Monday, January 20, 2020

Almost an Asian



     When I was a small child, I had two daddies. I didn’t just walk up to people and tell them, but sometimes it came out in the conversations that I had with adults or my little friends. Usually that was after I’d come back from a trip to California to visit my sisters.
In my book “Lizzie’s Blue Ridge Memories” I portray life on my grandmother’s farm with my sisters, mother and father as idyllic; one big happy family which was unfortunately beset by injury and a father’s lack of employment. In actuality, my mother had been married before she met my father. I was his one and only biological living child.

     Dave Owen, my father, joined the Navy in his late teens and married by the age of nineteen, but was divorced soon after. His wife Gem was too young and had lied to him more than once. Gem really just wanted to “get out of the house” and after she married my father, she was confused by her new family’s lack of sympathy when she wanted to go to the malt shop or to a dance in search of a new boyfriend. Finally, my grandmother ran the poor girl off and my dad reenlisted in the Navy.

     My parents originally met in Hawaii. My mother Ann had moved from her native Germany to the US territory with her first husband. She got a job at a local bar serving drinks. If I remember the story, it was called the Dolphin Club. One day, Ann was at work when a baby-faced sailor came in for a beer and began to flirt with the pretty little German waitress that served him. My mother said right away, “I’m married to a soldier and have a child.” Over the course of a few months, my dad would persist and my mother would set him up on dates with young women she knew, but those dates went nowhere. Ann and Dave became friends and he was sent to Japan about the time my mother had another child.

     The two wrote to each other, my mother not thinking much about the sailor stationed far away in Japan. In fact, love blossomed between Dave and a Japanese woman named Mary. He moved in with the girl and wanted to marry her, but she was unwilling to give up her profession, one that her father basically sold her into because, when she was a teen, he’d caught her kissing a boy. He said she must be a whore and dragged her down to a brothel in another city. She never saw her family again. At least that was her story. Dave stayed with Mary nearly two years while he was stationed in Japan. When he returned to the states, Mary stayed behind. If not for that, maybe I would have been born to her.

     Then again, maybe I would have been born to Ann and her first husband Kiyoshi Takahara, a Japanese – American stationed in the Army. If not for the fact that by the time Dave returned to Hawaii, Ann’s marriage to Kiyoshi was on the rocks. He was much older than Ann and although he was very much in love with her, she was resentful of his substance abuse and gambling.

     In 1960, when Ann’s youngest child Maggie was three, Ann and Dave had a whirlwind romance and ran off to Mexico where they married in Mexicali. Jenny, my oldest sister, stayed with her father while Maggie got to go on the honeymoon to Palm Springs. I was born in Detroit a few years later.

    Koshi-Daddy as I called him, never once treated me with any resentment or malice. He very well could have. Instead, he was patient, kind and generous. Eventually both my sisters moved in with him and at least once a year, we’d visit his home in Stockton, California. It all sounds complicated, I know, but there was always a room for my mother and me when she missed her oldest children. One year, Koshi-Daddy was stationed in Vietnam and married a woman from that country. By that time, Jenny was married and we stayed at her house. It would have been very awkward if my mother and I continued to stay at Koshi-Daddy’s home in Stockton after his second marriage.

     I grew up in a very Asian home. Some people these days might call it culture appropriation. Others might call it culture appreciation. I called it reality – life. My dad and mom actually taught me “how to bow in two languages”. They taught me the Japanese way as well as the English way, you know, just in case I had the pleasure and privilege to meet and later marry Prince Charles, but that honor went to Princess Diana. (We’ll leave that story for another blog entry.) We had Asian furniture, bamboo chairs, tempera paint art of birds on bamboo branches and much more. Yes, my mother made American and German foods, but her specialty was cooked Japanese fried rice. My father cooked teriyaki marinated steak and the most delicious shrimp curry.  I wish I had that curry recipe.
     
     Long before the Karate Kid, there was a television show called Mr. T and Tina. Pat Morita portrayed the traditional Japanese Mr. Taro from Japan who hired Tina to be the nanny of his two children. My mother would ooh and ah, stating how much Taro looked like Kiyoshi, or “Tak” as she called her ex-husband. I didn’t see the resemblance at all. Incidentally neither Mr. Morita nor my Koshi-Daddy were from Japan. They were both American born and raised, through and through. My mother watched the sitcom without fail until after only five episodes, the show ended in a quiet death in 1976.
     
     Dave tried to teach me how to multiply on the abacus that he’d brought back from Japan. He taught me how to count in Japanese, too: ichi, ni, san, shi. We also took our shoes off whenever we entered our home and wore slippers. We didn’t have robes, we had kimonos up until the early 1980s. Although not Japanese, my mother would oft times put on Hawaiian music and dance the hula. The goal was for us to move to Hawaii when my dad retired, but instead my parents ended up in the desert southwest.
     
     As an adult, my biological father Dave and I rarely saw eye-to-eye on any subject. I never had an argument with Koshi-Daddy, but then I didn’t interact with him after both my sisters were married. Mother didn’t have to go to California to visit two little girls any longer. They were able to do their own traveling if they chose to. I suppose if I’d been raised by Kiyoshi, maybe he’d have found a reason to discipline me – maybe not. I will never know.

     We lost Koshi-Daddy in 1989, the same season that a big earthquake shook Candlestick Park during the World Series. Kiyoshi was in the hospital following a heart attack. I had a new baby and couldn’t travel, but my mother went to visit him. A month later, Kiyoshi perished from a major stroke. Ann died fifteen years later. My father died three years after Ann passed. Sometimes I miss them all and look in the faces of people, searching for my parents. Crazy, I know. I see my mother in Jenny. I sometimes see my dad in my features, and that scares me. I see Kiyoshi in my cousin Glen, but sometimes I see him in other smiling faces.

     I had two daddies in my childhood – and I was blessed. Why should I ask for more? As a grandmother, why should I seek a father figure now? Sometimes I just want a daddy to talk to, even more than a mother. Women are all around, so full of advice. They stand as the mommies we need when our own mothers are far and gone. To whom can I turn, to take the place of an earthly father?

     Sometimes I think too much. The pondering and contemplation make my mind go in circles. Sometimes I think that I was almost Asian, that if the cards had been dealt another way, I would have had pretty brown Asian eyes and straight hair instead of round green eyes and curls. I might have been shorter, since my mother was petite and Koshi-Daddy was short.

     Kiyoshi, if he was alive, would have been 99 years old today. Happy Birthday, Koshi-Daddy from the little girl who was not yours.

Kiyoshi Takahara January 21, 1921 – November 12, 1989






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