Ananda, you have invited me to walk in meditation with you, but when we do walk, we chatter and laugh endlessly about everything, foolish nonsense, and yet with the pleasure of the deepest sense of our living moments together; we live a noisy meditation. I suppose we would not have it any other way. To be honest, the silent meditation we experience is when we are apart, distant in our own worlds, writers in separate universes. That is perhaps the state of the writer and the letter writer, a meditative state graced by the imagination of the presence of the other. Ah, but you would say that meditation is wordless, the breathing space in the hollow of the mind that whispers through and between and beyond. There is no such thing as noisy meditation or musing meditation or even prayer meditation. It is complete attention to a bodiless timeless everywhere, a wholly mindful space between life and death. Of this, I believe I am incapable. But push me out into warm waters to swim, become a fish, better yet, a jellyfish, a transparent billowing community, pulsing through liquid, slipping into and under muffled and cyanese silence. Maybe. As a child, nightly I witnessed the severed heads of unknown people swirling around my dark bed; terrified, I slipped into water and swam away.

By contrast, Tomi landed in the desert of central Utah. Nothing but sand and sage. At the end of 1942, Tomi turned sixty. She had immigrated to Oakland through the Port of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century at the fair age of eighteen, married Kishiro Yamashita, and bore seven children, one every three years from 1903 on. John speculated that he and his siblings were exactly three years apart because Tomi breastfed each of them until age three. I never heard this from anyone else in the family, but maybe John had a good memory; plus this was the sort of raised-eyebrow detail John liked to tell in the middle of some dinner party. Between raising kids and breastfeeding, Tomi also worked as a seamstress in Kishiro’s Yokohama Tailors shop. In 1932, when Kishiro died, Tomi opened the Mayfair Cleaners, taking in laundry and sewing jobs. When people talked about the issei generation, you got the message that these were the real pioneers who labored, who broke their backs, scrimped and saved, lost their shirts, suffered the confusion of language and cruel humiliation of hatred. Then at the end of years of continuous labor, the final indignity was incarceration. As my mother Asako would say, no rest for the wicked. Not to say that I’ve had any sort of comparable life, but I’m around the same age as Tomi was when she walked into Topaz. She lived to be a few months short of ninety, so let’s say she was about two-thirds there. Knowing Tomi, she probably wore a corset all through camp; nothing would stop her from looking svelte, with proper posture and bosom in place, a woman of vitality. When Tomi was at the end of her life, nearing wicked rest, John flew to Chicago to be her hospice nurse. She opened her eyes one morning to find John cleaning up her room and grunted with some irritation, Mada ikiteru yo. When I think about Tomi, it’s this phrase I remember: You know, I’m still alive.

In Tomi’s photo album, there were a few of those rare photographs taken in camp: a larger group picture arranged before a tarpaper barrack and a smaller photo of Tomi and four women set against barbed wire and the dirt landscape. With some research, I discover that these folks represent the artists in camp sometime around 1944. Of the artists incarcerated at Topaz, perhaps the most well known were Miné Okubo and Chiura Obata. Both were friends of the Yamashitas from their Berkeley days. In the prewar, Okubo studied art at Cal with a couple years in Paris, and painted frescos with Diego Rivera for the Works Projects Administration. The Obata family lived in Berkeley, Chiura teaching art at Cal. At war’s end, Okubo gathered her sketches of evacuation to Tanforan and imprisonment in Topaz and published Citizen 13660, a pictorial indictment of those years. It was Chiura Obata who founded and opened an art school in camp, involving sixteen artists and eight hundred students over the years. One of those students was Tomi.

A story I did not know was that Chiura Obata, despite his idealistic decision to stay in Topaz to create an art school, attempting to bring some beauty and hope to that ugly episode, was attacked and beaten as if a traitor by a camp fellow. After his hospitalization, the Obatas left Topaz for Saint Louis, and thereafter, colleague artist and friend Matsusaburo Hibi and his wife Hisako continued the direction of the art school until the camp’s closure in 1945. It is this later contingent of artists and students, sans Obata, who pose in that group photo before the Topaz barracks. And in the smaller photo, Tomi stands among her lady artist friends, Hisako Hibi and her daughter Ibuki crouched in the dirt. The gifted artist Hisako Hibi would also have been Tomi’s teacher.

