Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

I began this weblog over two and a half years ago (April 2003) as a bid to maintain my sanity in what was for me an utterly surreal environment, Japan.  I lived in a fairly rural area and was often alone, if not always physically, then at least in my experience.  Writing forced me to focus on just one thoroughly overwhelming thing at a time, and sharing them with someone, anyone, even via impersonal keyboard,   somewhat diluted the constant explosions my senses were setting off inside my head.  Every sight then was a drug, and every motion an epiphany, and keeping it all inside often felt too much a strain.

Before I wrote online, I kept a journal, primitive-style, in a big paper book.  On December 9, 2001, I was reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a passage there more accurately described my feelings that moment than anything else I could think of myself.  I added it to my journal.

"Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it.  Arthur blinked at him.  He wished there was something simple and recognizable he could grasp hold of.  He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassis' underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous' mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear, he had been able to see just a small packet of cornflakes."

There was no small packet of cornflakes for me either, so I started a journal to serve the purpose.  It was a tiny, normal, familiar, comforting, inconsequential world I could grasp in my hand and control, and it made sense, if absolutely nothing else did.  I could focus in on it when I needed to breathe, and let everything else slow-fade into the background until I regained my equilibrium.

Just over a year ago, I left Japan and returned to my former hometown, and now it's me that no longer makes any sense, and that's much harder to write about or to understand. In Japan, sharing was part of the thrill, and the thing that best helped me grasp what I was experiencing and how it was affecting me.  It all felt too big to keep inside in Japan, but what I've gone through since I decided to leave has been too big for me to let out.  Now I'm focusing in on little pieces of Japan for equilibrium, a Hokusai print here, an Ultraman toy there, the little things I stowed back with me, maybe sensing this would come.  In Japan, it was easy to understand why nothing made sense.  It was to be expected, and it was okay.  In my hometown, with a familiar face on every block and a memory on every corner, losing equilibrium feels a lot more poignant.

I have a thousand routes home on the walk from work, and one of these routes takes me past a kindergarten.  I looked in the windows as I passed last night across the street, and the familiarity made me smile.  It looked so much like the kindergartens I worked in in Japan -- the construction paper animals on the windows, the bright solid-colored fixtures, the child-drawn misshapen human figures grouped on walls, the tiny furniture all arranged at knee-level.  Something was very different though, and I thought about it long and hard, thinking maybe I was about to stumble across some cultural epiphany about American education or child-rearing.  Several blocks later, I realized what it was.  There wasn't any place to take off shoes.

Once at my neighborhood ramen restaurant in Japan, I became a focus of fascination for the owner. She cooed predictably about my fine skills with chopsticks, but then continued to watch me silently .

"You eat your soup so quietly," she told me finally, shaking her head slowly as if with disbelief. Three and a half years in Japan, and I never could get comfortable with noisy slurping.

Last night, at my neighborhood Texas Chinese restaurant, the Chinese owner giggled at me from behind a stack of menus. My waiter, her son, came over to explain. "My mother says you eat your egg drop like a Japanese person," he told me. Oddly, I had even been using a spoon.

When I left, he yelled after me, "Konnichiwa!", and broke into a gasping fit of laughter.

I miss Japan.

I drive around a lot talking to myself in Japanese. It's weird to hear nothing but one language sometimes for unbroken stretches of weeks at a time, and then suddenly have it stop altogether. I miss its rhythms and sounds, and the way the words feel in my mouth. Japanese feels much different in my mouth than English, and my tongue and lips sometimes miss doing those old dance moves, even if it means dancing by themselves off in the corner.

I miss Japanese food. I brought back supplies of favorites to help wean me back off the foods I'd gotten used to eating every day -- instant miso soup, sesame seed salad dressing, maccha milk and Royal Milk teas, colorful sprinkles to put on top of rice. It doesn't really help though. The miso soup tastes strange in my ceramic bowls, the sesame seed dressing doesn't seem at home on Texas lettuce, the teas are incomplete without convenience store inari or azuki sweets, and California rice isn't as much like Japanese rice as I had thought. I did bring back a Japanese rice cooker, I couldn't see living without one again and I had been correct, but the adapter I had to special order on the Internet to use it is slightly smaller and much heavier than the appliance itself. Absolutely worth it though.

