I remember red and white caps bobbing up and down, up and down and about. And also some red and white umbrellas spiraling up, and the drizzle spinning down onto the dancing red and white caps. Sometimes the faces swirled closer and then farther and then sometimes I was suddenly swimming somewhere among the umbrellas and looking down at upturned faces—big eyes, lots of them, capped with dark hair and red cheeks and funny round hats. And behind the schoolchildren were colors, crescendos of colors that far outdo the pixels in my mind's eye. I remember the crying sky and the red and white children and the rainbow fountains behind them that were thousands and thousands of paper cranes.
Years later, my father told me that he had to pick me up sometimes, my sister too, so we wouldn't get trampled by the schoolchildren that day in the park. That's when you swam up into the umbrellas, he said.
We visited the Hiroshima Peace Park on a school day. Several elementary schools were also visiting the memorial, smartly uniformed students who scampered freely under the anonymous disguise of red and white. I suppose these schoolchildren had never seen foreigners before, because they crowded us and smiled big O's at us and pulled at my dress and fingers. I was seven years old, my sister was just five, and my father was the light-haired giant that the schoolchildren tried to climb.
We sat there for almost two hours signing autographs like celebrities. Except that we were more like curiosities, like bills printed with upside-down presidents—unusual but not more useful. I could barely sign my name, and when I looked over at my sister, she was drawing lopsided trees and red balloons instead of her name. The schoolchildren kept calling my father Sean Connery; I think Sean Connery was the only white male they knew. So my dad answered to Sean Connery, and slurred like Sean Connery, and signed his autographs Sean Connery because he didn't know what else to do.
At some point, the schoolchildren drifted off towards the end of the school day, and we were left alone with the colorful cranes underneath the crying sky. Thousands and thousands of these cranes swayed in long strands: browns turned to red-oranges and turquoises melted into pale greens that camouflaged the yellows but not the shiny crisp gold cranes. Sometimes, there were strands of only gold cranes; these ones I ran my hands through over and over again.
Not far away from the Peace Park is the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), an atomic bomb research center at the top of the largest hill in Hiroshima. The hill used to be a sacred Buddhist area called Hijiyama, but the Americans took it over when they built their research facility right after the war. It was here that my parents first met. They met in the 80s under the allure of big hair and big glasses and broken English, sometime in early spring when the cherry blossoms danced off trees that were planted by monks long ago. They played in tennis tournaments together, and went to the local toastmaster club, and toured the many islands of the city in a tongue-tripping courtship. My father, at the time, was a graduate student from the United States—pictures of him show a shabbily dressed rail of a man, skinny because he had no money to eat and a thyroid problem to boot. My mother, on the other hand, was always dressed like a movie star, with enormous sunglasses framed by a mane of black hair; she wasn't allowed to grow her hair past her ears until after college, and once college ended, vowed that she would never cut it again, but I think that was the 70s talking.
During the day, they studied radiation poisoning and leukemia and met sometimes at the vending machines to drink canned green tea. At night, though, they drank with the other American researchers, and their relationship matured under the heady charm of sake and foreign affairs. They were a celebrated couple—it was still rare in Japan to date foreigners, so rare, in fact, that my grandfather threw a fit and didn't speak to my mother for a month. But my mother braved the storm, riding perhaps on the envy of her friends, and my father learned to speak Japanese so he could talk with my grandfather. Once married, my father forgot how to speak Japanese, but never forgot to love Japan and how he met my mother.
Because of this, every December 7th—Pearl Harbor Day—my father pulls out a brown paper bag during breakfast for our perverse family ritual. Sometimes he already has it tucked in the morning paper so he can pull it out slyly; sometimes he makes a big ado about it and brandishes a bag from the silverware drawer or the microwave. And always, he turns to my mother and says, here's the bag for you to wear over your head today, and grins his foolish smile. Some years, my mother gets mad and refuses to iron his shirt in the morning, so he looks again like a frumpy graduate student, but a much fatter one now. But sometimes, my mother smiles and takes the paper bag and my dad gleefully cuts eye holes and a mouth hole, and then makes himself one also. And then I leave for school, but I imagine them sitting around the table remembering Hijiyama and drinking tea through cutout mouths.
Since then, I've returned to Hiroshima, a city of islands that chokes the mouth of a river so that it dribbles water into the sea. The hills and the rain and the water remind me of Seattle; my mother always says that Seattle reminds her of her home. We were staying at the house of my mother's best friend Kiyoshi. Every day, Kiyoshi's father went fishing to cook us fresh mackerel for dinner, and we picked soybeans from their garden to eat with the fish, and afterwards they gave us some crazy acupuncture with lighted incense sticks that they pushed into the base of our necks. Except that my mother's hair lit on fire, so she had a bald spot at one point and that was the end of that. One night, I stayed up late talking to Kiyoshi and her parents, and they started talking about the war. Kiyoshi's mother said that she had left for the countryside to purchase some rice the day the bomb exploded in Hiroshima. And she heard it and ran back to the city to find flattened hills and flattened homes and no family. She said that she lost her father and brother that day. She never even found their bodies. And Kiyoshi mentioned how her husband's parents had lost siblings also. They talked about how only grandparents remember that day now, that the people who were alive then are now dying. And Kiyoshi's mother said, "I think that it will be a good thing when no one remembers."
The next day, I revisited the Peace Park. I walked through the museum and saw photographs of the mushroom cloud, photographs of people with skin hanging from their bodies; an exhibit of cement steps showed the silhouette of a person who had been instantly incinerated—shadow preserved on the rock. Visitors cried all around me, I felt sick and nauseous instead. I sat down until my mother found me, like I was again seven years old and needed to be picked up so I wouldn't be trampled. No one, I said, can imagine how dirty, how dirty, how wrong we were... I know, she said. She picked me up. Did you see this yet, she asked, and took me to an exhibit of the research facility. An enormous map hung on the wall. This, she said pointing to a building, is where your father and I first held hands. And this, this is where your father proposed to me, and afterwards, this is where your father got so drunk he smeared butter on my nose. And this over here, she said pointing now to the Peace Park, this is where all of the cranes are. These are the things we should remember now, she said.