war. My sisters and I were the only non-white kids in the area.
On the first day of school in Olinda, I was so shy that I couldn't look any other students in the eye. When recess came, I was stunned when the other children came up to us and dragged us into games and kept us at the center of all the fun. I later learned that our teacher, Miss Donovan, had told all the other students that my sisters and I were coming and that we were to be welcomed into their midst. What a wonderful gift she gave us.
I loved that year in Olinda, but we moved to the town of Leamington the next year when Dad found a job in a dry-cleaning plant. It was 1946, and when we arrived there, some Leamingtonians boasted to me that “no colored person has ever stayed here beyond sunset.” We were the first “colored” family to move into the town, and we were nervous.
In postwar Ontario, Japanese Canadians were sprinkled across the province. In southern Ontario, a handful of families worked on farms, and they kept in touch and became the social circle for my parents. The adults would get together periodically to share stories, offer help, and feast on some of the treasured Japanese food prepared for the occasion. Dad became active in the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, a group that sprang up to help people settle in their new province and to begin the long struggle for redress and apology. Meeting other Japanese Canadians filled me with mixed emotions because I still remembered the way I had been treated in the camps, but the hormones surging through my body spurred me to check out the only possible dating opportunities—Japanese Canadian girls.
Children are wonderful. They are blind to color or race until they learn from their parents or peers what to notice and how to respond. I was playing with one of my chums when my father came along on a bicycle. I called out to him, and he waved and cycled on past. My friend was dumbfounded and asked, “How do you know him?” When I replied, “Because he's my dad, stupid,” he gasped, “But he's a Chink!”
In grade 6 at Mill Street School in Leamington, my teacher was a woman after whom the school is now named. I was an obedient, well-behaved student, so it was a shock one day when, as I was sitting quietly in class, she ordered me to get out. I stumbled into the corridor, stunned and humiliated, and trembled with apprehension as I sat on a seat. After an interminable wait, the teacher came out. “But what did I do?” I stammered. She retorted, “You were smirking at me. I know what you people are thinking. Now get back in there, and don't ever let me catch you looking at me like that again!” I was completely confused but seething with an anger I had to hide.
From that experience, I understood that my physical appearance must be threatening to people like her. Ignorance and the relentless propaganda during the war, portraying buck-toothed, slant-eyed “Japs” in the cockpit of a plane on a kamikaze mission, must have caused mystery and fear just as today's image of a Muslim extremist strapped with explosives. Every time I looked in a mirror, I saw that stereotype. To this day, I don't like the way I look on television and don't like watching myself on my own TVprograms.
One of our fellow students at Mill Street School was a Native boy named Wayne Hillman. I often wonder what happened to him, but back then I envied him because he seemed so carefree. He always had a smile on his face, and he was the personification of laid-back. I'm sure he suffered abuse from our bigoted teacher, too.
I graduated from Mill Street School to enter grade 9 in the only high school in Leamington. I think I was the only Asian enrolled; if anything, I was like a mascot or an oddity. I loved the school and begged my parents to allow me to finish my first year there when they decided to move to London, about one hundred miles away. They arranged for me to stay at a farm run by friends, the Shikaze family, some five miles from Leamington. In return for doing chores before and after school and on weekends, I was given room and board. I even learned some primitive Japanese, because Mr. and Mrs. Shikaze were Issei and spoke Japanese at home. At Leamington High, many students were farm kids who were bused to school, so I fitted in.
Just a few years ago, I happened on a Leamington High yearbook and was amazed to find one of my poems in it:
A WALK IN THE SPRING
David Suzuki
(Junior Poem, Phoebus, Leamington High School Yearbook 1950)
Let us take a walk through the wood,
While we are in this imaginative mood;
Let us observe Nature's guiding hand,
Throughout this scenic, colorful land.
Along a rocky ledge there dwells
A fairy with her sweet blue-bells;
Singing and dancing through the day,
Enchanting all things in her delicate way.
A brilliant bluejay scolds a rabbit,
Lecturing him on his playful habit.
A lovely butterfly flits through the air,
As though in this world it hasn't a care.
The many birds give their mating calls,
Lovelier than the Harp in Tara's Halls;
A wary doe and her speckled fawn,
Creep silently along on their moss-
covered lawn.
Water cress line the banks of a stream
That is the answer to a fisherman's dream;
Teeming with trout and large black bass
That scoot for cover as we noisily pass.
The V-line of the geese reappear,
Showing that spring is actually here;
The swampy marshes are full of duck,
In the water and on the muck.
