My great-grandpa José arrived in El Paso, TX by way of barbed wire. He walked through Mexico deserts, his legs carrying him amongst the cacti, holes gaping in his shoes when they caught the barbs, until he struck gold in the land of opportunity. And by gold, I mean a job in the fields, where he could make money to send home to his widowed father and help provide for his siblings on the other side of the wire. He brought them to the states eventually, and one by one he earned his way to send his siblings to college. He married a single mom, work built into her hands, and their family grew wide and vast. When she died, he followed the work and walked from El Paso to Los Angeles to send money home to his kids. While walking, he stole lettuce from the cows behind barbed wire fences. “All food tastes good to me,” he used to tell my mom, “because I know what it’s like to be hungry.”
My great-grandmother Nao arrived in Gila Rivers, AZ by way of barbed wire. She was put on a train with the windows boarded, a tag hanging from her coat on the left, three children hanging from her coat on the right. Her husband had been taken somewhere else, somewhere she didn’t know, somewhere low and dry behind barbed wire. She would live there, in the horse stalls, in the barracks, and imagine her life outside, her life if she had not been born nisei. She would be released one day, and her husband would die in a car accident, and she would put her three children through college on her own, barbed wire still catching her ankles in the morning. “I would rather commit suicide than be interned,” she’d written on a journal page that rests in our family album.
I imagine my lineage, all the people who sacrificed so I could exist, caught in barbed wire, their skin torn and bleeding into desert sand, caught in joint and tendon, imagine them screaming or silent from exhaustion, something sharp and broken in the air. I hear them when I sleep.
This is what it means, I often think, to be descended from barbed wire.
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I bought a pair of Dr. Martens when I was sixteen years old, and hung out with mohawked punks and patched vest hazel eyes. I remember everyone telling me how to break them in, how to force my feet to fit in them. My “Flintstone” feet, just slightly too wide for most shoes, were resilient against the leather. I pretended I belonged in those boots for a day, but when I took them off, the veins along my metatarsals pulsed as if they had finally taken a breath after hours of suffocation, and the skin on my feet shined red from the hard leather pressing into it. I put the boots in my closet and never wore them again. They’re still there.
Often, I think of those empty promises sitting in my closet. But I also think of you. You rode motorcycles, and every photo of your long hair and handlebar mustache also pictured bandanas and leather boots. Granted, I’ve only seen a few pictures of you.
I remember Mom picking us up from school and telling us it had happened: you’d died. Shelby burst into a waterfall at the first death she’d ever remember, while I searched for the title “Grandpa James” in my Rolodex memory, never finding quite what I was looking for. You’ve always escaped me—and I’ve never gone looking.
Mom has a lot to say about you now, which is funny because she’s never said anything about you until these last few years. But sometimes, when she starts talking about you, there is something inside of her that forces her to keep talking. I’m forced to wonder about you, a man I’ve met only once, a man I am tied to so deeply with no memory of being.
She talks about how you abused and abandoned, the nighttime just as broken as the chain-lock on the door. Somehow, though, somewhere in your warped sense of it, you loved my grandmother. She was so afraid of you that she refused to give you her address, but you had her phone number. You’d call and talk to her husband, Jesse, for hours as if you were old friends. When you were dying and Mom walked into the room, you mistook her for Grandma and opened your arms wide and smiled, “Babe.” Yes, even then, you missed her.
Mom talks about what kind of man you were when you were young, how you and your friends set a man aflame in the street and watched him burn and burn from a safe alleyway. She talks about the teenage boy who hid behind your car, and how you surprised him with a bullet in the head. I often try to imagine who he might have been hiding from: a gangster or his father or whoever he might have thought more dangerous than a stranger. You claimed self-defense for that one and served no time. You always represented yourself in court. Mom talks about your best friend, the one you pumped full of shotgun pellets for making a pass at your wife. You served one year for that one: a crime of passion. When you got out, you went right to my grandmother and told her you “made swiss cheese outta him.” Remorse was not a word you were built for.
Still, when Mom needed family most, you were there. Grandma and all Mom’s siblings boycotted her wedding, a marriage they resisted. But you arrived with your wife, to ensure loneliness wouldn’t touch her. She talks about how upset you were that you wouldn’t be the one walking her down the aisle. She told you, “You should have been there. You should have earned it.” You, a long shadow behind her wedding dress, her, a sunflower facing east.
She talks about how you died with your blood filled with fire, how you were so brimmed with pain that her sister begged the doctors to pump you full of something—anything—that might steal your agony away for even a moment. It didn’t matter how many more days or hours you had at that point. “No one,” my mom often says when speaking of this, “leaves this world without paying for all their wrong-doings.” You died surrounded by your children, as if you were the dinner table you never sat at, the door you never walked through.
