Category: The Othered

The Different and the Same

Posted on by Kai Raine

“No one is born with prejudice,” I often hear. And while that is true, it does come with some caveats. No one is born racist, but most small children do grow accustomed to a certain set of physical characteristics that they frequently see, and can become alarmed upon meeting someone with different characteristics.

For me as an infant, it was men with beards and/or deep voices. My father’s voice isn’t very deep, and he’s chosen to present himself as clean shaven consistently since before I was born. Of my parents’ friends, most were also clean shaven and with higher voices. When the few with beards or deep voices attempted to approach me, my mother recounted, I would cry.

The community where we lived when I was born was a very, very white one. So perhaps it was inevitable that one girl of my age would scream bloody murder at the sight of my dark-skinned father—an action which led her embarrassed parents to suddenly realize they had somewhere else to be, as the story was recounted to me.

I never noticed the skin color difference until I was put into preschool at four years old.

There was a state-mandated inclusivity session for preschools, called “We’re all different, we’re all the same.” In this session, the teachers sat us all down and explained to us that everybody is the same, even if our hair color or eye color or skin colors are different.

I have no doubt that this is a session that was useful to some children, who had already noticed that there was a difference and started acting upon it. However, for me, it had the opposite effect.

I looked around, and for the first time, realized that all the children but me and one boy had white skin, and most of them even had blond hair and blue eyes. I had boring brown eyes; stupidly dark hair; and shamefully dark skin. Obviously, I realized, if they were telling us that we were actually all the same, that meant that we weren’t. That day, I went home and cried to my mother, asking why I couldn’t have her skin, hair and eye color.

My mother was furious, but had no idea what to do except try to explain to me that I was perfect as I was. (Not that it mattered. I’d already firmly decided that white skin, blue eyes and blond hair were the Ideal.) My mother remained so furious that over twenty years later, she wrote a lengthy letter to one of my preschool teachers, detailing the damage that that single session did to my psyche.

As it turned out, that teacher was already aware of the damage. She had colored grandchildren, who had gone through a similar experience, and lamented the state mandate for the inclusivity session that seemed to have the unfortunate effect of making visible minority children aware that they were minorities.

I’ve often pondered this. It took the better part of a decade for me to grow out of the idea that someday I might be able to change my looks for the better with plastic surgery.

Yes: in my early teens, I actually became more secure with my looks. I attribute it partly to losing interest: after nine years of mentally beating myself up for being what I was, alternating between avoiding mirrors and staring into them detailing all the physical characteristics that were “wrong”—first because I wasn’t white, and then because I wasn’t Japanese—I finally simply grew tired of the stress and resigned myself to what I was. It helped that there were bigger things to worry about regarding my appearance, like my horrid acne outbreaks and my awful habit of scratching at them until they bled rivers in the middle of class.

What I most regret—what terrifies me to confess about this whole debacle, was the way I treated others. Because I was so convinced that being dark skinned was bad, I shunned the child—namely the one boy in my preschool—who was darker than I. Because being dark was bad, but being associated with other dark children, in my mind, would have made it even worse, as if somehow my skin color might change by association.

I don’t have a solution to this sort of situation. I’m sure there are excellent programs out there. This is simply my story.

Variable Comforts

Posted on by Kai Raine

A Talk about “Writing Diverse Characters”

I gave a talk at the Japan Writers Conference about writing diverse characters. Like I said in my post leading up to the conference, I chose to go in with practically no preparation. I ended up so tense that I foolishly rehearsed talking about certain things—and those things were, predictably, the things I ended up wanting to talk about. I wanted to not prepare to avoid biasing myself in favor of certain topics, you see—but by rehearsing some things and not everything (which is of course impossible, since I couldn’t have known going in what people would want me to talk about), I biased myself in favor of talking about those things. For better or for worse.

Considering how much it stressed me out to try that format, and how I basically failed at my goal of giving a talk unbiased by my own preferences of topic, I was a little surprised that so many people seemed happy with the outcome.

The idea was that by asking people to introduce themselves early on, they would have a sense of which of each other to turn to, and I could also tailor what I talked about to what I thought it would help people to hear.

There are things I would do differently if I chose to do it again. But considering I felt like I had no idea what I was doing going in, I think it went pretty well!

There’s one thing I didn’t get to that I regret: talking a little about bias. I said that I operate by trying to understand my own biases, and the way that I think, and trying to balance that out. (Edit: I do intend to make a less personal post eventually, with links to more resources! This is not that, though if you follow the links below, some do lead to resources that may end up referenced in that post, as well.)

It’s a simplistic explanation of a complicated subject, so I’m going to write a post, now, explaining some facet of my mindset.

Discomfort in Comfort

The bottom line of what I’m about to describe is simple: I’m not comfortable being comfortable.

In essence, I suppose I try as much as possible to be aware that I’m only 1 of 8,000,000,000. I’m nearly nothing; and in fact, I aspire to be nothing—to be a blank canvas on which any story can write itself.

Obviously, that’s impossible. Complete absence of personality and preference and bias is probably unhealthy. Probably, everybody has a degree to which they’re comfortable leaving their own skin in their minds; a point beyond which things start to feel wrong.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I live in a state where almost everything feels just a little bit “wrong”. I don’t know if it’s a factor of how I grew up—always an outsider, always the Other. I don’t know if it’s because of the mind games my cognitive scientist father played with me as a child—teaching me to exercise my imagination. I don’t know if it’s a predisposition, or PTSD, or maybe even a benign temporary state that I will grow out of.

Whatever the case, nothing makes me more uncomfortable than feeling like people are trying to accept me into their “group”. It’s not that I don’t want to be in a group; it’s not even that I don’t join the group.

But I am conscious of the group thinking; of any points where it becomes us vs them; of the ways that I adapt to the group. I’m also always conscious that the very same process that brings us closer together is also driving us further away from the rest of the world.

From a more selfish perspective, I’m also aware of the fact that the group might, at some point, decide—with good reasons that my mind can easily produce—that I don’t really belong.

Flexible Opinions

Opinions, to me, are just things in a box that I carry around. Sure, there are some that I’m more attached to than others, but I see them as tools in the constant search for better ones. So I’m that annoying person who, when surrounded by people all echoing the same opinion, will ask for an explanation from another viewpoint in order to see how this opinion is expanded and defended.

I have been conscious of and highly suspicious of my “brain holes” as well as everyone else’s, to the extent that I start to simply set myself at opinions opposed to whatever I’m reading or whomever I’m talking to, if the person or writing seems too ingrained in one particular perspective. If I catch myself thinking, “This just sounds right,” I immediately go looking for data to disprove it—or, if I don’t have time for that, just find a counterpoint opinion and send my mind to time-out over there.

Often, I end up debating these opinions I’ve randomly selected on a sort of a reflex—I’ve taken this stance, and feel I must defend it.

It’s not a lie, exactly, because I believe it’s my opinion in the moment. But these come and go so quickly—in a matter of days or hours, sometimes.

This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m always out for a debate. That gets exhausting. And there are times when I want validation. But then I usually go to people whose honesty I trust, and sometimes tell them that I’m feeling vulnerable and don’t want opposition.

So there are settings where I want and maybe even need validation.

