A conversation with the earth
A struggle with (my) roots
Article and art by Katie Kamio
I sat on a bench in San Francisco and the Earth spoke to me. It reminded me of what I missed a long time ago, before I was born, and before my parents were born. Its words were quiet at first, almost mumbling to me in the brook of the Japanese Tea Gardens. Bubbling on about how if I looked deep into my veins and scrutinized every plasma right down to its molecules, I’d remember.
I now walk around the gardens, but nothing surfaces. Only the strand of a memory of my Japanese cousins giving me a miniature dollhouse, my only fleeting moment of having a Japanese American family. Shortly after that memory, they were cut off from my nuclear family and thus, my life thereafter. The only thing remaining, the miniature dollhouse that sat in the palm of my hand, offering itself as the only proof of family I could retain. A miniscule memento of what could have been. As I walk, the garden is full of miniature things to match, the tiny trees writhing through the undergrowth of moss and tiny walkways dividing up this garden space. I have heard through my father the love my grandfather harbored for dwarfed trees. How the same trees that populate this garden were clustered throughout his house. Each Bonsai grows slowly, learning and relearning what is snipped from its existence or allowed to remain. I feel the Bonsai of my severed Japanese half surge with the possibility of growth.
The garden bends toward the underside of a bridge. I follow, and the Earth follows behind me.
The Earth wonders aloud, “Where do the roots go when they are cut off?”
And I respond, “What if they were never cut off to begin with?”
I continue walking. I find myself under a bridge that links the lush undergrowth to the canopy.
“What if those roots were liberated all that time ago, and they were buried deep in the soil, waiting for warm weather to sprout up and into the world?”
The Earth goes silent, pondering. Small streams of light filter through the cracks in the bridge; we both look down at the dirt path.
When I ended up in the sunny blocks of San Jose, the sun bleached the pavement and the stores were deserted for the cool refuge of awnings at home. Here, the Earth’s heat radiated up from the street, wrapping around my ankles and beckoning me to listen to all that is silenced down the block; the stores that did not make it and the fields that never had a chance. At the Japanese American Museum, I felt as though the tightly bottled taglines in the descriptions were sterile. Scrubbed clean of all the little quirks and weird ticks of what once was. A before that my grandparents never talked about. They died before I took my first breath, and took with them all connection to ancestry. Before the incarceration, before their confinement, before my grandparents lost everything and nothing all wrapped up in one.
Then I found myself in Japantown at a college art class, a class that should’ve been straightforward. Yet, the artist’s family, and cousin, and friend, and acquaintance came in and I felt the Earth rejoice at what simple joy that must be. “You missed this,” the Earth said.
“You missed the friendly faces and the cross-stitch of cultures.”
I long for days where I could claim the staticky lights in the Asian supermarket and not have to guess which snack I’d like. And then return home and eat hamburgers with a side of starched potatoes. A time where I could collage both sides of my history and not feel the fabrication fraying.
But it is not like that, that concoction of cultures which was lost all that time ago. My family bonds broke on the dusty desert of Utah, where my grandparents had to make do with fences around their world, ones that slowly seeped into their being. All they asked was for their descendants to keep that landscape hidden inside them. Part of me remembers those landscapes and hears the Earth and all its desert apologize for all the dust blowing around inside me, and all the questions that will never get answered. For all that I have missed and all that I hope to gain.