When you visited us, you bought us a swingset and built it in the backyard with our dad. “Those kids need to be able to be kids,” you told my mom. I ponder your word, “those” as if we were so far from you, despite being perfectly within your grasp. We would never know the life our mother had—our father knew our table, our father knew our door, and the word “those” held flesh tightly.
Being there, though, would not replace all the time you weren’t. We never knew you, would never know you really, and you were out of time already. You couldn’t give us closeness, so instead you offered us a bit of joy. The swing set knew our hands like doors do, and every picture of us smiling on it draws us by red strings back to you despite your absence.
Yes, my mom has a lot to say about you now. I know all the stories, the ones she’s told and can’t stop telling. But when I think of you, I somehow think of the only thing my dad says about you: “He slept with his boots on.”
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Pinkies are one of the most fragile parts: your most ulnar phalangeal digit on the outer side of your hand. This is where we are said to be connected to our fate. I imagine the pinky as the skinniest, shortest being in a group of armed forces being asked to take the front line. My father’s pinkies are destroyed from years of playing basketball when he was young, crooked every which way that pinkies shouldn’t be. Sometimes, I imagine that one day my pinkies might look like that, not from basketballs, but perhaps an accident in which I might break my fingers and may never be able to play piano again. My aunt’s pinkies were once bent backward and broken, perpendicular to the direction they were supposed to be, by a man she was in love with. Would I suffer the same fate? How many kinds of pain do we endure before the windows shatter? What does it mean to be small, vulnerable?
Snakes eat pinkies, the small plump bodies of baby mice making for an easily digestible meal. After years of fighting to get a snake, getting geckos instead (and still loving them accordingly, of course), my parents finally agreed to corn snakes. We were given two: a red one named Aspen and one the color of earth named Serena. We loved them, doted on them, as our at-home zoo expanded. Four leopard geckos, three frogs, and now two snakes appeared in the empty room of our house, our dogs staring into the tanks with us probably wondering what kind of dogs these smooth animals were. The geckos would eat crickets and mealworms, so it was never a surprise seeing a cricket crawling on our ceiling in the dark of night, a refugee, a good-luck charm. The frogs ate whatever my dad put in their tanks, from flies to small crickets. At the beginning, we would go to buy their food from Petsmart, crickets and mealworms and frozen pinkies in small plastic baggies, paws flat against the clear barrier between two worlds. We would defrost them in warm water (they needed to be warm so the snakes could see them with their thermal vision) before dropping them into the tanks and watching Aspen wrap her mouth about the pink body and bulge where she was digesting it. Serena was a bit more shy and seemed to eat wherever or whenever we weren’t looking. We watched the spectacle every time, amazed at how an entire body could become just a stain on the bark.
One day, my dad brought home two mice and an enclosure for them. I had always wanted a rat, so a mouse was the second-best thing. We all helped set up the enclosure and added seeds to the list of food we had to buy at Petsmart. My dad removed pinkies from the list. He’d bought a male and female, and as mice do, they bred quickly. Our first batch, we were allowed to keep two. I named one, who would grow into an onyx-colored mouse with a bright pink nose, Midnight. She would always be my favorite. The ones we didn’t keep faced the unfathomable.
He would bring out small plastic baggies and make us put the pinkies in them, zip them up, and put them in the freezer. I remember the tears soaking my purple pajama shirt, holding a pink body in my fingers, everything inside of me breaking, suffocating with it as he zipped up the opening. “This is just part of life. You wanted a snake, and the snake has to eat, and you have to know where their food comes from,” he’d say every time. This was a lesson.
Defrosting the pinkies became horrible, mostly because I knew my hands had put them there. I often asked myself what they were thinking, their eyes unopen, their skin so soft and new they surely felt me shaking. Did they know they were dying? I imagined myself, small, pink, helpless, my lungs closing up, hearing only sobs and a deeper voice saying, “This is just part of life,” the hands holding me trembling.
We stopped watching the snakes eat. How horrific, the thought of an animal devouring another animal, the thought of death passing through our hands. We could not unsee it, though: the bulge in Aspen’s stomach, the clams our dad shucked on the kitchen counter, the albacore my grandpa held in the pictures on the boat, the whole turkey we’d eat on Thanksgiving, the crickets eating one of our dead geckos, Dad lifting a dead mouse from their tank, our dog coughing up black mucus on the patio, our mother locking herself in the bathroom and sobbing after the phone call came in, the array of still-bodies we passed in caskets, each in succession of the other only a month apart, the photos of uncles we’d never hug again. It was looming—a reminder of rot from the inside, that no matter how much you seek to give something a good life, it will inevitably be found dead by someone.
We were too young, yet, to consider life. There wasn’t a need to understand that all things are borrowed, tied together by red strings so inextricably that they cannot exist separately. To see only death is to be young. Understanding balance comes only with age.