That preface is a counterpoint to my next generalization: verbal validation in particular can make me feel uncomfortable, in some settings. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I’m so at ease with the idea that some people really don’t understand or like TLTLBU; I’m more comfortable trying reading or listening to someone’s thoughts to try and understand what put them off my writing than I am simply accepting that someone really liked my writing.

So…What?

So what? What’s the point of any of this? Am I saying people should try to be like me? No. Of course not. I think the world takes all sorts of people to function, and if everyone thought like me…yikes.

I’m not sure what the point is, actually.

Someone said that good writing comes from extremes, and I should be trying less to be balanced.

Maybe that’s true. There are certainly ways to interpret those words—not necessarily how they were intended—in a way that would be productive.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention in this post that I’m a recovering codependent: I used to use my flexibility of mind to mould my thoughts as closely as possible against another person’s, whom I liked. This doesn’t mean I’d just agree blindly with everything they’d say; but I’d find an angle that worked for me that was mostly in alignment with other people I liked—or, often, in alignment with what they thought I did or should believe. I couldn’t tell you which came first—my malleable mind or my codependent tendencies.

But the keyword there is recovering. That is no longer who I am.

So who am I, really? What lies at the core of all this malleability? I’m honestly not sure. I used to think there was nothing there. I’m starting to realize that there is a person there; but right now, all I know about her is that she doesn’t like thinking in absolutes, and she likes trying to understand people on a deeper level than mere surface logic.

I only just realized a few months ago that I think in specifics but often speak in generalizations. I used to think that this was what everyone did—until I realized that some people genuinely seem to think of certain things (usually places and people and other things they’re not familiar with) in generalizations. I’m not sure what to do with that. I feel like if I were speaking in specifics, I’d come off as extremely pedantic, and be tedious. (I don’t just mean I’d be tedious to listen to—I mean I’d be tedious talking.)

I don’t know what to do with it, but it’s a new fact about me that I know am aware of—and in being aware of it, I’m also aware that this isn’t necessarily the case for others.

But not knowing who I am beyond a few things doesn’t hurt my writing—it’s a factor that can (and does) help bring it to life.

The Inappropriate Song—or, How My Childhood Mind Thought in Absolutes

Posted on by Kai Raine

–Note: This blog post uses fake names for real people to protect their privacy.–

A few days ago, I woke up and scrolled through my music library for a song I felt like writing to.

I landed on Fukai Mori, or “The Deep Forest” by Do As Infinity. As I listened to the lyrics, I realized that this was the first time in seventeen years that I was letting myself enjoy this song without shaming or judging myself for it.

Not because there’s actually anything wrong with the song—but because of something that happened in school when I was eleven years old, and the way that I interpreted it.

I was in fifth grade, and was required to join a school committee. There were several, including the health and gym committee, the environmental committee, the student council, and the announcement committee. The idea was that each committee had certain responsibilities, but also a certain leeway to choose what they wanted to do, as long as it was somewhat in the purview of their committee.

I joined the broadcasting committee. I didn’t care at all about broadcasting, but I very much was an indoor child. Most of the other committees had responsibilities that involved going outside (such as the health and gym committee, or the environmental committee). But most of the broadcasting committee’s responsibilities were limited to sitting at the soundboard in the broadcasting room. We got to play the designated good morning song at 8 every morning, and the designated goodbye song at the end of school hours ever afternoon. During lunch hour, we got to play DJ and broadcast whatever music we felt like. When necessary, we would make announcements. At the end of the school year, we broadcasted live interviews with individuals of the graduating class during lunch hour.

The point is, I liked the idea of responsibilities that were largely limited to sitting in a room, playing music.

Now, one of the first things on the agenda that year was to change the designated goodbye song, which hadn’t changed in the last 6 years. Being a recent transfer, I was disappointed—I very much liked the existing goodbye song.

Ever the opinionated child, I voiced this thought. I was immediately overruled, though not unkindly.

“We get it—it’s new to you. But the rest of us have been listening to this song every single school day since the first grade. We’re sick of it.”

We nominated songs we liked and took a vote. Being that it was the goodbye song, the nominations tended to be songs that were on the slower, more subdued side of the spectrum.

The song that won with an overwhelming majority was Fukai Mori: the song that started off this blog post.

As our president declared that decision made, the two teachers chaperoning our meeting started conferring in low voices. Shortly after, the vice principal stepped forward.

“Listen,” he said gravely. “I’m sorry, but I have to object that song. Normally, I wouldn’t do this. We want you to make your own decisions for yourselves, and we want to respect the choices you make. But Ms. Yokohama and I think that maybe you don’t understand that song, and why it’s inappropriate as the daily goodbye song. So I’m going to explain why we think you should choose something else.”

He proceeded to write out the lyrics of the first verse on the blackboard.

深い深い森の奥に　今もきっと In the depths of the deep, deep forest
置き去りにした心　隠してるよ Lie the abandoned hearts hidden there
探すほどの力もなく　疲れ果てた The exhausted people have no strength to search
人々は永遠の闇に消える And fade into eternal darkness

Having written this out, he turned back to us and asked, “Can anyone here explain what the word ‘abandoned’ means?”

We were silent. I knew the word from a book. It had been about a girl who’d met a man who promised to marry her, then “abandoned” her. It just meant left behind, I thought.

Now, under umbrella of the teacher’s disapproval, I tried to understand if I’d misunderstood the word. Did it mean that something “inappropriate” had happened before the man left? I wondered. My mind exploded into possible stories, based on what I assumed to be “inappropriate”: I assumed that the word meant toilet stuff, violence or sex.

The teacher went on to define the word, and explain the lyrics. I’m pretty sure I was only half digesting what he was saying, already lost as I was down the rabbit hole that is my single-minded brain.

It was only the other day as I listened to the song that for the first time, I realized that the word I didn’t understand wasn’t abandonment. It was the word inappropriate.

Fukai Mori a nice enough song. There’s no “bad language” or rudeness or meanness in the lyrics. It’s simply that they’re a little fatalistic and depressing.

The teacher wasn’t telling us we shouldn’t listen to it, or even broadcast it. We’d played it during lunch break before—probably several times, given that this was during the height of that song’s popularity—and no one had ever said anything about it. We didn’t play it again after this—but maybe that was because we were all a little embarrassed by having to be lectured by our teacher about why a song about how life takes everything away from you, leaving behind nothing but deception and lies, is inappropriate as a daily goodbye song, especially considering the impression it might leave on the first and second graders.

I got caught up in the rabbit hole of my own mind, and misunderstood the problem. I thought in absolutes, and if a song was inappropriate as a goodbye song, then I thought it must be inappropriate in general. But I believe I might have been the only one with that hang-up.

The teacher didn’t even veto the song. He explained to us why he thought it was a bad idea, and asked us to vote again. It was the president of our committee, a serious bespectacled sixth grader whom I couldn’t help but admire, who stepped up after the teacher was done and vetoed Fukai Mori before taking a new vote on the remaining songs.

To be completely honest, I don’t even remember what song we did vote for. I only remember that for years afterwards, I couldn’t enjoy Fukai Mori because I was convinced that it was this shameful thing, even though I couldn’t exactly explain why.

