by Tracy Slater
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Copyright © 2015 by Tracy Slater
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Excerpts from The Five Stages of Culture Shock: Critical Incidents Around the World by Paul Pedersen (1995) republished with permission of ABC-CLIO Inc., permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slater, Tracy.
The good shufu : finding love, self, and home on the far side of the world / Tracy Slater.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-63484-4
1. Slater, Tracy. 2. Sex role—Japan. 3. Man-woman relationships—Japan. 4. Women—Social conditions—Japan. 5. Marriage—Japan. 6. Housewives—Japan—Biography. 7. Married people—Japan—Biography. 8. Japan—Social life and customs. I. Title.
HQ1075.5.J3S53 2015 2014039143
305.30952—dc23
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_1
FOR TORU, OF COURSE, AND IN LOVING MEMORY OF MAMORU HOSHINO
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introductory Note
1. DEPARTURE
ONE
TWO
THREE
2. THE HONEYMOON STAGE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
3. THE DISINTEGRATION STAGE
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
4. THE REINTEGRATION STAGE
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
5. THE AUTONOMY STAGE
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
6. THE ACCEPTANCE STAGE
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EPILOGUE: LANDING
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The following is a work of nonfiction, and in calling it so, I feel a grave responsibility to honor that definition, but I acknowledge that it rests on the limits of my memory. I’ve recalled each aspect of the story as best and accurately as I can, and as literally, with the following creative exceptions: 1) I’ve re-created the dialogue from memory, not notes taken at the time, except on very few occasions (such as times I wrote down verbatim things my husband said because they struck me as so unique). Therefore, the conversations recorded here are a combination of my best approximations of what took place and my attempts, when possible, to consult the other people involved. 2) To protect the privacy of certain characters in the book, I have changed some names. 3) In a very few instances, for the sake of narrative consistency or brevity, I have combined multiple minor scenes that happened over time into a single minor scene.
Any other inaccuracies or errors in the text are both unintentional and mine alone.
1.
DEPARTURE
Most if not all descriptions of culture shock indicate a progression of attitudes regarding one’s self and others from a lower to a higher level of development . . . [in] the form of a three-to-five stage U-curve. . . . [But] the actual progression of culture shock is seldom as neat and orderly as a U-curve suggests. Only rarely will a person achieve as high a level of functioning in the host culture as in the previous home culture, suggesting a backward J-curve as perhaps more authentic.
• Paul Pedersen, The Five Stages of Culture Shock
Whatever you do, don’t fall in love over there.
• My mother
ONE
I MET HIM IN KOBE, JAPAN, IN May 2004. Three weeks later, he told me he loved me. At least I thought that’s what he said.
We were hidden away far past midnight in my dorm room at a corporate training center. He was balanced above me on his arms while I stared up from below. I was a new faculty member in an East Asia executive MBA program. All twenty of my students were men. He was one of them. I’d already fallen in love with him, too.
I was supposed to be teaching these men business communication: how to lead teams and run meetings in a language and culture not their own. I knew almost nothing about English as a second language—or ESL—and had been hired under the flawed assumption that since I taught writing to American MBA students in Boston I could coach this group of Asian businessmen to talk like native English speakers.
I began to realize what I was up against on my first day of class, when I learned that most of my students had never worked with a woman who didn’t serve them tea. Anyway, by now, a few weeks into the job, I was already failing miserably in the classroom, never mind my extracurricular late-night transgressions with a student who could barely speak English but had already begun to make my heart spin.
• • •
BACK IN BOSTON a month and a half earlier, on the day I’d been recruited for the job, I’d been warned I might confront challenges as a young American woman teaching senior Asian businessmen. It was early April, and the Korean faculty director of the program had tried, indirectly, to prepare me. I had yet to learn that in East Asia the most important communication is almost always indirect, where meaning is often a destination arrived at through multiple circuitous way-stops.
The director was sitting behind the broad desk in his office, books piled high against the wall, when he introduced his pitch to me. The window behind him boasted a panoramic view of the Charles River, Cambridge stretched out beyond. One of MIT’s domes stood proud and gray in the distance, as if nodding sagely at its lesser colleagues across the water.
“The executive students all work for global Japanese and Korean corporations,” he said. “You’ll be traveling with them to Kobe, Beijing, and Seoul for each of the program’s monthlong summer modules, where they’ll see firsthand the manufacturing sectors across a range of markets. Then they all come here for nine months.” He drew his hands wide in an expansive sweep, as if displaying the whole group in miniature right there. “They’ll finish their degrees in Boston before returning next spring to their homes and companies in Asia.” He smiled broadly, then sat back and folded his hands.