All of us, at the time, were just small, pink bodies, squirming in the palms of an unforgiving world, hoping it wouldn’t suffocate us. We couldn’t hear the world crying into its purple pajamas. We weren’t listening.
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My grandma Minnie taught my mom how to paint apartment walls. She used to be an apartment supervisor and would repaint after the tenant vacated the premises. She’d lay the masking tape on the edges of the baseboards and around the outlets, and have my mom edge around them with a brush, while she rolled the white paint over the rest, making anew the rooms for the next tenants. My mom, watching, learned how to erase existences.
Growing up, we moved every two years on average, entering a new home with barren white walls or leftover dull brown walls from whoever lived there prior. We’d move in all our furniture and get settled into our routines. But we knew this wasn’t actually a home. We knew these white walls were not ours, brown skin stark against a suburban background. We knew, in two year’s time, we’d be taking the pictures down and packing our books into boxes. We never learned how to be permanent. We all dealt with this in different ways. Shelby started nesting, unpacking everything she had, every picture or piece of art she owned laid into frames and hung on her walls. She put up wallpaper, she bought new furniture, and forced herself to belong between those four walls. Spencer started spending all his time in his room, maybe because he knew it’d be over in a second. I left all but my necessities packed away, hung no pictures, painted no walls, spent only the moments before I sunk into sleep in my room, and kept my old bedroom furniture from when I was seven until I was nineteen. I was comfortable with—or traumatized by, I’m not sure—impermanence.
My mother knew how to turn a house into a home. She’d pull out the masking tape and the rollers and paint brushes, and we’d all get to work on the main floor of the house, laying down coat after coat of yellow paint. We’d laugh, accidentally step on the tile with our shoe soles brushed with paint and rush to wipe it up with a rag. Mom would blast the Bee Gees and we’d sing along and dance all the while. Afterwards, we’d open all the windows to let the light in and the paint smell out, and the room would brighten with yellow sunshine. All traces of whoever was there before would be gone. It was just us and our red strings in a new house with newly painted walls.
They were ours, after that, to fill with laughter and tears and secrets. They were ours to stare into when the night held our ankles to stop us from leaving. They were ours to run our fingers against in the dark on our descent down the stairs for a glass of water at three in the morning. They were ours to hang pictures on, ours to tell our thoughts, ours to flood with ourselves like basements in monsoon season.
“I don’t want to be my mother,” I’d whisper to them, these walls which knew her silence and her passive nature almost as well as I did. I didn’t know, yet, there was no alternative result. I was too young to see that she was more than bamboo bending under Dad’s rage. Her mindfulness painting the walls, her compassion, cleverness, and perfectionism were all lost on me. I was blinded by dining tables jammed into ribs and a mother who would forget it ever happened. All the other qualities that made my parents dissipated into smoke rising up to my bedroom window, something lingering, something unseen seeping into my lungs. I would become my parents and it would not be a terrible fate. My dad’s stubbornness would be built into my roof, my mother’s cleverness opening the windows, colliding in my bones to build this human danger. And all the walls I’ve touched will know me, will be tainted by my voice, and someone will have to erase me too. It took me a long time to understand the difference between erasure and forgiveness, between white and yellow walls. I decorate everything now, even my skin, with makeup and tattoos, erasing all those who have tainted me, building my ____ here in this body.
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The hundreds of photos of us in your house tell the whole story– progressions of us from children to adults, a perfect chronology to our lives and your love for us. “I love you kids like you’re my own,” you told me once, “Our people are not good at saying these things. But now you know.” When I hear your voice in our family videos, I cry because I know.
I never told you how much I miss the garden, endless rows of orchids shaded by sunlight filters, hanging moss and elephant ferns, pomegranate trees and tomato plants, desert flowers stubbornly growing up the slope of the hill in the yard. There is nothing that will ever feel like home again– not even my own bones.
I remember the pink cymbidium tucked behind my ear, blossoming beside my right eye. I imagined it growing from my desert skin, mistook me for its roots and made itself a home there. You and I used to sway through the garden, hands folded behind our backs, sunlight kneading us like dough, molding us into extensions of sunshine.
I’m still not sure how you managed it, the nurture of 400 cymbidium orchids and a few dozen dendrobiums. When you talked about your life, you would always start with, “We were slaves.” Maybe your hands never forgot the plantations in Hawai’i, never unlearned how to carry baskets full with pineapples across the fields. Maybe your hands needed to keep working, but I wonder how rewarding it was, this time, to be able to choose to work.
Sometimes, I imagine the elephant fern the size of a man hanging on the back of your garage. I imagine it small, when you first got it and hung it on a wooden plank, soft green leaves still wrinkling open to catch the sun. I wonder what kind of love it took to turn it into a man so large no wall could hold it but the one behind the garage, leaves now smoothed from growth, thick with the experience of a life well-lived. That fern knows what it’s like to be cared for. Those orchids know what it’s like to be loved.
