"Why don't you go back to China, where you can be coolies working in your bare feet out in the rice fields?" (1439), exclaims the handsome, red-faced, greying man on the bus in Hisaye Yamamoto's, "Wilshire Bus." These words are not spoken directly to Yamamoto's central character, Esther Kuroiwa, but might as well be and probably are intended as much for her as for the other oriental individuals riding on the bus this day.
Yamamoto's is a story of a Japanese-American woman who, after returning to California from a concentration camp in Arkansas (sometime earlier), rides a bus along fast, wide Wilshire Boulevard to a hospital at soldiers" home to see her husband, Buro (usually, twice a week). They were married less than a year when a three-month convalescence became necessary, due to a back injury he suffered in the war.
During this ride, the handsome, red-faced man ("a somatotonic," [1438] as Esther refers to him) appears to Esther as having been drinking. She first listens with interest to the man's diatribe, but then feels the tenseness in an elderly Chinese woman's body, seated next to her, as the man shoots toward her defensive, oppressive statements about Chinese people. Esther turns away, gazes out the window and feels detached (wondering if, since she is Japanese, she will be excluded from his cruelty). But, soon she realizes she is "gloating over the fact the drunken man had specified the Chinese as the unwanted" (1439). She is shocked by her feelings and remembers once (in great detail) seeing an elderly Korean man wearing a button proclaiming his Korean heritage. "Heat suddenly rising to her throat, she had felt angry, then desolate and betrayed." "Wryly, she wished for an I AM JAPANESE button, just to be able to call the man's attention to it, "Look at me"" (1440)?.
After her memories, Esther tries to make up for her "moral shabbiness," (1440) and turns to give her elderly neighbor, who had boarded the bus with her husband, a reassuring smile.
