There was nobody left to tell us what they meant; the mysterious signs, with those bold ink strokes against red banners, which came to life with the spirits that blew the vigorous air in the West. The flags and ornaments, setting the neighborhood ablaze with their imminent presence, seemed to actively seek out to communicate something, to us, the newcomers. At least that’s how we saw it, those coming into the unknown land. My late grandmother used to say: In a ghost town, ghosts tend to make themselves known. She would say this when we heard something in our dwellings, or rather thought we had heard something, or whenever the tenements would suddenly grow cold as if the sun had simply vanished.
Witnessing the signs being taken down was a disheartening scene. Everyone was quiet in understanding and mourning. Those who lived here were now gone, as if a colossal flood had displaced them, a massive wave from the enraged, and deeply wounded Pacific. As if the strongest gust of wind the Coast had ever seen had blown everything that once existed in this place, out of order.
We just moved, but it’s all familiar: the smell, the hustle, the crowded boarding rooms. It seems as though we have been everywhere, but lived nowhere at all, as if there’s no place to fit us into. As if we are meant to drift or float as the currents take us, as the work takes us.
People who live in a certain place for a time are bound to mark their lives into the wooden floors and the trapped air of compact rooms, leaving a peculiar scent or a specific token that acknowledges their existence. As you look into other migrant’s eyes, there’s a mutual understanding, an unspoken agreement that we should be one another’s support and though neither one speaks the other’s language, we can nod to each other in sympathy and respect for the other.
There were so many of us flowing into that neighborhood, we were overflowing like seafood on a fish tank. Soon, the ghost town was alive once again, for many people moving out of the South in the millions during the Great Migration, opened clubs and shops as they filled in all vacant spots. The district was rebranded as much as it was revitalized when they settled with us in our little space in the city, and our tiny corner of the world. We were used to living in compact rooms since we arrived through Texas. It was the same when we passed through New Mexico, then again in Arizona, and finally it proved to be a pattern in the Golden State. We managed with the space we were given, there was a bunk bed, so my mother and my grandmother could sleep on proper beds, and the rest of us, rested on mattresses on the floor. They had left their beds behind.
There was a peculiar inscription under the wooden bed where my grandma slept. I know this because I slept down there from the winter of 1942 through ‘46. The symbols were engraved deeply into the wood in the way a child would, messily and hastily, but it was so intimate, and uniquely human. It wasn’t formal at all, that’s how I knew it wasn’t some sort of label, but rather a profound message from the past.
My grandmother said she could hear chattering at night. At first, she thought that it was my mother, talking deep in her sleep. She claimed to hear multiple overlapping voices, as if it were the spirits of many generations. My parents paid no mind to her irrational superstitious claims, for they didn’t have the time nor the will to worry about ghosts between their draining work shifts. They knew she had an old mind, and they could not afford to agonize about anything but work. They thought about resting, in order to recover from it.
Every single night I would go to bed, scratching my head in perplexity, wondering what the symbols under there meant. I guess I assumed it was something so personal and sacred I was not to tell the others about it, at least not until I had made some sense of it. I pondered all day long of a way to decode what it was telling me through its unintelligible whispers.
I heard people talk about what used to be here. They talked about the cooks and the delicious food they served, and the shops, the merchants, and the lights illuminating the night, trying to make it seem as though it were daytime still. People regularly talked about those things during the commute, and I couldn’t have been more curious. Strikingly, I started to see those things whenever I slept. I dreamed about the people who lived here, and the things they had brought from their land.
Back in the day, people were all about bebop and the brass instruments hollered from the illuminated evening till sunrise at dawn. I dreamed of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker playing, I remember dreaming about the dancing crowds, guided by The Bird’s saxophone, and for a moment it was as if there was no war anywhere and everything that mattered in the world was to listen to the wind for some sort of answer, of what that inscription under the bed meant, as all those like-minded people outside sang in unison about wanting to find our place here, struggling with the same things we were. Perhaps I already knew what the message said, in that shared bond that was born from sympathy of other migrants, a bond nurtured and strengthened by my time there, in the busy trenches of Downtown LA.
Back then, even schools were segregated, but that didn’t discourage me from investigating the unfamiliar language. I attended ‘Mexican schools’ which sought to train us as field workers and house cleaners at the expense of developing academic skills. Most school board members depended on the cheap agricultural labor of Mexican American workers, so it was in their best interest to do that. At least I was able to go to school and meet new people, unlike my mother, who got so lonely sometimes, the few people she knew were those she lived with. She would beg me to make friends and learn a lot to compensate for our miscarried dreams in America.
I made many friends who were in similar situations and we shared our dreams out loud, hoping it would manifest them into reality. I was wrong thinking school could provide the answers to my burning questions about the people that lived here and their language, their intricate writings I was determined to decipher. School avoided the topic if it was brought up and it was clear to me that nobody there would even try to begin reading the message. For the first time, both the teachers who taught English and I were illiterate at the same time.
There was a small gap of a half an hour between school and work. We cleaned houses in Beverly Hills and so that small window of time I dedicated to writing. I learned to read and write English through the old newspapers I could find. The Sunday paper was five cents, which was too much of a burden to our fragile budget, so we avoided it. After all it wouldn’t matter, for no matter how informed we were or not, it wouldn’t change a thing in the world. By the time of the invasion of Sicily, I was able to read a few sentences and by the Normandy landings I could read a whole book. My family thanked God for this, and I read the newspapers to my grandmother and the rest of my family, translating it as I read.
