Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma

author, poet, teacher, and performer

Writings

Stories, Essays, Poems, Interviews

Explore Books

“Senior Year”

I was honored to have a story published in the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber this week as part of the Literary Project of Open Space for Arts and Community and their !Attention! Artists at Work program. The theme for the project was “Close to Home.”

SENIOR YEAR
By Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma

Janelle stared at the computer screen with dread. Her granddaughter had talked her through using Room or Boom or whatever it was called more times than she could count, but getting ready to do it always made her feel nervous. “Just follow your list,” she heard Gweneth saying. Now that Gweneth was almost done with college, she called herself Gwen, but Janelle still thought of her as Gweneth. Gweneth told her it was fine, “You have grandmother’s rights,” but Janelle still wanted to honor her wishes.

Outside the window she saw Barbara, her closest neighbor, taking out the garbage with her purple-pink mask. At least when she talked on her computer Janelle didn’t have to wear a mask. How else could she make herself understood?

Gweneth’s helpful list, which Janelle had taped to the tabletop beside her large mouse, said the next thing to do was to click the link in her email. She’d managed to find the link and clicked the left button on her mouse with her right index finger, watching the screens open and close. Join with video? Yes. Join with audio? Yes. But when Gweneth appeared, her screen looked different than last time.

“Grandma,” Gweneth said, “can you hear me?” She seemed to be standing outside. Janelle had expected to see Gweneth’s bedroom, since she was home from college for the month.

“Loud and clear, my dear,” she answered.

“Oh good,” said Gweneth.

“But Gwen, for some reason, your picture looks different. There are these bars on both sides of your face. Do I need to adjust something?”

“Oh, that’s fine, I’m on my cell phone, Grandma.”

“You can use Joom on your cell phone?”

“Yes, Grandma, you can use Zoom on a cell phone. I’ll show you sometime.”

“Zoom, yes, of course.” Janelle picked up her pencil to write down the name, then saw that she’d written it already. Why hadn’t she remembered to look? Maybe she should write the letters a little darker.

“Grandma,” Gweneth said, “I have a surprise for you.”

Actually it wasn’t completely a surprise. During their last “Grandma Tea,” Gweneth had mentioned she might have a surprise for her next time. Still, Janelle felt a little rush of anticipation, as if she herself were the granddaughter, not Gwen.

“Just talking to you is a surprise, my dear. I’m still amazed I can get this thing to work.”

“This is a bigger surprise than that. Look out your front window, Grandma.”

“The window?” She looked out again and instead of Barbara with her mask she saw Gweneth, standing with her phone. “Gweneth! What are you doing out there?”

“Well,” she said, her voice coming from inside and outside, “I can attend class from anywhere now, so I quarantined myself and got myself tested. Would you mind some company for a time?”

And Janelle stood from her chair unable even to say, “No, not at all, come in.”


Read the story in the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber.

Open Space for Arts and Community designed !Attention! Artists at Work to fund artists financially impacted by COVID-19 to create public art. The entire Literary Project collection will soon be available online for free.

Welcome to the Dance

Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma reciting "Welcome to the Dance"

For the 2016 Strawberry Festival, Leah Mann, along with Friends of Mukai, the Vashon Chamber of Commerce, Vashon Center for the Arts, Chautauqua Elementary School, Vashon-Maury Land Trust, and 4Culture, organized a Bon Odori dance at the 2016 Strawberry Festival to honor Vashon’s Japanese-American past and to remember the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. To open the dance, she asked me to write and recite a poem.

You can read more about the event on the Vashon Beachcomber.

Opening Remarks

I’ll have to admit it is both wonderful and a bit strange to see a Bon Odori dance at the four-way stop here on Vashon. Growing up, I only really participated in O Bon, as we called it, on Maui, where my mother was born and raised, and where my mother’s family moved from Okinawa, now part of Japan. My memories of O Bon are of going with my Grandma and Grandpa, and my aunties and uncles, and my cousins and cousins and cousins and cousins, to a cemetery on the ocean just past the town of Paia, where my Great-Grandfather once had a barber shop. We’d go to the family tomb—the haka—hang paper lanterns, and honor our ancestors with incense, water, tea, food, and prayers. Then we’d dance in the Bon dance as the sun set into the sea.

