Free The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka Page A

the Hotel Drexel and had no children of her own. My husband was a gambler who left me with only forty-five cents . They played go in the lobby with the bachelor, Mr. Morita, who started out as a presser at the Empress Hand Laundry thirty years ago and still worked there as a presser to this day. It all went by so fast . They trailed their fathers from one yard to the next as they made their gardening rounds and learned how to trim the hedges and mow the grass. They waited for us on wooden slatted benches in the park while we finished cleaning the houses across the street. Don’t talk to strangers , we told them. Study hard. Be patient. Whatever you do, don’t end up like me .
    AT SCHOOL they sat in the back of the classroom in their homemade clothes with the Mexicans and spoke in timid, faltering voices. They never raised their hands. They never smiled. At recess they huddled together in a corner of the school yard and whispered among themselves in their secret, shameful language. In the cafeteria they were always last in line for lunch. Some of them—our firstborns—hardly knew any English and whenever they were called upon to speak their knees began to shake. One of them, when asked her name by the teacher, replied, “Six,” and the laughter rang in her ears for days. Another said his name was Table, and for the rest of his life that was what he was called. Many of them begged us not to be sent back, but within weeks, it seemed, they could name all the animals in English and read aloud every sign that they saw whenever we went shopping downtown—the street of the tall timber poles, they told us, was called State Street, and the street of the unfriendly barbers was Grove, and the bridge from which Mr. Itami had jumped after the stock market collapsed was the Last Chance Bridge—and wherever they went they were able to make their desires known. One chocolate malt, please .
    ONE BY ONE all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads. They forgot the names of the flowers in Japanese. They forgot the names of the colors. They forgot the names of the fox god and the thunder god and the god of poverty, whom we could never escape. No matter how long we live in this country they’ll never let us buy land . They forgot the name of the water goddess, Mizu Gami, who protected our rivers and streams and insisted that we keep our wells clean. They forgot the words for snow-light and bell cricket and fleeing in the night. They forgot what to say at the altar to our dead ancestors, who watched over us night and day. They forgot how to count. They forgot how to pray. They spent their days now living in the new language, whose twenty-six letters still eluded us even though we had been in America for years. All I learned was the letter x so I could sign my name at the bank . They pronounced their l ’s and r ’s with ease. And even when we sent them to the Buddhist church on Saturdays to study Japanese they did not learn a thing. The only reason my children go is to get out of working in the store . But whenever we heard them talking out loud in their sleep the words that came out of their mouths came out—we were sure of it—in Japanese.
    THEY GAVE THEMSELVES new names we had not chosen for them and could barely pronounce. One called herself Doris. One called herself Peggy. Many called themselves George. Saburo was called Chinky by all the others because he looked just like a Chinaman. Toshitachi was called Harlem because his skin was so dark. Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. “It’s his mother’s name,” she explained. To which we replied, “So is yours.” Sumire called herself Violet. Shizuko was Sugar. Makoto was just Mac. Shigeharu Takagi joined the Baptist church at the age of nine and changed his name to Paul. Edison Kobayashi was born lazy but had a photographic memory and could tell you the name of every person he’d ever met. Grace