by Tracy Slater
Twenty pairs of dark eyes stared at me. A few heads nodded politely in slight acknowledgment. The two youngest students in the room—Toru and Makoto, both Japanese, both in their early thirties, and both the only ones my age or younger—smiled kindly, but the other faces before me remained impassive. I began to sweat, my cheeks feeling bright. I opened my mouth to begin again, but instead of speaking, I gaped silently. I’m alienating them, I thought, and I’m not even sure why. Turning to glance at the clock, I swallowed, my throat like sand. Ten minutes past. Twenty more to go. And still no clue how to engage them.
What I did know: my Ph.D. meant nothing now. The confidence I had been trained to project as a professor in the U.S. came off as an insult here, an uncouth display of ignorance about my real status, determined by my age, my gender, and, most of all, my lack of knowledge about their countries. Why didn’t the faculty director warn me what an offense it is to show ignorance of their cultures, when he knew I’d never taught abroad before? I felt a flash of anger. But underneath, I knew the fault was mine. It was a foolish miscalculation to devote my few weeks posthire to reading travel guides and crafting business scenarios for reenactment instead of really learning about the homes and histories of my future students.
“The right, um, the American way to greet colleagues.” I plowed on, and the entire class stiffened. “I mean, in the West, in Canada or, or in North America.” I fumbled. “The usual way to greet people you work with . . .” I tried to backpedal, realizing my sloppy word choice suggested a terrible insult: that the American way is best, all others lacking. I was tongue-tied and sweating harder by the second.
Later, Ji-na, the program coordinator, pulled me aside. She explained that the students had designated one Korean and one Japanese participant to be their leaders and spokesmen. In both cases, they chose the eldest, men in their late fifties, since their companies’ Confucian hierarchies equated age with authority.
“The students are . . . commenting,” she said, after a pause. She looked down for a moment, then raised her eyes toward mine, resting them somewhere around the middle of my nose. “They like how . . . clear your voice is,” she added encouragingly. “But . . .” She stopped, looked down again. “Could you . . . talk more . . . quietly? Perhaps?” Then she giggled, her small, thin fingers coming up to cover her mouth. “Show less confidence? You know,” she said, waving her tiny hand in front of me. “Be more shy. Like women here are supposed to. Like the students are used to.” Later, in the dining hall, neither of the group leaders would acknowledge my presence, their eyes sweeping past me, their shoulders high and proud.
• • •
FOR THE REST of the week, we mostly stayed inside the training center, sallow under its wash of fluorescent lighting. The students began referring to it as “Kobe Jail,” its interior so sparse and ordered, so utterly removed from the outside world. Despite my experience teaching in a real prison in the U.S., I felt even more confined here. At least in Boston I could leave lockup after my three hours a week of teaching were up.
The few times I did venture out, to a nearby supermarket, I handed my ID to the guard at the security gate, then blinked into a sun made improbably bright after the dull glare of the training center’s lights. Outside, in a residential area on the outskirts of Kobe proper, I could communicate with no one. Children on the road stared shyly at me or hid behind their mothers, my long, wavy, blond-streaked hair looking very foreign to them, I supposed. Most of the brightly colored goods at the store remained mysterious to me, with vivid packaging and unintelligible black calligraphy dancing across their tops or down their sides, a kaleidoscope of the indecipherable.
When I found a bag showing peanuts on its front, with crescent-shaped rice crackers glowing like little orange moons, the women at the checkout counter smiled and bowed and laughed kindly as I struggled to count out correct change. Between the outside environment and the world inside the training center, I felt at once like a child in wonderland and like that fish on the platter my first night in Japan: flailing, stuck, utterly exposed.
After my talk with Ji-na, I spent the next week both ashamed and uncomfortable in the classroom. I spoke more softly. I looked down often, buttoned my shirts an extra notch around my neck. Except for the encouraging smiles of Toru and Makoto, I felt nervous meeting the eyes of the men around me. In the contest between the ideals that defined my life in Boston and the gender expectations of the East Asian classroom, I caved.
