Yoneko Tajitsu was born in Seattle in 1925 to Japanese immigrant parents, and she moved easily between the two worlds inhabited by many immigrants. She was active in Girl Reserves and Seattle public-school activities, sometimes representing Garfield High School in various citywide events, but she also attended Japanese-language school and a Japanese American church. Her life as an all-American multicultural girl came to an abrupt halt, however, when she was 17. Along with the other 120,000 Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, she was forcibly removed from her Seattle home in 1942 and sent to a concentration camp in Hunt, Idaho.
Her father’s church connections allowed her to get out and complete high school in Idaho and then go on to a nursing program at Keuka College in upstate New York. Like other nisei, she lived with the pain of dislocation and the stigma of being an outsider in her country of birth.
My mom went on to become a registered nurse with a master’s in education and special education. She worked in public health, special education and book publishing. She served as PTA president, completed The New York Times crossword puzzle regularly, and was an avid sender of e-mail messages to friends and family across the globe. Yet, despite her many accomplishments, she never put on airs. In fact, whenever I am tempted to use a five-syllable word, I can hear her voice saying, “Why use that $0.25 word, when a $0.10 word will do?”
Mom married my dad, Herman “Keek” Nash, in 1951, and they went on to have four kids raised in suburban Maywood, N.J. On Nov. 4, after 45 years in Maywood, they sold their home and moved to San Diego to live near my brother and his family. Just as she was starting to enjoy her new life in California, Mom died suddenly on Nov. 28 at age 79.
One of Mom’s most important gifts to me was one I almost didn’t even realize. When I heard my children’s peers talk about having trouble with bullies on the playground at school, I realized that I did not have any childhood memories of this sort of thing even though we grew up in a white suburban enclave.
I called Mom and asked her whether I was just not remembering racist threats. She said that she and my dad had been very deliberate in their actions with regards to race as we were growing up. They made a point of bringing over friends of all races and faiths on a regular basis. Every Friday we went to the local YMCA for Family Swim Night so that we could socialize with kids of various backgrounds.
To make sure that her multiracial kids fit in with their peers, Mom always served as a class mother and played her guitar during the local library’s story hour. She got so friendly that we still get Christmas cards from my first-grade teacher, Marjorie Cummings. And even though money was tight, Mom made a point of cooking cheeseburgers and inviting our friends over for lunch when we were in elementary school. Instead of hanging out in the schoolyard without friends, I remember getting to know my classmates one on one in my own house, where being multiracial was the norm.
As I thought about the way Mom had struggled against racism and hurtful exclusions of people her whole life, I marveled at the way she had turned what could have been a lifetime of bitterness into a lifetime of building connectedness. When some people drew a line to keep her out at age 17, she spent the rest of her life figuring out how to draw a circle to bring us all in.