“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…
Category: The Othered
Variable Comforts
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,…
The Inappropriate Song—or, How My Childhood Mind Thought in Absolutes
–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…
Unexpected Comfort Gauge: the Bathroom Metric
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…
Belonging: My Greatest Love Story
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….
Why I Vote Now—And Why I Didn’t in the Past
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…
Queen of Our World
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…
Queen of Our Kingdom
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…
You’re Going to Be a Sister!
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,…
Falling Face-First into Gender Norms: The Books
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…