I did find some moments of reprieve, though. Especially outside of class, I was touched by most of the students’ polite manners, even as I could sense they wanted someone more experienced teaching them business conversation. “Oh, you like white rice!” a few would exclaim when they saw me in the dining room with an overflowing bowl. They’d incline their heads in welcome as I pulled out a chair at their table and set my tray down. They found it hilarious when I dumped soy sauce and wasabi over my serving, since in Japan and Korea, white rice is usually eaten plain. “This, this is natto,” a student named Sato told me when I eyed his dish of beans bathed in yellow gravy, sticky strands of sauce hanging from the end of his chopsticks. “Americans don’t like! Can you eat?” he asked. “Strong smell! But good taste! Good taste!” I shook my head and widened my eyes as I peered into the bowl, then pulled back abruptly as its scent hit me, and the whole table laughed good-naturedly.
While most of the students remained distant in the classroom, Makoto would repeat everything I said under his breath, practicing the movements with his mouth. Vertical marketing, he’d mouth silently. “V-V-V,” he’d practice, trying to push his teeth into his bottom lip to pronounce the v that Japanese replaces with a b. “Bertical, vertical, vertical marketing,” he’d repeat under his breath.
Then there was Toru. At thirty-one, he was at least a decade younger than most of his classmates. Not until I’d spent a few days watching him did I realize I was drawn to him. He’d tilt his head calmly in thought, search through his portable electronic dictionary for translations to English words, and smile slowly. Sometimes he’d stare off into space, then nod and bend his head over his compact laptop, spiked black hair and fine-edged cheeks suspended over the keyboard, muscled forearms peeking from his shirt. Next he’d raise his dark eyes, cock his head, and think some more, all angular features and unhurried gestures. When he laughed, his quiet expression would break into a grin.
“Can you help?” he’d ask me sometimes after class, handing me a case study with the vocabulary he didn’t understand circled in blue ballpoint. He’d nod slowly and seriously as I explained each word, watching my emphatic hand movements with interest. “Market launch,” I’d explain, mimicking a rocket in flight, my fingers slanting upward. “Ahhh, yah, yah, yah,” he’d say. “Okay, thanks you very much,” he’d add as we finished. “I’m appreciate you.”
Between my failures in the classroom and my disorientation in Japan, Toru’s shy sincerity washed through me with bright relief.
• • •
ONE NIGHT, a few days after she first broke the obvious news that the students were unhappy with my teaching, Ji-na and I were slumped together in one of the training center’s barren lounges. Her job was proving no easier than mine: since she was a young woman, and a Korean one at that, the elder Korean students treated her more like a secretary than the coordinator of an international executive program who had already earned her MBA. Mainly, they expected her to xerox their assignments and fetch them tea and snacks while listening to their litany of complaints. The air-conditioning was too high in some classrooms, too low in others, they insisted. The software for their marketing simulation was unsophisticated and slow.
Ji-na and I gossiped and giggled over beer and a Japanese approximation of Doritos. She told me which students she liked best, the few she thought were handsome and kind, and then I confided my small crush. In the twilight zone of the Japanese corporate training center—where we were the only women besides th
e uniformed cleaning or cafeteria workers who bowed silently to us each morning, where everything was more tidy, ordered, and sterile than our actual lives a world away—neither one of us dwelled on practical concerns such as professional boundaries or academic ethics. Instead, Ji-na pointed out how happy she was with her Jewish-American professor husband in Boston (“Just like you and Toru, sort of!”), how much calmer Toru seemed than the more senior, restive students in the program. How much she disapproved of my latest ex-boyfriend back home, the award-winning scientist with multiple diplomas and persistent fidelity issues.
That night when I slept, I dreamed about Toru, a hazy landscape of confusion and turmoil brought still by the shelter of his body. In the dream, I felt more comfort and warmth in his presence than I had ever known with another person—real or imagined. I woke feeling not so much excited as calm and safe. Then, although Toru and I could barely communicate, we came from entirely different worlds, and he was a student in a program where I was failing miserably as teacher, my feelings gave way to an even more surprising thought: this might not end disastrously.
