Free The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

receive. Don’t be loud like the Americans. Stay away from the Chinese. They don’t like us . Watch out for the Koreans. They hate us . Be careful around the Filipinos. They’re worse than the Koreans . Never marry an Okinawan. They’re not real Japanese .
    IN THE COUNTRYSIDE , especially, we often lost them early. To diphtheria and the measles. Tonsillitis. Whooping cough. Mysterious infections that turned gangrenous overnight. One of them was bitten by a poisonous black spider in the outhouse and came down with fever. One was kicked in the stomach by our favorite gray mule. One disappeared while we were sorting the peaches in the packing shed and even though we looked under every rock and tree for her we never did find her and after that we were never the same. I lost the will to live . One tumbled out of the truck while we were driving the rhubarb to market and fell into a coma from which he never awoke. One was kidnapped by a pear picker from a nearby orchard whose advances we had repeatedly rebuffed. I should have just told him yes . Another was badly burned when the moonshine still exploded out back behind the barn and lived for only a day. The last thing she said to me was “Mama, don’t forget to look up at the sky.” Several drowned. One in the Calaveras River. One in the Nacimiento. One in an irrigation ditch. One in a laundry tub we knew we should not have left out overnight. And every year, in August, on the Feast of the Dead, we lit white paper lanterns on their gravestones and welcomed their spirits back to earth for a day. And at the end of that day, when it was time for them to leave, we set the paper lanterns afloat on the river to guide them safely home. For they were Buddhas now, who resided in the Land of Bliss.
    A FEW OF US were unable to have them, and this was the worst fate of all. For without an heir to carry on the family name the spirits of our ancestors would cease to exist. I feel like I came all the way to America for nothing . Sometimes we tried going to the faith healer, who told us that our uterus was the wrong shape and there was nothing that could be done. “Your destiny has been settled by the gods,” she said to us, and then she showed us to the door. Or we consulted the acupuncturist, Dr. Ishida, who took one look at us and said, “Too much yang,” and gave us herbs to nourish our yin and blood. And three months later we found ourselves miscarrying yet again. Sometimes we were sent by our husband back home to Japan, where the rumors would follow us for the rest of our lives. “Divorced,” the neighbors would whisper. And, “I hear she’s dry as a gourd.” Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she would make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not—the only thing he wanted, he had said to us, was to grow old by our side—we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had. Every night I can hear them playing outside my window in the trees .
    IN J-TOWN they lived with us eight and nine to a room behind our barbershops and bathhouses and in tiny unpainted apartments that were so dark we had to leave the lights on all day long. They chopped carrots for us in our restaurants. They stacked apples for us at our fruit stands. They climbed up onto their bicycles and delivered bags of groceries to our customers’ back doors. They separated the colors from the whites in our basement laundries and quickly learned to tell the difference between a red wine stain and blood. They swept the floors of our boardinghouses. They changed towels. They stripped sheets. They made up the beds. They opened doors on things that should never be seen. I thought he was praying but he was dead . They brought supper every evening to the elderly widow in 4A from Nagasaki, Mrs. Kawamura, who worked as a chambermaid at