At the gift shop in Los Alamos, they are selling bumper stickers that say CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS. They are selling pewter keychains shaped like Little Boy and Fat Man; they are selling pewter cufflinks shaped like Little Boy and Fat Man; they are selling pewter earrings shaped like Little Boy and Fat Man. They are selling water bottles and shot glasses and coffee mugs and potholders printed with the nuclear symbol. They are selling J. Robert Oppenheimer bobbleheads and martini shakers and baseball caps and t-shirts and pins and patches and picnic blankets.
I am standing in line at the cash register to buy a ticket to the museum, and it is a weekday in spring, and it is crowded with people. It is not exactly a line, because the gift shop is not set up for there to be enough space for a line, it is more like a loose milieu, and even though I think it should be clear that I am in the milieu, that I am waiting for something, a man and a woman in their sixties, both white, step in front of me.
And I wonder if I should say something, but I do not, and it makes me think of the time, several years earlier, when I was standing in line at airport security and the man in front of me, South Asian, stopped for a moment to pull something out of his backpack, and I stopped behind him, waiting, and a gap started to form between him and the person ahead of him, but he and I were still, in my mind, quite clearly in the line, and then a woman a little bit older than me, white, walked right past us. And I, a half-Asian but still clearly Asian woman, said, Excuse me, we’re in line, and the woman looked at me with so much disdain that it truly shocked me, the way she didn’t even try to conceal it, nor did she apologize as she took her place behind me. And the man had finished fishing out whatever it was he needed from his backpack, and so we moved forward, and after we had closed the gap, he turned around and said Thank you.
And that makes me think of the time, a few months ago, when I was boarding a flight with Southwest, who have that open seating system, and I had chosen my seat and put my bag under the seat in front of me and was about to lower myself down when the woman behind me in line, a white woman my age, said, Can you sit here instead? and pointed to a seat across the aisle that was, objectively, a worse seat, because someone was sitting in the middle, whereas the seat I had chosen had no one sitting in the middle, at least not yet. She wanted my seat so that she and her boyfriend could sit together. And that had never happened to me before on Southwest; we were in the B group, we were relatively early, the plane wasn’t even half-full yet, there were plenty of rows free just a few steps further into the plane. And I looked at her with confusion and another white woman, trying to be helpful, said to her, It’s open seating, and I said, I’d rather stay here, and the first white woman looked at both of us and said, I know it’s open seating, I thought she might want to be nice.
And that makes me think of being at home with my parents, a few weeks ago, when my mother, who was born in Japan, told me and my father about this white lady in a Tesla who had parked next to her at the grocery store and opened her car door into my mother’s car and had looked at her like it was my mother’s fault.
And that makes me think about how my mother was born in Japan, in Hiroshima, five years after the bomb was dropped, and how this isn’t something she ever talks about. Not about coming over to the U.S. when she was three years old, not about the older brother, my uncle, who was lost during the war.
And then I hear the couple in front of me, the white couple who cut me in line, telling the man behind the cash register that they are having a great time, that they’ve been meaning to come for years. And the man behind the cash register—a white man in his early seventies, a volunteer—is telling them how busy it’s been since the movie came out, just nuts.
And then it’s my turn, and I tell the man behind the cash register one, please, like he’s the ticket-taker at a carnival, and he presses a button on the computer and I look around the gift shop—at the potholders and shot glasses and cufflinks and bumper stickers and coffee mugs—and he says, Is that all?
