Cambridge Seniors: Fukiko Cudhea

Hear Fukiko Cudhea’s voice here.

The first time Fukiko Cudhea and I met for an interview, she brought for me a bag of treats: a bottle of homemade iced tea and rice crackers. The next time, it was a slightly bigger bag, containing packets of houjicha – a type of Japanese tea – with instructions about how to steep it in a pitcher. Also, a huge slice of watermelon and almond-encrusted cookies. The time after that, the bounty had grown to include homemade onigiri (triangular packed rice wrapped in crispy seaweed), a sandwich, roasted rice green tea (genmaicha, my favorite), and homemade sesame cookies. For our final interview, she brought a big woven bag packed with a homemade sandwich; stir-fried soba noodles with veggies; a rice dish flecked with salmon; sesame cookies; and another bag of loose genmaicha tea.

Handmade onigiri by Fukiko. Inside were pickled plums (umeboshi). The garnish was shiso leaves from her own garden.

Fukiko was the only subject I met “out on the town.” (The rest I met through institutions and friends). Near Cambridge City Hall, one sunny Friday morning early in the summer, I came across two women talking. I was looking for subjects, and I thought the older of the two might fit the bill. She seemed like a Cambridge resident, and her English (if I wasn’t mistaken) still had traces of a Japanese accent. I lived in Japan on and off between the ages of 19 and 25, and though I’ve mostly given up on my habit of accosting Japanese strangers to make new friends, I haven’t entirely.

Luckily I didn’t entirely mortify myself – just the mortification inherent in speaking to strangers – because she was, as I’d guessed, Japanese, and is also a decades-long resident of central Cambridge. When I told her I was particularly interested in profiling older people, she said, “Oh, I guess you could tell I’m an older woman.” In Japanese, obaasan means “older woman” but the name is synonymous with being a grandmother. She was quick to clarify that she doesn’t have grandchildren yet. She lives with her only child, a 37-year-old son. When I asked about her last name, she explained that it was her husband’s, and is an old Irish name pronounced “Cuddy.”

When I told her I am an illustrator, she told me she used to have a keen interest in illustration, but these days her attention has fully turned to gardening. (One more food item she included in a couple of her gift baskets for me was fresh green shiso leaves from her garden).

Fukiko is petite, a bit below five feet in height. She has a sweet, watchful energy, and a boundless sense of generosity. She is very close with her mother-in-law, after having tragically lost her husband to cancer in the late 1980s. (Her husband’s family is from the Boston area).

Fukiko was born and raised in Okayama, a seaside city on the southern coast of Japan’s biggest island, Honshu. Okayama, Fukiko told me, is famous for its muscat grapes and its white peaches. She was the fourth of five children, and one of two girls. She was thick as thieves with her older sister, Hideko. Hideko went off to nursing school while Fukiko was still in high school, and the two sisters exchanged letters every single day while Hideko was across town. Hideko would drop her letter off at the family home, while Fukiko would put hers in the post. Fukiko says Hideko was endlessly sweet. Her sister would even say, “I’d die for you.”

(We conducted interviews in both English and Japanese, and these accounts include some translations).

Sadly, Hideko fell ill almost two decades ago. But Fukiko was devoted to her during her illness, visiting her in the hospital every single day to laugh and reminisce about their high school days.

Her father owned his own mechanics shop. He was extremely good at tinkering with mechanical things, and as Fukiko describes it, not so great with words (kuchibeta, “bad at the mouth” or “bad at speaking,” which was a new and poetic word for me). Her mother was a very skilled homemaker, doing Fukiko’s sewing homework for her in exchange for Fukiko’s washing the dishes. Fukiko was sent to an all-girls high school, less an academic institution and more a kind of training ground for brides in order to learn the skills necessary to get a high-status husband and run a household.

Fukiko wanted to go on to university after school. Her mother said it wasn’t suitable for her to be a 浪人 rōnin – which originally meant “masterless samurai” but now means an unattached period in one’s life – and she had connections at a local bank, so Fukiko started working there at age eighteen. She was by far the youngest person there. The next-oldest person was 23, but most of her coworkers were decades older than she.

