Play Steeped in Memories of a War Bride’s Daughter

Some little girls grow up wanting to dress up like their mothers. Velina Hasu Houston grew up wanting to drink tea like hers.

Houston’s mother had left her native Japan to marry an American soldier, a man half Native American Indian and half black, who was stationed in Japan when they met after World War II. She and hundreds like her were called “war brides.” The U.S. Army stationed them in Kansas so they wouldn’t congregate with other Japanese-Americans on the East or West coasts.

“We lived in a new housing development,” Houston recalled. “On one side was a field. I remember my mother would sit at a window and have a cup of tea, looking out in the field with the cows.

“She would sit there perched on the edge of the chair by the dining table and she would have the cup in her hand. A sigh would escape from her. The cup would go up and down. I thought of it as so romantic. I always wanted to sip tea like my mother.”

It was this memory and that of her mother having tea with her Japanese friends that inspired Houston to write her play “Tea,” which will make its West Coast premiere at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage on Saturday.

In the play, four Japanese war brides meet over tea to put a fifth one, who committed suicide, to rest. One of the brides is modeled after Houston’s mother, and even has her name--Setsuko. The others are based on her mother’s friends and the 50 Japanese war brides Houston interviewed in Kansas when she researched her play.

The women are married to Anglo-Americans, Mexican-Americans and Japanese-Americans. The tea--a symbol of their shared heritage, their dead friend and the difficulties they face in living between cultures--brings them together. Much the way “Tea” brought Houston and her mother closer together.

Houston’s decision to become a playwright wasn’t supported by her mother. (Her father died when she was 11.) Art is not considered a dignified profession in Japan, Houston pointed out. Nor did her mother understand Houston’s decision to have a child out of wedlock two years ago at age 28.

On the surface, those choices may seem odd for a woman who identifies so strongly with her mother and her Japanese heritage.

But, as Houston points out, rebellion runs in the family. After all, her parents broke tradition by running off with each other--albeit after a nine-year courtship. The match was partially responsible for her Japanese grandfather’s suicide and for her father’s brothers cutting him off.

Still, Houston’s decisions were not made out of rebellion.

Having her son, Kiyoshi Shannen, “was the best thing I’ve ever done.” As for how she lives her life: “I just do what I have to do. That’s what I said when I decided to become a writer. That’s what I said when I decided to move to California. That’s what I said when I decided to have a child. I do what I have to do. And if it’s meant to happen, it will get done.”

Houston began “Tea” in 1982, after writing two other plays about her parents’ courtship and marriage--”Asa Ga Kimashita” (“Morning Has Broken”) and “American Dreams.” But it was not until “Tea” premiered at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club in October for an eight-week run that her mother began to take her work seriously.

Houston’s mother was talked into coming to see the play by the actress portraying her.

“It would mean so much to Velina,” Houston said the actress told her mother on the phone.

When her mother saw the show, Houston said, “She wept through the whole thing. It was a turning point.” Houston’s mother then gave her the validation for which she had waited: “I understand,” she said. “You are really a playwright.”

Houston refers to the play as “a poem to my mother.” Though she speaks of her father with warmth, he did not leave her with an impression of the price he paid for his marriage. Houston remembers him as “a gentle soul, a generalist, an American who wanted everyone to get along.”

In contrast, Houston sees the tragedy of her mother and her friends as “not fitting in here and not fitting in there. It creates a place where these women live the rest of their lives. It’s the old story of you can’t go home again. But they can’t feel at home in the place they have lived for the past 20 years, either.”

Now, after six years and 20 drafts, Houston feels she has finished “Tea” and is ready to move on to other concerns. She is working on “Father, I Must Have Rice,” a one-act play about an Amerasian girl of black and Japanese descent that had its debut at the Los Angeles Ensemble Studio Theatre, and “Tips on How to Store Breast Milk,” which was recently commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

“Tips” deals non-ethnically with the problems a single mother faces with family and friends. The one thing it has in common with “Tea,” Houston said, is that it is “one of my liquid plays.”

The milk, like the tea, represents a liquid life force, which Houston compares to the taking of wine and bread at communion.

It also points up the fact that the loneliness she describes in “Tea” is not exclusive to the lives of the Japanese war brides. And that her mother and her friends have something Houston has not yet found for herself--and would like to.

“When I interviewed the women (the war brides in Kansas), the common thread I found was that they all said, ‘I loved him.’ Despite the circumstances that make you look for other reasons, when you strip things away, there’s a man and a woman, two people from very different backgrounds who decided to take the chance, no matter how hard it was to be with each other.”

A wistful note crept into her voice as she glanced out the window of the Cassius Carter lobby.

“I’ve certainly loved and been loved, but I don’t know if I’d be willing to cross an ocean and go to a strange country with anyone at this point in my life.”

She laughed and said, “I might be talked into it.” Then the pensive tone returned.

“I think, ‘How grand the love these women must have had for these men.’ They had no idea what they were getting into. It was like walking into a black hole and holding tightly onto someone’s hand. You can’t see anything, but you just take that chance.

“I feel in that way they were very lucky and blessed. I tell my mother that she was very lucky to have someone like my father who loved her so deeply.”