Pacific Crossing

Pacific Crossing follows fourteen-year-old Mexican American Lincoln Mendoza as he spends six weeks with a host family in rural Japan, where he deepens his martial arts training, forms new friendships, and discovers unexpected similarities between his world and his hosts'.

The novel opens with Lincoln startled awake on a jumbo jet over the Pacific. Beside him sits Tony Contreras, his lifelong best friend and neighbor from the barrio, the Mexican American neighborhood in San Francisco where both boys grew up. Neither has flown before. Backstory reveals that after Lincoln and his mother moved back to San Francisco from a suburb where he had grown moody and fought at school, Lincoln discovered shorinji kempō, a Japanese martial art, at a Zen center he found after getting on the wrong bus. Tony quit after two months, but Lincoln advanced to sankyu, or brown-belt rank, in six months, and his grades improved. Then Mr. Ayala, the principal of Franklin Junior High, nominated both boys for a student-exchange program with Japan. Both mothers scraped together their share of the airfare from savings.

At the Tokyo airport, Lincoln meets his host father, Mr. Ono, a small, dignified man with rough hands and watery eyes. Mr. Ono drives Lincoln three hours to Atami, a farming village. Along the way, Lincoln notices that Mr. Ono's car has a buckled fender and that not everyone in Japan is wealthy, as he had assumed. They arrive at the Ono home, a small western-style house on a tiny farm, where Lincoln meets Mrs. Ono, who reminds him of his own mother, and their son Mitsuo, a strong boy Lincoln's age with closely cropped hair.

Lincoln's first full day sets the pattern for his weeks in Japan. He insists on helping in the eggplant field despite Mrs. Ono's objection that he is a guest. Though his relatives once worked as farmhands in California's San Joaquin Valley, field labor is new to Lincoln. That afternoon, Mitsuo takes him to a sentō, a public bathhouse, where the boys soak in a steaming tub. Mr. Ono joins them and cracks jokes, prompting Lincoln to revise his assumption that Japanese people are reserved. The boys try to sneak into a pachinko parlor, an adults-only pinball-game establishment, but are thrown out. When Mitsuo shows Lincoln the local kempō dojo, Lincoln is disappointed to find it is just a cement driveway and a patch of lawn.

Back at the house, Lincoln meets Mrs. Oyama, a woman sitting with the Onos on the engawa, the wooden porch. She asks about his martial arts training, and Lincoln brags about his rank. He tells the Onos his father is a police officer, omitting that his parents divorced and that he has not seen his father in years. At practice that night, he discovers that Mrs. Oyama is actually Oyama-sensei, the instructor. Mortified, he resolves never to boast again. She tells him a promotion is possible in six weeks, but he must shave his hair. Mitsuo reveals that Mr. Ono orchestrated the surprise as a joke.

The days settle into a rhythm of farm work, cultural exchange, and training. Lincoln explains that he is both Mexican and American, and he and Mitsuo compare family stories: Mitsuo claims samurai ancestry, while Lincoln's mother claims descent from Aztec warriors. Lincoln reunites with Tony, who is now wearing a yukata (a cotton robe) and geta (wooden sandals) with his head shaved, helping the Inaba family carve Buddhist statues. Lincoln proposes they cook a Mexican dinner for their host families. Mitsuo also takes Lincoln to his uncle's sword foundry, where they watch an apprentice forge a blade. Lincoln is awed to have met two genuine masters, one in kempō and one in sword making.

Mrs. Ono sends the boys to help Mrs. Nakayama, an elderly widowed neighbor, weed her overgrown garden. They labor for hours in the heat while the old woman watches from her porch, and she rewards them with only a bag of bruised peaches. That evening, Lincoln receives a letter from his mother complaining about car repairs and warning him not to embarrass her. He reads the Onos a fabricated version praising his intelligence and Mexican pride.

At dinner, Mr. Ono shares a story from World War II. His grandparents lived in Hiroshima and sent their children to the countryside for safety. His grandmother wrote weekly letters with little songs and sometimes a piece of gum. The letters stopped when the United States dropped the atomic bomb. Mr. Ono leaves the rest unspoken. Lincoln feels awful, but Mr. Ono reassures him, saying the exchange program exists so that Americans and Japanese can learn from each other. That night Lincoln practices with extra intensity, wanting to feel real pain.

After practice, Oyama-sensei asks Lincoln to come see her the next day. At her home, she gives him translated poems to edit, asking him to mark language that sounds wrong in English. His mother calls from San Francisco and cries as she says goodbye, leaving Lincoln homesick.

The Mexican dinner brings the Ono and Inaba families together, but the food is a disaster: hard tortillas, undercooked frijoles, and salsa that tastes like ketchup. The families politely eat everything. The boys, still hungry, sneak out for ice cream and return to find the adults have prepared a proper Japanese meal.

Mr. Ono takes Lincoln and Mitsuo camping on a mountain pilgrimage along a path of Buddhist shrines. The next morning, Mr. Ono discovers two swollen spider bites on his arm, and a monk warns he could die without treatment. They begin a hurried descent. Mr. Ono grows feverish, and the boys lance the bites with a sterilized knife to drain the infection. When Mr. Ono becomes too weak to walk, they drag him to the car. Lincoln, though only fourteen, drives down the winding mountain road, cracking the windshield but reaching the town of Ina, where Mr. Ono is hospitalized. He recovers with his arm in a sling.

Back home, Mr. Ono surprises the boys with tickets to a sumo wrestling tournament, then sends them on a scavenger hunt to find a hidden note in the Sumitomo Building in Tokyo. After a chaotic day of wrong stops and a confrontation with a bus driver, the boys find the note: a drawing of a clown, another of Mr. Ono's pranks.

With his nikkyu (second-rank) test approaching, Lincoln trains intensely, collecting bruises and a strained neck. Mitsuo and Mr. Ono shave his hair nearly bald. Lincoln and Mitsuo sit quietly on the engawa, aware they are about to part, and talk about Mitsuo visiting California. At the test, Lincoln performs his basic techniques well but stumbles on his embu, a prearranged attack form, falling face-first into the grass before recovering. He spars against a boy his age and takes hard blows but refuses to go down. He passes to nikkyu rank, two steps from black belt.

On the return flight, Lincoln reclines with a bruised eye and swollen lip, thinking about the gifts from his Japanese family and the tearful goodbye at the airport. Tony sleeps beside him. Lincoln looks out the window at the Pacific Ocean, thinking about his mother, his dog Flaco, the Onos, and Mitsuo, a brother from a different country. He reflects that no life could be better than the one he is living.