Category: The Othered

Subverting Gender Norms: The Toys

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my parents got married, my father said to my mother, “I want four girls.” Eight years later, when they had my sisters, my mother joked, “You said you wanted four girls. Well, you have four of us now.”

It took me a long time to realize how unusual this was, given that it was the environment I was accustomed to, but my parents were dedicated to raising me, a daughter, as a person first and foremost. They took care to make sure that I had an abundance of traditionally “girl” toys like stuffed animals and dolls, but also traditionally “boy” toys like toy cars and trains.

I displayed a preference for the stuffed animals and dolls as a child, but very quickly lost interest in the toy cars. In my adulthood, some people in my family have reflected on this and pointed to it as proof of my inherent femininity shining through. I disagree.

I liked to play pretend, making up stories. It’s easy to see why stuffed animals and dolls would appeal here. I liked the toy cars that could do things: there was a truck with doors that opened and closed that I used a lot. The toy cars with motors that allowed me to propel them across the room were fun too, though it was hard to make them work on the carpet of my room. The plastic cars that did nothing―no motors, no doors that opened, no figure inside them to be driving―confused me. What was I supposed to do with these things? Yes, I could roll them along the floor, but what sense did this make if there was no one driving them?

Clearly these cars had to be sentient to make sense. The notion of sentient cars was a nightmarish one to me, and I had a recurring nightmare about my mother’s car kidnapping me from my mother after she had gotten out of the car, before she had come to the back of the car to unstrap me from the carseat. (I continued to have this nightmare for years, even after I was no longer in the carseat; and even then for awhile after we no longer owned a car.)

That was why I largely ignored my mostly-useless, driverless, nightmarish toy cars. When I got a radio-controlled car from my godfather, however, I had no such compunctions and I very much enjoyed that. I also had a wooden puzzle train set that, though it could only be set up into a figure eight, delighted me.

When my parents first took me to India at age two, a Hindu priest “blessed” my parents, that their next child would be a son. My father took offense at this, and berated the priest that he wanted more daughters.

It became a common theme throughout my childhood that whenever she heard me saying things that subscribed to gender stereotypes, my mother berated and corrected me. It often seemed strange to me, that my parents were so dedicated to keeping me from thinking in a way that most of society seemed to think. But I would not, perhaps, have become as confused as I eventually became if not for the books.

Reading and My Mother

Posted on by Kai Raine

If there is a reader in my life who taught me to relish the written word and my time immersed inside a book, that person is my mother.

An avid reader herself, my mother spent a large part of my childhood reading books that she would then set in front of me so that I could love them, too. Somehow, my mother always had an uncanny knack for figuring out what sorts of books I liked and procuring more of them.

This was especially pronounced in my early childhood, when my mother and father would both pick out books for me at the library, and I found that I often gravitated more towards those chosen by my mother.

I learned to read using a kit called Hooked-on-Phonix that my parents gave me the summer we spent at my grandparents’ house before we moved to Japan. That Christmas, right before we moved, my mother gave me Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. With my father busy in his new job and my mother was busy looking after my new sisters, being read to became a luxury. So I learned to read to myself, and I learned quickly.

At first, being in Japan meant that access to new English books was rare. It was years before we borrowed the subsequent books in the Little House series from someone and I could finish reading them. By that time, I had somewhat passed the target age group and was finding myself less drawn into the stories.

Eventually, we discovered that the American School, which was in reasonable biking distance, had elementary school, middle school and high school libraries that we could access. For the eight years that we lived in Japan, the American elementary school library became my primary source of books.

I began frequenting this library on my own when I became addicted to the Nancy Drew series though we only had three volumes at home (courtesy of my mother, of course). I then discovered that many of the books were available at the American School. The librarian used to call me the Nancy Drew Girl, long after I’d read all volumes by the original author and determined that I didn’t enjoy those parts of the series written by (an)other author(s), and therefore was no longer reading Nancy Drew.

My mother also introduced me to Harry Potter when I was perhaps five or six years old. She was waxing poetic, so I read the first chapter and a half or so. I was unimpressed and didn’t pick it up again until I was nearly or had just turned seven. At that point I devoured it with an obsessive enthusiasm, joining the ranks of children who secretly waited in vain for their Hogwarts letter all through their eleventh summer.

(Side note: I still don’t like the formula used in the first chapter of a few Harry Potter books, including the first. Namely, the formula where the first chapter is full of characters which the reader either never really knows or will come to know later, only there to set a scene and atmosphere. Reading such chapters, there is generally a certain lack of engagement that I feel, woven into the writing because the author is implicitly letting you know that this is not your main character. Now that I know and can usually identify this formula very quickly, I breeze through these chapters, entirely disengaged, just waiting for the next chapter to begin. While I understand the appeal of this formula and even use it on occasion in my own work, I find that for me, it’s a formula that’s a lot more fun to write than it is to read. Which is why, to date, I’ve ended up cutting every use of it out of my own work after writing it.)

