Sometime around 1910, Tomi boarded the Chiyo-Maru to chaperone eleven young women, all picture brides, from Yokohama to San Francisco. We date the trip to around 1910 because Chizu, who seems to be one or two years at the time and you figure, according to John’s calculations, still breastfeeding, is in the photographs. The tallest and most strikingly beautiful young woman in the group must be the future Mrs. Suzuki. The story was that Tomi worried the entire trip about arriving in San Francisco and the eventual meeting with her picture husband, who was shorter and not, in Tomi’s opinion, much of a matching beau. If Tomi was five feet, who knows what tall was in the day, but Mrs. Suzuki embraced her fate, and the rest is history.
The Suzukis’ two sons, Goro and Michio (nicknamed Mike), grew up in Oakland around the West Tenth Church with the Yamashitas. The fathers were both tailors, colleagues in the business who both also died early in the prewar years, Mr. Suzuki in 1929 and Kishiro Yamashita in 1931. At the time of his father’s death, Goro would have been twelve. Growing up in a closed community, you imagine that the Suzuki boys got absorbed from time to time into the Yamashita family. In those years, Kay, who was the family cook for the core seven or eight who then still lived together, remembered that you never knew who or how many hungry buddies John would also bring home for dinner. She would see them come through the door and throw more breadcrumbs into the meat loaf. John called this Kay’s Depression meat loaf, a loaf of veggies and bread with a hint of ground beef.
John, five years Goro’s senior, remembered coaching him for a speech contest. I assume John tweaked, directed the speech’s emphasis, and Goro, age seventeen at the time, won the contest, the 1934 gold medal from the Japanese American Citizens League for “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.” Not to take anything away from Goro’s personal vision, but in John’s papers, you can read at least three versions of the speech with John’s editorial changes and oratorical instructions for cadence, emphasis, and significant pause. John recommends and pencils above the lines in red: slow & pondering each word, casually, solemnly, meaningful, stylishly slow, weighty, feeling, taper off, rise, strong & full, come down softer, pause, whisper. He then underlines words for emphasis: crisis of democracy, citizenship, selfishness, idealism, sacrifice, humanity. You can see John orchestrating Goro’s oratory with a fine baton. With this speech, they—Japanese Americans—would save America for democracy. They would needle into the hearts of those JACL judges, get them on to their patriotic feet to cheer, and, as they say, not a dry eye in the house. Well, it was the middle of the Depression, and they had no idea what would happen seven years later. Actually, knowing myself a high school teenager under John’s tutelage, I have to bet he mostly wrote the speech, titled in John’s versions: “The Significance of Citizenship in a Changing World.” And after, John suggested matter-of-factly, Goro, a shy kid, got the chutzpah to be a performer. This is one of those beginnings that, I guess, could have gone either way: preacher or comedian.
Maybe John’s providential intervention is a fiction and its own chutzpah since Goro was also known to croon like both Bing Crosby and Paul Robeson. Twelve years after nabbing the JACL medal, Goro got hauled off to camp like everyone else. Oh yeah, says Asako, here we were arriving in camp, and there’s Goro Suzuki greeting us with a band and singing “Ol’ Man River.” It was really absurd. Apparently over the years, Robeson changed the lyrics, but only those who were there in camp know what version Goro sang, whether the upbeat jazz of Crosby or the spiritual force of Robeson. Maybe it was a mix to meet the irony of the situation.
What does he care if the world’s got troubles?
What does he care if the land ain’t free?
Colored folks work while the white folks play . . .
Getting no rest till the judgment day.
I keep laughing instead of crying.
I must keep fighting until I’m dying.
And Ol’ Man River, he just keeps rolling along
Eventually, Goro Suzuki refashioned himself for the stage and television as Jack Soo, the nickname Su assuming a Chinese surname since anyway all Asians look the same; it wasn’t really a lie. It was more like a serious joke. In those days there was no way to get out of camp to go on the road with a Japanese stage name. Juxtaposed in these stories of Goro/ Jack is heartfelt idealism with oppressive racism, and somewhere between impossibility and indignity, the funny and absurd arises. I sense here a wry comedic thread of irony, the sort of mismatch of picture bride to picture husband, of Crosby to Robeson, of entering camp on the river of the Ol’ Man. If Goro, over the years, cultivated the classic nisei deadpan he made famous on Barney Miller, as the detective sergeant Nick Yemana (is that a Japanese surname anyway?)—humor honed on adversity—John was the guy whose eyes lighted up. Years later John would take me to see the Roger and Hammerstein’s musical Flower Drum Song. And there I saw Jack Soo (Goro) crooning and tap dancing with Pat Suzuki. Hey, John chortled with amusement, I grew up with that guy. I gave him his first big break.
Sometime in 1978, I remember finally meeting Jack Soo at the Centenary Methodist summer church bazaar in Los Angeles. I say I met Jack Soo, since his famous comedic and performer’s face was by then so familiar, but the man I really met was Goro Suzuki, who, ailing from cancer, stood with John among the booths of snow cones, teriyaki sticks, and flipping ping-pongs into bowls of goldfish. On a hot August weekend, John stepped forward unsteadily on his cane. The two men had perhaps only seen each other a few times since the war years. One of the last encounters may have been as long ago as 1949 in Oakland when John presided over Mrs. Suzuki’s funeral. And though John may have wished for an old joke, one last consummate wisecrack, Goro, unable to speak, held John’s hand and wept.