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 from Japan,” they said. I saw some faces peering around curiously for a glimpse of the Japanese girl. Their eyes slid right over me.
A thread of irritation went through me: at the school for giving a statement so easily misconstrued, and at my schoolmates for assuming they would be able to tell who I was just by looking. But by then I was used to it. It was a small annoyance, easily forgotten. And forget I did, within a day or two.
So it was a surprise a few days or weeks later, when I was getting to know a smiling, long-haired classmate and she asked me what middle school I’d attended.
“I didn’t go to middle school,” I explained. “I was in school in Japan, and-”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “So you’re the Japanese girl!”
I stared, confused, and asked what she meant.
“They were talking about how there was someone from Japan at orientation.” Now that she mentioned it, I did remember that.
I tried to explain that I wasn’t Japanese. She countered with the observation that I had come from there, hadn’t I? I had to agree. I was already tired of the conversation. I felt that she didn’t have any concept of the complexity of the subject as she simply tried to fit me into a box to suit her worldview. Yet at the same time, I quite liked the idea of getting to be Japanese, at least for a little while.
I attended that school for two years. Some things became easier. In the beginning, some things were impossible for me to do in English. We started out doing logic in math class, and I simply wasn’t used to step-by-step reasoning in English. It took me an excruciating amount of time to do one page of homework, because trying to reason out the problems as they were made my head spin. I would translate the question into Japanese, reason it out, and then translate it back into English. Sometimes, the answer still wouldn’t make sense, and I’d have to start again. After a few months, this problem was a thing of the past. I learned who Britney Spears was and learned to use slang intermittently. I learned that Orlando Bloom’s name meant that you stood up and screamed.
(A lot of the “cultural knowledge” I gained at the time I find slightly disturbing in retrospect. It’s not the knowledge itself, but the fact that I was dropped into the middle of a culture where a lot of information was already assumed to be known to people my age. So for instance, in a seminar about how to spot eating disorders in your friends, I was getting a crash course in what an eating disorder was, why I might like to try it, what people use to spot it and getting ideas how to hide it effectively. Fortunately, eating disorders weren’t for me. I gave up after a week of trying and failing to develop one.)
The more I learned to pretend to be a part of the culture, the less I felt like a part of it. In part, I’m sure it was your average dose of teenage angst: the “no one understands me” mindset. Maybe, had I continued to live there, I would have grown to feel like a part of it. But two years later, I was moving to Hyderabad, India, and there was a whole new set of rules all over again.
By the time that I started university in Alaska, I was answering the dreaded question based on my mood and the people present at the time. If I was in a group of Americans, I would claim to be from India or Japan. Among Indians, I would claim to be American or Japanese. Among Japanese, I would claim to be American or Indian (but with the claim that I grew up in Japan). This fluid answer worked well for me for years.
Eventually, I grew tired of having to think every time I answered so basic a question. By the time that I was in graduate school in Europe, I was defaulting to “I grew up in Japan.” I would have to explain myself afterwards, but I could get by with a succinct explanation. For a time, I thought I had finally found a single, simple answer.
But again, years went by and my last visit to Japan fell further and further into the past. By the time that it had been 7 years since I’d last been to Japan, I was starting to feel that even my current answer was no longer the truest explanation. One day, I tentatively answered that I was American. There was no reaction but acceptance. It was easy. My mind rebelled against the idea of settling into that identification just because it was simplest, and the next couple times I met people, I went back to the “I grew up in Japan” response. Then, eventually, I started calling myself American consistently.
This was only a problem when I was talking to Americans, because this would inevitably lead to a discussion of where in America. The only place in America I could speak with any confidence about was Fairbanks, Alaska, and even that was limited to college life. If I said I was born near Boston, I was met with talk of people and places I’d never heard of. But I so rarely had this conversation with Americans that this was largely a non-issue. When I had to, I would smile and nod if I did not feel in the mood to explain my entire life story.
By the time I visited Japan again, I was in my mid-twenties and hadn’t so much as visited in 9 years. I was terrified to go back, by then. What if I no longer had anything in common with my friends? What if my Japanese was no longer quite native—what if I could no longer follow a conversation? What if this last one place that I still sometimes could think of as home no longer felt like home at all?
It isn’t uncommon that I get caught in a maze of what ifs in my own head. Generally it’s a colossal waste of time, and this time was no different. Japan was easy in a way I’d forgotten life could be easy; comfortable in a way that I’d forgotten any culture could feel comfortable. It didn’t matter where I said I was from, I realized. There is no longer a path of least resistance. Whether I call myself American or Japanese (or Indian or German), there tend to be puzzled looks and follow-up questions. I no longer occupy my time thinking about how to answer the question. I give the answer that strikes me as best at that time.