Most of my belongings are still in boxes, as I still lack the furniture with which to house them. I'm also putting far more thought than is usual into my decor. Integrating my Japanese possessions with my American ones has become far too symbolic. Somehow I think that if I can seamlessly blend my obis and emas and geta and sarubobos and robotic panda toys in with the rest of my stuff, than it follows that I can do the same with those new more incorporeal Japanese elements of my life. I found a strange psychological peace when I was finally able to alphabetize my Japanese CDs into the rest of my CD collection rather than having them off in a corner by themselves -- seeing Motoharu Sano in my CD books right after The Monks and Moondog and Morphine, and just before My Bloody Valentine and Willie Nelson and New York Dolls made me feel more balanced somehow. I bought a bookshelf at a garage sale a couple weeks ago, and breathed a little easier seeing my Japanese for Busy People resting so complacently near Edward Gorey. I sleep easier with a Japanese winter blanket over my body and an American foam pillow under my head than I ever did when the entire bedset was Japanese. I am surprised by how comfortably tabi shoes go with jeans. I feel very disjointed sometimes with my head in two cultures, and seeing my possessions making such good token strides at integration gives me hope.

I've been back now in Texas two months, and am just finally starting to settle in.  Last week I moved into an apartment, my own, but still rather primitive.  No furniture, no phone, no Internet, no TV, no VCR.  I read all my books and drank all my housewarming beer, and at the moment, it's not much fun there (see above).  I spent a morning unpacking the boxes I'd sent from Japan, and then realizing I had nowhere to put their contents, spent the afternoon putting everything back in the boxes.  My very next day off, I actually did that again.

I'm finding resettling here in America much more difficult than settling in Japan ever was.  In Japan, the challenge was to insert the whole of myself into a foreign environment, and to try do that smoothly enough to survive to the next day.  Now the challenge is stranger:  to smoothly incorporate that new foreign part of myself into a familiar environment, one in which to the casual observer, there is nothing foreign about me at all. 

I can't write lately.  It's not because culture shock doesn't provide me with ample emotions and wild thoughts, because it's great for that.  I think it's because for the first time in two years, I have regular and frequent conversations with people.

In Japan, there was often no one to talk to.  My work schedule usually kept me from my foreign friends, and my foreignness sometimes kept me from Japanese ones.  It always felt pointless to talk to Japanese friends about how weird or incredible or maddening Japan was, so except for those precious lucky occasions when I or a friend could trek across country or city to meet, I mostly had to keep those things to myself.  Japan was a series of daily perspective jolts and sensory bombshells, and when it became too much, I needed an outlet.  Lacking one, I started to write.

I had a particularly relevant epiphany shortly before leaving Japan.  In Japan, I had a lot -- a good job that I enjoyed, a nice apartment stocked with comfortable things, a salary that permitted moderate exploration of things I enjoy, like traveling and books and music, and a dependable car.  I had wonderful things in Japan, but I had no people -- no family, no nearby close friends.  When I left Japan, I left everything, and returned jobless, homeless, and carless.  Here in America, I have nothing else, but I have people. 

I thought a lot about what I had in Japan, and about what I'd be returning to in America.  Everything with no people, versus nothing but with people.  The latter situation seemed the better option. 

Money comes back, stability tends to reestablish itself, remembered adventures are never lost, and needs are always changing.   People tend to come with stability, whereas adventures are more easily found on one's own. I've never regretted a moment of my time in Japan, but after three years of adventures, what I need most right now is people.  Needs change.

With every day that I'm back, my repertoire of stories grows smaller.  Friends have already heard them, and the stories themselves grow more distant, and more strange.  Sometimes it feels like my stories may have happened to someone else, someone living away in some faraway land, instead of to all those people I myself have been.  Each new day also brings new stories, things that happened to me just last evening, or things that are happening right now.  These new stories tend to crowd the old ones out, and make me more a part of this place, and less of the last place, Japan.

I arrived in Texas two days ago, and it all feels very surreal.  I'm sure I looked a bit crazy to my friends out on New Year's Eve, staring around with darting eyes at the endless procession of strange, tall, white people, and unfocusedly eavesdropping on every conversation just because I could.  Old friends asked me a variety of questions, but my answer to each one was the same: "Sorry, but I'm a bit freaked out right now," followed by more eyes darting.

Mostly I really enjoy culture shock, those first few weeks after arriving somewhere, when my powers of observation are at their keenest, and I notice things missed by routine.  It's also when I'm probably the hardest to be around for others.

These first few weeks are when I hold the most objects up, asking for or confirming their names in my native language.  I forget whether Americans have things called "pet bottles" or "live houses." It turns out we don't, and even though these are some of the few English words I ever heard in Japan, it seems they are useless for communication here. My friends are unsure of the words that are used here, for a recyclable plastic drink bottle and a small venue where one can see live music, respectively.  I know a keitai's a "cell phone" and a konbini's a "convenience store," but force of habit prevents me from using these more cumbersome words.

These first weeks are also when I bow conversationally, cut through crowds with my hands steepled, apologize compulsively, eat badly with forks, self-indicate with a point at my nose, consistently produce incorrect change, forget to hold open doors or say "bless you", make grunting sounds of agreement, remove my shoes indoors often before I realize I've done it, and mumble "itadakimasu" every time I eat. 