“You won’t be giving them grades. Just sit with them at meals, get them talking, go to their marketing and strategy classes with them. Help them on their case studies and assignments. Some may be demanding, but you can handle this, yes?” He leaned forward toward me, both hands on his desk. “You have a Ph.D., so you’re a professional, no?” Sitting back, he laughed then, at what I wasn’t sure, but I laughed along with him. I wanted to suggest that—for the business-class tickets and a summer semester of highly compensated travel as a kind of “conversation coach”—this was work I could easily manage.
In truth, not only had I never been to East Asia or taught ESL, my Ph.D. was in Englis
h and American literature, not linguistics or organizational behavior. Moreover, I barely had an interest in cultures other than my own, although within my liberal academic circle, my provincialism wasn’t something I’d easily admit.
That April morning, just hours before the director offered me the job, I’d woken in my street-level studio apartment in Boston’s South End, the city where I’d always lived and planned to settle for good. As the sun streamed through my old floor-to-ceiling windows, I lay in my high-thread-count sheets and savored both the stillness and predictability of my life as a left-leaning, thirty-six-year-old confirmed Bostonian: overeducated, fiercely protective of my independence, and deeply committed to the cultural values of the liberal northeastern U.S.
Around me in the silence, the light swept across my bookshelves, full of volumes leaning left and right. Somewhere in the middle of all the Shakespeare and Milton, the Hemingway, Mailer, and Morrison, and the barely skimmed pages of literary theory, stood my own thinly bound doctoral dissertation on gender and violence in the modern American novel. On the floor lay a half-read copy of Vogue. My laptop was perched on a makeshift desk in front of kitchenette shelves stuffed not with dishes or pans but with papers and syllabi from ten years of teaching at local universities, which were crammed next to shopping bags and old tax returns. In the storage loft above the mini-kitchen were all the shoes I couldn’t fit in the studio’s small closet, rows of heels and boots and little ballet-slipper flats stacked on wooden racks.
As I did most days, I lingered awhile before leaving for my meeting on campus, luxuriating in the quiet, grateful for both the life I’d built around me and what it lacked: no complicated marriage or crying child to colonize my time. Then I climbed out of bed, showered, dressed, added a swipe of makeup, and stopped at my usual café for a soy chai before heading to the Boston-area university where I now taught. On my way out for the day, I ignored the mezuzah my mother had insisted I hang on the door frame, its tiny Old Testament scroll hidden in silver casing.
The only time my regular morning ritual differed, before my trip to East Asia changed everything, was the one day a week I’d go to Norfolk Correctional Center, a men’s medium-security prison. Then I’d wake at dawn, skip the makeup, wear an old pair of flats, and drive the barren highway west. I’d reach the barbed-wired complex early, then pass through a series of electric gates before arriving at the classroom where I’d spend three hours teaching literature and gender studies in a college-behind-bars program to male convicts. This was the work I truly valued, one in a string of progressive education jobs I’d had: running writing classes for homeless adults, preparing inner-city teens for college, teaching first-generation undergraduates at a public university. The writing seminars for American MBAs funded my work in these other programs.
Either way, whether I was headed to prison or the ivory tower, I always began my morning firmly rooted on the exact path I had scripted for myself, what one ex-boyfriend termed “your life as a nonpracticing communist.” I had a large circle of like-minded friends; a combination of academic jobs that satisfied me politically, socially, and intellectually; plus cash to buy great shoes. I’d planned each aspect of my world meticulously until together they created a kind of bulwark against the handful of mistakes I swore I’d never make: to take blind leaps of faith, give up my home in Boston, become dependent on a man, build a traditional nuclear family like my parents had, or, most important, cook dinner on a regular basis.
When he sought me out, the Korean director knew me only from my reputation around the business school. The year before, the deans had hired me to create a new writing curriculum for their on-campus graduate management program, and though I told him I’d never even been to East Asia, let alone taught there, the director had convinced himself that I was the woman to turn his foreign execs-in-training into English conversationalists—and to start in just a few weeks’ time. Once he floated the idea by me, I assured him (remembering my Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking students in lockup), “Well, I have had nonnative speakers in my literature classes before, lots of times.”
“Excellent.” He nodded, confirming my perfection for the job.
I played along. After all, I reasoned, the money they were offering for three months of work was more than five times what I’d make in a whole year teaching in prison, and I liked to travel. Besides, what could these East Asian executives possibly throw at me that I hadn’t already seen either behind bars or in an MBA classroom?
