Searching for a Past Traced With Gold

I first heard the story two days after my mother’s 80th birthday. My wife, daughter and I were staying at my parents’ home in Fort Collins, Colo., and I was relaxing beneath the cherry tree in their backyard. My mother joined me in the shade, sitting quietly at first. She rarely talks about her past, particularly the hard times, and when she does, her stories are brief, without beginning or end.

In such manner, she told me the tale of a hand-painted Japanese plate. It belonged to her mother, but it was left behind in a trunk during World War II.

I tried to picture this plate I had never seen, in hands I barely remembered. My grandmother lived with us a few years before her death in 1976. She spoke little English, and I spoke little Japanese, but I remember her voice and laughter, and I can picture her sitting by the back door on a wooden chair, softly humming, rocking, ever so slightly, back and forth.

As I thought about the plate, it came to represent in my mind all that was lost or taken from my grandmother’s family, which, over the years, included freedom and, surely, at times, hope itself.

From the moment I heard about the plate, I knew I would go in search of it, back in time to Yuba City, north of Sacramento, along the Feather River, where my grandparents worked in fields and orchards. It was almost 60 years since my mother last saw the plate. In all likelihood, I would never have known about it were it not for her birthday in July.

The celebration was planned by my brother and sister, who, without due consideration, assigned me the task of buying a gift from all of us, even though in shopping I lack tenacity and rely heavily on luck. And since I can’t think clearly in malls, I went to L.A.’s Little Tokyo, where I came upon a gold Imari vase. The woman at the store said it was a traditional style of hand-painted gold porcelain, appropriate for the occasion of my mother’s birthday. Almost all families of Japanese ancestry, she said, have at least one piece of Imari.

The pieces are, indeed, beautiful. Imari porcelain dates back to the early 17th century and the island of Kyushu, Japan, where my grandmother grew up. Imari, a generic term used to describe the highly decorated porcelain produced in the region, takes its name from the seaport through which it was shipped.

I brought the vase home and my wife, leery of my judgment in such matters, carefully picked apart the gift wrapping to examine it, then telephoned my sister to assure her that it would not be necessary to implement Plan B, which involved my sister-in-law, a good shopper, saving us from embarrassment.

Mom seemed pleased when she opened the gift, but she had to, as about 50 friends, relatives and dogs were watching. She placed it back in the box, took it home, and I thought that was the end of the story.

But, then, in the shade of the cherry tree, my mother opened a door on the past. “My mom had an Imari plate before the war,� she said.

She described it as the largest and most beautiful of my grandmother’s “New Year’s plates,� an Imari among ware of lesser pedigree stored in a hutch enclosed by curtains. It’s likely, my mother said, that her mother brought it from Japan, perhaps as a gift or keepsake, handed down through generations.

Once a year, my grandmother would bring it out in presentation of the holiday meal: sushi, sashimi, tempura, the works. But as was the case then--and today--war changed everything.

There are different ways of winning and losing in war. My mother’s family did both. Their country was victorious, but in the process, it imprisoned them and 120,000 others of Japanese ancestry. I think of that now as our country, again, prepares for war, and innocent people are profiled, taunted, attacked.

Before my mom and her family were forced to leave their home, they packed the plate in a trunk and stored it in a barn. They never saw it again, my mother said. Then she turned silent.

Lives, Belongings

Left Behind

Immigration records show that my grandmother, Tetsuo Hoshiko, arrived in the United States on the USS Yokohama Maru on Aug. 6, 1915. She was 20 years old. My grandfather, Tetsuzo Hoshiko, met her in Seattle, where she entered the country, and they were married a few days later.

Their first child, Takeshi, lived only four days following his birth in 1917. Their second child, my mother, was born in 1921, while they were visiting in Japan. Months after her birth, they returned to the United States, and it was on that crossing, my mother said, that they probably brought the Imari plate.

Initially, they lived in Colorado, but in the late 1920s they moved to Isleton, southwest of Sacramento, and opened a restaurant. They took the first part of their family name, “Hoshi,� which in Japanese means “star,� and called it the Star Restaurant. Among their offerings were good coffee and roast beef with gravy, their customer base drawing heavily from a nearby tomato factory.