The only time that my mother and I had a serious disagreement about a book was over Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens. I was eleven or twelve years old, and my mother decided that it was time for me to graduate from the fantasy novels I was devouring and turn to more serious books. Some of the books she gave me at this time were well worth reading (Bridge to Terabithia and The Giver, for example). But one that I didn’t understand―and still don’t understand, in the context of my age at the time―was Bleakhouse.

I suffered through the entire first chapter (which, fifteen years later, I still summarize as “it was stormy and windy”). When we reached the second chapter and the prose was still meandering on the subject of a senseless family feud and how very senseless it is, I put my foot down.

“What’s the point of any of this?” I demanded. “Is there even a story?”

The answer was yes, but the book took so long to get to it that by that point I was utterly disinterested in it. My mother gave up and never suggested another Charles Dickens book to me―in fact, that became the last book she ever told me to read. After that, her recommendations were conveyed to me as recommendations rather than as orders.

Storytelling and My Father

Posted on by Kai Raine

If there is a storyteller in my life who taught me to love every part of creating stories, that person is my father.

My father would make up stories for me all the time, and would frequently pull me in to help him create the story (though I would have been perfectly happy listening to him simply tell me a story). He would make up stories based on things we had seen or talked about. Eventually, I started craving repetition: not the same premise told a dozen different ways, but one story, told in a certain way.

I had two favorites. One was a story about a baby bird who falls out of his nest while his mother is out finding worms to eat, who then sets out looking to find his way back to his tree. The other was a story about a raccoon in the US and a Koala in Australia who become pen pals through messages in bottles thrown into the ocean.

My favorite game was also a game we called Friends, which was essentially a game of pretend. We would pretend to be somewhere else, and pretend to explore that place or play there. I have one particular memory of playing Friends at the Beach when we were at the top of a mountain. Another parent may have said, Why don’t we play Friends on the Mountain, so that we can enjoy being here? But not my father.

In fact, my father was frequently attempting to engage my imagination in ways that sometimes seemed to distress others. For instance, when someone would read me a fairy tale or show me a Disney movie, and they would tell me at the end that “They all lived happily ever after,” my father would point out, “No they didn’t. What about the stepmother?”

I don’t recall whether he did this with me as well, but when my sisters were young, he frequently told them variations on fairy tales, perhaps becoming the catalyst that kicked off my love of adaptations of fairy tales and folklore. I have a particular memory of his version of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters and stepmother are kindhearted and Cinderella is the antagonist. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I so enjoyed Alex Flinn’s Bewitched, which told that same story, but making the stepsister far less altruistic and more human, crumbling under her step-sister’s self-victimization and manipulations.

I didn’t recognize my father’s skill in storytelling until, one day when my father was gone on a business trip, my mother offered to read me a book and I asked her to make up a story instead. I awaited her story with bated breath―and was underwhelmed when she told me about an episode where a girl watches a baby’s diaper being changed. The twist―“That girl was me!,” ended my mother―did nothing to improve my opinion of the story. I asked her to tell me stories two or three more times afterwards, but it was always the same: an episode out of her own childhood with no arc, and neither a beginning nor an end. (Essentially, things happened, but there was no story there. Funnily, my mother was capable of telling engaging stories out of her childhood, but only if it happened naturally over the course of a conversation and she couldn’t seem to call up these stories simply in the name of a story.) I learned to ask my mother to read to me and to ask my father for the made up stories.

Eventually, there came a time when I tired of the same repeated stories and asked for new ones. My father would tell me that he would tell part of a story if I would continue it for a time, then he would pick it up again. I remember a story we were making up this way, night after night, until one night I was making up a scene about a few of the characters (various animals) running up a downwards escalator in a mall at Christmastime when I realized that I could no longer remember how the story had begun. I also realized that I had no sense of the story trajectory any longer. Immediately, the whole venture seemed pointless. The following night, I asked my father for the story about the raccoon and the koala. I began to resist attempts by my father to draw me into storytelling: I would think of the animals running up the downwards escalator and think of the pointlessness of it all, and didn’t want to repeat that experience.

After my sisters were born, storytelling between my father and myself became a rarity. As I grew older and learned to read, I discovered a whole world of stories, and the father-daughter tradition of storytelling died out altogether.

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.

Language Acquisition, or Lying Like a Rug

Posted on by Kai Raine

At some point, if I didn’t understand a question, I took to giving random answers. Somehow, I deemed this preferable to revealing that I didn’t understand the question at all. If there was only one word that I didn’t understand, as in, “Do you like poetry with onomatopoeia?” I could ask, “What’s onomatopoeia?” But frequently, I would think I understood all the words in the question, but it didn’t make sense.

