positive thoughts

quotes from the buddha in the attic by julie otsuka

"most of us on the boat were accomplished and were sure we would make good wives. we knew how to cook and sew. we knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours, saying absolutely nothing of substance at all. a girl must blend into a room: she must be present without appearing to exist. we knew how to behave at funerals, and how to write short, melancholy poems about the passing of autumn that were exactly seventeen syllables long. we knew how to pull weeds and chop kindling and haul water, and one of us - the rice miller's daughter - knew how to walk two miles into town with an eighty-pound sack of rice on her back without once breaking into a sweat. it's all in the way you breathe. most of us had good manners, and were extremely polite, except for when we got mad and cursed like sailors. most of us spoke like ladies most of the time, with our voices pitched high, and pretended to know much less than we did, and whenever we walked past the deckhands we made sure to take small, mincing steps with our toes turned properly in. because how many times had our mothers told us: walk like the city, not like the farm!"

"one of us blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. one of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead. others of us learned to live without thinking of them at all. we threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. we put away our mirrors. we stopped combing our hair. we forgot about makeup. whenever i powder my nose it just looks like frost on a mountain. we forgot about buddha. we forgot about god. we developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. i fear my soul has died. we stopped writing home to our mothers. we lost weight and grew thin. we stopped bleeding. we stopped dreaming. we stopped wanting. we simply worked, that was all. we gulped down our meals three times a day without saying a word to our husbands so we could hurry back out into the fields. 'one minute sooner to pull one more weed.' i could not get this thought out of my mind. we spread our legs for them every evening but were so exhausted we often fell asleep before they were done. we washed their clothes for them once a week in tubs of boiling hot water. we cooked for them. we cleaned for them. we helped them chop wood. but it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. and often our husbands did not even notice we'd disappeared."

"in the newspapers, and on the radio, we began to hear talk of mass removals. house to hold hearings on national defense migration. governor urges president to evacuate all enemy aliens from the coast. send them back to tojo! it would happen gradually, we heard, over a period of weeks, if not months. none of us would be forced out overnight. we would be sent far away, to a point of our own choosing deep in the zone of the interior where we could not do anyone any harm. we would be held under protective custody arrest for the duration of the war. only those of us who lived within one hundred miles of the coast would be removed. only those of us on the list would be removed. only those of us who were non-citizens would be removed. our adult children would be allowed to remain behind to oversee our businesses and farms. our businesses and farms would be confiscated and put up for auction. so start liquidating now. we would be separated from our younger children. we would be sterilized and deported at the earliest practicable date.

we tried to think positive thoughts. if we finished ironing the laundry before midnight our husband's name would be removed from the list. if we bought a ten-dollar war bond our children would be spared. if we sang 'the hemp-winding song' all the way through without making a mistake then there would be no list, no laundry, no war bonds, no war. often, though, at the end of the day, we felt uneasy, as if there was something we had forgotten to do. had we remembered to close the sluice gate? turn off the stove? feed the chickens? feed the children? tap the bedpost three times?"