by Tracy Slater
Often, expats form thick bonds before they have time to discover if they even really like each other or would be friends in another context. Like lovers blinded by slick surfaces, foreigners together can fall prey to a mirage of intimacy: You’re from far away and look different, too! No one will sit next to you on the subway either!
Among a few other foreigners I’d started to meet, I already sensed how easily a relatively nice fellow expat could become an intense new friend crush. How, along with the smooth relief of having a like-passported partner in crime, a subtle disconnect could take shape, then a vague dissatisfaction. Finally came a kind of gently stultifying emptiness when you realized that, beyond geography, you and your new closest companion lacked essential symmetry.
Jodi felt like she could be a true friend, though. For one, I was fascinated by her business. She had gone to community college, and her mother had been a struggling civil servant barely able to pay the bills. But Jodi had unusual dexterity in her hands, and she became a court stenographer. She was so talented that she could do “real time” court reporting, typing testimony virtually simultaneous to its utterance. I’d never met a stenographer before; I’d only seen them on Law & Order, sitting modestly in the corner, hunched over some strange, square machine. But Jodi was funny and outgoing and stylish. She made a small fortune every year as a freelance real-time court reporter, being flown around the world by major American law firms taking depositions in international cases. Who knew? I thought.
A few years earlier, legal clients involved in international cases had started sending Jodi to Asia, repeatedly and at huge expense, because no one in the region offered the services she could. She saw an opportunity and grabbed it. With virtually no business or entrepreneurial experience, she founded the first U.S. real-time court reporting agency in East Asia.
I admired Jodi’s pluck. Like most privileged American Northeasterners from education-obsessed families, I’d never met someone who had gone to community college and then founded a global organization. Nor did I personally know many people who made a living anymore from, literally, their hands.
Jodi and I also shared some similarities beyond being outsiders in Osaka. Although economically different from mine, her family was another tribe of neurotic second-generation Americans. Like mine, her mother found Yiddish the perfect lexicon to express the trauma of seeing her nice Jewish daughter in Japan. Jodi’s mother wanted to know why she had to shlep all the way to Osaka every few months. “Oy, the kvetching!” Jodi complained jokingly, and it felt like some kind of weirdly sweet homecoming when she did.
Also like mine, Jodi’s family’s name had been changed when her grandfather emigrated from Eastern Europe (in my case, from Slutsky, in hers, from Chaemowitz; we laughed about both, but even she admitted my original last name had been worse). We’d sit in a bar near her apartment in Umeda, a few subway stops from mine, swilling dirty martinis that we ordered after handing a note written by Jodi’s translator to the bartender. Then we’d cackle over our latest publishing idea: the launch of the Slutsky-Chaemowitz Osaka Post, a periodical dedicated to our misadventures in Japan. Her grandmother in assisted living in Boca Raton had already promised to be a faithful subscriber.
Later that spring, we planned a trip to Hong Kong, where Jodi had a three-day deposition. I lounged in the five-star hotel room her client had provided and tapped away at my keyboard while Jodi deposed witnesses at their law offices. When the weekend came, we went to the night markets, huge outdoor corridors lined with stalls selling brightly embroidered fabrics, little silver-threaded Chinese jackets, sweetly stitched silk purses, and ten-dollar “cashmere” pashminas I absolutely needed. In every color. We bought jade bangles and fake-jewel earrings, filling our fists with accessories, the twang of Cantonese peppering the air around us. We were stoked on a cheap-goods shopping high, fueled by an ice-thin euphoria, a kind of dizzy energy as if we’d eaten too many Twinkies.
Jodi bought a cheongsam, a tight, embroidered Chinese dress slit up the thigh. “Oh. My. God,” she said as she grabbed for it, an eye-popping sheath hanging on a makeshift metal rack. “Can you imagine what my international luvaah is going to say when he sees me in this?” She was referring to her latest on-again, off-again international hookup, an American executive she only saw when he was in Asia on business. They almost always met at his hotel because she didn’t like men to stay the night at her apartment. “Too much snoring.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Too little space in the bed” for her not to have an easy way out.