It’s interesting to think that I understood exactly what the lyrics meant on a surface level, but it never occurred to me to look deeper, and consider the dark implications and the impressions that might leave on young children if they heard those words everyday and internalized them. So what if small children hear that life takes everything away and just leaves you with lies and emptiness? I thought. It’s true. That couldn’t possibly be the root of the problem—there must be some weird violent or sexual subtext to the word “abandonment.” (I was a precocious child, already diving headlong into the teenage angst phase.)

Now, seventeen years later, letting go of that weird, misunderstood hangup and simply permitting myself to enjoy the song, I think…

It’s okay. Nothing amazing. A little too teen-angst-y for me now. But there’s nothing wrong with some good angst. It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. It never was.

Unexpected Comfort Gauge: the Bathroom Metric

Posted on by Kai Raine

Over the years, the recurring conversations that I’ve had have not always been the obvious ones.

One of the more surprising recurring conversations is that on the cleanliness of bathrooms.

“Why are American Bathrooms So Dirty?”

When I was five, and had just moved to Japan, there was a girl at my preschool who became my friend. She was loud and rowdy, and one of the first things she did was lead me into the bathroom, where we opened every stall one by one. The stalls were small, with little preschooler-sized toilets, and did not have locks on them. So we opened each one, regardless of whether there was someone inside, screamed, “Benjo!” (a rude term for “toilet”) and slammed the door, moving on to the next stall.

I’ll call this girl Snowy. Snowy was born in the US, but her parents moved back to Japan while she was still an infant. She had no memory of living there, though she did recall a visit or two.

One day, Snowy inexplicably had an outburst.

“Why are American bathrooms so dirty?” she asked me.

At that point, I’d been living in Japan for a year or so. I’d used all sorts of bathrooms: seated and squatting, old and new, clean and filthy.

Still, when she said that, four specific bathrooms came to my mind. The pristine bathrooms of my grandmother’s house, and the old, shabby-looking (but clean) bathroom of our apartment. Then I thought of the old, dirty, squatting bathroom I’d used in the baggage claim area of Narita Airport, and the clean, seated bathroom I’d used when we were at Niagara Falls.

So, “American bathrooms aren’t dirty,” I countered at once. “Japanese bathrooms are dirty!”

“No they’re not!” she shouted. “Japanese bathrooms are clean! American bathrooms are dirty!”

War commenced. We argued until the teacher intervened. I don’t remember what she said. I do remember that the bathroom question was one we never resolved.

The Moral of the Story is…

My mother and I read a lot of Chicken Soup books back in the 90s, volumes that we would laboriously bring over from the US, or occasionally receive in packages from friends and family.

There was one particular story—I would guess that it was in Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul—that I remember with particular clarity.

It was a story about two children arguing over a sphere.

“It’s black,” said one child, standing on one side of the sphere.

“No, it’s white,” said the other, standing on the other side.

They argued until the teacher came and picked them up, and moved each of them to the other side of the sphere.

“Now what color is it?” asked the teacher.

“White,” said the first child.

“Black,” said the other.

This story confused me. Why were they so determinedly standing on opposite sides of the sphere? Why did they never attempt to move to the other side?

It was a stupid story, I thought.

I remembered this fight I had with Snowy about the bathrooms. Now, if only that fight had been so easily solved by moving a few steps, I thought.

For some reason, the story of the sphere and my fight with Snowy became entwined in my memory anyway. Years later, I finally understood that we were simply generalizing based on a few limited experiences. I’d seen a few dirty bathrooms in Japan, and she’d seen a few dirty bathrooms in America, and we’d decided that this was how it always is—even though I, at least, had definitely seen clean bathrooms in Japan, too.

Somehow, the dirty bathrooms had expanded through my consciousness, until it seemed suitable to define an entire country by them.

It took me even longer to see that there was a reason the story of the sphere had stuck to that memory. Metaphorically, the two had always been the same story.

Deja Vu: Italian Bathrooms

23 years after Snowy and I railed at each other over whether American or Japanese bathrooms were dirtier, I was sitting in a bar drinking with a handful of my Japanese friends. One of them was a sweet girl whom I’ll call Casta, and she was talking about her honeymoon in Italy.

“That must’ve been nice,” said another girl, whom I’ll call Lapis.

“Oh, but the bathrooms there are so dirty,” said Casta.

“Really?” blinked Lapis.

I snorted into my drink. “It depends on the bathroom,” I said lightly, thinking of all the bathrooms I used during the year I lived in Italy.

“Oh, it was so bad,” said Casta, almost gleefully. “I couldn’t believe how dirty they were.”

“I guess that’s how it is overseas,” said another friend, a guy I’ll call Shin.

“It depends on the bathroom,” I said again, a little more emphatically.

“Yeah,” Casta agreed, looking at Shin, not me. “That definitely wouldn’t happen in Japan.”

“It depends on the bathroom,” I said yet again, but it didn’t matter.

Shin was launching into his anxieties about his upcoming honeymoon to Australia—his first time overseas, and the place being his wife’s choice, not his.

He railed at the prospect of dirty bathrooms in foreign countries.

I listened for a while without arguing, because suddenly, I understood. This wasn’t about the bathrooms. It never had been. It wasn’t even about countries.

It was about discomfort, or unhappiness.

The Bathroom Metric as a Comfort Gauge

When I was a child and a teenager, my parents—as most traveling parents do—planned trips without consulting me or my sisters.

There were a few trips in particular that we made in India when I was a teenager, that I desperately didn’t want to go on. From those trips, I mainly remember grimacing at dirty bathrooms in the places where we stayed.

Perhaps, I realized, when we are unhappy or uncomfortable and looking for something to blame, a dirty bathroom is the perfect outlet. Disgust at a dirty bathroom is totally understandable, and easy to express. It’s a thing we can look at and say to ourselves, “See? Of course I’m unhappy. Look at this place!”

It’s an explanation that means we don’t have to look inward at ourselves.

Unhappiness, of course, can from anywhere. It comes from families, or marriages, or friendships, or self-loathing. It often throws us off-balance if we realize that things that we always took for granted, opinions we always thought were common sense, are actually entirely up for debate.

Traveling—or moving—is one of those strange actions that can force us to stare these unhappinesses in the face. Routine, home and the familiar give us all the nooks and crannies to stuff our problems away like we’re teenagers hiding secrets from our parents. But traveling strips all those things away, and suddenly we can see the problems we’d forgotten about.

When we suddenly are faced with misery—of course it’s easier to look at a dirty bathroom and say, “See? This is how this place is, and that’s why I’m miserable,” perhaps conveniently ignoring the dirty bathrooms we’ve seen elsewhere that we didn’t expand to define an experience or a country.

Of course, this gauge is predicated on encountering a dirty bathroom, which is objectively an unpleasant experience. One might still complain about a dirty bathroom one had to use despite enjoying a trip overall. Complaining about a dirty bathroom isn’t, by itself, a predictor.

But when that experience is part of someone’s description of an entire country? Then it would seem that one has some dissatisfaction with the country, or the trip, that one desperately wants to express somehow.

The Country of Unbearably Spicy Food

But what if there is no dirty bathroom to blame?

