Before You Read
“Obasan in Suburbia”
Susan Ito – born 1959
About Ito
When Susan Ito was an infant, her mother gave her up for adoption to a Japanese
American couple who had waited ten years for a child. Her adoptive parents were often
confronted with questions about her racial background, which Ito describes as “fifty percent
Japanese, and fifty percent…unknown.” Because of her experiences, Ito is fascinated by
literature that explores the complexities of adoption, especially in cases involving a mixed-race
child.
Ito has co-edited an anthology called A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems about
Adoption. She lives in Oakland, CA, where she teaches creative writing. Ito‟s stories, poems,
and essays have appeared in numerous publications.
Generations
The grandmother portrayed in “Obasan in Suburbia” is an issei, or first generation
Japanese immigrant. While growing up in Japan, she would have been taught to place a high
value on family obligations. Issei were generally willing to make great sacrifices for their
children. In return, they expected appreciation and obedience. Most issei planned to live with
their children when they grew old. The nisei (second generation) were exposed to American
ways at an early age. Although many nisei showed considerable respect to their parents, there
was often friction between the two generations. The more assimilated the nisei became, the
more likely they were to reject traditional Japanese views about the roles of husbands and wives,
parents and children.
“Obasan in Suburbia” – Susan Ito
When my grandmother was eighty years old, she got kicked out of her house for leaving
her nighttime kimono in the bathroom one time too many. I remember the day she moved; I was
ten. I sat in the backseat of my parents‟ station wagon while my father loaded her things – they
fit easily into three or four cartons. He wrapped her little black and white television in a white
chenille bedspread and laid it on the floor by my feet. She sat next to me, looking out the
window, with a Kleenex in her fist.
She was living with my uncle Taro, her youngest son, his wife and my little cousin
Jenney, in the big pink house she and my grandfather had bought after the war. When Uncle
Taro brought his bride, Michiko, down from Canada, my grandparents invited them to stay until
their savings grew. They never got any savings. They bought a car, a big one with automatic
windows. They bought a fur coat. They bought television sets for every room in the pink house,
and when my grandfather died ten years later, it was clear that Uncle Taro and his family weren‟t
going anywhere.
That was all right. Nana would have been sad if they‟d left her alone in all that space.
But by that time the house had filled up with their things, pushing my grandmother to the outer
perimeters of the house. She slept in the attic, in a small room with a slanted ceiling. Even
though she was tiny, not even five feet tall, she could only stand up in the center of the room.
She took her meals in the basement, back behind the laundry room where my grandfather had
built a small, second kitchen, a one-burner stove next to an industrial size freezer. Sometimes
she rested her plate on the ping-pong table and watched the Lawrence Welk show while she ate.
The rest of them ate above her, Jenney spilling her Spaghetti-O‟s on the linoleum floor.
It was like a split screen television, America above, and Japan below. Upstairs, they called
themselves Ray and Lillian. Lil. I think Michiko chose that name intentionally, knowing that
my grandmother would never be able to pronounce it. “Lil-lian,” she tried to say, but it always
came out sounding like “Re-run.” Changing their names never seemed right, anyway. Once, my
mother told me that Aunt Michi„s mother up in Canada never knew she was calling herself Lil.
To me, they were always Uncle Taro and Aunt Michi. Ray and Lil sounded like something out
of I Love Lucy. But there they were, upstairs, trying to fit that suburban life around them. He
joined the volunteer fire department. She gave Tupperware parties.
In the downstairs kitchen, my grandmother shuffled on the cement floor in her rubbersoled zoris. She washed the rice in the sink where Lil‟s nylons, dripping. There was a pantry
down there, next to the enormous refrigerator. One shelf was designated for her food, the cans
she carried in a canvas bag on the subway from Manhattan. Kamaboko, and the stinky yellow
daikon. White fish cakes with the pink coating. I stacked the cans and cellophane packages,
neatly on her shelf, playing Japanese grocer with my play money. “Ikura?” I asked my
grandmother. “How much?” “Two hundred dollar, please,” she laughed. Her teeth clicked in
her mouth, and she covered her face with the back of her hand.
After a while they stopped letting her talk to Jenney. “She won‟t be able to learn
English,” said Aunt Michi. “When she goes to school, people will think she talks funny.”
Ray and Lil gave barbecues in the backyard, my uncle wearing a red butcher‟s apron.
They couldn‟t keep Nana locked in the attic, not on weekends with everyone around, so she sat
in the cool basement, rolling logs of sushi on little bamboo mats. I helped her with the nori, thin
sheets of green-black seaweed. You had to toast it first, holding it carefully over a gas flame or a
candle. Nana didn‟t mind when I burned holes in it. “Don‟t worry. It‟s a window for the gohan
to look out.” We arranged the sushi pieces on a big round platter, and brought them out to the
picnic table. Nana put it down right next to whatever Aunt Michi had made, Jell-O or fruit
cocktail with little marshmallows in it. Michi would make a face when she saw the sushi, like it
was something strange and disgusting, so none of her friends would eat it either. She didn‟t tell
them it was the same thing she loved to eat when she was a little girl. But sometimes I‟d see her,
after everyone went home, and she‟d be standing next to the refrigerator, popping the norimaki
in her mouth when she thought no one was looking.