Twice the restaurant burned down, and my mother’s second cousin suggested they might have better luck near his family in Yuba City. He brought a truck and helped move their meager possessions to a place on Phillips Road.

My grandparents worked in orchards and fields and lived in a one-bedroom house, a shack, really, with an outdoor toilet and leaky roof. My grandfather lined the ceiling with paper bags from the grocery store, changing them each time it rained. He added on to the house with boards used to prop up branches of peach trees when they were heavy with fruit. The property was owned by a family that let them stay in exchange for work. When the owner died, the property was taken over by relatives, a family named Van Antwerp, my mother said, who lived on the same property. My mother could not remember their first names.

She remembered, however, baby-sitting the two Van Antwerp children, a girl and a boy. My mother had adult responsibilities even as a teenager, and was often left in charge of her three younger siblings for weeks at a time as my grandparents followed the course of seasonal farm work.

One could tell the season by the Hoshiko children’s diet. During asparagus harvest, my grandparents would send home crates of the stuff, and my mother would use it for sandwiches to take to school. When other children asked my mother, Aunt Mabel, Uncle Kat and Aunt Lil what they were eating, they would make it sound as though the asparagus sandwiches were, in fact, quite tasty, hoping to entice fellow students to trade their bologna.

There were good days, but they were followed by more hard times. When Japan and the United States went to war, people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were ordered into internment camps and allowed to take only what they could carry. The Van Antwerps said they could store the rest in the barn.

My mom, then 21, her two sisters and brother and their parents were first sent to Merced, where they stayed about four months before being moved to a southern Colorado camp known as Amache on Sept. 3, 1942.

Once in Colorado, my mother wrote back to the Van Antwerps asking if they might send some of their possessions, which they did. One of the family’s trunks was sent. My Uncle Katsumi Hoshiko still has it. Mrs. Van Antwerp also sold the family’s 1935 Ford and sent along the money. And she sent knitting supplies for my grandmother.

But the trunk with the plate never came. Instead there arrived a letter from the Van Antwerps, my mother said, stating that they did not think that in time of war, they should continue to do anything that might constitute aiding the enemy. She handed the letter to my Uncle Kat, who, my mother said, ripped it apart.

Eight months after they entered camp, the Hoshikos were released under the sponsorship of friends in Colorado. Eventually my grandparents, along with my aunts and uncle, migrated to Southern California. But my mother met my father, a farmer, in Colorado, and they stayed.

My mom remembers the Van Antwerps as kind people. The letter was contrary to the many ways in which Mrs. Van Antwerp helped the Hoshikos. Each Sunday, she took Uncle Kat and Aunt Lil to the Lutheran church with her. Even though the Hoshikos were Buddhist, Mrs. Van Antwerp would bring them Christmas gifts. Sometimes, they were the only gifts the family would receive.

There was one memorable Sunday when Mrs. Van Antwerp was driving her two children, Aunt Lil and Uncle Kat home from church when news came on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

“Oh my God,� were her only words. In the ensuing days, she was a faithful friend. She went shopping for my mother’s family when curfew was imposed and travel was restricted.

On the day they left for camp, the Van Antwerps drove them to the bus station. Their daughter, then 8, wore a blue dress, and as she was saying goodbye to my Aunt Lil, she gave her a doll, wearing an identical blue dress.

Some families left behind homes filled with belongings and crops planted in land they owned. The truth is that my mother’s family didn’t have much to leave behind: the car, a refrigerator, my Uncle Kat’s Western Flyer bicycle. And my grandmother’s Imari plate, packed away in a trunk.

A Search

Across Time

The odds of finding the plate are slim, but that hardly seems reason for not searching. I begin with one bit of information: that the plate was last in the possession of a family named Van Antwerp.

When I arrive in Yuba City, the orchards are bare, already plucked of the season’s peaches. There are no Van Antwerps in the Yuba City telephone listings, so my hope is to find someone who remembers them and can lead me to them.