When I was seven, we also made a week-long family trip to China. I was miserable. My parents were both attending a conference, so a strange woman babysat us. But my sisters didn’t like her much—perhaps they couldn’t understand her English through her accent—so I ended up looking after them. I liked taking care of them on occasion, but after the first day, I was tired and bored. We had to stay in the apartment all day, and there was nothing to do. My sisters were two at the time, and equally unhappy, which contributed to my frustration.

I was in the throes of my horse-obsession then, so at the end of our trip, my mother bought me a beautiful hand-carved wood decoration of two horses galloping majestically through a wave-like design. I loved the horses, but the trip was engraved into my memory with misery anyway.

Perhaps all the bathrooms we encountered were clean, because I don’t remember them. What I do remember is one evening when I was particularly hungry, but the food was so spicy I could hardly stand it. I was hungry enough to force it down, but I didn’t enjoy it.

And so for over a decade, China remained in my memory The Country of Unbearably Spicy Food.

I even almost forgot the misery of being stuck in an apartment taking care of my also-unhappy sisters. After my mother’s death, I was looking at my horse carving, trying to decide whether it was worth trying to keep it.

One of my sisters recalled being frustrated that I was the only one to get a gift like that.

And suddenly, I remembered:

My sisters crying when our mother bought me the carving, because they wanted to get something too.

My mother explaining to them that this was a special gift, because I’d been a good big sister to them.

I felt delight at hearing that—delight that I attached to the horse carving alone. Meanwhile, the one night of spicy food continued to define my entire food experience in China—and, at times, China itself.

Back to the Bar…

Casta and Shin were deep in rapture about the dangers of international travel, gushing about the comforts of Japan.

I listened to this for a little while in silence. I felt I could see Shin’s fear and insecurity in his new marriage. Casta was a romantic soul in an arranged marriage, so that her honeymoon was not a blissful getaway did not surprise me. On both counts, I sympathized with them.

I decided to discuss the literal level of the conversation anyway.

“You’re talking about the bathroom at the place where you stayed, right?” I asked Casta. She nodded. “Not everywhere has dirty bathrooms.”

“Sure,” Shin countered. “But there’s no way to know that stuff before you go.”

“There are review sites online,” I countered back. “When you look for a hotel, find one of those review sites, and read some of the reviews. If there’s something like dirty bathrooms, there’ll be reviews that say so.”

Casta and Shin stared at me, as if I’d just blown their minds.

Again, I sympathized, because in a way, I figured I had. I’d taken away an excuse they had to justify their feelings—for the night, at least. Memory is a funny thing, and perhaps the next day they went right back to thinking as they had been before.

A Final Note

It’s a dangerous thing, presuming to know how other people feel. I don’t actually know what Snowy, Casta or Shin were thinking or feeling. Mostly, I’m just guessing at the root of their complaints. It’s not impossible that one or more of them is just particularly clean or even germaphobic, and complaints of dirty bathrooms were, truly, about nothing more than dirty bathrooms.

However, such complaints of my own have never been at the roots of any such unhappiness I’ve experienced over the years. Such complaints for me—and there have been many, increasing in complexity as I’ve gotten wiser to the tricks of my own mind and confusing myself has become a more elaborate process—were always a short-lived band-aid over some underlying unhappiness.

Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps it’s just a prevalent mentality in Japanese culture.

But when I look outwards, that’s what I see.

At the end of the day, I just find it funny that it so often comes back to dirty bathrooms.

Belonging: My Greatest Love Story

Posted on by Kai Raine

Recently, I’ve read Born a Crime and One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Both collections of very personal essays. Both very resonant with me, personally. Both with very strong themes about belonging in a society where the authors are seen as Other.

I used to want nothing more than to belong.

As a child, it seemed like the most beautiful, magical thing, belonging somewhere.

I felt it in preschool in Massachusetts, when a lesson meant to teach tolerance instead made me realize that I was one of only two nonwhite children in the whole school.*

I felt it through my childhood in Tokyo, where my oddness was made fun of by everyone from my Japanese classmates to the children attending the American School, whom we saw at the church we attended; where people would stare at me openly in the streets and people at cash registers would look at me in horror at the thought that they might have to speak English.

Our vacations in the US started out as a refuge, but grew worse and worse year after year as the summer schools my parents sent me to only served to highlight how I didn’t belong here, either. I was often confused. Knowledge was assumed of me that I didn’t have—like what the pledge of allegiance even was, much less the words to it. It usually ended with me having at most one friend, and otherwise ostracized.

I was often angry. I cried a lot. I blamed the world, and sometimes my parents, for robbing me of a place to belong, which I thought I deserved. I daydreamed of a place to belong, or when that seemed too far-fetched, at least some imaginary perfect person with whom I could belong.

And now?

I can belong most anywhere—some places more than others. I look at my childhood fantasies as just that: fantasies. And like all childhood fantasies, they can come true—but not in the form imagined as a child.

 

The Myth of Belonging

Three years ago, I lived in Germany and was frequently visiting the Bay Area in California.

I didn’t know much about California at the time. My experiences living in the US were mainly Buffalo and Fairbanks, with a sprinkling of memories of a happy childhood in suburban Massachusetts.

Still, based on those years of experiences, I had one general certainty: I did not want to live in the US.

So it was a little alarming to me that I kept finding myself in conversations with people offering to help me find a job in California.

This was before I dropped out of my PhD program in Germany. I had a steady income—not a lot, but enough that I could save about 500 Euros a month if I lived frugally, which I did. I had great health insurance. I loved the city I lived in. My personal life was at the start of a downward spiral, but that couldn’t be mitigated no matter where I lived.

Yet I was perceived to be lacking something that could only be gained by moving to California. It was disconcerting.

I was slow to learn that there was nothing to be gained by trying to explain my perspective. My explanations were almost always taken as a personal challenge, or insult. If I said I didn’t enjoy living in the US, I was asked to explain why; but my explanations were usually met with “But it’s not like that here,” or “But I’ve never experienced that,” or even “But that’s such a generalization.”

Needless to say, arguing does not usually result in one person adopting the other person’s experience over their own. And that’s all it was: a dissonance of my experiences to those of others.

At one point, one person graced me with the frankest, most honest version of this conversation, which was the most enlightening in hindsight:

“You know, my brother works at this company in your field,” she was saying to me, “I can refer you to him, and you can apply for a job there.”

“I’m not really looking to live here,” I replied awkwardly. “And I mean, there’s still no end in sight to my PhD…”

“But you wouldn’t need one to work there,” she enthused. “They hire people out of their bachelor’s and master’s all the time. And you can always do a PhD through them!”

“I don’t think I’d like that. I’m happy where I am.”

She looked at me incredulously. “But you’re in Germany!”

I blinked. “Yes.”

“You’re an outsider.”

I stared at her. “I’m no less an outsider here,” I said.

She grew agitated. “But you can belong here! I mean, you’re American! And anyone can be accepted here, anyone can belong.”

“I can belong in Germany,” I said.

She was really agitated now. “You can’t,” she told me firmly. “You’ll never be German.”

I started to tell her that I was pretty sure that there are ways to get German citizenship, and she cut me off.

“Yes, but they’ll never really accept you. You’ll never be German like they are. Not like here. Here, anyone can belong. Everyone is equal.”