• • •
IN THE WEEKS before I left for the Far East, I made only modest preparations. I bought sightseeing books about the three countries I would visit. In their brief introductions to each culture, I read that all were more conservative about gender than the West. But surely, this won’t extend much into corporate life in multinational corporations, I assumed. Not until many months later would I learn that, in Japan particularly, even the majority of professional women become what’s known as shufu1: housewives who after marriage give up their careers.2
My travel guides also introduced me to the phenomenon of culture shock, the five or so stages visitors can pass through in foreign places. The names of these stages sounded both mysterious and like pop psychology: Honeymoon, Disintegration, Reintegration, Autonomy, Acceptance. The books promised a kind of euphoria followed by a crash and then—if one spent enough time abroad—a whole other, more integrated self could emerge, combining one’s native and new multicultural identities. I dismissed these notions, too. I won’t be in any of these countries for long enough. So I turned my attention to matters I considered more relevant: buying outfits for my new short-term global gig.
When I arrived in Kobe in mid-May, the faculty director from Boston was already there. He’d come early, affording him a few days of golf with the Japanese head of the training center where we would be staying. My trip from the East Coast had taken almost twenty-four hours, and I was exhausted. But as a formal welcome, we went to dinner at a traditional restaurant downtown. Its entranceway was a mini-garden, tiny bonsai trees dotting the white stone steps from the outside door to the dining room threshold. A gentle glow from paper floor lanterns lit our way. Removing our shoes, we stored them in little wooden cubbies, then glided in slippers over polished floors to our table. Even through the blur of jet lag, the effect was serene, magical.
At our seats, the faculty director poured sake for me, his golf buddy, and another woman who had joined us, Ji-na. She was the young Korean program coordinator who would travel with me and the executive students throughout the entire summer. She had recently moved to Boston with her Jewish-American business-professor husband, then took this job for the chance to travel back to Seoul once a year to visit family.
Ji-na explained proper drinking protocol in Asia, her small face and thin frame leaning in toward me, her hair swaying like a shiny black curtain. One person poured, and then, when everyone’s glass had been drained—or better yet, when they were almost but not quite empty—we would take turns giving refills. She picked up the little round ceramic sake pitcher, holding it between delicate fingers, and did the honors.
For the first course, a kimonoed waitress brought sashimi. The entire fish was propped on a series of sticks over a plate of shaved ice, head at one end, tail at the other. Tucked inside its carved-out torso were slices of white flesh arranged in a neat row. I stared at our meal’s profile, its mouth slightly open as if caught by surprise, one black pupil facing me like a laminated disk. I’d never been able to bear raw fish, nor a meal that made eye contact, but I gamely picked up my chopsticks, dangling them a few inches from the platter while I tried to build an air of nonchalance. That’s when I noticed the tail waving, a slow arc through the air like a metronome.
“Um, it’s moving?” I observed. “Is it. Is it . . .” I could feel my eyes grow wide, my expression between confusion and horror.
“Yes! It’s still alive! So we know it’s delicious and fresh!” the facu
lty director enthused. I knew the polite response would be to tuck in with feigned relish or at the very least try a tiny nibble. But I couldn’t bring myself to do either. I put down my chopsticks, my face hot, my smile weak, and drained my sake cup completely.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, after jet lag propelled me through a deep but uneven sleep, I had time to explore the training center where we would be working, eating, and sleeping for the next month. Its air felt arid, disorienting. Every inch was tidy, basic, uniform: identical seminar rooms with long, tiered, curving desks; orange upholstered swivel chairs; plain gray carpeting; wall-length whiteboards with black markers spaced evenly across their trays. The faculty bedrooms occupied their own wing, separated by a hallway from the students’ rooms, but they, too, were basic and bare, with a narrow single bed, a nightstand, three sets of drawers for clothes, and a small white bathroom.
Classes officially began the next morning. It didn’t take me long to realize that the university had made an awful mistake. I was terrible at the job, not knowing anything about the field of ESL, how our brains acquire words, or how to help foreign speakers exercise the muscles in their mouths to shape new sounds. My students realized the same thing.
I learned immediately that although the Japanese and Korean participants were unable to differentiate between v and b or r and l (so “evaluate” became ebaluate; “product” morphed into ploduct), they were expert at discerning when a young woman who supposedly occupies a position of authority is, in fact, woefully bereft of experience. “When you meet a Western colleague, you shake his, or her, hand, look directly into his, or her, eyes,” I enunciated loudly as I stood in front of the classroom on the second day, my chin raised high. The hot sun baked the ground beyond the window, but inside our classroom and the hermetically sealed walls of the training center, the air conditioner was blasting. The room was bright, sterile, cold.