One of the problems with the house was that it only had one bathroom. Aunt Michi made
it clear that it was her bathroom, and that other people, namely my uncle and cousin and Nana,
were allowed to use it, but only because of her generosity. There were rules. The shampoo had
to stay under the sink, not on the bathroom ledge. All her knick-knacks had to be arranged just
so: the pink yarn sweater with the dog‟s head that covered the extra toilet tissue; the porcelain
mermaid whose tail spread into a soap dish. Wet towels had to be taken directly down to the
laundry room, and put in the dryer, set to high so that they‟d fluff up. Wet towels were ugly.
One day, I was sitting in Nana‟s room, and the window was open. Michiko was out on
the back porch with Kit. Kit was their next-door neighbor with red hair, who smoked, inhaling
and exhaling like an accordion.
Aunt Michi said, “Tell me, Kit, what‟s it like to have your own house?” They were
sitting in matching white Adirondack chairs, balancing glasses of iced tea on the armrests.
“Lil, believe me, it‟s no picnic. I‟ve gotta clean up after the kids, after Mister AirConditioner King, with no help. At least you get a hand around here!” Kit took another long
puff, and then let it out. “I don‟t think Ray‟s mother is so bad. What‟s the matter, she pick on
you?”
I leaned against the window screen, not breathing.
After a pause, I heard Aunt Michi say, in her low gravelly voice, “She drives me nuts.
She won‟t speak English. She won‟t eat anything that comes in an aluminum package. She
shuffles around in those damn zoris lie she‟s Mrs. Buddha. Kit, that woman has been here more
than fifty years, and she acts like she just popped up out of a rice paddy!”
Kit laughed. “So she hasn‟t learned to say the Pledge of Allegiance yet. I think she‟s
cute, Lil.”
Aunt Michi snorted. “Cute. She‟s a pain in the oshidi.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
Nana, at eighty years old, was still making a daily commute over the Hudson River to
Manhattan, where she worked in a curtain factory. More than once, I watched her wrap BandAids around her fingers, which sometimes got caught under the machine‟s running needle. Her
nails were purple and scarred, and each finger pad was a callous, but she liked her job. The
sweatshop where she earned less than minimum wage was a place to feel busy, useful, a place to
gossip with her Chinese lady friends.
My grandmother signed her paychecks, “Sadao Kitayama” in a long, snaky scrawl, the
only English characters she knew. Then she turned them over to Uncle Taro for the mortgage
payment. He went to the bank for her and deposited them in their joint account, keeping the little
leather passbook in the locked drawer of his mahogany desk. It wasn‟t the money that mattered
to her though, it was the work. Crossing the Hudson each morning on the big silver commuter
bus gave her a sense of confidence, knowing that she could maneuver through places that Michi
was afraid to go. She wandered by herself through the alleys of Chinatown, picking up unusual
vegetables, carrying them in a bag made of plastic fishnet. Every night she came home, prepared
dinner quietly by herself in the basement, and retired to her room in the attic. There was no
sound to indicate her presence except the soft lilt of Lawrence Welk through the floor.
The crime that committed her to solitude, though, the final insult, was the kimono, indigo
and white in a bamboo pattern. She kept hanging it on the bathroom hook and forgetting to
remove it in the morning. It riled my aunt; she didn‟t want to touch the thing, so she would leave
it there and seethe all day. By the time Nana came home from work, Michi‟s face was set in
steel. Two words only: “Kimono, Obasan.”
No one ever told me the details of how it happened, how the family split that summer,
like a tree stuck by lightning. I imagined my aunt and uncle saying something to her about how
there wasn‟t enough space for all of them. My parents offered up our spare room, told her she
could move in with us right away. But Nana was too sad, and too proud to accept. She insisted
that they help her find an apartment small enough to be rented on her paycheck. It was an old
brick building, in the same complex where my parents had lived as newlyweds. There was talk
of a legal battle, of my grandmother winning her house back, but she refused to do it. “Taro my
smallest baby,” she said, wiping her runny eyes. “No fight him with lawyer.” She turned away
from the pink house without a struggle.
After she moved, my parents and I drove to Nana‟s place every Wednesday night and
took her out to dinner. It made me sad to see her whole life in such a tiny box, her studio
apartment. One room held a miniature kitchen, a folding metal table which she used for meals,
and to iron on. Underneath the window was her single bed, a plastic cube-shaped nightstand and
a phonograph on a rolling tea cart. The bed was covered with the white chenille spread and two
plain yellow throw pillows she had taken from my uncle‟s couch.
My father tried, once, a few years later, to build a bridge to the other side, but it was
already too late. He went to Uncle Taro‟s house and stood on the front step, shaking the quarters
and pennies in his pockets. Taro talked to him from behind the screen door, repeating, “There‟s
nothing to say.” My father‟s efforts collapsed like a thing made of old, hollow bones, and when
he came back to our house that night, we knew there wouldn‟t be another try. He stood in the
driveway and opened the door to the station wagon, and my mother and I got in. It was a
Wednesday, fried chicken night at Howard Johnson‟s, and my grandmother was waiting for us.