I don’t remember how the conversation ended. Maybe I continued arguing, or maybe I shut my mouth and fumed in silence. I remember the bitterness in my mouth, and the sting of angry tears. I remember what I didn’t say, even as the memories cluttered my mind: horrible things I’ve heard Americans say about immigrants who’d gotten US citizenship. Horrible things I’ve heard Americans say to and about me when they realize that I might look like an American and talk like an American, but I don’t think like one.

It was such a source of frustration at the time. I felt attacked and lonely, like my face was being rubbed in a reality where I can’t ever belong anywhere. That my best bet would be to pretend at belonging in the US until the act felt real.

Here’s the secret I’ve since discovered how to articulate: belonging is only a fraction about whether people accept you. It’s really mostly about you, and your relationship with that place.

 

The Death of Homesickness

I grew up in the suburbs of west Tokyo. I’m living here again now, as of last week. It’s been fifteen years since I lived here. Fifteen years of living in place after place that either became my home, or didn’t.

In these fifteen years, my reserve of homesickness was painfully drained, squeezed to the last drop, and then squeezed some more until that very capacity shriveled up and crumbled to dust. I don’t feel homesickness anymore. When I leave Japan, I have no strong longing to return. I never feel any longing to return anywhere. I’m either happy where I am and I want to stay, or I’m not happy where I am and I want to get away.

This happened because Japan was my home. It was the home where I was not allowed to belong, to which on my return, even my friends tended to highlight my foreignness, expressing surprise when I would say that Japan was what I thought of as home. Yet circumstances conspired to give me a 9-year period during which I could not even visit—during which I frequently went without speaking Japanese for months at a time. There may have even been a solid year in there when the Japanese language was entirely absent from my life.

Over the 9 years, the ache grew, at first. The last time I’d visited Japan had been 3 years after the time before that—an interval that seemed cruelly long at the time. I felt certain that somehow, I would not have to wait more than another 3 years. Those 3 years came and went, and I didn’t visit. I was in university, up to my ears in debt. I thought about applying to grad school in Hokkaido University and emailed a professor, who was not exactly encouraging.

I went to grad school in Italy instead. When I wanted to do an internship, I searched for something in Japan and found nothing appropriate. So I went to Namibia, then to Germany.

I started my PhD and was too poor—both in money and time—to plan any sort of trip to anywhere, much less Japan. My supervisor was excited about my bilingualism, and asked me to email a partner lab in Japanese. I did so. Uncertain of the level of formality required between professional adults, never having been an adult in Japan, I went full throttle with the formality. Though we did keep up a correspondence and had no trouble understanding each other, they said to my supervisor when they next saw him that my Japanese was quite odd. He related this to me, and I instinctively blamed it on typical Japanese xenophobia. The shame was immediate, and in its wake, I was resigned. Perhaps this was not my identity, after all.

It was the seventh year when I started to feel that part of me die. The ache and yearning I’d felt deepening and intensifying year after year began to dry. Increasingly, I just didn’t care anymore.

I stopped trying to keep up with my Japanese friends. I stopped going out of my way to find Japanese books to read. Most of the time, I thought of Japan with a vague sense of past love.

By the eighth year, I no longer claimed I was from Japan. I’d say I was from America, when asked. Never mind that I couldn’t identify as American. I couldn’t identify as anything anymore, and American seemed as good as anything. At least I had the passport to make my case, and what else matters?

In the ninth year, I seriously considered not even bothering coming back. I was fine now, I thought. What if it turns out I’ve forgotten my Japanese? What if it doesn’t feel like home anymore? What if after I leave, the homesickness just comes back at full blast? How can I go through that again?

Obviously, something else won out and I made that visit anyway. None of my fears came to fruition. My Japanese was still fully intact, if a bit rusty. It still felt like home, a marvelous feeling that I hadn’t even remembered I’d forgotten. And after I left, the homesickness was numb and gone in a matter of weeks.

Thus began a pattern. I would come for a visit, remember how much I loved it, try to find a way to stay, fail, leave, and forget about it until I came back again. This until eventually, I found something, and got to come back for real.

 

Home — The Reality

So I’m home now. It’s lovely. People I know welcome me home. People I don’t know treat me like a visitor, at first. And it’s fine.

I’ve been here ten days, working out bureaucracy, and this is a dialogue that I’ve been having, in some variation, on a daily basis:

They begin speaking in English.

I respond in Japanese (either responding or asking them to repeat themselves in Japanese).

The conversation continues in Japanese.

At some point, they say to me, “My, your Japanese is really good!”

I respond, “Thank you, I grew up here.”

Sometimes, they continue praising my linguistic skill, comparing me to foreign residents who don’t speak the language. I listen politely. Sometimes, they give me a look that makes me wonder if they think I’m lying. I ignore this, they ignore my “lie,” and the conversation moves on. And sometimes, they accept my explanation with haste after that moment of surprise, even apologizing for their remarks. To this, I tell them there is no need and sometimes apologize back.

At one time, that third reaction would have made me happy. Now, the contrition makes me feel guilty for making them feel bad when they were only trying to be helpful; I wonder if I shouldn’t have just played the foreigner and gone on speaking English. Sadly, the reality is this: I’m terrible at understanding Japanese English accents, because in all my life I’ve almost never spoken in English with a Japanese person.

(I had a Japanese roommate in my last semester of university. Recently, I met her and we had dinner with my father. During the dinner conversation that consisted of much English, we realized that we’d never really spoken with each other in English before, in all the time we’ve known each other.)

This happens on the phone, too. Conversations progress normally up until the moment when I have to give my name, at which point there is a pause of surprise, followed by a tentative, “And who is it I’m speaking to?” or a knee-jerk, “What country are you from?”

And it’s all fine. It’s repetitive, but unsurprising. None of this detracts from any sense of belonging for me. Strangers’ reactions carry almost no emotional weight for me—at most, a drop of frustration that quickly dissipates. Trying to spell my name over the phone is a far bigger frustration. (My real name, not my penname. My real name is a nightmare to spell and to pronounce in every language I know—hence the penname.)

I know that I belong, and my friends know that I belong. That’s more than enough.

The town where I grew up is far more diverse than it was when I was a child. Walking down the street on the average day, I almost always see someone who looks distinctly not-Japanese. It’s a far cry from the days when every morning one April that I was on time walking to school, I would inevitably pass the same preschooler waiting for his bus with his mom, who would point and shout, “Look, it’s a foreigner!”

But I’ve changed, too. Belonging isn’t something I’m waiting to have bestowed upon me, like some gift society can give me. It’s something I find for myself. It’s fragile and not necessarily everlasting, but beautiful and precious while it lasts.

In many ways, my new life is a poetic echo of my childhood dreams. As a child, I lived in an apartment in an ugly old concrete building with a sinking ceiling and sections of rotting floor, on the third floor, in the second apartment from the right. (My mother described it in the kindest, tamest language she could, which was “seemed to be literally falling apart.”) I desperately wanted to live somewhere nicer, preferably one where the outer façade looked like bricks.

Now I live in a lovely apartment building with a brick façade, on the third floor, in the second apartment from the right. Those childhood yearnings aren’t mine anymore, but I remember them. I know that little me would have been happy to know that one day, she would live in this place, in an apartment just like she’d dreamed. I’m very much aware that I’m living her dream. I even have no trouble belonging here, this time.