That weekend we ate steaming plates of tofu and vegetables, bought fresh lychees at an outdoor fruit market, peeling away the rough brown skin and popping the little white mounds into our mouths, the firm flesh bursting in a rush of tang and sweet as we bit down to the pit. We had tea and pastry at a restaurant overlooking Victoria Peak, the vista of Hong Kong rising in the gauzy fog below. Then we went for fifteen-dollar, hour-and-a-half foot massages. “Heaven,” I said to Jodi, leaning my head lazily toward her. She was stretched out with her eyes closed on the faux-leather recliner next to mine. “Heaven,” she murmured.
And it really did feel like a kind of heaven to me. I was thrilled by the newness of yet another place and culture. My cheeks felt flushed from our fits of laughter over the coffee-flavored jelly we’d bitten into at the restaurant overlooking the peak, horror spreading over Jodi’s face as she realized that what looked on the menu like dark chocolate cake was really a gelatinous, Sanka-flavored Jell-O square.
I had a fiancé whose love felt both deeper and less complicated than I’d ever thought possible, even if the logistics of our relationship terrified me. I had a best girlfriend to travel and laugh with, one whose wacky bicontinental existence mirrored mine. “I feel . . . I feel weirdly . . . complete,” I said to Jodi after our massages ended. “I feel like I have almost everything in life I could need: Toru, you, a great circle of friends in Boston, my health, a steady income, a chance to travel, a lifestyle where I’m learning new things all the time.”
“Oh, God, not me,” Jodi snorted, streaking her fingers through the chunky highlights she had flat-ironed that morning. “Running the business, with Japan’s red tape, is becoming a major pain in the ass. I’m not even sure I’ll have enough depos scheduled to cover July.” Plus, she complained, her boyfriend was driving her “crazy” with his inability to set a definitive schedule for his next business trip back to Asia.
“I mean,” she added, “not that I’m not having a blast with you in Hong Kong or anything. But I am so over Japan lately.” I felt a twinge of disappointment that our trip hadn’t made her feel as fulfilled as I did. But then I realized I didn’t really care. I loved Jodi’s bald honesty, her tendency toward cranky complaint. I knew she adored me as much as I adored her. And unlike Jodi’s, my work life was easy, Toru took care of any pragmatic challenge in Osaka that I might face, and I was in love. I felt happier than ever, even if the price for my new existence was the fullness of the life in Boston I’d spent years so carefully building.
3.
THE DISINTEGRATION STAGE
After the novelty wears off, the host culture starts to intrude . . . in unexpected and often uncontrollable ways. . . . This sense of being different, isolated, and inadequate seems permanent, together with bewilderment, alienation, depression, and withdrawal. In extreme cases this stage can seem to result in the complete disintegration of personality.
• Paul Pedersen, The Five Stages of Culture Shock
Low or not low is no matter. It’s just that feelings go up, and then they come down.
• Toru
EIGHT
THAT SUMMER, TORU’S SISTER, Kei, was set to marry her longtime boyfriend, Funaki-san. They’d met almost a decade earlier in their college ski club, where in winter they’d go to nearby resorts and in fall and spring to Tokyo’s indoor mountain. A few weeks before the wedding, Toru and I went to Tokyo for the weekend to meet Kei’s
future husband. Japan’s capital is considerably bigger than Osaka, its crowds even denser, its sprawl endless. The city also has many more foreign faces, so my light-streaked hair attracted no attention.
The four of us gathered at a restaurant for dinner, sitting on sleek chairs at a blond-wood table. Kei had a round, lovely face, high cheekbones, and neatly manicured nails, and she spoke beautiful English, as if she’d picked up a British accent at the private girls’ school she had attended. She still referred to her fiancé as Funaki-san, or “Mr. Funaki,” as she had done since they had met. They had been friends, but he’d been her elder and thus, according to Japanese tradition, deserved a formal salutation. He called her Kei.
Funaki-san had a wide, nervous smile, and he was sweating at the brow a bit as he bowed formally to Toru, calling him, as Kei’s older brother, by his last name and honorific, Hoshino-san. (Kei, like all little sisters, called Toru Onii-san, “Respected Older Brother.” After their marriage, Funaki-san could choose whether to call Toru Hoshino-san or, like Kei, Onii-san.) Everyone just called me “Tracy,” pronouncing it “To-ray-shee.”