For instance, while I was still in preschool, a girl in our apartment building once decided that I just had to see her stuffed rabbit. She raced into her apartment and came out with it.

“Hoshii?” she asked me. I blinked and said “Huh?” She repeated the question. We repeated this exchange twice or thrice, but she simply continued repeating the question.

Here was the thing. I knew the word hoshi, which meant star. But it made no sense to me that she would be asking me, “Star?” with regards to her stuffed bunny, which had nothing in common with a star. Finally, I concluded that she must be asking if I thought it was pretty like a star. I said yes.

“You can’t have it!” she told me gleefully, clutching the bunny to her chest.

That was how I learned that hoshii meant to want. She had been asking me if I wanted it. (I was grateful that she hadn’t been serious, since I didn’t particularly want the worn stuffed animal.) This was a pattern that became a habit.

There was a girl with whom I became instant friends in preschool. Let’s call her Snowy. Our friendship, I believe, was based less on mutual liking and more on the fact that no one else seemed to want to spend any time with either of us. Snowy was loud, outspoken and disruptive. She taught me the word “benjo,” a rude word for toilet, by leading me through the preschool bathrooms, opening every stall, screaming, “Benjo!” and slamming the door regardless of whether or not their was an occupant. (The children’s stalls didn’t have locks; there was only one stall for the teachers that did have a lock.) Then she took me to the urinals and taught me the word “chin-chin” (penis) by harassing a male teacher in the process of relieving himself. He valiantly tried to explain why what she was doing was wrong over Snowy’s very loud squeals and exclamations while simultaneously fending her off.

Snowy was not conventional by any stretch of the imagination. Later, when we attended the same elementary school with nearly 600 students, everyone knew who I was because I was foreign; but everyone knew who Snowy was because of who she was. We fell in and out of friendship during the five years that we attended the same schools. She had been born in the US, and was happy to watch Disney movies in English with me. I never knew the rules of interaction with Snowy, so maybe that’s why I can’t remember a time when I ever thought of her as a best friend; but she was certainly a constant.

In elementary school, Snowy and I were placed in separate classes. It was convention that children walked to and from school alone, though we were told never to stray from our assigned routes. Drop-offs by car or bicycle were not permitted. So during the first two weeks, we went home in groups, led by a teacher. Snowy and my houses were in the same direction, but her assigned route broke off of the main group very early on.

“You’re this way, right?” Snowy asked me on the first day. I didn’t understand the question, so I nodded (it seemed the right thing to do; defaulting to nodding seemed in generally better than defaulting to shaking my head). Moments later, she was pulling me down the side street with her, and understanding flooded me just a little too late. I also didn’t have the courage to correct her, but the teacher didn’t call out to stop me. I ended up walking home through the side streets, past Snowy’s house.

Mistake though it may have been, I enjoyed getting that time with Snowy, so the next day I was happy to do it again. Only this time, the teacher (who had a list of which children were supposed to turn off where, and no doubt noticed when I wasn’t there at my turn-off on the previous day) noticed.

“You’re not that way,” she laughed, and ushered me back to the group. I shuffled along, my face burning. I glanced back and saw Snowy looking at me, her jaw slack. She clenched her teeth and spun on her heel. The rush of shame and guilt was already a familiar companion. It didn’t make it any less unpleasant.

The next day at school, Snowy turned her nose up at me and told me she wanted nothing to do with liars like myself. I was too tired or too guilty to contradict her. I didn’t know how to explain.

“You always lie,” Snowy said to me. This hurt more than Snowy’s frostiness.

My mother talked of her own childhood like she was a paragon of honesty and integrity. She never lied, she told me. When her teacher, who checked that everyone had their handkerchiefs every morning, forgot to check on the same day that my mother had forgotten her handkerchief, she had gone to the teacher of her own volition and admitted to not having it. She had been good and honest. I was trying, but still I was bad and a liar. I didn’t know what to do about any of this, but certainly explaining this situation to any adults was out of the question. I couldn’t bear the shame of letting them know exactly what I’d become.

So I lied to my parents on purpose to hide the shame of the lies I was telling left and right at school without meaning to.

I was six years old.

Language Acquisition, or Making Little Girls Cry

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I tell a story of my childhood, I sometimes preface the story with, “Look, I was an especially slow child.” Truth be told, I don’t think that was quite true. I think I was an especially confused child with a tendency to overthink everything without even knowing, confusing myself even further. I emphasize this because a lot of trouble could have been avoided if I’d simply asked questions or admitted to not understanding more often.

