Hey, Ma, you know who else died
the same day as you? You’re gonna love this:
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston,

the woman incarcerated as a child at Manzanar
during World War II, the one who later wrote
“Farewell to Manzanar,” her memoir that you gave
me in high school, calling it a must-read.

So I did, devastated to learn that this little girl, all of 7,
and her nine siblings, their mother and grandmother,
were imprisoned for the crime of being Japanese in
wartime. Her father, a fisherman, was sent to military
prison for nine months before he, too, came to Manzanar,
a hastily assembled prison in California’s Mojave Desert,
where they were held for three years.

“That was wrong,” you said, and even Dad agreed,
the guy who’d fought in Korea and had the bad habit
of referring to one of our school friends as “that little
Jap girl” because he couldn’t remember her name.
You yelled at him more than once, “You can’t call her
that! She’s Carrie!” He eventually caught on.

Years later I got to introduce Ms. Houston when she
spoke at the college where I taught. You loved the story
of how I gave her pieces of broken dishes that I’d collected
at the Manzanar dump site, ones that said “Tepco” on them—
the same brand of old restaurant dishes that Cliff’s family
used, plates and cups that he brought to our marriage and
lived in his grandmother’s china cabinet in our dining room.

When I gave her the shards of dishes wrapped in a soft cloth,
Ms. Houston put her hand over her mouth. Little stars of
tears glistened in her eyes. Then she hugged me.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I said, adding that
you’d given me her book and said that I had to read it,
and I did. And it so infused me that for years as a
journalist (she’d been a journalism major, too), I sought
out former internees to interview, moved by their stories
of survival, which some of them rarely shared.

She died at home, too, Ma, in Santa Cruz, the two of you
less than 200 miles apart, lifting off into whatever’s next.
And oh, how I hope that your two souls might’ve crossed
enroute, both of you in your 90s, both mothers of daughters,
both of you with stories to share.