Two Families West

It would be misleading to romanticize our life in Oakland. Our stretch of Fleming Avenue, with a grimy gasoline station and mechanic’s garage at the corner of Seminary some five houses away and the smell of vinegar and stewing tomatoes when the wind shifted behind the nearby Heinz ketchup factory, was no Parisian boulevard. But between Ethel's [my mother, Ethel Pickering] Mills connections and her music network we were exposed to a wider world that transcended Oakland’s rough spots. Mills was, inter alia, where Ethel recruited several baby sitters; many of them were foreign students and thus had knowledge and an outlook that were new to us. One was a German or Austrian girl named Ursula Theiss, who baby-sat for us several times and taught us to count to ten in German. Once when she put me to bed she kissed me on the cheek. I guess it was a perfectly natural thing for her, but to me it signaled a thrilling kind of illicit conspiracy between us. I remember responding, “Thank you.” Ethel’s connection through her Theta ties with the American Association of University Women, which promotes women’s education, led to other visits by foreign students. One of these I recall (I do not remember his name) was probably also German or Austrian, and a graduate student. His table manners and demeanor were sophisticated and understated, and what he taught me was the utility of a diplomatic silence. We were at the dinner table, and Ethel I think hiccupped once or twice and excused herself as she did so. The student, whom I had expected to acknowledge her apology, kept silent, and the correctness of that silence struck me strongly. Either through the A.A.U.W. or through Mills we also took in a foreign student for what I recall to have been several weeks. He was an Okinawan named Morishiga Miyahira, who might have been studying engineering. He was proficient in a type of karate, a skill that he told us many of his countrymen shared. They had had to develop it, he said, because the Japanese, who colonized Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Island chain in the 1880’s, had confiscated all the Okinawans’ weapons. In our living room one afternoon he gave what is now the standard demonstration, setting up a board between two cinder blocks and breaking it with one blow of the edge of his hand. [My brother] Dennis said Morishiga had told our parents that his brother had been a Kamikaze pilot, though that seems improbable given the high, if brief, status of the World War II suicide pilots and the oppression under which the ethnically distinct Okinawans labored as virtual vassals of Japan.