It was entirely situational. In many cases, I could openly ask questions, or just flat out say, “I don’t understand.” But those were cases where I could see that it was permitted, or even accepted. The moment that a person started talking with the assumption that I of course knew what they were talking about, I would not ask.

I don’t remember my early days in Japan well enough to say whether or not I tried asking or admitting to not knowing. In many cases, it was obvious that I didn’t understand. But children are not naturally granted the ability to explain. In most cases, if I’d be confused, the other children would repeat the same words, only more slowly and loudly.

My parents couldn’t afford an international school, and I was young enough that I was just plonked straight into preschool. I’ve been told that my parents wanted to wait awhile to put me in school, but I was insistent. I wanted to go to school immediately.

They found a nearby preschool and took me there to see it. I didn’t care about anything except that I’d get to be in school again. I said I wanted to go there. My parents folded.

Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me before I started that this would mean that I would have to speak Japanese all day, everyday. On my first day, a girl came up to me while I was playing in the sandbox and said, “Okatazuke!” I stared blankly at her. She repeated, “O-ka-ta-zu-ke!” Bored of the repeated syllables, I turned away and back to the sandbox. She went away. Momentarily, the teacher came to me.

“Clean up,” the teacher explained to me through her heavy accent, pointing to the words scribbled on a sheet of paper. At last I understood, and I obeyed. The next day, when a child went around calling, “Okatazuke!” I knew what to do. (I feel that it is important to explain that she didn’t actually speak English. She had minimal knowledge of English and abundant knowledge of children, and somehow this was enough to tide us over for the week or two when I entirely could not understand Japanese.)

I gained Japanese vocabulary rapidly, motivated by the fact that no one understood me. But there were also no rules or lessons to guide me. As my Japanese improved, other children came to expect responses from me. I would still stare at the speaker in incomprehension, but now the question would be repeated more times, with rising irritation. There was no such nuance as I-can-follow-most-conversations-but-this-question-has-a-word-in-it-that-I-don’t-know. I was expected to understand, and so I expected to understand…and felt ashamed when I didn’t.

There was a ritual that all the children engaged in when playing as a group. A child who wanted to join the group would chant, in a sing-song voice, “I-re-te!” (let me in) and the children in the group would chant in response, “I-i-yo!” (yes you can). It was like clockwork. No group ever said anything else. So one day, I decided to try. There was a sort of spinning jungle gym that we all loved: a spherical climbing frame with a hollow center, set up on a platform that rotated. We would take turns sitting on the frame and standing on the outside, running in a circle and pulling the bars with us to make it rotate.

On this occasion, after days or weeks of wishing, I had managed to seize the much-coveted spot at the very top. I was lying there looking up at the sky and enjoying spinning, tactfully silent so that when it was time to swap places, no one would notice that I hadn’t moved. My plan worked, and I basked in my success.

That was when a girl came and sang, “I-re-te!” Elated by my cleverness, I decided to try breaking the pattern. “Da~me!” (No) I said amidst the choir of “Iiyo”s.

The girl wilted before my eyes, all the excitement leaving her in a rush. Her head fell and she began to sniffle. This startled me. At no point had I expected crying. As the other children rushed to comfort her, telling her that no, of course she could play with us, I sat up from my perch. Suddenly I felt small and foolish and wished I’d been somewhere less conspicuous than the very top.

“No, don’t cry! You can play with us!” the children said to the crying girl.

“No, I can’t. Someone said I can’t.”

“Who? Who said that?”

She pointed straight at me. Another girl looked up at me. There was no accusation in her look, just confusion. It made me feel like scum.

“When someone wants to play with you, you say yes,” she explained to me. I nodded. She turned back to the crying girl. “See? She understands now.”

“Come on, play with us!” the other children were saying. I was tongue-tied with guilt. The girl didn’t move and continued to sniffle.

“Play with us,” I managed at last. “You can play with us.”

At last, she climbed into the sphere. Her eyes were still watery.

The other children were a lot less concerned with the girl’s hurt feelings than they were when they realized that I’d been skipping turns when I was supposed to be on the outside, rotating the sphere. I obediently climbed down and took to running on the outer side. The other children let the crying girl have the place at the top that I’d vacated.

She and I were never in the same class. I don’t think she went to the same school as I did after preschool. I don’t believe I ever even knew her name. But for the remaining 7 years of our time in Tokyo, I would see her near our apartment from time to time, usually with her grandmother. Even seven years later, the sight of her made me feel guilty and ashamed. I would duck my head and rush past, hoping that she didn’t remember me.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Posted on by Kai Raine

For the second half of my first decade of life, I had a reputation as a liar.