To me, it’s an amazing thing when a love long gone can be reignited years later, changes wrought by time only having made the two parties more inclined to fall in love again. So it is now amazing to see this love come alive again, even if one party is myself and the other is a little suburban town.

And I belong.

*My enlightened-preschooler sense of race revolved primarily around skin color, so I’m pretty sure that far-east Asians would have counted as “white,” though I’m not sure if there were any.

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Why I Vote Now—And Why I Didn’t in the Past

Posted on by Kai Raine

This is not going to be a sermon on why we should all vote. I want this to be clear from the get-go. As I state in the title, I haven’t voted in the past, despite being eligible to do so. I don’t regret that decision in any way—nor do I regret the choice I eventually made to register and vote. I’m not here to offer judgement or advice—just my story.

As a Child…

Civic duty and patriotism weren’t exactly subjects of discussion in my home, growing up. Civic duty was a thing I learned in school, but in the context of Japan—and being the only non-Japanese there, there was a silent understanding that I was an outside observer in these duties.

I would be an adult before I would be able to see how my parents’ views guided and confused mine, because my parents’ views were never explained to me. My father is a naturalized US citizen, but never expressed any particular attachment, neither to the US nor to India where he was born and raised. His naturalization, he once explained to me, was simply a practical decision when I was born—better that everyone in the family share a nationality. My mother was born and raised in the US, and so civic duty was important to her—but in a way that seemed so obviously common sense to her that she never vocalized it until I completely derailed from her expectations of common sense.

We learned in school that it was important to stay abreast of the news, but my family did not have Japanese newspapers delivered to us—we had an English newspaper. We didn’t watch TV. Our newspaper was our source of news, and it appeared to be geared toward the more internationally-minded. So the news I would read about would not be the same news my classmates would read about. Reading Japanese newspapers would have been extremely difficult for me as a third- fourth- and fifth-grader, with too many characters I didn’t know how to read yet, and no one at home to help me. It seemed that reading our English newspaper only highlighted my otherness more than it already was on a daily basis—so I quickly decided not to bother with it at all.

When my mother occasionally freaked out about news, distressed and hand-wringing, I watched with a detached bewilderment. When Bush was elected in 2000, I was baffled at my mother’s frustration over some leadership dispute an ocean away in another world. When 9/11 happened, my mother was beside herself, panicking and rushing to make phone calls.

“But do we know anybody in New York?” I asked, confused.

“No,” my mother snapped tersely.

“But then why are you so upset? This sort of stuff happens all the time,” I said, thinking of the then-ongoing genocide in Sudan, which had been in the papers for months and had a much higher death toll than this one attack in New York.

My mother called me spoiled in a tone I’d never heard from her before. I shut my mouth and judged her for so unabashedly prioritizing strangers in New York over strangers in Sudan.

As a Teen…

Eventually, I moved to the US. Still my understanding of politics was limited.

In high school in Buffalo, NY, I finally dared to ask the meaning of these strange variations on the words democracy and republic. A classmate kindly explained it to me, with the air of someone glad to be in the position of knowledge, but confused at this basic lack of understanding in me.

“It’s like, if you’re a democrat, you believe in abortion and not the death penalty. If you’re a republican, you believe in the death penalty and not abortion.”

“But what if I believe in neither abortion nor the death penalty?” I asked, every bit the wide-eyed teen.

“You can’t do that,” said my classmate impatiently. “I mean, I guess you could be independent? But it’s better to pick one or the other.”

Well, clearly this was a ridiculous system. I decided that I was independent, and it would be a waste of time to learn any more about this party business.

The 2008 Elections

The 2008 elections were the first where I was eligible to vote. In 2008, I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska and I didn’t have a car. Therefore, I didn’t vote.

I’ll elaborate.

Fairbanks, AK has an abysmal barely-there public transportation system, and it was even worse in 2008. There were 4 bus lines, and they mainly operated on a schedule of once an hour during normal business hours. The margin of error with regards to the schedule was, in my experience, +/- 1hr. I was once left standing out in the -40º Alaska cold by the side of a road for over an hour, at which point the bus I’d been waiting showed up with the next bus immediately behind it. I would have already been at my destination had I chosen to walk, but it was cold and I didn’t want to miss the bus between stops.

To register to vote, I would have needed to take one of these buses, and then take it back. It would have to be on a weekday, so I’d have to work it in with my class and work schedules. To be out in town entirely dependent on the bus schedule to return felt like a terrifying prospect.

Furthermore, it was Alaska. McCain was running with Sarah Palin as his running mate. What was the point in voting? The state would go to McCain regardless.

Why Should I Vote?

When my mother learned that I hadn’t voted, she made her disapproval clear.

“Why should I vote?” I asked. “They don’t let random Japanese people vote. Why does it make sense for me to vote?”

My mother shook her head mutely. Her disapproval was palpable, as was the air that she thought that I was being cheeky, and so wouldn’t dignify my question with a response.

But my question was entirely sincere. People in the US, I had learned during my time in Buffalo and Fairbanks, seemed singularly concerned with the right of foreigners to have a say in the running of the US. I, it seemed to me, didn’t have the right to a say in a country I felt I barely knew.

For years, whenever the question of voting came up, I would pose the question to people: “Why should I vote?”

“It’s your duty as a US citizen,” some would say.

“It’s wrong not to,” others would say.

“If you don’t vote you’ve got no right to complain,” still others would say.

None of these was an argument—just guilt trips. So I disregarded them. Sometimes, the same people who would tell me these things would also voice the opinion that immigrants with insufficient time or experience in the US should not be allowed a voice in these elections. To me, it seemed odd that I should vote because I happened to be born on US soil, while the person who voluntarily chose the US should not.

I didn’t vote, and I don’t regret it.

Then, one day in Namibia when the 2012 elections were approaching, one of the leaders in my research group at last offered me a different argument:

“We’re each only allowed say in the running of one—maybe two—countries in the world. We have so little say in how the world is run. So we should use what voice we do have to the fullest.”

The moment she said it, I felt that it was true. At the earliest opportunity, I registered myself to vote as an overseas resident—a process more complicated than I would have liked, given that I’d never legally resided in the US as an adult. I voted in the 2012 elections and have continued to do so in the elections where I was eligible to vote ever since.

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Queen of Our World

Posted on by Kai Raine

I led a charmed life with my parents. My mother was a bell-ringer working in IT and my father was in academia. They traveled often. When I was an infant, my parents took this as their chance to take me around the world before I started school and my world became more narrow.

They took me to various cities in the US, as well as to visit friends in Europe and family in India. I learned to talk in France and made friends with a dog in Germany, who napped with me and watched over me, defining my early awareness as a fearless animal lover. My mother’s aunt had a large dog, and in my love for it I had no sense of self-preservation, even sticking my hand in its mouth, to my family’s horror. (Yet neither that dog nor any other animal I encountered harmed me.)

My first visit to India was in the winter of 1992, coincidentally coinciding with the riots that occurred that winter. Curfews were instated, and I only knew that suddenly all the busy adults had an abundance of time for me. While horrors and violence raged across the country, I was in my own little heaven. I made friends with aunts, uncles, cousins and other local children. Language was no meaningful barrier yet: I befriended the three sons of my great aunt’s maid, and played with them running around the living room and climbing over couches until we tipped one of the couches backwards and were met with my great uncle’s ire.

