Writing
These poems, monologues and statements partner with my visual works to further explore motherhood, heritage, and family.
Koinobori
The only name I really know you by is Mama. Of course, I know that that wasn’t actually your name. No one actually has that name. And a mother isn’t something that anyone is from birth. We are all first other things. Babies, toddlers, daughters. Maybe funny, silly, odd. Maybe artist, musicians, athletes, writers, poets. I don’t know those things about you. I know you as Mama. Not because you are my mother, but because your husband calls you that. In his writings. Even though you weren’t his mother either.
We don’t call him father. Great-great grandfather takes too long to say. And it’s too confusing because that’s such a relative name. It seems important not to call him that, because to my father he was a great-grandfather and to my grandfather he was a grandfather. And so, we call him by the initials of his name. We never call him father. We never call him husband. But when I come to my father with questions about our past, he knows that when I say Mama, I mean you. Even though you are not my mother. And you are not my father’s mother.
I think it’s very sweet that he called you Mama. He clearly loved you. I do not stick my nose up at endearment. But I wonder. Before you were Mama, what were you? What did you do, did you like? What did you think about leaving Japan? What did you think about Florida and the beach and the ocean? In every photo I have ever seen of you are serious and faded and holding a child. But you had thoughts, same as I. I wonder what they were.
When people talk about you, they say you were quiet and kind and nurturing. That you were a wonderful mother. That you had taught young children in Japan.
I imagine that you loved music. Somewhere I read a story about you playing the piano for your children and them dancing and singing nursery rhymes. Then again, I think the interview was with one of your daughters. And she cannot help but remember you as a mother.
Somewhere it said you didn’t understand segregation. That black people and white people walking on opposite sides of the road struck you and silly and odd. I wonder what you thought of other aspects of life. I wonder if you thought segregation silly because to you too both black and white were foreigner. I wonder what you’d think of me. He seemed so interested in the “modern world”. In an American life characterized by far reaching trains and western style houses. What were you interested in? Would you find it odd that your great-great granddaughter is now mostly white? Who were you? Not who you were as the red koinobori flying second. Who were you as the any-colored carp, swimming towards the sky?
ご飯 (Rice)
My husband cooked me rice on the stove today
I’ve never eaten rice cooked on the stove
But I had a heavy day
And, in his way, he knew I needed a taste of home
Knew that, for me,
teriyaki chicken and veggies and white rice
Can turn a day around
He went to the store, and bought a bag of white rice
A little bag
I’ve never bought rice like that
At home we buy rice from the Asian Grocery
Mom keeps the 50 pound bags in the garage freezer
And we’d walk through the hot garage, the ground gritty on bare feet, to scoop rice from the bag
And bring it back inside to the rice cooker
But today, me and my husband live above someone else’s garage
We have no room for a 50lb bag of rice
In this new city, I haven’t yet found the Asian grocery
My rice cooker is lost somewhere, displaced in the move
And so, for the first time, I eat rice cooked on the stove
And it tastes like love
ご飯
Mama
Ever since I found out that it’s going to be a girl, I’ve been having these vivid dreams. I’m laboring, and I’m all alone. I reach out for someone, for him, for my mother, but there’s no one there. Deep breaths and shooting pain and I feel the baby coming so I reach out to catch her myself… and when I look down at my baby… she isn’t a baby. Laying in my hands, coated in my blood…. Is a bird. A bird like the ones that watch us from the oak tree. With intelligent eyes, feathers matted with the lining of my womb. My daughter. And I hold her, up against my chest, and I feel my body solidify. And I remember. I remember having feather, having wings. I remember my light bones and curved beak. And I feel her, who I once was, flutter softly inside of me. And I realize, desperately, that I must save my daughter. I must warn her. And then I wake up. Every time. I wake up. And even in the conscious world, sometimes I brush my own arm, my leg, my waist, and feel a cool hardness against what once might have been a talon.
