“I’ll buy the bread,” said Emi.
She had grown used to being the mouthpiece for her mother over the years, a habit that started on her father’s first assignment in London, when Emi was only five years old. There she was sent to a British school for girls, where she wore a uniform so starched by the family’s amah that she had to wet the collar down or her neck would itch until it turned purple. After school, Keiko and her amah would pick her up and drag her to piano lessons, as Keiko assumed it was what Western girls did. She forced Emi to practice until she was far and away her esteemed teacher’s best student.
After lessons—because Keiko’s English was still poor despite a year in London, while Emi had picked it up like a child catching a cold—she dragged her mother by the hand all over the city. For three years, Emi spoke and lived like a Japanese child with her parents, but like a British one in public. Then the Katos moved to Berlin and Emi was put into German school, where she continued to float to the top. She learned German, just as she had learned English. And just as she had led her mother around London, she did the same in Berlin.
By the time she was sixteen and had reached Vienna, she was fluent in German, which was a pleasant surprise for her parents. Somewhat unintentionally, Norio and Keiko Kato had raised a fiercely independent, worldly young woman. Emi could tell that her parents, though they had started bringing up marriage and children after she’d reached twenty, were proud of the way she’d turned out. By 1939, Keiko’s English was near fluent, but Emi knew that she still liked it when her daughter spoke first when they entered a restaurant or a shop, always enjoying her daughter’s upper-crust British accent.
As they made their way from their first-class cabin to the dining room for dinner on the boat that night, Emi took her mother’s hand, happy that they were still packing her up like a little suitcase wedged between them.
Though Keiko had been trying for years to have Emi crop her hair like she had, chin length and waved in the front, Emi still wore hers long and straight, refusing to change it. She wasn’t sure why she was so uncompromising about the cut; perhaps she liked the rebellion more than the hairstyle. On this cool night on their ocean crossing, she had put it up for dinner at her mother’s insistence and was wearing one of her best dresses—that part she didn’t mind. After two years in Vienna, she was used to formality, and despite resisting her mother’s plans for her hair, had come to enjoy the nice affairs her father’s job allowed them.
But Washington was not Vienna. The Kato women soon learned that in America, the diplomatic world was far less extravagant than in Europe.
It took Emi and Keiko some time to adjust to their new landscape after their arrival in 1939. Though they both thought it would be very much like England, the language was the only similarity they felt. The people were much more outspoken, and the city did not have the cosmopolitan flair that London had. “For all the embassies being here, it doesn’t feel very international,” said Emi, who was always looking for faces that resembled hers.
In two years, Emi grew to like the city as much as someone whose heart was somewhere else could. She made a few friends at her all-girls Catholic school in a Maryland suburb, but she did not bother to get close to anyone. On the family’s first posting abroad, to London, Emi had made many friends, too young to realize that she would have to give them all up in a few years. In Berlin, the Katos’ next posting, she was accepted at her all-girls school with the same kindness and genuine fascination she had received in London, but she became more reserved with her friendships as her heart still stung with the pain of leaving her British community behind. And when she moved to Vienna, she had reached an age where all she wanted was a small circle of friends. But when she met Leo, that circle tied itself into a knot. All Emi wanted was Leo.
In Washington, though her classmates did not treat her with hostility or spite, they all took a few months to warm to her presence, and the reception never heated past tepid. The girls’ indifference, compared to what she had encountered in Europe, bothered Emi at first, but she soon realized that she preferred to return to her apartment near the National Zoo after school and dream about Leo anyway. So Emi went to school, was civil with her classmates who were civil to her, but after years in Washington, she still did not have any true friends.
Leo and Emi wrote to each other every Friday, though the letters did not always make it across the ocean. Still, Emi read the ones she received until the paper was nearly translucent. She took them to school, she read them in the bath. She was never without a letter from Leo somewhere on her person. The Katos’ apartment in Washington overlooked the south part of the zoo and Emi could sometimes see giraffes milling around their small sandy enclosure while she bathed, letter from Leo in hand. It was her favorite thing about the city.
“You shouldn’t spend all your years here locked in your room,” Keiko advised, eyeing Emi’s letter resting on her floral coverlet and her glossy pictures of Vienna’s landmarks hanging on the wall. It was January 1940 and Emi was leaving the apartment much less than she had when they’d first arrived, choosing to spend her time with the comfort of her memories.
Emi looked at her mother skeptically. “And you?” she asked.
“Yes, I know. I don’t go out that often, either,” Keiko admitted.
“Almost never unless you’re with father,” said Emi.
“But the world doesn’t need to see me. You’re young and beautiful. And unmarried. Don’t waste those fleeting things locked up in here staring at pictures of a city across an ocean.”