The Chikamori Legacy
Prologue: “The Seeds of Dissent”
Vancouver, BC, Canada - 1988
“Why can’t you be intelligent like your Uncle Hidekazu? At least when he studied he got marks that were tops in the province. Every-one’s going to think you’re an idiot. Are you mentally retarded that you can’t figure out those questions?”
Haruo rolled his eyes as he gripped his pencil almost hard enough to snap in two. It had always been like this when he was growing up. Math had always been his most difficult subject. And he knew for a fact; without A's in every single subject, he was never going to make honour roll so why even bother trying. Childhood was supposed to be fun. So why take all the fun out of living so that being a child or teen was an onerous drudge. Haruo knew the recriminations and guilt trips his mother used to lay on him by heart. And here comes the laying of blame…Haruo rolled his eyes again.
“Do you even realize just how hard your father had to work in order to make enough to get you your piano lessons and your math tutor? The least you could do is try!”
But I am trying. I can’t help that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s. You keep insisting that I’m smart but I’m not compared to other people. You keep insisting that I’m lazy, but I’m not. I just don’t see the reasoning behind continuing to bang my head against a wall trying to learn something that it’s going to be nearly impossible for me to understand…when I could be doing the same amount of work doing something I like doing. But Haruo knew to keep silent. Because if he uttered one peep, Mayumi would go on for six hours plus a two in the morning wake up rant to let her ungrateful brat know just how thin of ice he was walking on and the capstone:
If you don’t like it; there’s the door.
It used to terrify an elementary school child, but not any longer. Now that Haruo was in the latter years of high-school, he was certainly not afraid of just packing his stuff and leaving home.
But River…
His mind, perhaps his sense of self-preservation stopped him from slamming his text-book shut, hurling it at the wall and walking out. If he did that, it would be a dice-roll if he would survive the ass-chewing he’d get from both his mother and his father.
…and…how could he explain to his best friend why he was now homeless….if he did that.
…and then…the Ministry of Children and Families would get involved and he’d be sent to a foster home at least for the next six months until he was eighteen and he’d never see River again. Where would he end up if the Ministry took him? Maybe somewhere in Interior Bumsquat BC or maybe, horrors of horrors, even Mission!
(Author’s note: I was a Maple Ridge boy, went to Garibaldi Secondary back in the Stone Age - yeah, I’m old. When I was in elementary school my narcissist mother, when she got a burr up her ass about something, would threaten to drop me off in Mission (somewhere around where the monastery was located) and make me walk home to Maple Ridge.)
Finishing homework took more time than he thought and by the time his homework was complete, the sun had gone down. And it wasn’t just his homework from his teachers; his mother being a teacher herself decided to pile on her own homework to make sure her idiot son realized that it took sacrifice to maintain a 4.0 GPA. It was supposed to make him smarter.
Unfortunately what it seemed to do was to show Haruo just how dumb he really was in comparison to the rest of his classmates and basically gave him the viewpoint of:
I’m never going to be able to understand this. Why even bother trying?
For most of Haruo’s childhood, it was subtle putdowns and comparisons. Then when he’d turned 13, the verbal abuse ramped up. And the contradictions. He was expected to excel in his schoolwork, yet he was subtly told that he was stupid and any time he got 100% on his exams, he was told not to get too big for his britches. So it was this constant up-down confusion that was driven into him and the lack of emotional security was the main reason why he lived in a constant state of stress and fear. And after a while that sort of thing wears on a person.
The toughest part of school was making friends. Because then those friends wanted to invite you to birthday parties and get-togethers and Mom didn’t like wasting money; so no parties for him. Mom didn’t like anything as far as he knew, least of all him. All she ever did was nag at him, “Did you do your homework? Did you get 100% on your test?” If you didn’t, you were a worthless piece of microscopic dung, not even worth dusting and throwing out, who wouldn’t amount to anything worthwhile. Evidently she resented him for something, he didn’t know what. But it seemed as though she was dedicated to making his existence a living hell. He was constantly told that if he couldn’t get the same grades as his uncle (his mother’s older maternal brother) that he would be destined to live out his life as a drudge; to live out his life in fear of starvation or worse. There were two ways to deal with that kind of abuse and both involved a matter of defiance.
The first involved utilizing it as motivation to give her a “fuck you” by proving her wrong and excelling!
The second involved shutting down, proving her right and in essence saying “well if you’re going to think I’m useless, might as well prove you right…so fuck you too!”