I was in my teens the first time a friend (irritated to realize that I’d been nodding along with no idea what she was talking about) pointed out that I should ask when I didn’t understand something. What a novel idea! I was in my twenties before I grew comfortable asking…and even now, I wonder if I truly am always able to ask for clarification when I should.

It doesn’t take much to imagine why this might cause problems.

On some level, in my own childish way, I was always aware that this was a problem. In later years (by which I mean ages 8 through my early teens), I would blame it on language barriers, the moves and culture shock. I even relished the feel of believing this claim from time to time. Yet I know that that isn’t really the case. I have one particular, distinct memory that has never left me, and it contradicts that notion.

When I was five years old, before we moved to Japan, my newborn sisters and I lived with our mother at her parents’ place while we waited for our visas. The visa process took far longer than we expected (months: nearly half a year in all). I had one friend and a group of kids that I remember spending time with simply because they never said I couldn’t. I seized any new potential friends. On one occasion, I went to one new potential friend’s house (with my mother’s knowledge, as I hadn’t gone rogue quite yet). It must have been my first time there. His mother was Chinese*. I can’t recall her name, but I need a name for this story, so I’ll call her Fiona. Fiona began asking me questions.

I have to emphasize that I have no recollection of why I couldn’t understand the questions. Perhaps she had an accent (to this day, some accents can render me completely incapable of comprehending English that is, I am told, perfectly comprehensible to others). Perhaps I didn’t understand the way that the questions were phrased. Perhaps I was willfully refusing to listen. Or perhaps I was so confused about what was happening that I understood the words of the question but had no idea how they configured into something comprehensible within the framework of my recently uprooted life.

Fiona’s question that began my spiral of lies, for the record, was “Are you staring school in September?”

I was four years old when my father and I visited Japan for his job interview. I went with him because my mother, whose pregnancy had recently been found to be twins, had been prescribed a certain amount of bedrest and couldn’t look after me during his trip. I was sat in the corner during his interview, but it was absolutely necessary to inform him every time my crayon broke. (Nothing is more important when you don’t have the dexterity to peel the paper off the crayon to keep coloring. Ask anyone.) My father was mad at me as a result, but I didn’t understand the cause and effect, since he waited until later to scold me for my behavior. This and a fire alarm that went off in the hotel in the middle of the night were the highlights of my first trip to Japan. It was not a good first impression.

It had been explained to me that we were moving there. My parents seemed excited enough. I was excited at first. Then my school year ended at the preschool I attended. My mother and I went to see a play that we went to see every year, performed by a local Kindergarten. I had always expected to attend that Kindergarten. I asked my mother excitedly if I would now be going there next year.

“No,” she said to me in a way that I registered as absent and irritated (not an unusual state when I asked repetitive questions shortly after my sisters were born). “We’re moving to Japan.”

That was the first time that I understood that moving to Japan meant that we wouldn’t be living in Acton anymore. The realizations came one-by-one: no more friends, no more room of my own, no more English. I learned to by myself that summer. I staged my own mini rebellion when my parents put me into private Japanese lessons: whenever the teacher asked a question I would take a sip of my drink. All this got me was a suspension of my mid-lesson drink privileges. (I abandoned my rebellion of my own volition when I discovered that there were hand games in the book. I pointed one out to the teacher and she smiled and taught me that instead.)

Despite my rebellion, I was still in the process of working out what it all meant. It wasn’t only the move: the addition of twin sisters only a few months prior had also utterly upended the family dynamics I’d grown used to. My sense of reality was utterly compromised.

So, was I going to school in September? Well, my mother was always gushing about school and learning. I didn’t know. Could I go to school in September? Maybe. I said yes.

Fiona followed up with the question, “Are you going to Maple West?” Maple West was the local elementary school. I didn’t know this. I heard a jumble of sounds that I didn’t understand.

Maybe I was tired from my crisis over the previous question and a long day of playing. Maybe I was so confused that anything seemed possible. Maybe I didn’t care as long as I could stop answering questions.

I said yes again.

Later, at home, I wasn’t hungry at dinner. (I’d just had an existential crisis over whether or not I’d be going to school. It’s exhausting, but not in a way that works up an appetite.) I told my mother and grandmother that I’d eaten at Fiona’s house. (I had. It was a packet of peanuts like you’d get in a plane. I didn’t mention that, but I assumed they knew by telepathy, as mothers always do.)

“Oh,” said my grandmother. “Was it Chinese?”

Was it Chinese? What was Chinese? Well, Fiona was Chinese, so maybe it was. I said yes.

There were a few follow-up questions (“Was there rice?”) during which I realized I’d made a mistake. But how did I explain something so shameful as misunderstanding a question? Besides, I realized, if I told them, they would make me eat. I didn’t want to eat. So I nodded along to all their questions until they let me leave the table.