At war’s end, the Obata family returned to Berkeley, and Chiura became a professor of art at Cal. Tomi also relocated to Berkeley, and she continued to be a faithful student of Obata, probably almost until her death in 1972. Her sumi-e paintings were saved in large rolls of rice paper that John and I unrolled and perused after her death, spreading them across the tables and floors. What we discovered were repeated attempts at the same scene, but there was always at least one of each that was, well, perfect, and this I assume to have been Obata’s example that Tomi tediously tried over and over to reproduce. John chose the most perfectly rendered and had them framed, and told guests that they were Tomi’s work. They were unsigned, so who knows? Tomi would have been one of Obata’s oldest students, if not the oldest, his senior by three years. After so many years of dogged persistence, Obata granted Tomi some sort of official status as a deshi with a name and hanko. John said, Oh it was honorary. She was never very good. Obata must have thrown in the towel. But what were those unsigned paintings that hung all over the house? Some sort of fiction, I suppose.

Rolled up in the center of a heavy pillar of Tomi’s artworks was a canvas painting, which for some reason had been stored and forgotten. An oil painting, a still life of yellow flowers with black centers, squash and fruit in the foreground. The painting is signed Hisako Hibi, Topaz 1945 with an inscription in the back of the canvas: Milky Weeds and Sunflowers. Matsusaburo Hibi died only two years after the war in 1947, but Hisako returned to San Francisco and lived a long and productive creative life. The painting was perhaps a parting gift, removed quickly from its wood frame, sent away to wander far from the sadness of camp, to remember friendship.

What, I ask you, is the true value of art? In Tomi’s precariously kept collection of paintings, there are also original Obatas and this Hibi still life. I will have to pay an expert to refurbish and remount the Hibi. The Obatas are variously dotted with brown spots, evidence of the paper’s acid slowly returning the work to dust. This is even true of the carefully framed unsigned work, assuming it is Obata’s. Everything is slowly fading. Although sold to sustain their lives, neither Obata nor Hibi would have necessarily assigned great monetary value to the product of their art. Not that I don’t feel guilty that this art isn’t better preserved, but like the letters, it’s a bit of clutter and bother. Don’t museums make choices? What to hoard; what not to hoard? But, you may protest, Obata and Hibi would find this dilemma crass. The subjects of their art demonstrate their aesthetics and ethics. Art is a tool and a process. In a time of war and intense hatred, Obata and Hibi sought escape and resistance. Exiled to the desert, Obata sought the meditative solace of nature. Within the confines of barbed wire, Hibi sought the ordinary in daily life. A mindful resistance mediated between life and death.

As for Tomi, John always said that camp gave his mother a break from constant labor, that being able to spend her days painting was a hidden gift. Leisure in confinement. A cruel truth. How many other of Obata’s and Hibi’s students also came to enjoy for the first time that sense of creative pleasure? Were they not laborers removed from the backbreaking work of harvesting fruits and vegetables, the tedium of slicing and canning fish, washing and cleaning the houses of the rich? Obata, Hibi, and even Tomi had pretensions to another life, and Obata was beaten up by someone who resented that presumption and the arrogance of the mind’s freedom, or perhaps what was perceived to be the blind innocence of intellectuals and aesthetes who did not recognize their basic condition as fodder to exchange for the lives of American POWs. In war, nothing is fair. In the nationalist agenda, you are either for or against. Tomi refused to the end of her life to become naturalized as an American citizen, her stubborn protest of the indignity of incarceration. No questionnaire could define her loyalty. She had sacrificed her youth to raise and educate two children in Japan and five others in America.

Years later, I’ve separated only those few drawings that Tomi signed and to which she put her red stamp. In fact, there is only one scene on which she imprinted her hanko, that of Yosemite Falls. You can take a look and judge for yourself. Let’s say it isn’t the technique but the spirit of the work, in the spirit of her teacher. Slipped in among those same rolls of paintings on rice paper was the shiny 1960 Life magazine cover featuring Grandma Moses on her hundredth birthday. In 1960, Tomi was seventy-eight, camping out with us in Yosemite, hiking to the falls and Half Dome. Undoubtedly, she and I, then a nine-year-old kid, walked together in noisy meditation.

Granma, what does your name Tomi mean?

Means rich. Tomi rich.

What about my name Tei?

Means happy. Means you are very happy girl.

Studying in Japan years later, I look up the word tei and find the meaning: chastity. I also discover that my American name has basically the same meaning. She was right. I am very happy girl.

I bet she was still wearing her corset.