The air is filled with a buzzing sound,
From above and from the ground;
The air is heavy with the scent of flowers,
Of new buds and evergreen bowers.
Thus precedes Nature's endless show,
Of all things, both friend and foe,
Living in her vast domain,
And under her wise rule and reign.
Thus within her kingdom lies,
Filling scenes for hungry eyes;
Also treasures of this natural world,
Which, if watched carefully, will be
unfurled.
DAD'S BROTHERS AND PARENTS had moved to London in southwestern Ontario during the war and missed the incarceration. After the war's end in 1945, they started a construction company that began to do very well in the postwar building boom. They had urged my father to join them in London, where the schools were better and he could work for them. In Leamington, Mom and Dad had managed to make a living, supplemented by what my sisters and I earned working on farms during the summer, but they were just getting by and had precious little to save. When we moved to London, we were still destitute.
Leamington was a town of perhaps ten thousand people, so when I arrived in London, which had close to one hundred thousand residents in 1950, it seemed a huge metropolis. I really felt like a hick. My cousins had attended elementary school there and were fully accepted into the community; Dad, though he himself hadn't wanted to leave his beloved B.C., had advised his kin to go east when the war started and thus had saved them from much of the distress of being Japanese in Canada. Out east, Japanese were rare, more of an oddity than a perceived threat. Dan and Art, my cousins, hung out exclusively with white kids and even went to parties where, they told me, they played spin the bottle! Wow, kissing a white girl was inconceivable to me, and I was so envious of them.
My uncles helped my family get on its feet. I don't know what the financial arrangements were, but Dad worked for his younger brothers as a trimmer, doing the fine carpentry of hanging doors, trimming along the floor and windows, and building kitchen cabinets. Years later, his outgoing personality made him perfect to sell insurance on the homes built by Suzuki Brothers Construction. In the first months after our family moved to London, my parents and sisters lived with my Uncle Minoru's family. I missed out on that by remaining with the Shikazes near Leamington, but I heard that it was cramped in that house in London and that the inevitable tensions arose between the families.
By the time I arrived in London, my parents had purchased a lot and the brothers had pitched in and helped to build a small house. When I moved in, the roof had been shingled, but the outside walls were sheathed only with raw plywood, the partitions inside were bare, and the floor was simply subfloor. The house was still being built, but the family had already moved in, covering the partitions with cardboard from boxes. Over the months that followed, as we all worked and contributed our earnings to the family coffer, we gradually bought the materials needed to complete the interior and then the outside. I had begun working as a framer for Suzuki Brothers Construction and loved it, working on weekends, holidays, and during the summers. I learned enough to frame, make sidewalks, build a fruit cellar, and pour a concrete slab at the entrance to our house. It took about two years to complete the dwelling. My sisters and I were embarrassed to be living in an unfinished house and would never invite anyone over.
Dad finally bought a car, the first in the family after the end of the war—a 1929 Model A Ford. It was in good shape, and today anyone would be thrilled to own one, but in the early 1950s, it was humiliating for a teenager. Whenever we drove anywhere, I would slump down, hoping no one I knew would see me. To make matters worse, in the autumn Dad went out to collect the leaves that had piled up on the streets and then been squashed into thick clumps as cars drove over them—perfect mulch for the garden. He made a box that could be hung on the rear bumper of the old car, and after dinner I would have to accompany him as he drove around to find an especially rich area of crushed leaves. We shoveled them into the box, drove home, and dumped the leaves in a pile in the front yard. The next day, after school, it was my task to wheel the leaves to the back of the house, where I would dig trenches in the garden and bury the soggy mess as compost. I lived in fear that I would be recognized as I toiled beside Dad under streetlights, piling leaves into the box at the back of the Model A. I admire Dad's gardening obsession now, but as a teenager, I found it excruciating. Like any boy going through puberty, I had sex on the brain, but I was too shy to talk with others about it. Encountering fellow students on buses or walking along a street, I would do my best to avoid having to make conversation by sitting alone or crossing the street.
At Leamington High School, I had felt comfortable in the student body and had even won the junior oratorical contest. But London Central Collegiate Institute was a different matter. Most students move to high school with friends from elementary school, and in the first year, old friendships are solidified, new ones are formed, and cliques coalesce. By the time I arrived for grade 10 at Central, social circles were pretty well established and I was a total stranger, a hick from a farm, an outsider. As adolescent hormones coursed through my body, I became consumed by thoughts of sex, but I was totally incapable of doing anything about it. It never occurred to me to ask a white girl out on a date, because the fear of refusal was too great. Of the ten Japanese Canadian teenage girls in London, three were my sisters.