My parents also took me on a trip to Australia. We stayed at the Barrington Guesthouse in the middle of nowhere in the bush outside of Sydney. The place was known for its origins–built out of timber from the trees that had been felled to make the clearing–as well as the unusually friendly wildlife that surrounded the place. There were birds that would settle on guests’ heads and shoulders in anticipation of being fed, and kangaroos that would eat out of humans’ hands. They had stables full of horses, and one pony named Cuddles. I got my first experience riding Cuddles while my parents led him by the reins.

During one trip to Seattle, while my mother was busy, my father took me to climb a small mountain (he told me years later it was called the Children’s Mountain). I took to the hike with delight, and he began taking me on nature walks and hikes more frequently, much of it close to home. I became fascinated with all manner of wildlife from birds to beavers. When we saw signs that redirected our walk because a beaver dam had flooded some bridge, it was never a disappointment or a deterrent. It was an exciting part of nature.

In blueberry season, my father and I would hike in areas with wild blueberries with tupperwares, which we would fill to bring home. It disappointed me that we had to use plastic tupperwares rather than the wicker baskets I saw in my picture books, such as Blueberries for Sal. We would munch on blueberries as we hiked, play some pretend, and then go home. When my mother came home from work, she would bake some of the blueberries into muffins.

I was happy.

Queen of Our Kingdom

Posted on by Kai Raine

As much as I felt, as a child, that my life began with my sisters’ birth, that was not at all the case. The first five years of my life were eventful (though not as dramatically as the year of my sister’s birth), and shaped my life in ways I did not comprehend as a child. As my parents’ first and only offspring, during those years I was very rarely left alone. I enjoyed a sort of blind adoration that few infants get to boast: my mother recounted repeatedly to me how when anyone would suggest that my parents might want time away from me, or that they might be exhausted by me, they would react with shock and chagrin because they so enjoyed every moment of being with me.

Other people with their eyes unclouded by unconditional devotion pointed out that I was spoiled rotten.

As first-time parents, my mother and father read many a parenting book. One of their early disagreements came up when I would cry for attention. My mother had read a parenting book that suggested that it would be healthy if, when I cried at night despite being well fed and my diaper unsoiled, my parents not respond to my cries. It would teach discipline, the book suggested. My father couldn’t bear it. After an occasion or two of attempting to ignore my sobs, he threw discipline to the wind and brought me to bed with him and my mother.

I slept most often with my parents, and I far preferred it. By the time I entered elementary school, I would come to wish I had spent more time in my crib, experiencing the world on my own. As it was, I hated the crib with a passion, isolated as it was in my own room, away from my parents unless my cries called them to me. Before I figured out how to walk, I figured out how to push my stuffed animals and blankets against the side of the crib and climb the pile to tumble over the top of the railing and crash painfully to the ground: an event that concluded my parents’ reliance on the crib.

Our apartment was our kingdom and I reigned uncontested as queen. I wasn’t even 2 years old when my mother counted my teddy bears and was shocked to realize that I had over a hundred. (Not all stuffed animals: just teddy bears.) I was the first grandchild on both sides of the aisle, and as such had aunts, uncles, grandparents and godparents galore who doted on me and bought me all manner of gifts that even my parents thought indulgent and ridiculous.

My parents let me indulge. All three of our lives revolved around me, and my opinions were requested and respected long before I had any concept of an opinion. By the time I was 3 or 4, I expected to get my way most of the time, because if I cried, my parents would act. So I cried when I wanted something. Sometimes I cried when another child was playing with something of mine in a playdate in my room. Sometimes I cried when we had a guest who had to sleep either on the couch or in my bed, and I didn’t want to concede either spot.

Occasionally, but not often, my father would scold me. My mother scolded even more rarely: she would reason with me instead. Frequently, while visiting relatives or while relatives were visiting us, I would find myself being scolded for something—a mannerism, a custom, a way of acting—that was assumed to be common sense but was unknown to me. I adored my relatives, but at the same time became extremely wary. As I grew older, I also became aware that my mother was stricter in the presence of her family, suddenly cautioning me for things that she would otherwise ignore.

Even with all of the leniency and freedom I was allowed, still I looked for more. I didn’t want to have to put my toys away if I’d paused in the middle of an elaborate make-believe session with my dolls and toy cars. I wanted to avoid displeasing my parents. Once I discovered sweets (an indulgence that my parents were careful to keep from me for as long as possible by any means necessary), I wanted to have them by any means that I could find.

On my fourth Halloween, at my maternal grandparents’ house, I made a blanket fort for the purpose of hiding with my candy so that I could eat it all, away from my mother’s careful rations. To my grandparents’ amusement, I gave myself away by failing to clean up the wrappers, inviting a rare scolding from my mother.

 

You’re Going to Be a Sister!

Posted on by Kai Raine

I wrote a lot as a child. Once, on a trip to America over summer, a childhood friend of mine showed me an autobiography she was writing in the third person for an assignment. I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to write my own. So I tried, and tried again. It never felt quite right, so I never finished one. I had dozens of notebooks of stories, diaries and autobiographies. (Most of them I threw away in disgust as a teenager.)

There was one constant: my autobiographies always began with the birth of my sisters. Their birth was engrained in me as The Beginning. The beginning of change. The beginning of my family. The beginning of hardship. The beginning of complication. The beginning of my life.

The discovery of my mother’s pregnancy being twins was a subject that my mother and I began to contest in my late teens. I distinctly remember telling her that she was pregnant with twins. I remember her smiling and explaining to me that that was not the case. Later, I remember her praising me for being the first to know.

My mother, ten or fifteen years after my sisters’ birth, remembered it as her own realization due to the locations of kicks. She remembered going to the doctor and asking for an ultrasound (not standard procedure at the time) because she was sure it was twins. When the doctor told her that it was unlikely, she said to him flatly, “It’s either twins or a monster.”

(One of my sisters once told me that upon hearing this story, she asked, “Which would you have preferred?”

Our mother responded only, “Which do you think?”

I asked, “Which was that?”

“Twins, obviously,” said my sister. “Who’d prefer a monster?”

“Hm,” I responded, remembering our mother’s endless exhaustion during their infancy.)

After a few such discussions, I dismissed my own memories as false, painted by the dreams and wishes of my childhood. Years later, after my mother’s death, I reconnected with some of my friends from my early childhood—and, by extension, their parents. One of them started telling me, one day, how my mother had been so proud of me for being the first to realize that she was having twins.

I remember someone saying cynically, “It was probably just your wishful thinking.” But this is one childhood illusion that I have no desire to let go.

My mother’s pregnancy was a time that, for years afterwards, I remembered as the best time of my life. She was often at home, and frequently asked me to do small things to help her: go fetch this thing or that, make sandwiches for a picnic… I felt important, and had her attention. As a family, we were incredibly happy. We were all elated with anticipation of the birth. My parents bought a new van so that we could comfortably fit all five of us and more, factoring in car seats for the babies. My mother spent what felt to me like hours at the kitchen table deliberating over names. (The only thing set in stone was that a boy would be Julian. I would also have been Julian, had I been a boy. All the girl names picked were so non-traditional and so unusual that all of us routinely use fake names at places like Starbucks to avoid confusion. Yet any boy would have been plain old Julian. I always thought it funny that the only name that either of my parents had decided in advance was my mother’s desire to name a son Julian; and then she only had daughters. Go figure.)

