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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