The next day, my mother and Fiona spoke. I received a thorough scolding about how I shouldn’t go around telling lies. I was ashamed, but even more confused. How was I supposed to answer these questions? I didn’t know. I was already a liar. My mother was always telling me how smart I was: better a liar, I thought, than to let on that I really wasn’t smart at all.

And this was all before language and culture got thrown into the mix.

*I honestly don’t remember if she was Chinese. It could have been Taiwanese, or some completely different Asian country. My memory of geography from the age of five is questionable.

“Where Are You From?”: The Unanswerable Question

Posted on by Kai Raine

After Japan, I lived in Buffalo, NY for a few years. I moved at the end of May, and from September, I attended 9th grade at a Catholic girl’s school. On the day of freshman orientation, the teachers emphasized how people were coming to this school from all sorts of places. “We even have someone from Japan,” they said. I saw some faces peering around curiously for a glimpse of the Japanese girl. Their eyes slid right over me.

A thread of irritation went through me: at the school for giving a statement so easily misconstrued, and at my schoolmates for assuming they would be able to tell who I was just by looking. But by then I was used to it. It was a small annoyance, easily forgotten. And forget I did, within a day or two.

So it was a surprise a few days or weeks later, when I was getting to know a smiling, long-haired classmate and she asked me what middle school I’d attended.

“I didn’t go to middle school,” I explained. “I was in school in Japan, and-”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “So you’re the Japanese girl!”

I stared, confused, and asked what she meant.

“They were talking about how there was someone from Japan at orientation.” Now that she mentioned it, I did remember that.

I tried to explain that I wasn’t Japanese. She countered with the observation that I had come from there, hadn’t I? I had to agree. I was already tired of the conversation. I felt that she didn’t have any concept of the complexity of the subject as she simply tried to fit me into a box to suit her worldview. Yet at the same time, I quite liked the idea of getting to be Japanese, at least for a little while.

I attended that school for two years. Some things became easier. In the beginning, some things were impossible for me to do in English. We started out doing logic in math class, and I simply wasn’t used to step-by-step reasoning in English. It took me an excruciating amount of time to do one page of homework, because trying to reason out the problems as they were made my head spin. I would translate the question into Japanese, reason it out, and then translate it back into English. Sometimes, the answer still wouldn’t make sense, and I’d have to start again. After a few months, this problem was a thing of the past. I learned who Britney Spears was and learned to use slang intermittently. I learned that Orlando Bloom’s name meant that you stood up and screamed.

(A lot of the “cultural knowledge” I gained at the time I find slightly disturbing in retrospect. It’s not the knowledge itself, but the fact that I was dropped into the middle of a culture where a lot of information was already assumed to be known to people my age. So for instance, in a seminar about how to spot eating disorders in your friends, I was getting a crash course in what an eating disorder was, why I might like to try it, what people use to spot it and getting ideas how to hide it effectively. Fortunately, eating disorders weren’t for me. I gave up after a week of trying and failing to develop one.)

The more I learned to pretend to be a part of the culture, the less I felt like a part of it. In part, I’m sure it was your average dose of teenage angst: the “no one understands me” mindset. Maybe, had I continued to live there, I would have grown to feel like a part of it. But two years later, I was moving to Hyderabad, India, and there was a whole new set of rules all over again.

By the time that I started university in Alaska, I was answering the dreaded question based on my mood and the people present at the time. If I was in a group of Americans, I would claim to be from India or Japan. Among Indians, I would claim to be American or Japanese. Among Japanese, I would claim to be American or Indian (but with the claim that I grew up in Japan). This fluid answer worked well for me for years.

Eventually, I grew tired of having to think every time I answered so basic a question. By the time that I was in graduate school in Europe, I was defaulting to “I grew up in Japan.” I would have to explain myself afterwards, but I could get by with a succinct explanation. For a time, I thought I had finally found a single, simple answer.

But again, years went by and my last visit to Japan fell further and further into the past. By the time that it had been 7 years since I’d last been to Japan, I was starting to feel that even my current answer was no longer the truest explanation. One day, I tentatively answered that I was American. There was no reaction but acceptance. It was easy. My mind rebelled against the idea of settling into that identification just because it was simplest, and the next couple times I met people, I went back to the “I grew up in Japan” response. Then, eventually, I started calling myself American consistently.

This was only a problem when I was talking to Americans, because this would inevitably lead to a discussion of where in America. The only place in America I could speak with any confidence about was Fairbanks, Alaska, and even that was limited to college life. If I said I was born near Boston, I was met with talk of people and places I’d never heard of. But I so rarely had this conversation with Americans that this was largely a non-issue. When I had to, I would smile and nod if I did not feel in the mood to explain my entire life story.