The birth changed my life drastically. I went from having all of my parents’ attention to having none. I couldn’t even leave the apartment to play in the hall with my friends: my new baby sisters were bathed in the kitchen sink, which was near the door. I had a confusing interaction with my father in which he told me I could go out only if I could do so without opening the door. I said, “Ok,” and immediately went for the door. When I was scolded, I cried, “But I’m only going to open it once!” It was explained to me that opening the door would create a draft that would make the babies cold. I could go out after their baths. But bathing the babies took a small eternity. I could hear my friends in the hallway now. By the time the baths were over they’d be done playing. I sulked.

I initially felt mostly forgotten in the face of my new sisters. Then one day, my father had to leave my sisters strapped into little bouncy chairs to my care for a scant five or ten minutes while he took a shower. Of course, as is inevitable, the moment my father left the room they woke up and began to sob their tiny hearts out. I remember feeling utterly exhausted, nearly desensitized to all the screaming and sobbing. I was sitting on the couch. I positioned the bouncy chairs so I could rest one foot on the top of each chair, above their heads. I just bounced them with my feet.

The screaming quieted and then stopped.

My father came rushing out of the shower. (At the time, I was confused as to why he was so frantic after they’d stopped crying. In retrospect, I realize how frightening silence must be to a parent who just left newborns in the care of a five-year-old.) He was surprised, then delighted and showered me with praise. I remember it distinctly, because I’d been wilting, and his praise let me regain my footing. I knew that I still mattered.

After that, my parents let me babysit my sisters from time to time.

I was still reeling from the changes when we moved. The new van was sold barely used. The apartment I’d always known was stripped and sold. My sisters were only two or three months old when we moved to my mother’s parents’ place to await our visas. We finally moved when they were nearly nine months old.

Because my father’s visa had been issued months before ours, he had had to go ahead to start his work and set up our apartment. This meant that my mother moved with a lot of luggage, two infants and a five-year-old. (She carried my sisters by strapping one to her chest in a front pack, and the other to her back in a baby carrier backpack. Then she carried over her shoulder the giant baby bag full of necessities. If ever there was a person that needed priority boarding to get seated, it was my mother.)

In a way, because the changes were more or less constant over this year-long period, I probably adjusted not to any new state of affairs, but to the state of constant change. And by that, I mean that I became accustomed to being confused. The state of confusion was so normal to me that sometimes I’d entirely fail to realize that I was confused at all. I believe that this has largely become a strength in my life. But it would take a long journey to get there.

Falling Face-First into Gender Norms: The Books

Posted on by Kai Raine

My mother often railed at the “happily ever after” mentality and the mindset that it teaches children. She told me how there is no happily ever after, because the wedding is only the beginning and it’s hard.

By the time that she thought to tell me this, I didn’t believe her one bit. She’d already read me fairy tales, and I’d seen all sorts of Disney movies that ended with a wedding. Sure, the wedding is the beginning: the beginning of happily ever after.

As a young child, I subconsciously saw marriage as my ultimate goal in life. This mentality goes as far back as I can remember, when I already had decided on the boy that I was going to marry. I don’t know what led to such a warped idea of reality, so I can only surmise.

But all of my books were either about children, or if they were about older people, it was a fairy tale or a similar sort of story that ended in marriage. I dreamed of doing things with my life, yes: of being a farmer on a ranch or a horse trainer or an archaeologist. Yet in all those visions of the future, there was always a vague figure of a man who would be my husband, because of course I had to have one.

Looking back, I lament that despite my mother railing at Disney and fairy tales for creating this mentality, she bought us Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, 101 Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, Aladdin and the Lion King. Absent were movies such as the Fox and the Hound, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book or Peter Pan. Furthermore, I picked up on my mother’s not-subtle-enough distaste for Aladdin and the Lion King, and she was not at all subtle in her dislike of 101 Dalmatians. I would feel a vague sort of guilt (and in fact, I still do) at enjoying those movies and stopped watching them. When Lilo and Stitch came out and my friends were talking about it at school, my mother would not take me to see it because the trailer gave her the impression that it was too violent. She bought Ever After, and that became her comfort movie, and by extension, mine.

When I was about eleven or twelve, I discovered that I rather enjoyed romances more than the rest of books. Sometimes, I would entirely ignore a plot, reading a book only for the romantic subplot. I was a talker, and no doubt tired of hearing me read a mystery only to come out gushing about the love story, my mother gave me two romance novels for teenagers.

While I enjoyed them, something felt inherently off about these books: the plots too contrived, the antagonists too mean, and nothing really happening. I went back to reading non-romance books for the romances. So my mother tried a different approach. When I would read a book and come out of it talking about the romance, she would not-so-subtly tell me that she didn’t think that part was that important, because “picking your boyfriend is something people do everyday.”

Which further engrained in me this idea that I would have to eventually pick a boyfriend (and therefore husband).

It wasn’t only the happily ever after mentality. It was also the contrast between what my mother said and what others told me. For instance, my mother bought me both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. I was immediately drawn to the Hardy Boys, and picked up the book and started reading. One of my aunts saw me and asked me why I didn’t read Nancy Drew.

“Hardy Boys is for boys,” she said to me. “Nancy Drew is for girls.”

I felt stupid and ashamed and even after I ran out of Nancy Drew books to read, I didn’t dare touch the Hardy Boys book, because I was a girl. It was four years later that I realized what nonsensical logic that was, and in a bed and breakfast in Australia, picked up a Hardy Boys book for the second time. But it was too late. The tone was too childish and simple to be enjoyable to me. I closed the book and turned off my reading light and stared at the bunk above me where my sisters were sleeping, wondering why I’d ever listened.

Such instances happened a lot. I would do something that subverted someone else’s gender norm, that someone else would tell me I was wrong, and I would feel ashamed and try to comply with these rules that I didn’t understand. So I grew up in a confused array of mixed messages, understanding that my life was about my femininity, which put me on a track headed toward marriage to a man, with certain roles I had to fulfill as a woman, but that I wasn’t supposed to talk about any of it. I was supposed to pretend.

By the time I was in my late teens, I reached the point where I could hold my own against people who felt that I wasn’t fulfilling the gender role that they expected me to fill: but by that point, it was a rarity. I neatly slotted into what most societies relevant to me expected of females. It took years for me to dig deeper into my own assumptions.

My mother continued to rail at fairy tales and Disney and the happily ever mentality, but it took decades for me to at last open my ears to the alarm bells as she ranted about this subject. At last I came to realize that even as she complained, she had  accidentally indoctrinated me. And then I gradually realized that everything was optional: not just for other people, but for me, too. I didn’t necessarily have to get married. I didn’t have to learn to clean and cook to take care of people. I didn’t even have to date.

So maybe my mother failed in my childhood to raise a child free of the gender-based shackles that society places on one. But by accidentally indoctrinating me and trying so hard to break me out of it, she taught me an even more valuable lesson about the forces of society and the ridiculousness of neat little gender-based boxes.