Little Yellow Notebook

In the lounge in my home right above the television hangs a black and white photograph of my grandmother- Gladys Nakamura. Throughout my life, countless people have entered our home, looked at this picture of my grandmother and remarked on how much I, one of six children in my family, favor her. This woman, unbeknownst to me, has pale skin and very dark black hair cut in a bob. She is in her thirties in her photograph and the years of living a first-generation immigrant’s life here in the United States seem to show in her eyes. However, despite our age gap and the chasm between our skin tones, I favor her- this fact has been always been undeniably evident to everyone around me but myself. I have always been told I am the spitting image of my mother, so when I look at the differences between myself and this photograph of my paternal grandmother- who I only sometimes recognize bits of my father in- I do not understand what resemblance could possibly be there. Perhaps it is in my almond shaped eyes or my high cheekbones. Perhaps it is my quiet, discerning nature. I love the hybrid-Japanese culture in which I grew up in Honolulu but I still do not feel it connects me to my sobo’s Japanese American experience.

If she were still alive today, I would ask her about what it was like to live in the internment camps during WWII and why she chose to stay in California after being released- I do not even know if I will stay here after graduation. I would sit and listen to what her involvement was like in the NAACP at the height of the civil rights movement and I would compare it to the “commitment” I and so many other Stanford students have to our undergraduate chapter. I would ask her what she thinks of as progress despite the race riots in Los Angeles in ‘92, the election in ‘08, and our country’s current state of affairs internationally. I would ask her what my father was like when he was seven years old, what it was like to get married in one state when just 17 miles away that very union would be considered illegitimate, and what the Okinawan air smells like first thing in the morning. I would ask her all of these things and I would write about it. But for now, I look at this photograph every now and then and I only question- could my connection to this stranger truly birth a real connection to the past?

One day, maybe I will sit down in front of the television in the lounge and instead of reaching for the remote, I will reach for a notebook. I hope when that day comes, I am filled with even more questions than I have ever had before, and that in my little yellow notebook my answers will finally come.