I’ve brought a fan with me that my auntie used to use in dancing, in memory of those dances, and in honor of the continuing practice.

All of this could feel far away from Seattle, where I spent most of my childhood—with the exception of a few times and places. Like the days when our mother took us to Uwajimaya—the old one, with the blue tile roof—and I’d rush up to the gift shop to the explore the aisle with the origami paper, marveling at all the colors and kinds they carried.

In honor of that memory, I also brought a single crane, the first origami figure I learned to fold. It later became a poignant reminder for me of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, the story of a young girl who catches leukemia after the bombing of Hiroshima and decides to attempt folding a thousand paper cranes, believed to help a person to heal. Her plight and determination moved me as a child, and still do.

So these are the memories that were awakened in me as I composed this poem for our own Bon Odori here on Vashon. It’s called “Welcome to the Dance” and takes its form from the syllabic pattern of the Japanese waka, “short poem”: a 5-syllable line, followed by a 7-syllable line, followed by another 5-syllable line and two 7-syllable lines.

Welcome to the Dance

As children we danced
in the graveyards of Maui
my sister and I
having come from Seattle
the mainland visiting our

Grandma and Grandpa
Nakamura actually
Nakandakari
but changed like so many names
entering America

itself a name changed
crossing the wide sea and we
knew it as normal
as natural as breathing this
dancing with the living and

being with the dead
we do not dance for sadness
my grandfather said
but for joy like the daughter
who sees that her mother now

dances in the dance
beyond life and death—it seemed
so far from our home
in Seattle where I read
the story of Sadako

and her cranes struck down
before reaching one thousand
by the terrible
bright light of Hiroshima
turned to cancer in her veins

how can we dance I
wanted to know when the world
has known such horrors
bombings displacements and im-
prisonments of whole peoples

in the places they’d
come to call home I had no
answer and I have
no answer save the answer
that dances in the dancing

itself—we dance
because we can because we
have it in our bones
because all of our sorrows
are all of our joys hidden

in the dance between
the living and the dying
and the being here
together welcoming all
things and people and feelings

like Sadako whose
cranes are ours to keep folding
one thousand little
lights that together are not
little like the lanterns at

O Bon glowing in
the darkness gracing the tombs
of the dead who are
living—here in our hearts here
in our dance here in our lives

lighting the crossroads
lifting to the sky like birds
and their wings dancing
for joy and sorrow alike
for all that the dancing brings

Here: A Poem in Five Parts

“Here” was written by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma for “Joy and Heartache: Vashon’s 125-year Japanese American Legacy” at the Vashon Heritage Museum. Each of the five sections of the poem corresponds to the five sections of the exhibit:

I. Hope 1910-1920

Young, single laborers looking for a new life were quickly followed by “picture bride” families whose efforts created a vibrant community and a vital presence in Vashon’s community and economy.

II. Struggle 1920-1942

Vashon’s flourishing Japanese American farms became the backbone of the Vashon farming community during the 1920s and 1930s, despite Alien Land Laws and anti-immigrant legislation. Their organizations worked hard to build a positive presence in the larger Vashon community, through arts, good works and education.

III. Trauma 1942-1945

On May 16, 1942 Vashon Japanese were sent to the Pinedale Processing Center in California, then to Tule Lake Relocation Camp. When Tule Lake became a segregation camp for what were known as “No No’s”, most Vashon residents were “re-distributed” into seven of the ten American concentration camps, effectively destroying the Japanese community on Vashon.

IV. Resilience 1946-1960

Only about one-third of Vashon’s Japanese American evacuees, returned to the island to pick up their interrupted lives and careers. Many islanders welcomed their former neighbors, but some did not.

V. Identities 1960-Today

But things could never be the same. Their children, the Sansei, grew up during the decades of activism in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Today, Japanese Americans on Vashon are at every income strata with diverse occupations. Each with unique experiences, but sharing a cultural bond.

Learn more about the exhibit at vashonheritagemuseum.org.