She had a keen interest in writing, and there was a course associated with a novelist she admired, named Seiko Tanabe, in nearby Osaka. For a year she did a correspondence course and also attended classes there on the weekends. By Bullet Train (Shinkansen), she could make the round trip in one day. She remembers Tanabe saying: “Unless you have that urge that you absolutely have to write – an urge from the heart – it’s better to let it go.” Fukiko wrote short stories, with the names changed, about her experiences, and kept a journal for years, but didn’t feel that kind of dedication to it. (She jokingly noted that no one else from the course ever got famous, either).

In her early twenties, Fukiko knew she wanted to leave Okayama, either to go to Tokyo or to somewhere farther afield. In 1979, a girlfriend who was much more keen on English decided to attend the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Boston, and asked if Fukiko wanted to come with her. Fukiko found an English course at Boston University. Her mother agreed to it but said, “You get one semester over there, then you come home!”

At Boston University, Fukiko studied English every day, but as she notes now, “I think it comes down to whether you just have that sense for language. If you’re interested from a young age. I don’t have that.”

She met her husband that year in Boston, and in 1980 they decided to get married. They had weddings in the Boston area and also in Japan. She was partial to the American wedding, because it was held at one of his family’s homes and felt much more personal and unique. At her wedding in Japan, the hotel staff brought her the wrong kind of kimono but there was no time to switch it out. And they caked her face in white makeup, geisha-like.

Fukiko and her husband at their wedding in Japan.

Soon after getting married, she and her husband bought an apartment in the North End. Then his work took them to Kanazawa, a historic city midway down the island of Honshu on the north side, sitting on the Sea of Japan. He got regular TV gigs there, thanks to his striking blue eyes and the near-total absence of Western foreigners in Kanazawa at the time. After Kanazawa, Fukiko and her husband moved to the United States and gave birth to a son. When he was nine months old, they moved to Kawasaki for her husband to begin his work programming English-Japanese electronic dictionaries at NEC.

Unfortunately, her husband fell ill with an illness that took many months for Japanese doctors to name, because it appears much more frequently in Caucasian men. Doctors didn’t recognize his symptoms, and told him he just had a cold. Eventually they found a doctor at a Tokyo hospital who correctly identified his symptoms as Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He was treated at Yokohama Cancer Center. They decided to return to the States and have him treated at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. They tried everything possible, including a bone marrow transplant, but he died in 1990, at the impossible age of 35.

When I was expressing my sympathy to her, she insisted that her experience was difficult, but many people have it worse. I include an audio clip of Fukiko with the translation here:

“Of course, it was hard, but there are many people who’ve been through harder. Where are you starting from, and where are you coming from? Really, if you’re living in America, there are so many people who have it harder. You can’t really compare, can you? Yes, he was so young. But there’s really nothing you can do. Nothing you can do.”

Fukiko decided to stay on in the house they’d bought in Cambridge, on Harvard Street. She had a few Japanese girlfriends nearby. She raised their son in Cambridge. He later attended Carleton College and then Harvard for his Masters and PhD in Biostatistics.

Fukiko is still very close with her husband’s mother, with whom she’s traveled extensively. She’s also close with her husband’s brother, who lives nearby. She often travels to the family rustic home outside Boston, which, until a recent drought, boasted a beautiful lake.

Fukiko took a couple of illustration courses, having had a long-term interest. One was at Massachusetts College of Art. For one of her courses, the homework assignment following the first day of class was to go home and write a story about a llama. “I don’t know the first thing about llamas! What was I supposed to write?” Fukiko said. She dropped out of the course. The other course, she finished. But she sees gardening as a better creative outlet these days than writing or illustration.

Fukiko lost a beloved friend somewhat recently. Her portrait in this show is of her in a shirt given to her by her friend. And, being herself, she brought a bag full of homemade cookies to this exhibition’s opening for me to enjoy.