In a civics class, we were asked what our parents did. To my surprise, I was the only person in the class whose mother worked; all the other students' mothers were full-time parents, and at that time, that was an indication of social status. To exacerbate my isolation, I was a good student, which in that era was like having leprosy. I was horrified when a teacher once asked each of us to tell what our grades had been the year before. I was ashamed to have to say all my marks had been first-class. “But I did get a second in one exam,” I offered in a vain effort to soften the scorn. As well, for my sisters and me, weekends and summer holidays were not times to play and take vacations; they were opportunities to work and contribute income to the family. I was stunned to discover in another class that my fellow students spent the entire summer on holiday—that is, not working. Again, the situation set me apart from my classmates.
The only Japanese Canadians at London Central Collegiate Institute were my sisters and cousins. My cousins were well integrated, and my sisters had formed friendships in elementary school because they moved to London earlier than I, so for them the transition to high school was easy. Students at Central were pretty homogeneous, and there were even fewer Chinese Canadians than Japanese Canadians. I didn't realize the differences between gentiles and Jews were very important at London Central; to me, they were all whites who happened to go to different churches. When I was in grade 12, one of the candidates for president of the student council was Jerry Grafstein, now a federal Liberal party wheeler-dealer and senator. I voted for him since I admired his talkative disposition and tremendous popularity,
A carp caught in the Thames River in London, Ontario
and I assumed he was a shoo-in. I couldn't believe it when he lost, and I learned only later that Central just didn't elect Jews to student office.
My loneliness during high school was intense. I ached to have a best buddy to pal around with but was far too self-conscious to assert myself and make a friend. My main solace was a large swamp a ten-minute bike ride from our house. Any marsh or wetland is a magical place, filled with mystery and an incredible variety of plant and animal life. I was an animal guy, and insects were my fascination. Anyone who spotted me in that swamp would have had confirmation of my absolute nerdiness as I waded in fully clothed, my eyes at water level, peering beneath the surface, a net and jar in my hands behind my back. But I couldn't spend all my time in that swamp. I spent most of my waking hours daydreaming, creating a fantasy world in which I was endowed with superhuman athletic and intellectual powers that would enable me to bring peace to the world and win mobs of gorgeous women begging to be my girl.
I hung out with a few other marginal guys who were good students but not on any sporting team. In his fascinating 1976 book Is There Life After High School? Ralph Keyes makes the point that high school is the most intense formative period of our lives. Dividing high school students into two groups—Innies (football players, cheerleaders, basketball players) and Outies (everybody else, wishing they were Innies)—he suggests that our high school status remains with us psychically through adulthood. He's right in my case.
In my last year of high school, one of my fellow nerds suggested I run for school president. It was completely unexpected, and I said no. When I told my father, he was disappointed and asked why. “Because I'd lose” was my explanation. Dad was outraged. “How do you know if you don't even try? Besides, what's wrong with losing? Whatever you do, there will always be people better than you, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. There's no shame in not coming in first.” I don't know how he acquired his wisdom, but his response stayed with me for life.
So I went back to my friend and said I'd give it a try. We campaigned as Outies and rallied all of those who weren't with the in crowd and wanted a say in student government. My sisters and our friends mounted the campaign with signs and posters saying You'll Rave About Dave. Dad let me take the Model A to school, and we tied a sign on the roof. My public-speaking experience at Leamington High served me well during the campaign at Central, and to my amazement, I won with more votes than all the other candidates combined. It was a powerful lesson—there are a lot more Outies than Innies, and together that means power.
All during high school and college, I worked for Suzuki Brothers Construction as a framer. I worked on houses, framing the footings, shoveling and pouring concrete, and then framing the house all the
Dad's Model A decked out for my campaign to be student president in 1953 (note the box on the back where we carried leaves to use for compost) way to the roof. It was hard physical work, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to watch a house emerge from a hole in the ground. The structure we framers put up was later covered with shingles, siding, plaster, trim, and paint, until there was no outward sign of the work we had put into it.
In many ways, that house was like our childhood experiences. Over time, we acquire a veneer of personality that enables us to move among and interact with others, but beneath it remain all the unremembered experiences with family and the fears, hurt, and insecurities of childhood, which others cannot see. For me, the alienation that began with our evacuation from the coast of British Columbia and continued through high school has remained a fundamental part of who I am, all my life, despite the acquired veneer of adult maturity.