By the time I visited Japan again, I was in my mid-twenties and hadn’t so much as visited in 9 years. I was terrified to go back, by then. What if I no longer had anything in common with my friends? What if my Japanese was no longer quite native—what if I could no longer follow a conversation? What if this last one place that I still sometimes could think of as home no longer felt like home at all?

It isn’t uncommon that I get caught in a maze of what ifs in my own head. Generally it’s a colossal waste of time, and this time was no different. Japan was easy in a way I’d forgotten life could be easy; comfortable in a way that I’d forgotten any culture could feel comfortable. It didn’t matter where I said I was from, I realized. There is no longer a path of least resistance. Whether I call myself American or Japanese (or Indian or German), there tend to be puzzled looks and follow-up questions. I no longer occupy my time thinking about how to answer the question. I give the answer that strikes me as best at that time.

“Where Are You From?”: When I Became Japanese

Posted on by Kai Raine

In the third term of fourth grade, I was transferred out of public school and into a small private school. Everything changed. I was extremely culturally confused and had a temper that flared up at very inconvenient times and places that I myself couldn’t explain…and yet I made friends. I had had friends in public school, of course. I had two wonderful friends with whom I still remain friends to this day. But it was entirely different at this new school. All of a sudden, I had people who would come over to my apartment to play with my hamster and try to photograph ghosts. Some of the kids were harsh, and there were certainly classmates with whom I argued all the time, but no one ostracized me.

There was a girl who told me that there were, in fact, English-language shows on Japanese TV. She told me the channel and the time, but once I started watching, I didn’t like the show. Instead I started flipping the channel and discovered Inuyasha. Shortly after that I had discovered Detective Conan and One Piece, and a variety show called Sekai Marumie. My father had to impose TV restrictions on me, declaring I was only allowed up to 2-3 hours a week. This wasn’t a thing that had ever even been discussed in our house before.

I had always been an avid reader of English-language novels. My father had attempted to buy me Japanese novels on a few occasions. Some I had read and some I had not, but I’d never picked up reading Japanese for pleasure the way I had with English. Now, it was like a mental block had been removed: I devoured Japanese books. (I even voluntarily tried to read Harry Potter in Japanese, though I abandoned that after two pages of reading forced me to realize that the humor didn’t translate at all. A subject for a future blog post, perhaps.)

I didn’t realize that I was integrating at the time. All I knew was that I was happy. Suddenly, nationality didn’t matter. I belonged here, in this class, with these people. There was nothing else that mattered. My classmates knew that I was American; and I was the only totally foreign girl in our class. But there were other foreign students in the school, and other foreign-looking students in our class. I grew more secure in my identity, which had nothing to do with any country, after all.

But five years of cultural drifting doesn’t just go away. I continued to have crises from time to time over the notion of where I was “really from” or where I belonged. Yet where previously my default state had been to say “I’m American” and feel sorry for myself being the fish out of water that I was, my default state was to now feel irritation at the unwitting soul who had just dared to assume that I didn’t belong here simply because I looked different.

In sixth grade, the last year that I lived in Japan, there was a young boy, maybe four years old, who would be waiting for the bus on my way to school. On the first day that I walked past him, he shouted, “Mommy, look, a foreigner!” I didn’t think much of it until the next time that I walked past him and he did the same thing. His mother hushed him half-heartedly every time, but with the air of a parent who has more important things to worry about.

Avoiding this child became a matter of routine for me. It wasn’t a big deal, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.

Similarly, I completely stopped trying to understand when people spoke to me in English. On one occasion, a friend (half-Japanese and half-English) and I were lap swimming in a public pool, using the center of the lane instead of one side so that people could pass us (as we were supposed to). A life guard came up to explain the rules to us. He did so in English so accented and long-winded that I didn’t understand a word. When I looked to my friend beside me, she looked as confused as I felt.

“Could you please speak Japanese?” I asked in Japanese.

The life guard turned bright, bright red and explained to us that we had to swim on one side of the lane in one concise sentence and left.

My Japanese, I had realized by then, sounds absolutely native. I grew up learning and socializing as a Japanese child, and it shows in my command of the language. But it didn’t hit me how much my cultural identity had changed until my class trip to Hiroshima.

My school had (and still has) a tradition for sixth graders. They spend the first half of the year learning about Japan’s role in World War II, culminating in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The whole school then contributes to the folding of over 2000 paper cranes, which we hang by the statue of Sadako along with a pledge to work toward world peace, that such a tragedy might never happen again. It is educational and somber, but also extremely fun: it is, after all, a class trip.

