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…
Category: The Othered
Reading and My Mother
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…
Storytelling and My Father
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…
Language Acquisition, or the Endless Lie
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…
Language Acquisition, or Lying Like a Rug
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,…
Language Acquisition, or Making Little Girls Cry
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…
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
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…
“Where Are You From?”: The Unanswerable Question
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…
“Where Are You From?”: When I Became Japanese
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…
“Where Are You From?”: The Beginning of an Identity Crisis
“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…