The most difficult part of readjusting so far is conversation.  The translation filter I'm accustomed to using is unnecessary, but the time delay persists.  I don't need to tediously plan all my sentences in my head now, but I still do.  I also have to be more careful now of uttering sarcasm or extraordinary whimsy, because I can no longer depend on the language barrier to dilute them when they go wrong, through the magic of benefit of doubt.

Conversation topics are difficult.  I've never seen Queer Eye, or American Idol, or Simple Life. I've never heard Avril Lavigne or Destiny's Child.  I didn't know there was a first installment to most of the sequels that are out. I can't distinguish Jessica Simpson from Lindsay Lohan, and I know nothing of SpongeBob SquarePants beyond the very obvious.   When I left the U.S., the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking, we hadn't yet bombed Iraq, and there was no Patriot Act.  I'm too clueless about American pop culture yet to have formed any opinions on it, and recent politics is something I've read about from afar, but not yet felt.

The only conversational contributions I can make now all begin, "In Japan,...".  Everything I say comes off sounding like a mini-lecture by a pretentious bighead, but it's often all I have to offer, because for the last three years, it's all I've known.  Unless my anecdote begins with "Four years ago," or "This morning while I was brushing my teeth," there is little else I can say, and otherwise I just have to wait to speak until after I rack up a few local experiences.

Happy New Year.

I don't think I've slept at the same times on any two days since I've been in America.  Each night's schedule is its own individual sleep snowflake, no two the same.  I passed a point sometime last week where not only was I used to Texas, but Japan seemed like someone else's long ago dream, or was it something I read somewhere in a book?  I find myself beginning most sentences with, "In Japan...," partly because that's the only recent experience I have to contribute to conversations, and partly to hear it out loud and see whether I still believe it.  I still stop and gawk aloud several times a day at perfectly ordinary things, "Cranberry juice! Lawn chairs!  Mutts!  A taco stand!", and this is one of the games I most enjoy.  But it just seems like I was asleep for a very long time, and certainly not in Japan.  Three years is a long time to lose in just one plane ride. 

Simple commercial transactions unnerve me, I find that I still approach every checkout counter and ticket booth with my words still deep in the back of my head instead of on the tip of my tongue, where I can use them.  It still makes no sense that all I have to do to communicate is talk, with no gesturing, no sketching, no consulting of dictionaries, and no humbly fumbled verb tenses.  Cashiers stare at me impatiently while I search for the words that they already know.  I nearly always give the incorrect change, and no one looks surprised when I don't.  A week and a half more here, the time is going much faster than I like.  It's hard to communicate my need to traverse and touch and photograph and archive and hold every block, every noise, every flavor.  It's hard to make friends understand the preciousness of each effortless conversation, every casually ordered meal and thoughtless purchase.  I want to store every moment like a camel's long oasis drink, but at the same remember the calm of when I took it all for granted. 

Today I have an appointment with a graduate school advisor, just looking.

It's 6:00 in the morning in Texas, and I'm wide awake.  This is a fine time to be just waking up if one has somewhere important to go, and a wonderful time to be unnoticeably carried into by wine and long conversations with friends, but a truly lousy time to be in a house full of sleeping people and already have been staring at the ceiling for hours crazed with jet lag and inconveniently hungry.  But other than the Cicadian chaos it's wreaked, it feels wonderful to be here.  And so much more than I was hoping for, Texas feels like home.

It's funny the things I'd forgotten about, so much so that I started writing them down on the back of my boarding pass stub as soon as I started spotting them from the air.  I want to notice this time when I start taking these things for granted again, because I'll never remember once I do.  I had totally forgotten about big yellow schoolbuses for instance, and grid-system streets, front yards, the commonness of private swimming pools, and how long highways are.  On the small short last flight from the airline hub to Texas, two passengers picked fights with the flight attendant before we had even been cleared for takeoff.  Everyone asked for soda rather than juice or water, and almost no one said thank you or please.  In the waiting area, strangers acted more like old acquaintances, and bonded casually while laughing together at the repeated paging call made for a man by his mother.  At customs, nearly everyone complained and aired their suspicions loudly they were being persecuted personally by the length of the lines, while on the other side, foreign visitors were fingerprinted in long-suffering near silence.  The middle-aged woman in front of me discussed the medication she had started taking for this brand-new syndrome she had just discovered she had, the symptoms of which apparently made her fidgety while sitting in the same position on 11-hour flights.  While our international pilot spoke as a sober professional reassuring us in serious tones, our Texas-bound pilot addressed us in a surprisingly skillful impersonation of an SNL Dana Carvey-era George Bush Sr., complete with reminders about a thousand points and being prudent. 

Cheese enchiladas and black beans are as good as I remembered, if not better, though, and right now nothing is better than  old friends.  Family comes next week.  I'll try to take good notes.