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Wham! Pearl Harbor. Half the world away from Otaru, in a bumpy California crossroads hamlet called Cressy (pop. 400), chunky little Chiyoko Suzuki began her rehearsals for Flower Drum just 28 years ago. Youngest of a fair-sized Japanese-American family (a brother twelve years older, and two sisters, eight and ten years older), "Chiby" (Squirt) Suzuki was a loner from the start—a kid who seemed to figure she was expected to take care of herself. She went to a two-room schoolhouse, rode horses bareback, learned to swim in irrigation canals on her father's 100-acre farm, and talked Spanish to the Mexican peach pickers. But it was not much fun. At least, looking back on her childhood, Chiby Suzuki insists: "I could hardly wait to grow up. I didn't like being a kid, because I always had certain feelings I couldn't explain. The only things I could dream about in those days were the trucks going by on the highway all night long. I used to dream of all the places they had been that I would like to go some day."
But there was no place to go. If Chiby got a kick out of anything, it was singing. She sang her earliest solo at 3½, when she visited a Sunday-school class one Easter and laced into White Lilies with such gusto that the rest of the kids quit to let her go it alone. To everyone in town, Chiby seemed like just another American kid; people began to call her "Pat." At a "couple of county things" she stopped the show with her unbridled rendition of I Am an American.
"Then, wham!" says she. "Pearl Harbor."
Along with the rest of the Suzuki family, Pat was shipped to the Amache relocation camp at Lamar, Colo. There life was a matter of school as usual. She did not sing much, and about the only memories she has are of thunderstorms, dust storms, and the Nisei boy scouts who went out every morning in the shifting sand to raise the American flag.
Bean Cake. After the war the Suzukis spent a year on a Colorado sugar-beet farm, renting their own land to help make a stake. Then they went home to Cressy. For Pat, it was as bad as ever. "I was kind of a homely kid. I was never a school type—I wasn't rah rah."
When Pat listened to her radio and heard music from the Edgewater Beach Hotel, she wanted to see Chicago. She could visualize just what the lake and beach would look like. When she saw paintings, she wanted desperately to see the places the artists had painted. And she never forgot some advice her father had once given her: "As you get older, you get afraid to take chances. When you're young, you have the drive. You should use your youth."