• • •
THREE DAYS LATER, at an izakaya, a Japanese pub in Kobe’s center, the entire program had an official celebration of our first weekend. We drank and toasted and drank some more, a common practice in East Asian corporate culture, where getting drunk together builds the trust necessary to do business. In general, getting drunk and doing business seemed pretty strange to me. But getting drunk and making a pass at a student suddenly struck me as a great idea.
I thought I had noticed Toru staring at me that first week in the classroom. He had begun to hang back and wait for me when the group walked down the hall after class to the cafeteria or shuttled to the program’s factory tours. I imagined I felt heat rising off his skin as he sat near me, but then I’d think, I’m being crazy; he’s a student. Even though we were all adults and, divested of the power to give grades, I held no meaningful authority anyway, I was still supposed to consider him off-limits. Not to mention the disaster I’ve already made of this job without adding inappropriate sexual conduct to the mix.
None of this actually stopped me from checking my contract to see how the university defined fireable offenses. After all, I’d spent years dating lawyers in Boston. Interesting, I thought, as I read through the document. Relationships between teachers and students-of-age were not, per se, forbidden, as long as harassment played no part.
That morning, before our celebration at the Kobe izakaya, Toru and I had sat together on the train when the whole group headed to Himeji Castle for sightseeing. The others paired near us, Ji-na sitting with one of the younger Korean students, the two talking a blue streak in their native language. Toru made me laugh by imitating the white-gloved conductor bowing again and again to no one in particular. Then he checked repeatedly to ensure the open window wasn’t whipping too much wind into my face, brushing his arm against mine for a fraction of a second as he pushed himself up to close it in one quick, liquid movement. I was ecstatic, then chagrined. Then ecstatic again.
Now, at dinner, he was sitting next to me. Getting drunk like I was.
Afterward, we filed out of the restaurant as a group, crowding tipsily into the elevator. “We’re going karaoke!” someone announced. On the street, everyone turned toward the karaoke bar.
I touched Toru’s arm. Then I ducked behind a pillar, out of sight from the rest. Toru grinned and joined me, our backs pressed against the concrete slab, Kobe’s neon signs blinking through the night air around us. We watched silently as the others departed. When they were halfway down the block, we turned to look at each other. His eyes were dark but very still. I pivoted the other way, and he followed. We were finally alone, together.
• • •
TWO WEEKS LATER, he told me he loved me.
The night of missed karaoke, we’d stayed late at a bar in Kobe, kissing furtively in a corner between bottles of beer, then snuck back to the training center, holding hands the whole way until we parted at the guard gate. For the next couple of weeks or so, he’d sneak into my room after midnight, the other students tucked into their single beds or studying under the pale light of single-bulb lamps in their bare rooms. He’d leave around three a.m. Each Japanese student had been paired with a Korean one, and soon his Korean roommate, a shy man approaching middle age, was impressed, exclaiming to the group how studious young Toru was, how he’d stay late into each night in the computer lab working diligently on his solitary assignments.
Now, as Toru declared his love for me, I feared at first I’d misheard him through his accent. The curtains were drawn against the midnight moon, Toru’s spiky black hair jutting out in urgent tufts. He looked straight at me when he said, “I lub you.”
In keeping with my dismal performance as an ESL coach, I didn’t nod with brisk encouragement or prod him patiently to enunciate his syllables. Instead, I blurted out, “You what?”
If he was saying what I was hoping, it would be one of the best things I’d ever heard, since he’d already turned my own heart upside down. But still, I’d only known him for three weeks, this man who’d spent his life half a planet from my home, who bowed when I shook hands, ate miso soup for breakfast while I ate cornflakes. I didn’t want to think he’d said, “I love you” when, in fact, he’d said, “I live far from you.”
