by Ruth Sasaki
“As soon as she saw that the family friend had disappeared with the koden, she collected the Oda boys and said, ‘You’re coming home with me.’”
Sometime around 1932, Bachan (my grandmother) went to the funeral of a family friend in Suisun with a big plate of homemade sushi and came home with three boys.
Their father had been a family friend in Wakayama, and when he first came to the US, he had stayed at “Pine,” the Takahashi home on Pine Street in San Francisco, en route to a job in California’s Delta. He had married late like many Issei (first generation immigrant), but his wife had died some time ago and so it was just Oda-san and the three boys: Henry, Eddie, and Harry.
Now Oda-san was gone. At the funeral, Bachan worried about the boys, huddled together alone. The middle one, Eddie, had an angelic innocence to him and looked to be about the same age as her own son Shig, who was eleven. The other two—Henry, two years older, and Harry, two years younger than Eddie, like bookends—bore a strong family resemblance to each other. They had mobile faces that looked as if the possessor could go either way—be a comedian or a pugnacious rabble-rouser. She noted the “friend of the family” who took charge of collecting the koden (funeral money) given by the guests. Times were hard, but people gave what they could, knowing the favor would be returned when they were the ones in need.
After the service, Bachan talked to some of the other ladies, who told her that the Odas’ “family friend” was not a reliable man. There were no relatives the boys could go to. People in the community were having a hard enough time feeding their own families. The boys would probably end up on the street, or be split up and farmed out to families or employers who needed field hands.
Bachan did not stop to think about her own family: two girls and two boys, ranging in age from nineteen to three, or her own age, which was fifty. She did not think about how fragile their own economic situation was, just a year or so out from a bad stretch that had her contemplating walking into the Pacific Ocean with her baby son (who, as it turned out, did not live to see his first birthday). She didn’t stop to count the bedrooms they had in the Victorian flat that they rented from their Greek landlord. Nor did she think about how their retail business on Grant Avenue was so much better than wholesale—when a retail customer bought something, you had cash in hand—and the store was doing well in its second year of operation.
As soon as she saw that the family friend had disappeared with the koden, she collected the Oda boys and said, “You’re coming home with me.” Still dazed with the loss of their father, they did not protest. They needed an adult to make a decision, and they were relieved.