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By Root 4181 0

three, their mother enforced the rigid rules of cleanliness that she had learned as a child. Nothing was left on the floor. No dish went unwashed. Chopsticks were handled so that no food dropped. Clothes were put away neatly, and the child who did not bathe completely at least once each day was a hopeless barbarian, no better than a Chinese. Their father's influence was more subtly felt. He saw the world as divided sharply into the good and the bad and he never hesitated long in defining where any given action fell. It was good to honor one's country, it was good to die heroically, it was good to attend to what one's superiors said, it was good to have education. He lived a life of the most fierce propriety in which stealing was bad, and gambling, and speaking back, and tearing one's clothes. He was a harsh disciplinarian, but he rarely struck his children, relying instead upon the force of his character. He loved his children as if they were mysterious angels that had been allowed to live with him for a little while, and if the mean little shack was sometimes barren of food, it was never lacking in love.

The children engaged in nonsensical jokes which their parents could not understand. Reiko-chan had a series of remarks which her brothers greeted with shouts no matter how often she recited them: "What did the hat say to the hatrack? You stay here and I'll go on a head." Six times a week the boys could scream with delight over that one. "What did the carpet say to the floor? Don't make a move, I got you covered!" And "What did the big toe say to the little toe? Don't look back, but we're being followed by a heel."

The boys had rougher games, including one in which Goro would grab a brother's ear and ask sweetly, "Do you want your ear any longer?" If the brother said no, Goro would pretend to twist it off. If the answer was yes, Goro would jerk vigorously on the ear and shout, "Then I'll make it longer!" This usually led to a fight, which was what Goro had intended.

But on two basic principles the Sakagawa children would permit no joking. No one was allowed to call them Japs. This was a word so offensive to the Japanese that it simply could not be tolerated, for throughout America it was being used in headlines and cartoons to depict sneaking, evil little men with buckteeth. No haole could appreciate the fervor with which Japanese combated the use of this word.

Nor were they to be called slant-eyes. They argued: "Our eyes are not slanted! It's only because we have no fold in our eyelids that they look slanted." But of course in this they were wrong. Reiko-chan's little eyes were delightfully slanted, low near the nose and tilting upward in saucy angles. It was she who came home with one of their best games. Putting her two fingers at the corners of her lovely eyes, she pulled them way up and chanted, "My mother's a Japanese." Then she pulled them far down and sang, "And my father's a Chinese." Then, moving her forefingers to the middle of her eyebrows and her thumbs below, she spread her eyes wide apart and shouted, "But I'm a hundred per cent American."

When Kamejiro first saw this trick, he rebuked his daughter and reminded her: "The proudest thing in your life is that you're a Japanese. Don't ever laugh about it." But at the same time he became vaguely aware that with the arrival of children his family had become entangled in values that were contradictory and mutually exclusive: he sent his offspring to American schools so that they would succeed in American life; but at the same time he kept them in Japanese school so that they would be prepared for their eventual return to Japan. The children felt this schizophrenia and one day at the close of the American school Goro went not to the Japanese teacher but directly home, where Kamejiro met him with the question, "Why are you home?"

"I'm not going to the Japanese school any longer." Kamejiro held his temper and asked patiently, "Why not?" "I don't want to be a Japanese. I want to be an American." For several moments Kamejiro held his hands to his side, in self-discipline,