“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.