To get a feel for the town, I drive around its perimeter, then over the bridge to Marysville and back and, finally, to the library to study the local newspaper’s archives on microfilm. I go back to 1941 and 1942, when the word “Japs� appears regularly in headlines.

My mother has told me about her closest childhood friend, May Nakao. I find her in a nursing home, her sister, Opal Wakayama, sitting at her bedside. May likely would have remembered the Van Antwerps, but during my visit, she is heavily medicated, unable to see or hear.

“She’s pretty tough,� Opal says. “Maybe she’ll pull out of this.�

I also visit Gladys Inouye, who lived across the road. Unlike the Hoshikos, her family owned property and a house. During the war, however, their house burned down. Upon their release from the camps, they returned to Yuba City and began anew.

Gladys, too, is ill and unable to talk the day I visit. Her daughter, Darlene Inouye, says she remembers the Van Antwerps but has no idea where they are now. The local historian in the Japanese American community is Frank Nakamura, 88, a retired pharmacist. When I visit him and his wife, Hatsue, she pulls out a photo album.

“Is this your mother?� she asks.

There, seated with perfect posture, among other graduates of the Japanese language school in nearby Marysville, is my mother.

With each family I visit, I explain my search for the plate, fearing that I sound ridiculous. But they somehow seem to understand how such a thing can be important.

On the evening of my second day in Yuba City, I find in a phone book a Van Antwerp who lives about 50 miles away in Paradise. An elderly woman cautiously answers the door. I try to explain that I am a reporter and a son and am looking for the Van Antwerps and a plate.

The woman listens patiently, then says she is sorry but has no idea what in the world I’m talking about. She knows of no Van Antwerps from the Yuba City area and has, herself, never lived there.

“I hope you find your plate,� she says as I leave. “I have a little glass dish my mom left me. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.�

I drive back to my hotel on a narrow highway bounded by glimmering orchards, washed in golden light. I wonder if there were times when my grandmother sat looking out the door of our house in Colorado that she thought about this very road and returning home after working for weeks in distant fields.

Or maybe her thoughts were of Japan, a place I have never been. At age 48, I still don’t fully understand the role culture plays in my life, whether my thoughts are somehow shaped by ancestors I know nothing about. I realize that that, too, is part of my search.

The day before I am scheduled to head home, I go to the Sutter County Hall of Records to look through real estate transactions starting from the 1940s.

I find the names of Wesley and Leona Van Antwerp and call my mother. Yes, she says, those are their names, and suddenly I have twice as much information as I had before.

One document shows an address on Rosalind Avenue where the Van Antwerps lived after they sold the property on Phillips Road. As I arrive at the house, a man comes out, and I explain that I’m searching for information about people who used to live here. He sends me next door. “They,� he says, “have been here forever.�

The neighbor who answers the door and her husband both remember the Van Antwerps. They have no idea what happened to them, but then the woman tells me a story of coincidence. She describes how she grew up in Chico next door to Leona, before she married into the Van Antwerp family, and her brothers. Then, later in life, they ended up living next to each other again on Rosalind Avenue.

“Dickey,� she says. “Their name was Dickey.� She searches through the Chico listings and her finger stops at the name Frank Dickey. “I seem to remember that one of the brothers was Frank,� she says, “but I don’t know if this is the same one.�

That evening, I call the number expecting another “sorry, can’t help you.� A man answers, and I explain I am searching for relatives of Leona Van Antwerp.

“Why do you want to know?� he asks. His voice is gruff, and I am afraid he is going to hang up. I tell him the story of the plate and that I got his name from a former neighbor.

“Well,� he tells me, “everyone’s dead. I’m the only one left.�

I ask if he remembers seeing a Japanese plate in his sister Leona’s home or if she ever talked about my mother’s family. No, he says, he doesn’t think so. “She has a daughter,� he adds. “You need to talk to her.�

He says she lives in Orange County and gives me her number. The next day, I catch a flight back to Southern California.

A Connection

Lost, Found

I picture myself walking into Anne Bay’s house and seeing the plate, its cobalt blue and cayenne red floral designs, displayed on a shelf or in a cabinet.