We went to the park and the museum of the bombing in Hiroshima. I cried, as did a few of my classmates. That night, when we got back to the hotel, I received a letter from my mother. It was a long letter, and I’m sure it was very moving, but I only remember one thing. My mother told me how ashamed I must feel to be American and part of the country that did this. But until that very moment, it hadn’t even occurred to me. I went on a brief but intense emotional roller coaster (much to the chagrin of the teacher who had to sit with me through it, I’m sure), in which I went from “Oh no, I’m a terrible person to not have thought of how I’m a part of the country that did this” to “Wait, why do I have to be considered American at all?” and finally to, “Ugh, who cares? The bomb is upsetting enough without adding an identity crisis into the mix.”

It was the first time that I realized that I no longer identified as American.

In another world, I would have accepted that fact and gone on to middle school in Tokyo. Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn’t have changed everything: maybe my family would never have moved and I would have grown into adulthood in Japan. But, of course, that’s not what happened at all.

“Where Are You From?”: The Beginning of an Identity Crisis

Posted on by Kai Raine

“Where are you from?” is among the most common of getting-to-know-you questions. It is also my least favorite question of all time. I can’t think of a realistic context in which I would ever have to rank my least favorite questions in order, but I can say with absolute certainty that this question would top that list. My relationship with it spans over two decades and has featured highs and lows and tantrums and pain and love of all sorts.

As a child, during my first five years in Japan, I always identified as “American.” As a person attending public school and living a perfectly ordinary Japanese lifestyle, I vividly recall a love-hate relationship with the notion. On one hand, I loved that I could always excuse my weirdness by turning to the memory of America as the place where I belonged. On the other hand, I hated the way that anyone could pick me out of a crowd at a glance as the one who clearly didn’t belong. But at the time, I still believed that Japan was a temporary thing, and that we would eventually be going “home” to America, where I would once again enjoy the feeling of belonging.

I was in a school of nearly six hundred students, but everyone knew who I was. Older or younger, teacher or student, people knew me. On a few occasions, on the way home from school, some kid I didn’t know would say to me, “Why don’t you go home to your own country?” and I would be hurt and confused and wondering who this even was and what I’d ever done to him. I’d duck my head and walk home and wonder, yes, why weren’t we going home?

In third grade, a new boy transferred into our class. We had to each go around and introduce ourselves to him. We must have been informed that this would happen in advance, because I remember talking to my friends Windy and Rilla about it the previous day.

“I have to introduce myself as being American, and I hate that!” I told them.

I still remember the look quiet, bug-loving Windy gave me. It was half way between exasperated and fed up. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time she’d had to deal with me and my circular logic.

“So just don’t say that,” she told me. “Say something else about yourself.” I heard an unspoken, “He can tell you’re not Japanese without you saying so.”

“Yeah…” I said, imagining how wonderful it would be to introduce myself with my favorite show or favorite hobby, just like all the others did. “I guess so.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon and the following morning thinking about ways to introduce myself. There were so many different things I could say, and it was exciting. Then I stood up to introduce myself and knew that I had to be honest. I said my name. “I’m American,” I said, and sat down again. No one was surprised. I felt resigned, but knew I’d done the right thing.

But then I started to have similar problems during vacations, when I would go back to visit my grandparents in the US. My parents would habitually sign me up for activities (like summer camps) while we were there. I would, at best, make one or two friends. The disinterest of the rest of the class seemed like utopia compared to the condescension I felt back at home. Then there came a time when I was enrolled in a summer school in the US where everything was just as bad: I couldn’t make friends, things I said kept on getting misinterpreted, and worst of all, I got labeled the “Japanese girl.” I cried at the last one, and a teacher took that girl aside to explain to her that I was American. She was mystified.

“But you’re from Japan,” she said to me later. I struggled to explain that I lived there, but I wasn’t from there at all. She looked even more confused than before, and just stopped talking to me altogether.

We had to say the pledge of allegiance every morning. I so wanted to be a part of it, to be American in this one way, but I had never learned the words and couldn’t understand them in the chorus of mumbles around me. Half the time a stern-faced teacher would march up to me to correct my hands, because I had accidentally placed the left hand over my chest instead of the right. I remember whispering to one of the girls if she could maybe teach me the thing that people chanted in the morning.

“What? You mean the pledge of allegiance? You don’t know it?” she exclaimed loudly. I hastily said I was joking and avoided talking to her from then on.

So though I was clearly not Japanese, I might be failing at being American now. It was an idea that I loathed, so I tried even harder to be as American as I could be. I started talking with my mother about living with her parents in the US for awhile. Surely, I thought, this would be the key to belonging. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

Because that was all it was: I felt like I didn’t belong, and believed that there must be a place for me.

I don’t remember any one earth-rocking realization that I didn’t have to identify as American at all. I do remember that the realization came as a gradual shift. But there was one event that was no doubt a huge factor in that shift: in the third term of fourth grade, I was transferred to a different school. And everything changed.