Month: April 2017

Language Acquisition, or the Endless Lie

Posted on by Kai Raine

One fateful day in second grade, I was at my rambunctious friend Snowy’s house with two other girls. We sat around a table and a question was asked of me in a teasing voice. I was mostly fluent in Japanese; I drew blanks much less frequently than I had even a year before. Still, I didn’t want to admit to not understanding the question at all. I couldn’t even try to make sense of a part of it to guess at its meaning.

So I turned to my friend Shino and asked her to answer first.

Snowy and I weren’t especially close at the time, having been in separate classes for over a year and not having spoken for most of first grade after she deemed me a liar unworthy of her time. Snowy and I had always been more of fellow outcasts than close friends anyway, so I’d recovered and found myself another friend.

We used to spend hours at her house, drawing different versions of the Sailor Senshi from the comic and animated show Sailor Moon. But her father had been transferred to Indonesia at the end of first grade and she’d moved away. I’d been alone again for a time.

Making friends was particularly hard in second grade, because the teacher weirdly singled out myself and one other girl as her “favorites.” I was selected because I was foreign. The other girl Belle was in voice training and had an amazing singing voice. She sang a capella to the entire school and parents at sports day and a few other occasions: a role created especially for her because she was such a talented singer.

I went to Belle’s house to play with her a few times, but we didn’t quite have the chemistry to become close friends. She also didn’t have that much time after school, since she took classes like calligraphy and voice. I may have even resented her a little for having been singled out for her talent, where I was only singled out because my existence was a novelty. Belle shone under that teacher’s wing. She was the first to learn to recite the multiplication table. Her penmanship was exquisite (and this was very important in schools I attended in Japan). She was poised. And she could sing. I, on the other hand, was never better than average in anything.

I floated around for a few months, playing with various classmates from time to time but never really developing a connection. Then I became friends with Shino. Shino was a sweet, pretty girl who had been in the same class as me for a year and a half by then. We had never had any noteworthy interaction that I could remember. I wasn’t socially conscious enough yet to be aware that she was fairly popular among the other children in our class.

One day in the second term of second grade, the two of us had just gotten off lunch duty, returning our class’s lunch tray to the kitchen. We started playing a game in the hallway, tagging each other and running to the other end of the hallway, then trying to run back without letting the other tag us. We weren’t supposed to be running indoors, and a teacher passing by scolded us, but laughingly and indulgently. We apologized to the teacher. We stopped running and started talking.

We became fast friends. Finally, I had someone that I could honestly call a friend.

There was a duplicity in Shino that I wasn’t wise enough to see at the age of eight. She was wonderful to be around when it was only the two of us. But when others were around—especially girls—she seemed to become more plastic: she smiled and was nice, but never stood up for me. It never occurred to me that this was odd.

So that day at Snowy’s house, when I turned the question to her, Shino smiled sweetly and redirected it to Snowy instead.

Snowy shrugged and gave the name of a boy in our class.

This was a boy I’d never taken any particular note of. He was extremely good at sports and among the fastest runners. He was always cracking jokes and wore flattened, blackened slippers, since he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to put his heels into the indoor uwabaki slippers we all wore inside. I’m going to call him Kasanova, Kas for short.

So Snowy named Kas.

“Oh really?” gasped Shino. “Kas for me, too!”

“Me too,” said the third girl. “Kas.”

Now it was my turn to answer, but I still had no idea what the question had been. All I knew was that all the other girls had named Kas.

So, “Me too!” I said, widening my eyes and looking between them. “Kas!”

And then as they began to talk about him, it dawned on me what the question had been: “Whom do you like like?”

The next day at school, during a study hour in the library, Snowy announced loudly, “Kaaas!! Kai likes you!!”

Kas glanced at me (he looked a little puzzled) and I ducked my head back into my book. He turned away, apparently completely unconcerned. The rest of the class snickered while the librarian shushed Snowy.

I was seething. You like him, I wanted to say. You and the others all like him! I couldn’t admit that I had lied. I couldn’t out the others, because that would make me just as bad as Snowy. Shino was there, laughing lightly along with the others, but sending me an apologetic look. The anger left me: I couldn’t expose her in front of everyone.

So I said nothing.

Oh well. I supposed I’d best like Kas, then.

For the next two years, even after my friendship with Shino was reduced to a pile of ashes, I maintained the fiction that I liked Kas. At some points, I even convinced myself that I liked him. He was athletic. The other girls liked him. It wasn’t a bad option. I liked Kas. Over two years later, on the very day I transferred to a new school in fourth grade, my “feelings” for Kas vanished and I only felt relieved. Even after two years of faking it, there still wasn’t a single drop of genuine feeling there.

Twenty years later, reminiscing over drinks, my friends Rilla, Windy and I realized that every single one of us lied to each other about who we liked in the third and fourth grades. We laughed and commented on the idiocy of our childish mindsets.

Congratulations, You’re a Mother! Wait, What?

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was sixteen going on seventeen, my family made one long, extensive trip to see many of our family and friends in Japan and the US. Because my parents had work and therefore less flexible schedules, they returned home to India first. But my sisters and I wanted more time on the trip, and our parents agreed that we could return a little later.