When you couldn’t walk well anymore, you told Mom to take the orchids. We loaded the truck full with fifty each weekend and drove them out to our house, while Dad put up the metal pipes and hung the filters, and we nailed metal mesh into wood to build ventilated shelves. And each weekend while we were out there, you and I would go for a “joy ride” to Baskin-Robbins and you’d smile so wide I could cry.
Mom taught me what you taught her: how to fertilize and transplant the bulbs when too many crowded a pot, how to ventilate the bark, how to break up old, crowded roots. Reading the tags on some of the orchids, the years began standing out: 1986. Older than me. Before you knew me, or knew I’d exist.
I pride myself on the fact that you chose me. Your son had no plans of marrying, but that wasn’t going to stop you from having grandkids. You and Grandma chose us: restless, pink babies pushing against the world. No, we’re not connected by blood or genes, but by red strings and orchid roots stretching through the bark. I’m not sure you’ll ever know what it meant to us. I’m sure I’ll never know what it meant to you.
We were never good at saying what really needed to be said. You couldn’t hear and I’ve always been too embarrassed to say how full my heart is aloud. We were good at writing though. When we were apart, we’d write each other letters each week. When we were together, you’d pull out the small whiteboard and a dry-erase marker and we would talk and talk for hours. Sometimes, I wish you’d visit me in a dream, just so we could talk again.
I knew the time we had was limited, but underestimated the devastating nature of death. Nothing could have prepared me. I thought if I did everything right, spent every possible moment with you, it would hurt less. I did not yet understand that the hurt is not the thing to worry about. Just time.
We are not a hand-holding people—but you held my hand to fall asleep, brushed my hair from my face, and told me you were fine. And when you’d wake, you’d ask if I was hungry even though you wouldn’t eat. You’d share your three blankets even though you were cold. And in some moments, you stared past me at the light in the hallway and I knew– I was already a ghost to you. I have not stopped weeping since I saw you last. I hold you in my palms like the tide, always escaping.
I used to cry because I was unsure of what I would become when you were gone. Now, I have become mourning. It is built into me like any other organ, sprouting from my flesh as I feed it with tears, the way teeth peer out of our bodies when we laugh. You planted it in me without my knowing, this wild orchid, and now I am a home for memory. I used to see beauty before you passed. I used to notice. I’m trying so hard not to lose that because it’s something you gave to me. But I would be lying if I said it was second nature. I know now why cymbidiums are so temperamental in a pot in California, but grow wild in the forests of Japan.
I’m trying to be patient. Already, you and Grandma are waiting for us in another life and I am always falling behind, or maybe I’m just waiting for you too but in a different way. But it’s important for me to tell you– every careful decision you made, and all the reckless ones, ended in countless blossoms. You and Grandma will always be my home before all else. Sometimes, cymbidiums mistake little brown girls for the earth. Choosing love made me alive in ways I’d never be if you hadn’t picked us. To me, cymbidium means gratitude. One day, I hope to know what it meant to you.
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If I were to tug on the red strings tied to my fingers, it would ripple through time and oceans, mountains, forests, plantations, concentration camps, ashen cities, broken hands, painted walls, gardens. It would shake all those I’m tied to and something inside of them might feel me tugging. They might scream or cry, or gain or lose hope, might think, “One of us made it that far.”
I find myself reminding people that everyone is just doing their best, that hard work means different things for different people and we’re all just pushing through to the sunrise. I imagine my great-grandpa José walking through deserts with holes in his shoes. I imagine my great-grandma Nao standing in her flower shop wearing all black. I imagine Grandpa James building us a swing set in our backyard. I imagine Grandpa Asakura at twelve years old, staring at me through barbed wire. I imagine Grandpa Nishimura with a basket full of pineapples on his back. I remember my mother painting our walls and dancing. I remember my dad crying into the sink. I remember the moving boxes stacked in front of my door, the books puzzle-pieced inside of them, the breaking glass when I drop one of the dinner plates my parents were given for their wedding, the orchids sitting on the windowsill, the movement forward and backward of plumeria leaves under Santa Ana winds. We were always inevitable.
Where did we begin? Back in Hiroshima, small suns setting over oyster shell harbors awaiting demise. Back in Sisoguichi, Mexico, rising from clay deserts and stolen lands. Are we just the echo of the start? Are we just reverberations following the red strings? We arrived here, somewhere west and strange, pink bodies bundled in red hope and gold seams. It is important to keep surviving.
I braid the red strings tied about my hands two or three times over, so thick with understanding that not even something sharp and broken could cut through.
“We’re here,” I wave them, braided, at the sun and call out, “We made it.”