Excerpts from Full Length Play Florida Samurai
My father doesn’t speak Japanese. My grandfather didn’t either. My Dad asked my
great-grandmother once why she didn’t teach the language to her children. She explained
that in her time, it wasn’t popular to be Japanese. That was enough to keep my dad from
asking any more questions about that. But he still loved the language. He went to some
Saturday Japanese language lessons with his grandfather when he was small, and played
little vocabular tapes for us when we were children. Only a few words made it into our
everyday life. One of them was Ikimasho. He didn’t tell us the translations of the words
we used, he simply used them and let us figure it out. When I was much older I found out
that Ikimasho means “let’s go!”. This was a surprise to me. As I child, I equated it with if-
you-don’t-get-your-butt-out-of-the-house-right-now-we-are-gonna-leave-you. I forever
remember the word being bellowed by my father as he stood by the door, pulling his
shoes on and attempting to get us all out of the house. Ikimasho was a action word. It
wasn’t a suggestion, it is a command. It is a last call. Come with us, come with the family,
or be left.
---
It’s hard to tell, you know? Who he was. Really.
KAI smiles. It’s continued to get darker, the
stars starting to glitter overhead.
My Ojiisan saw him once. He remembers seeing him, for real. One hundred years seems
like a long time. But it’s only from my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother to my
grandmother and my father and me. And I remember my great-grandmother. I remember
her voice. Maybe 100 years is not so long.
It was nighttime. HTK was traveling and he stopped at my grandfather’s house. My
Ojiisan remembered a thin, tall, older man, coming into the house.
Light from below, reveals HTK, who has walked
onto the other side of the stage. The light makes
him look taller, the long shadows elongating him.
He remembers watching HTK wash his hands in the sink, through a cracked door.
HTK mimes washing his hands. AIKO stares at
him, wishful.
My grandfather doesn’t remember his own age at the time. We figure that he must have
been pretty young because he remembers HTK being hugely tall. In reality, HTK was
actually only like 5’4.
AIKO smiles to herself.
But I can’t help but imagine him like that. Huge and tall and strong, washing his hands in
the quiet of the night.
---
MAMA: Do you remember the first time you saw something burning? Not a controlled
fire that someone made. I mean a wild animal of a fire. Do you remember the first time
you saw something burning down?
HTK: No.
MAMA: I do.
It was far enough away that we didn’t have to leave, but close enough to smell the smoke
and just barely see the flames. But I don’t really remember the fire. Not as much as I
remember the buke hikeshi.
SAMURAI enters. He’s wearing a hikeshi
banten. On the outside, the coat is white with a
few Japanese characters across the back. The
coat drips. He holds a firefighting hook. He
crosses the stage, almost dancing, behind them.
I must have been very small because I thought he was the tallest man I’d ever seen. He
looked like a giant.
HTK: He was probably a gang member.2
MAMA: Not this one. He was from a samurai family.
HTK: How do you know? Samurai families were gone by then.
MAMA: I could just tell.
Beat.
The same way I can tell about you.
Silence.
His coat was dripping. And he ran past and I saw a little bit of the inside of his coat. And
I asked my mother why the fire warrior was wearing his coat the wrong way around.
HTK: What did she say?
MAMA: She told me that fighting a fire wasn’t like fighting other people. They wanted to make
sure they had the heavens on their side. They wanted to keep the images of heroes and
spirits near them. She told me that when they had beaten the fire, they would flip them
the right way around in victory.
HTK: They wore them inside out because they didn’t want the designs to burn off.
MAMA only smiles.
MAMA: He was carrying a hook. I didn’t understand then. I didn’t understand that they had to
destroy the nearby buildings to stop the fire.
Beat.
But now I think it’s kind of beautiful.
HTK: It was not beautiful for the people who lived in those houses.
MAMA only smiles.
But it was a small loss. They still had their families.
MAMA: Yes. They did.
MAMA exits and HTK moves to
the edge of the stage, speaking outwards.
HTK: June 3rd, 1914. House fire started at night, probably caused by a lamp exploding. Full 9
years of hard work completely lost. However, the entire family was unharmed, so I need
to be with them.
The SAMURAI, still moving behind him,
comes forward. In clean movements the
SAMURAI removes his soaking coat.
SAMURAI turns his coat the right way around.
He puts the coat on.
HTK: June 5th, 1914. Began rebuilding the house.
HTK exits.
SAMURAI turns, revealing the back of the coat
to the audience. The coat is covered with
beautiful images of plants growing out of flames.
It is breathtaking.