We would be flying back to Hyderabad from Chicago, with an overnight layover in Singapore. My mother had a friend in Singapore who would be meeting us there and taking us to the hotel where we’d be staying the night, then back to the airport in the morning. This was my first time flying alone without the unaccompanied minor service, though I don’t remember if this was because my parents had conceded to my argument that I was well-traveled enough to render it pointless, or because whichever airline we were using considered me too old to qualify. Either way, I was in charge with my twelve-year-old sisters in tow.

Our last stop was with my Italian godfather who lives in Chicago, who defies the combined stereotypes about Italians, godfathers and Chicago by leading a perfectly ordinary life and being a perfectly lovely person.* My godfather took us to the airport. He had intended to come through security with us, but they would not allow him through because his keys were too pointy; they also could not hold onto his keys for him, and of course he couldn’t simply abandon his keys. So we said our farewells at security and my sisters and I headed to our gate.

When we reached the gate, they were announcing that the flight was overbooked and asking everyone to come to the counter to check their bookings. I told my sisters to take a seat and took our boarding passes and passports to the counter. They asked me if we would be willing to rebook to fly to Singapore via Tokyo instead of Hong Kong.

I probably should have flatly said no, but the prospect of Japan was a lure of incomparable allure to me. Sure, we’d only been to Japan a few weeks prior. But I hadn’t been back for 3 years prior to that (it felt like an eternity at the time—how naive I was), and I didn’t know when I’d get to go back again (not for another 9 years, as it turned out). Even if we were only in the airport, even if it was only an hour or two, wouldn’t it be nice just to be able to speak Japanese a little more?

The lady behind the counter saw my hesitation and pounced. She spoke of vouchers to give us significant discounts off our next flights.

“Someone’s meeting us in Singapore,” I explained to her. “I don’t know how to contact him. We have to arrive at the time we said we would.”

“That’s not a problem,” she assured me. “The flight from Tokyo only arrives five minutes later than your current booking.”

I was still hesitant.

“I can give you seats together on the other flight,” she continued to hedge. “You would have to be seated separately otherwise.”

I folded.

I had one other reason for conceding. The flight was supposed to have the sort of layover in Hong Kong where some passengers disembarked and some new passengers embarked while the plane refueled, but everyone heading onwards to Singapore remained on the plane. My sisters were extremely susceptible to motion sickness, and a part of me thought that maybe it would be better if it was two shorter flights with a break to walk around an airport in the middle than to have one long flight with a break in which we had to remain in our seats. Whether or not I consulted my sisters’ opinions I don’t remember; but I suspect that in my teenage arrogance, I made the decision unilaterally.

She reprinted our boarding passes, gave me 3 discount vouchers and belatedly informed me that we had to hurry as the other flight was already boarding. So it was: all the way on the other side of the airport.

So I collected my sisters and we ran through the airport, back through the illuminated tunnel and reached our gate just as they were boarding the last stragglers. There we encountered a hitch: the lady who had reprinted our boarding passes had misprinted them. She had printed one of my sister’s names twice, and the other one not at all. After some brief confusion, the flight attendant realized that there were, indeed, 3 seats among us even if there were only 2 names. She let us on.

Once we reached Tokyo, I took the boarding passes to get reprinted with the correct name. We hung about in bookstores and concession stands in the airport while we waited for our connecting flight. My sisters were already not feeling well. After an objectively underwhelming, subjectively tantalizing hour or two in Tokyo, we boarded our next flight.

After we had boarded, one of my sisters informed me that she felt sick. The other one added that she did, too. I pushed the flight attendant call button. When the flight attendant arrived, I asked her if she had any sort of medication for motion sickness. There was a flurry of activity as flight attendants conferred with each other and peered with concern at my sisters, who were looking distinctly unwell. In particular one English-speaking man and one Japanese-speaking woman kept coming and asking more questions and expressing different concerns.

They had no medication, and there was talk of letting us off the plane if my sisters were too sick to fly. But my sisters decided that they could brave the trip and we took off, though the two flight attendants continued to keep an eye on us.

Now, as I have mentioned before, I looked far older than my age. (“She’s looked 32 since she was 12,” my mother used to say.) Meanwhile, my sisters did and still do look far younger than their age. They still tell me countless stories of odd looks and incredulous comments that they receive when trying to purchase alcohol, despite being over the legal age limit.

I had never specified to either flight attendant that these were my sisters, and in the stress of sitting between two ashen sisters, it didn’t occur to me to wonder at all the questions the Japanese-speaking stewardess was asking me about the difficulties of twins until she asked, “Is their father still around?”

I blinked. “Yes,” I said. At last it dawned on me that she thought I was their mother.

I continued conversing with her without missing a beat. Though I don’t recall outright lying, I never outright informed her that no, these were in fact my sisters, and she never seemed to catch on.

When we eventually landed, we were among the last to disembark, and then we all went to the bathroom. This meant that we were among the last to leave the secure area for our flight, and all passengers from the Hong Kong flight were long gone. Our mother’s friend had apparently been frantically calling our mother (who expressed a complete lack of concern and assured him that fifteen minutes was hardly cause for concern) and asking the airport personnel for information.

This adventure quickly rose to the ranks among favorite dinner table conversations in our family.

*Because this is the internet, I feel that I must make it absolutely clear that this is a joke: I don’t subscribe to any stereotypes about Italians, godfathers, Chicago or any combination thereof. My godfather, meanwhile, is in fact a perfectly lovely person.