But he repeated it again, and a third time, and when I finally answered, “You do?” he said simply but unmistakably, “Yes, I’m love with you.” And somehow, right then, I knew I’d found a lifetime perk to the worst teaching job I’d ever had.
• • •
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER Toru and I were together, though we spent very little time alone. We kept our relationship a secret, and during the week, in classes or sharing communal meals, we would go about as executive MBA student and faculty member. But on weekends, when the group would scatter for sightseeing or side trips, we would get away for overnights in Kyoto or downtown Kobe, and when the program moved to China and then South Korea, we’d escape to Beijing and Seoul. Away, we’d lie entwined for hours.
The initial heat of infatuation that had infected me like a fever didn’t so much dissipate as mellow, and alongside my yearning for Toru, I began to grow fond of him in a quieter, more balanced way. After a fifteen-year string of Ivy League academics, lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs who had impressed me with ambition and inspired me with wit but still left me empty in my chest, I’d finally fallen in love with a man I actually liked.
One weekend in Kobe, we stayed in a small hotel near the harbor. Like most spaces in Japan, our room was tiny but as sleek and modern as I’d ever seen: the clean, precise lines of the furniture edging its dark mahogany burnish; evenly placed pillows lined perfectly against impeccably white sheets pulled so taut that the sheer absence of wrinkles belied their buttery softness. One whole wall was a window opening to Kobe’s skyline, its pointed tower winking in the distance, headlights glowing in the street below, tall buildings with square windows stacked up like newly minted Chiclets. Off to one side, the sparkle of the city laced the dark expanse of water.
That night, lying face-to-face, I asked Toru about his family and his growing up. He told me of his middle-class, stable childhood in a small Osaka apartment and his parents, who loved and protected him and his younger sister with a mix of warmth and reserve that he found wholly unremarkable in Japan, but that I found intriguing compared to family dynamics in the West. “They could love me well enough, so I always knew I was safe,” he said simply.
“Did you feel lonely?” I asked, as he told me of the day he first went to school at five, when his parents said he should stop calling them Mama and Papa and use the more formal Okasan, Otosan: Respected Mother, Respected Father.
“Lonely?” he repeated. “No, not lonely. Maybe a little . . . a little sad. But proud. Now I was real boy, not baby, so I felt good. More good than sad.”
“Did your
parents hug you?” I asked, getting ready to psychoanalyze. After six years in a Ph.D. program perfecting theories about the hidden meanings of literature’s greatest works, there was nothing I liked better than dissecting a real-life story—especially when it involved a romance of my own.
“Yes, of course, lots!” Toru answered. “Until I was older, in school. Until about five. Then, we didn’t touch so much. We Japanese, we don’t touch so much.” He nodded as if this were the only sensible choice.
“But still, you always felt . . . you always felt held, anyway?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest and rocking my shoulders to pantomime a child’s sense of protection.
“Yes! Always held, yes. Even though not a lot of hugging.”
His parents never once went out to dinner without him and his sister, he told me, nor went away without them—child-free vacations being a concept so novel to Toru that it took me a few tries even to explain. In fact, they hardly ever went out to dinner at all. “No need,” Toru said, in response to my surprise. “We were happy at home.”
Memories of my own parents, grim-faced but impeccably dressed, flitted through my mind: leaving instructions for the housekeeper on the way out the door, my mother’s French perfume scenting the air around me as she’d lean down for a quick kiss, her voice then permeating the large, dark house by intercom—“Kids, we’re leaving now. Corita will have dinner ready later.” Or, best of all, when they let us four children dress up and come out with them. I’d order shrimp cocktail at Josephine’s on Newbury Street and explain to my father, as he’d stare off into space, how the mirrored foyer made this restaurant my favorite. I’d feel safe then, as if anyone could see that nothing bad would happen among the gilded walls, the clinking crystal, the bathrooms with little lettered towels, all the pretty people in the rooms around us.
Back in the Kobe hotel room, though, all I said to Toru was “Huh, interesting.”