"What's your name? What's your major? Where are you from?"
As any Cal Poly freshman would know, these are the first three questions you get asked by strangers on campus- by the talkative girl sitting behind you in your GE COMs class, by your vaguely disinterested but polite physics lab partner, and by the guy who arrived to ARCE211 ten minutes early by mistake and is trying to do anything but just stand there, waiting.
So I start with my name (Laura) and my major (architecture), and then I hesitate. How are you supposed to answer a question you don't even know the answer to?
I was born in Tokyo, Japan and spent the first few years of my life there, raised by my Japanese mother, Haruko, and my white father, James. From the ages three to seven, I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both my parents were working full-time, so my sister and I's primary caretakers were a rotating cast of au pairs. Au pairs are essentially live-in nannies from a foreign country- in my case, Japan- who take care of the host family’s domestic duties, such as child-rearing, in exchange for room and board in the host family’s house. I was enrolled in my school's speech classes to fix my lisp-ridden English and learned to celebrate Groundhog's Day and say "y'ins" (short for young'ins). Every summer, I attended the local Japanese elementary school near my grandparents' home in Yamanashi, Japan.
Following my parents' separation, I lived in Los Altos and then Palo Alto, California, where my sister and I were raised by my now single mother. My Japanese had grown mangled and dusty from years of half-hearted use- my mother attended college in America and is comfortably bilingual, so she prides herself in speaking English and never really emphasized our Japanese heritage. I took Japanese classes on the weekend but was more interested in reading (English books!!) and enjoying a closeted minimalist emo phase (see center photo). Meanwhile, my father remarried a different Japanese woman and had two children, both of whom now speak Japanese a lot better than I do.
After my sister graduated high school, my mother and I moved to Yokohama, Japan to be closer to my aging grandparents. I finished high school at an English-speaking, international IB school in Yokohama. My father's new family, on a path unintentionally parallel to ours, also ended up moving to Japan two years ago; my half brothers now attend an international school in Tokyo.
So you can imagine my mixed feelings when, upon arriving to Cal Poly, I was greeted again and again with the same, deceivingly complex question: Where are you from?
After graduating from a high school where I was regarded as solely "from America," saying where I was mostly recently from- Yokohama- and subsequently being regarded as 100% Japanese didn't feel like the whole truth. No matter how I presented myself, I felt like I was masquerading as either entirely Japanese or American, when truly, I am only partially both.
If you have watched me present JSA slides for the past year, you have watched me spiral in and out of moments of clarity surrounding my cultural identity. While I have always encouraged my non-Japanese peers to take part in JSA, I found myself invalidating my own voice and desperately grasping to my Japanese identity to "prove" I was Japanese enough to lead a Japanese club. I felt uncomfortable watching people who were some amount Japanese by lineage using JSA to try to reconnect with or discover Japanese culture, when in reality, this discomfort was a projection of my own fears of cultural rejection. After all, if anyone can understand just how stressful it can be to exist on the ambiguous fringes of a culture or community, it should be me.
I am learning to exist unapologetically as an "other" in all the rooms I only partially inhabit. There is beauty in having fragments of my soul spread thin across all the homes I’ve lived in, schools I’ve attended, and people I've met. There is a certain beauty- albeit a grotesque-patchwork-train-wreck kind of beauty- to celebrating Yokohama Baystars and the Steelers, Sushiritto and Akarenga; drapey modest kanto fashion and the cali abg lifestyle; sardonic Bay Area humor, convoluted IB acronyms, and memez in general-- all with equal, if slightly misinformed, gusto.
Honestly, in reflecting on my childhood, what stands out to me the most is the privilege I possess. I am privileged to have dual citizenship and lived experience in both my countries of origin; financial support and security from my father, despite my parents' separation; and glimpses- if only partially- of so many different community and cultural bubbles.
In the end, I guess I still don't know where I am from. Maybe home is not any singular location, but rather the people and spaces that make your heart hurt in the best, gut-wrenching kind of way, and every mundane conversation and deep breath and (awkward) laugh that somehow find lasting stake in your ever-moving ever-changing physical self. And maybe for now, that's a good enough of an answer for me.
from..Yokohama (as of rn),
Laura
& if you're still wondering how I answer that inescapable question, usually I pick somewhere I've lived at random and stick with that, hoping that I don't get asked too many specifics (I tend to favor Portland, Oregon, where I've spent the most time cumulatively throughout my childhood & probably know best even though I've never technically lived there & isn't even part of the story I told earlier..lol). Other days, if I am feeling especially self-indulgent, I attempt to stumble through the same long-winded monologue you just had to suffer through and make the poor guy who arrived to ARCE211 early wish he had arrived a lil more on JSA time :')
Commentaires