The first was fine and dandy if his mother had underestimated his skills and the educational institution and medical fields had not turned a blind eye to any neurological education deficits. Then he could utilize those aptitudes and soar.
But if by chance the parent had over-estimated the son’s grasp of his skills and turned a blind eye to his neurological deficits then the latter would rear its ugly head and the son would give up trying because he knew that no matter how hard he tried, the barriers were too high to overcome with just his abilities alone.
And it was into the latter category that Haruo fell into. As smart as he had appeared in his elementary school classes, going into high-school had been a cold-shower awakening as to his inadequacies in curricular study. There was a nagging feeling of not being able to measure up whenever he was tossed a new mathematical/algebraic concept or a chemistry or physics concept. And try as he might, he was just not able to grasp the concepts. They unfailingly eluded him no matter what study techniques he attempted to use. And being met with recrimination every single time one failed a test because the concepts were too difficult to grasp started to eat away at him.
If he was going to get yelled at as hard as he’d tried to understand the concepts then might as well say “fuck it” and not do the work.
And it took three times as long for him to understand the idea behind what was being taught to him. And then being told that he wasn’t catching on quickly enough or that his uncle would have understood it just like that, was not motivation. In fact to Haruo’s way of thinking it was a great de-motivator and a good enough reason to give his mother a subtle “fuck you”.
Time was of the essence in learning new concepts and the school curriculum was not tailored to helping those who were slow. Regardless of what was said, the school system didn’t like having to deal with those who were slow and made sure they knew it.
Those who couldn’t hack the curriculum were shunted off to classes monikered “the Retards” or “Special Ed” or even worse; the “Shortbus Crowd”. Political Correctness was not a hallmark of the 80s nor was it in the decade that preceded it.
Luckily for Haruo’s mental sanity, he had a bulwark against the never-ending pressure his mother inflicted on him.
His beloved friend, River…she was very much a tomboy; a fun-loving girl who enjoyed rough-housing with the other kids and taking long walks in the woods talking about stuff.. In elementary school her choice at recess was to play war with the rest of the boys rather than sit with the other girls and play with dolls. So she’d end up covered in dust from head to toe with the rest of the boys.
She was also not your generically pretty type of girl. Her facial features were angular with a strong jawline. And her mother kept her hair short in a pageboy cut so that she could keep it organized without it ending up in a mess. She was good-natured and empathetic and always willing to lend a helping hand. With other kids at school, making fun of her for her nose which seemed a bit too large for her face; it was her only sore point that would get her riled up enough to start a fight which from being tough as nails and from playing with the boys at school; she would win every fight she started and well, the ones she didn’t start either. She was no wilting wallflower. You didn’t mess with a McIrish.
Her crowning feature was her brown hair which if the light hit it right gleamed a bright golden-red. And Haruo was glad that she was his friend. She was the one rock he could lean on. And it seemed as if fate was destined to keep them together as she was his friend from elementary onwards and the years had brought them even closer.
River’s mom was a kindly, single lady who was trying to raise River on her own after her husband decided to bail on the marriage. River missed her dad, even though he hadn’t been owning up to his responsibilities. Her mother tried her best but it was hard being a single mother and trying to earn a living enough to support her daughter so it was nice that her daughter’s daycare nanny had put her onto her son-in-law’s family and helped to purchase a duplex to her daughter’s ever increasing ire when she was told to look into a duplex. But since Grandma Yumiko was fronting the downpayment, Mayumi Chikamori was not going to go against her mother’s wishes for her babysitting charge to not be taken care of. Besides Grandma Yumiko loved River like she loved her own grandson and would be livid if Mayumi mistreated River in any way shape or form.
Yasunobu was someone who wanted to work with his hands so he became a gardener. He was trying to get his cooking skills high enough to cook for the family since his wife was absolutely useless in the kitchen. Having grown up in Japan during the Second World War, he was of the opinion that life, if not lived, was wasted. He’d had to raise his own brothers and sister when they were young. His father had passed away when he was just six years old. Humping bags of rice and sugar over the mountains during the war years just so that he could support his mother and her children. There was a sense of duty and responsibility to his family no matter how unpleasant the task. He had been dealt a lovely smelling pile of garbage when having to deal with his harridan of a wife. But he bore it with the patience of someone who had seen way too much hardship in his life. All he wanted was for his son to grow up responsible and understanding of the fact that no matter what adversity came down the turnpike that he would handle it with dignity and silence; just as he had.
