He was not as handsome as she might have hoped and was a good deal poorer than she feared. The only reason she remained by his side was that he was, she learned soon enough, kind, not only to her but to others, and something of this pulled at her heart in ways she had not anticipated or even wanted. She did not know, of course, what she would do if she were to leave his side—she knew no one in San Francisco or anywhere else on the continent—and yet for many months the idea stayed with her, not as a real possibility but at least as an option, something that provided her a kind of compass during days of struggle and privation. It was a fiction, the idea that her location was of her own choosing, but one which helped her in those early days.

When I asked my grandmother about Kimiko Takahashi, it took her a long while to even determine who it was that I was talking about, the departed Japanese-Americans so wholly forgotten that it seemed they had been scrubbed clean out of my grandmother’s mind. But then something at last came to her memory, her words forming slowly as the information trickled back into whatever shallow furrows it had left behind. “Tak’s wife, you mean,” she told me. “Sure, Tak’s wife. I don’t think I knew her name. Nobody did, probably. She was just Tak’s wife. That’s all.”

And even if they knew she was named Kim—not Kimiko to Mrs. Wilson but Kim—that was scant knowledge compared with how they knew Mrs. Wilson herself or any of the other young women, young mothers, in the countryside and in the town, orchardist’s wives. In those days, days before I was born, their names were known. The names of their children were known. But my grandmother’s knowledge of Mrs. Takahashi was not so different from the white community’s knowledge of any of the Issei women. They would have known some of the men, of course, because they were actively working in the same industry in which the white farmers were working, property lines bounding property lines, fruit weighed upon the same scales and packed into the same Blue Anchor boxes. So they knew Tak and his family in the same, general way they knew the Dois and the Uyedas and the Nakaes and the Yokotes and many others too, knew them as quiet, almost silent neighbors and did not consider what that meant, exchanging a simple greeting when crossing paths but otherwise ignoring their presence altogether.