In my tireless search for an answer, I wrote to a boy who lived in an internment. He was a relatively new immigrant like myself and he told me all about his journey through Angel Island and San Francisco, which at the time, was as up north as my mind could possibly grasp. I wrote to him about how things were going in Little Tokyo—Bronzeville at the time—and I shared with him my wild, seemingly unachievable dreams of becoming a writer. He taught me about kanji and hiragana, the Japanese alphabets, and he told me his family name, Imai, meant something along the lines of “new residence" which he found appropriate; He was to bring a single bag with him to Manzanar, taking only the essentials. I could relate to that.
To me, he meant joy and sorrow at the same time, for I, uncertain as everyone else back then, was unable to assure him, and unable to tell when, if, all would finally come to an end. He showed me the way he lived, his father was a photographer, so he sent pictures of people’s daily life there, though it was strictly prohibited. There was cold white snow where he was, I had never seen anything like it, and those photographs were the most valuable things I owned.
As the war drew on, I fell deeper in love with him, but he grew distant, writing less and less, and by the time Imperial Japan surrendered, so did he. The fall of the Empire marked the end of our relationship and our correspondence. Perhaps he was drafted into the war and maybe I was not the only one who heard from him for the last time after that heartbreaking last letter. He desperately wanted to prove his loyalty to the United States. I was devastated. I used to dream of the two of us, young as we were then, meeting in the snow.
Work didn’t care how we felt, it didn’t stop and wait for you to feel better, so we worked industriously to earn our living, and we made daily sacrifices to pay for the room the entire family stayed in. We worked menial jobs because that’s all they would give to us. Despite their prejudice and discrimination, we persevered and worked to see another day. I tried to teach English to my grandmother and the rest while we scrubbed and mopped the floors and poured water on the windows of shiny apartments in Beverly Hills. Meanwhile, my older brother and my father worked in farming and then in a repurposed factory that manufactured for the war. Commuting was as tiring as the work itself, just unpaid. The City Hall building, the tallest in the city at the time, towered over us, and gave us a sense of direction in the fast-paced, unpredictable, and merciless, City of Angels.
I longed for sleep all day after Imai left my life, and yet I wrote more than ever after he was gone. I was hungry for knowledge and I devoured books accordingly, defying all my teacher’s expectations. They thought I was some prodigy, but failed to realize I was only human and desperate. They were ignorant enough to think others weren’t as bright as them solely based on what side of the border they had been born in.
One night I was especially exhausted from cleaning an enormous house, with more and more rooms and stairs to clean, seemingly never ending. I went to sleep with dirty work clothes on because of the extent of my exhaustion, I dropped all my weight down and would have been fast asleep, if it were not for the fact that I sensed a presence down there, another human being’s hopes and feelings, and I realized we weren’t so different after all since we both came from different places yet coincided there, in the same way that stars align to create constellations. We dreamt here at different times, in different tongues, but with the same burning passion.
Have not all of us who have dreamed here, dreamt of the same thing? Not under bright stars but under the dust and the creaking floorboards of the tenements? I looked up to see only the written phrase that had been there all those nights and mornings when I went to sleep and subsequently when I woke the next morning, still as clueless as to its explanation. Once again, I fell asleep trying to interpret what it meant, and as slumber carried me softly away with its comforting arms a voice spoke, composed and still, a whisper in a sea of thousands, an old voice, yet rejuvenated: “I was here,” the voice declared. That was what was written down there.
I made sure to write something down there as well. I recall energetically engraving something down there with a pocketknife, as someone else had, but I’m sorry to confess the years have worn my memory down and I don’t know exactly what I so desperately wanted to convey or why, to my fellow brave travelers who shall dream the way I did. I was there and they weren’t anymore. Those travelers were gushed away and when they came back it felt unreal, for they had been gone for years which felt like epochs, and children didn’t even know what they were coming back to. Most people we talked to couldn’t get back to their homes because they had signed the lease of their houses for the duration of the war and fighting was still ongoing in Japan, despite German surrender. Eventually, war was over, but it ringed on our ears, for nothing was ever the same in this orbiting sphere in space we all live in.
We were fired because our employers lost a diamond earring. They blamed me for its disappearance. Why would I want such a thing when I have the sun that sets and rises every day? I wondered.
Coming back to old Lil’ Tokyo is bittersweet as dark chocolate is once it melts in your tongue, for I was never able to find the young man I wrote to all those years ago. My dear grandmother was carried away by heavenly angels by the time people returned home from faraway internment. Even though life was not easy, I spent my last years of childhood here and I remember them with fondness. I grew and learned so much, to the point I could barely recognize myself before arriving on the Coast. I worked hard, and learned, and grew, and worked even more, always remembering to dream big under the spirited lights of Lil’ Tokyo who shall give the opportunity to chase and pursue dreams into reality, to people today and in the future as it has been doing in the past, for mine came true. Lil’ Tokyo is a love letter to culture and a heart-warming embrace of our differences, yet also a reminder of our undeniable shared human experience. I humbly ask you to never forget that. My late grandmother used to say: In a ghost town, ghosts tend to make themselves known.
*This story received honorable mention in the English Youth category of the Little Tokyo Historical Society’s 11th Imagine Little Tokyo Short Story Contest.
© 2024 Pablo Matias Hernandez Martinez