Mayumi (nee Miyagawa) Chikamori was a different kettle of foul-smelling fish. She loved nothing more than to make others miserable. As a school-teacher, she had that ability and she wielded it like a finely honed weapon. She would give detentions out to everyone if they even asked her why she did something that seemed the slightest bit unfair to then. In her classroom it was her way or the highway. And frankly she preferred it that way, no backtalk, no insolence, in fact, the kids were lucky if they were even allowed to breathe.
What she hated was the parent-teacher inevitable confrontations. As she felt she was superior to anyone she felt she shouldn’t have to answer to anyone, even to a school district supervisor. She loathed them. Who did that two-bit paper-pushing bureaucrat think he was talking to? After all, Mayumi was a straight A academic whiz who could think and argue circles around anyone. In fact in her understanding, the whole world revolved around her. So why shouldn’t she get the benefit of being adored by everybody?
And this was poor Haruo’s lot in existence. He would never be able to exceed or even meet Mayumi’s expectations; so why even bother.
Most everybody in Haruo’s friendship circle was either older than him or younger than him. There weren’t very many girls who were his same age. Haruo wasn’t inclined to be athletic, however he found that the gym was one of the few places that most detested and it formed a refuge of sorts to the point where he was either there or doing homework or sitting at the piano playing. So he grew up wiry and well-muscled.
This was the 80s and most schools had a majority of Canadian students with a European heritage. There was maybe one or two, perhaps at the most three or four Asians in the classroom out of a majority of Caucasian students and Bebe was of mixed descent being both Caucasian on her father’s side and Black on her mother’s side. In Haruo’s case his Asian schoolmate was his cousin Torao who was an year younger than him who was in the same class as River and perhaps the other two who were his maternal cousins which he hardly ever talked to. As long as his parents weren’t talking to them, he wasn’t talking to them either.
The Chikamori family had laid down their roots in Vancouver in the late 1950s and well, they were going to have to live with the decision that they’d made.
The Miyagawa family were also longtime residents of Vancouver from before the end of the first decade of the 1900s. Torakazu Miyagawa had landed in Los Angeles, CA, USA in 1907 and made his way up the coast to settle in Vancouver, BC; his wife Yumiko came over in 1908. They had 4 children, one stillborn and three live-births through the late 20s and early 30s. When the war came to British Columbia in 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the U.S., the Miyagawas were sent to an internment camp in Slocan where they were housed for a while, then shipped off to a sugar beet plantation in Iron Springs in Alberta. What possessions they had were auctioned off by the government of British Columbia and they never saw a single cent back.
Everything they had post-war had to be built up from the ground up. From sheer pennilessness to a decent standard of living. At the age of 58, with all their possessions that he’d worked for gone, Miyagawa Torakazu, Japanese naming protocol, last name first, given names after; had to gambatte and put his nose to the grindstone to build up his family’s fortune from nothing yet again. Torakazu wanted nothing more than to have his children apply themselves to their studies and to have a better life than what he’d had; to make his sacrifices to make a home in Canada worth something.
Were they not Canadian? And not Japs. They’d professed their loyalty to King George VI and country and not to Hirohito but no one had wanted the slanty-eyed Japs in Canada to aid in the war effort against Imperial Japan. After all, a Jap is a Jap and nothing more.
After all he’d endured in the internment camp, Torakazu had wanted nothing to do with the hakujin woman and child his wife took into her care. But for all the suffering that Yumiko had underwent in Slocan and Iron Springs, her heart hadn’t grown hard and intolerant like her husband’s.
Yumiko loved the little girl who she babysat with all her heart and she fawned over River as much as she had done with her own grandson. She smiled seeing the two toddlers together as they grew up together, reaching their teen years, which with good fortune she had been able to see, unlike her husband who had passed away when Haruo was eight years old, seeing just how close they were (they always seemed to gravitate towards each other) and often wondered if the two of them would find each other (in the romantic sense) eventually, they were one soul according to what the Buddhists referred to.
Grandma Yumiko prayed for such a union between the two. Despite Torakazu’s snort of derision for even coming up with such a thought, Yumiko had held out hope.
If fate wished such a union, it would happen. All she could do was guide them to become the adults they would be in the future. Wasn’t there a song in the 70s that said exactly this: Love Will Find A Way?
Grandma Yumiko was a romantic.
But little did she know just how many twists and turns the road to happiness for her two beloved charges was going to have.
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