The search was a mission to reclaim something that belonged to my mother’s family, but I know now that if I find the plate, I won’t ask for it. My mother would rather leave the past alone, and it occurs to me that the plate no longer belongs to us. That if it exists in Anne Bay’s home, left to her by her mother, it is hers.

I decide not to call beforehand because I’m afraid she’ll hang up. When you’re a reporter, you think about such things, and for some reason, I would rather have a door slammed in my face than to have someone hang up on me.

I take a laptop computer with me to the front door. It has stored images of old black-and-white photographs showing the Van Antwerp and Hoshiko children, pictures my mother had kept all these years.

A woman comes to the door.

“Anne Bay?� I ask.

“Yes,� she says.

I introduce myself and explain that I have been searching for her, that I have pictures to show her. She calls her husband, Jim Bay, to the door, and they invite me inside. I notice Japanese wood block prints on their walls, antique furniture in their front room, but no Japanese plates.

We sit at their dining table, and I pull one of the images up on the computer screen. It shows her with the Hoshiko children seated on an outdoor fireplace built in the Bays’ backyard.

When she sees it, she begins to cry.

Her memory immediately goes back to the day they said goodbye at the bus depot.

“What I remember is the trauma,� she says. “It still moves me. It was awful. Everyone was crying.�

When I bring up the matter of the plate and the letter, Anne says she is aware of neither. I absorb the news slowly. Perhaps I understand more clearly what my mother was saying when she told me the story. Maybe there is no ending.

Anne tells me the letter was not something her mother would have written, unless, possibly, someone told her that she shouldn’t send the trunk.

When Anne was in high school, the land on Phillips Road was sold. The buildings were torn down and new houses were built. After graduation, she moved to San Francisco, then Chico, where she attended college. It’s also where she met Jim. They have two children.

Like her mother, she became a teacher and worked in the classroom 17 years, almost all of them spent teaching English as a second language to adults.

Anne, 67, says her father, Wesley, died in 1969; Leona, of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1996; her brother, John, of cancer the year before.

We agree to meet again. As I leave their home, I am struck by their kindness and goodwill.

I look again at the photographs of them as children, neighbors and friends. I’m no longer thinking about the plate but of a bus depot where they said goodbye.

Anne calls later and suggests I bring Aunt Lil Noriyuki, 72, who lives in Gardena. The following week, when they see each other, they hug at the door then sit next to each other on the couch. They talk about a dog named Patsy, a cow named Bossie, a principal named Mr. Albertson, who was prone to pitching chalk erasers at mischievous boys, and Mrs. Ashford, the music teacher.

Within a half hour of their reunion, they are finishing each other’s sentences.

“We played outside,� Aunt Lil says.

“All the time,� Anne adds.

“Kick the can, and...�

“Everything.�

Just as my family had held on to the pictures of the two families together more than 60 years ago, so had the Van Antwerps. Anne had found the negatives in a box after my first visit and had prints made.

Anne’s mother was 88 years old when she died. She was staying with the Bays at the time. So many people were calling and writing to ask how she was doing that Anne put out a newsletter to update people. At last count, the mailing list was 145 people. That’s the type of person she was. Her teaching career was focused on children with special needs.

So the letter remains a mystery. I know that the words my mother and uncle read did not come from Leona’s heart. Perhaps they did not even come from her pen. They came from somewhere else--from misunderstanding, from war.

It is wonderful, I think, that a Hoshiko and a Van Antwerp are reunited, that once again there is laughter and friendship between them as there was long ago.

Somewhere, perhaps, the plate still exists. And in some ways, I’ll always search for it. What remains in my family’s possession is the memory of it. That’s what we can pass down.

Perhaps my daughters, some day, will tell their children about my grandparents, how they had bad luck--but also had good friends--and with the coming of each new year they had hope, symbolized by a plate hand-painted in gold.

They were our family’s first-generation of Americans, and we are now into our fifth. Each New Year’s Day, we gather at my mother’s house for traditional Japanese food, along with chips and bean dip and nuts, punch made of lime sherbet and 7-Up.

It’s a wonderful, beautiful meal, and it is served on my mother’s finest “New Year’s plates.