Kartika_Issue15

5.
Some people will accuse me of biographical revisionism, but I saw what I
saw in Eikichi’s photos in much the same way that sobo knew what she
knew when she looked away. In each photograph, my sobo is both present
(as pain) and invisible (as joy), as if part of her is already taking a field trip
to the spirit world. Soon after she returned to California, she began
coughing inexplicably, even worse than before. This went on for days, then
weeks, until the months stuck together like magnets. Slowly, sobo lost
weight until she looked gaunt and bony. Her face turned sallow, her smile
lines and crow’s feet cutting deep into her skin. Her appetite dwindled,
satisfied by morning coffee, rice, a bowl of miso shiru and a miniature
version of my mom’s dinner. Eventually, sobo saw the doctor and learned
that she had stage-4 lung cancer. The doctor gave her the death sentence:
two months, three at the most. I was in Portland, Oregon, walking to a
restaurant when my mom told me grandmamma was going to die. I fell apart,
my stitching became unstitched. I bawled in front of complete strangers on
the sidewalk, a stranger to myself. After her death, I looked at sobo’s
pictures of Ōsaka again and I felt haunted by her haunting, her spirit floating
back and forth from her body. The light in her eyes in every photograph
was fading, her energy weak and sluggish like a brownout in a once-dazzling
city. Even during her last visit to Japan, you could see that cancer had taken
over her radiant sparkle, her eyes now filled with the self-knowledge of the
dying. This is the story of how prophecies sometimes work backwards,
telling you what already happened.
6.
I didn’t know what I looking for and I was almost certain the search itself
was dangerous, but I pushed forward at a slow, determined pace to piece
together her life. I’d know what I was looking for once I’d found what I
didn’t know. Once, I had a girlfriend in 8 th grade. She stood me up the day I
was going to give her my Christmas gift—a teddy Bear in a fake fur coat,
veil and satin bow. Her name was Lauren BearCall. That Christmas, after I
told her my story about my flaky girlfriend who forgot to meet me on the last
day of class before Christmas vacation, sobo just shook her head in
disapproval. You were once in a relationship, I protested. No, she countered.
She told me it was bad to have a girlfriend. It was better, she explained, to
not be in a relationship at all. No hurt, she said. Better not to be in
relationship, she explained. This is the story of a Japanese American woman
hiding her past from her hapa grandson.
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