Alden m hayashi biography

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I peered into the kitchen to see Mom shoveling the contents from a cake pan into the garbage disposal.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Startled, Mom turned toward me, her face knotted in frustration. Love, Mom.” 

That gesture opened a welcome period of détente, when obligatory greeting cards for birthdays, Mother’s Days, Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Year’s Days went back and forth between two islands, Oahu and Manhattan, as she and I tried to maintain at least some level of contact, however minimal.

The faded red handle and the oxidized metal rotary gear sent me quickly down a path of a memory of a long-ago birthday party when I turned seven. But recently, as I’ve been approaching retirement, I’ve become increasingly restless, wanting to move beyond writing just about technology and business. Dad never talked about the war, yet I always felt its presence in his deepest being, like an apricot pit stuck in his gut.

It’s a sentiment aptly captured by the old Japanese saying, “deru kugi wa utareru”—literally, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Along with lectures on the inherent dangers of Western individualism, I was also taught the beauty of Eastern group unity. Do you think I’m talking just to hear the sound of my own voice?”

My thoughts were interrupted by the priest’s footsteps.

I knelt before Dad’s niche and suddenly felt such a powerful wave of regret for being so ignorant of the most momentous period in his life.

And that stubbornness has resulted in years of estrangement between a son, me, now living in New York City, and his mother, who has remained residing five thousand miles away in Honolulu.

*******

Waiting for Mom’s flight to arrive from Hawaii, I’m filled with remorse and apprehension. I could always base her future name on a characteristic of hers.

If the sight of a simple eggbeater had sent me down such a painful path, who knew what other distressing memories could be conjured by other seemingly innocent objects?

As I parked my car in the garage and entered my parents’ home, I summoned my strength for the work ahead. As it turned out, Mom’s “Keiko” meant “enlightening child.”

It was, perhaps, the most apt of the eight Keikos.

Having been born and raised in Los Angeles, they were rounded up and incarcerated during World War II in concentration camps for people of Japanese descent. A small plastic bowl that Mom used to serve me her seven-layer Jello dessert had me fighting back tears. So much kinder to let her live in her world of the past.

“They’re doing okay,” I replied, “but I was hoping you could help me with something.

Will she expect me to revert to the child I was growing up under her roof? Oddly, even the smallest part of me isn’t relieved by this delay. This, even as the government had rounded up more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, and incarcerated them in concentration camps. I rush over to the gate and, soon enough, passengers begin disembarking, some dressed casually in aloha shirts, a few even wearing fragrant but fading leis.

Mom had asked me to take care of just one thing—ordering the food and refreshments for the reception that followed the service—and that was all I did. The song was enka, or Japanese soul music, and from what I could make out with my limited Japanese, the lyrics were about life’s crooked paths, painful regrets, and dashed ambitions. I’m still mad, even after all these years, angry at not just the things she said but also at her reluctance to recognize the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life in an attempt to fulfill her vision of what a dutiful Japanese American son should be.

I check the display board near the Continental counter and see that Mom’s flight will be more than an hour late because of bad weather in the Midwest.