Eng. 412 (Creative Nonfiction) Photo Essay

This is another attempt at the five paragraph with five sentences per paragraph method. Again, warning if you don’t like run-on sentences. Luckily, my prof likes run-0n sentences as much as I do.
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The photo felt flimsy, my fingers used to a much heavier stock. Perhaps because of this, I handled it more gently than I might have otherwise, thumb and forefinger spread wide to catch and hold opposite edges, skin barely touching the creamy white boarder. Then again, maybe my fingertips sensed the oddness of this picture, so grasped it lightly and carefully, as if the image in the photo was made of water and would quiver if I held it too hard or too casually. The delicate square of paper already showed slight creases and minute rips, a bent corner and some warping from long evaporated water, yet was surprisingly clean and shiny, at least on the surface. Considering who is featured in this picture, I suppose my initial unease is justified.

The woman in the photo looks, for all intents and purposes, like a middle-aged Japanese lady, her hair parted in the middle and curled up on the sides, hands clasped together demurely in front of a modest flowered house dress belted high on the waist. She looks to the side, as if focusing on something or someone beyond the camera’s range, head tilted slightly to the left and her unsmiling lips parted as if the photographer caught her in mid-word. Perhaps they did. She is standing outside in the bright sunlight within a harshly beautiful day, the houses behind her sharply defined against what I imagine be a bright blue sky, my eyes attempting to paint life into a photo expressed in shades of gray and darkest black with the woman’s eyes shadowed and squinty and angled in such a way that no light gleams in their depths creating two slashes of darkness, revealing nothing of her soul, and if eyes are windows, the curtains are drawn. Although I suppose I should be more charitable–after all, she is my grandmother.

To be perfectly honest, I doubt she is my grandmother. Don’t get me wrong, this woman has her broad nose, curved chin and sharp cheekbones, and even those perpetually knitted brows as if she were solving a particularly difficult problem, but she is holding herself much too modestly in her June Cleaver dress and possesses a stillness that my grandmother-the-maniac never did. Then again, grandma always cared about what people thought of her, and could act perfectly polite and kind only to later brag about her performance, stating that she hated that woman, oh yes, but wasn’t she nice and you would never have guessed, would you, and never realizing the damage she caused to your faith in her by bragging and boasting about it later. In showing her hand, so to speak. Of course, the flamboyance I remember could have been bottled up tight during this picture, constrained by the image she wanted to project, frozen and caught now for all time, whether she wanted it to or not.

The underside of the picture is vastly different from its surface, because where the front is white and shiny, and the image clear and crisp, the back is aged to a light tan, marred by deep coffee colored smears and the words “Mrs. Kadodah” scribbled carelessly in pencil, the angled scrawl nearly edging off the rougher textured paper. It all became clear. This picture was not of my real grandmother, but some Mrs. Kadodah, a woman who presents a clean face to the world, who hid that particular coffee-mark of race under a Chinese name when she left the Japanese internment camp, moved to Chicago and tried to find work, and those lawyer’s wives whose hair she cut had to poke and pry at that face she wore until the best place to curl and cut and style was the red-light district because prostitutes never asked questions, or tried to peel back fingers from the stain they hid. They knew better than to pick at scabs. Then one day the war ended and she went back to California, back to her family and to the man who would become her husband, never knowing that the Chinese face she left in Chicago would be replaced with that of Suzy Homemaker, the perfect American wife and, oh, pay no attention to the shouts late at night in a garbled mess of Japanese and English because her husband felt that if they couldn’t be white, then, by God, they’d act white, and anything else doesn’t matter because at least they looked like a happy American couple living in a neighborhood where everyone is so shiny white and she, so desperate to fit in, would accept any spelling of her name, it doesn’t matter what they call her as long as they do. Even Mrs. Kadodah.

Grandma never showed me her Mrs. Kadodah face. By then her husband, my grandfather, was long dead and the war that took so much was mostly thought of only in conjunction with memorials and history classes, and this thin papered picture of Mrs. Kadodah was nothing more than a shed skin, useful at the time but was now neither wanted or necessary, yet ever present as a reminder of what she once had to be. And the last face she ever wore was the brave one she donned at her deathbed, with cancer eating its way through her once round body until all she had left was that mask perched on a small frail figure, smiling up at her children until it was needed no longer and she could finally set all masks aside. I like to think that I’ve seen her without any kind of invented face, when she would drive the entire family nuts with her demands, throw tantrums or tell stories, unafraid of being hurt or vulnerable, but I know that her obstinacy and stubbornness and ferocity for life was just another kind of face. And perhaps it went so deep, it really wasn’t a mask at all.