My grandmother just turned 91 and as she gets older, I am becoming more aware of how bittersweet the aging process can be. On the one hand, she has raised two successful daughters, seen her granddaughters grow into adults, and been able to spend a fair amount of time with her great-grandchildren. On the other hand, as the eldest of seven children (six girls and one boy), she has outlived four of her six siblings as well as many of her friends, and her short-term memory and sense of independence have slowly been slipping away from her over the past decade.
Undoubtedly, any 91-year old you meet has a fascinating history to share and my grandmother is no exception. She was born on a farm in Ft. Lupton, Colorado, the eldest of immigrant parents hailing from Kumamoto, Japan. My great-grandfather came over in 1913 through San Francisco and helped build the railroad from California to Colorado where he decided to settle in Ft. Lupton amongst a small community of other Japanese farmers. My great-grandmother was a "mail order" bride who hailed from a big city, and while my grandmother has less than fond memories of her mother, I have always been under the impression that my great-grandmother's life on a farm raising seven children in a foreign country was more than she bargained for.
Like many children of immigrants, my grandmother spent the early part of her life floating between several cultures and several sets of values. She grew up speaking Japanese, eating Japanese food, and learning various Japanese arts such as
odori (dancing),
shibai (drama), and
shigin (singing), all of which she loved tremendously and wanted to take up professionally. As the eldest child, however, she was responsible for a large portion of the farm work and became the "foreman" for the migrant workers from Mexico who helped harvest the farm's sugar beets and cabbage. She was, by no means, the delicate flower her Japanese mother wanted her to be - a reputation she has lived up to throughout her 91 years.
When my grandmother was in her 20s, her younger sister met a man whom she wanted to marry which caused an uproar in the family because Japanese custom dictated that the eldest in the family should marry first. My grandmother did not want to be bothered with men so therefore had no prospects for marriage. It is said that her parents, namely her mother, was so embarrassed at the idea of her younger daughter marrying before her eldest that they put my grandmother on a train to New York City to get her out of their hair.
When she arrived in NYC, my grandmother met my grandfather through a Buddhist temple, but from here the details are a bit foggy. My grandfather was from Kagoshima, Japan and no one is sure of when he arrived in the U.S. or why he chose to come, but by the time my grandmother met him, he was making a living running a restaurant in Manhattan. She helped run the restaurant for the entire length of their marriage, including a period of six months when my grandfather was detained on Ellis Island during World War II because of his immigration status. Though theirs was a loveless marriage, the two ended up having two daughters (my mother and my aunt). After running the restaurant for over a decade, my grandmother decided she'd had enough and stole money from the restaurant's cash register to buy one-way train tickets back to Colorado. She left my grandfather for good and never looked back.
Needless to say, my grandmother was not met with her family's open arms upon returning from New York a single mother in the early 1950s, but somehow she persevered. She would go on to marry and divorce two more times, all the while working two or three jobs to make ends meet. Her choice in men and her sometimes erratic parenting style made for difficult childhoods for both my mother and my aunt, but like my grandmother, they persevered and are strong, intelligent women in spite of it all.
Eleven years ago when my grandmother turned 80, I was living in a small rice-farming town in Chiba, Japan teaching English at the town's only Junior High School. For her birthday, I bought my grandmother a ticket to visit me for a week of travel and sightseeing around the island of Honshu. It would be my grandmother's second trip to Japan and is a memory I will carry with me forever. It was amazing to see this side of my grandmother that is so inherently Japanese. Though she hadn't spoken Japanese since her mother's death some 40 years prior, much of the language came back to her, and what was so amazing was that her accent was flawless. She spoke Japanese like a native and I will forever be in awe of this Japanese side of her that is so invisible here in the United States.
These days, my grandmother lives by herself in a retirement community. Her sense of independence has been waning over the past 10 years and her short-term memory is all but gone. It's sad to witness her forgetfulness over simple things like which day of the week it is, but she remembers her family and it's beautiful to watch her face light up when she sees her great-grandchildren. In the end, she continues to pass on an amazing story - one that will indelibly live on for generations to come.