Toru returned Funaki-san’s bow, inclining his head slightly less deeply, as befitting an elder. They spoke quickly, Toru’s tone a touch more stern than usual, again befitting an elder. But they also laughed easily, Toru tilting back his face and smiling as if to acknowledge both Funaki-san’s humor and his nerves. Kei dipped her head in a swift succession of nods as she followed their conversation. She seemed less tense than Funaki-san, as if she were both taking Toru’s sternness in stride and dismissing it as simple role-playing, all part of the expected: slightly annoying Japanese older-brother-meets-fiancé routine.
When I interjected to ask Funaki-san if he spoke English, his apple cheeks and broad forehead reddened. “Aaahh, a little, but . . . not good, not good!” he answered, grinning toothily and coloring even more, his hands waving in front of his face, his eyes going wide as if this was the part of the evening he dreaded most.
“Yes, he speaks,” Kei answered with her British-inflected accent, but she explained that he was too embarrassed to say much. Like many Japanese people, Funaki-san had a horror of shaming himself by speaking imperfect English.
“I study!” he offered, his blush now blooming crimson. “I want improve!” he added, paused, and then, as if the pressure was unbearable, broke down into rapid Japanese, gesticulating to Toru, who laughed again and nodded repeated sympathies.
For the rest of the evening, Kei and Toru translated questions between me and Funaki-san, or I sat quietly and listened to the sharp, foreign syllables of my family-to-be. I caught a word here and there—hai, demo, so desuka?; “yes,” “but,” “is that so?”—yet mainly the stream of verbiage eluded me.
The restaurant food was perfectly prepared and beautifully presented, the room bathed in a soothing glow that softened the strict tidiness of the decor. The service, as is typical in Japan, was flawless, no hint of unpleasantness, no detail askew. My seat was plush and cozy, and I felt peaceful and ensconced in our foursome, Toru stroking my wrist when I reached under the table to grab his hand. I was happy, grateful even, to be a part of this important gathering, to be sitting by Toru’s side, greeted as the elder sister-in-law. I was already becoming accustomed to my role as an integral part of the family—but one who nonetheless remained outside the fluid conversation, my face pressed to a pristine glass, so clear and light it was welcoming but for the invisible force of incomprehension sealing me off.
Since falling in love with Toru two years earlier, I’d been reluctant to learn his language. In agreeing to leave Boston at least part-time, I worried about Japan taking over so much of my life. Holding out against the language served as a kind of self-protection, a way to inculcate myself against the creep of expatriatism that flew in the face of the Boston-based academic I’d always planned on being. I didn’t want Japan to make me over, to change the woman I had worked so long and hard to become. Because I was someone who loved learning, my stance made little logical sense. But neither Japan nor its language was a topic in which I’d had any interest before Toru, and now I held some hazy belief that remaining impervious to Japanese would shield me from becoming too immersed in a culture and world I still approached with ambivalence. Moreover, I stubbornly resisted the idea that Toru and I would speak his language together. So much of our relationship had become defined by his world, and now with him in Japan full-time, he had to make so few concessions to mine. Speaking English together—a language I loved, whose shape and expressiveness and narratives I’d devoted years to studying—felt like some small way of ensuring my world and priorities remained front and center, too.
But the limits of this stance were becoming ever more apparent. Not only could I barely understand my future family, I couldn’t order in a restaurant that didn’t offer picture menus or ask directions if I got lost. So late that spring, I warily enrolled in my first Japanese class. I’ll learn a few words, I thought. Pick up a few phrases just so I can shop more easily, go out to dinner on my own. I planned to stop well short of learning to read or write.
One weekday morning, with Toru at the office, Tetsunobu-san took me to sign up for a course at the YWCA. When we had booked my enrollment by phone a few days earlier, I’d asked Toru to clarify that I spoke no Japanese. “I mean, can you make them understand, really no Japanese?” I added little swiping motions with my hands for emphasis, as if Toru were unaware of my linguistic limitations.
All Toru’s insistence came to naught, however. In a country where protocol reigns supreme, the Y still insisted I have the usual introductory interview—in Japanese. As Tetsunobu-san and I sat with knees scrunched at a low table in the tidy school office, a woman came toward us from around a high desk. She had neatly coiffed black hair and a pale pink lipsticked mouth, and she held an olive green binder. Behind the desk, rows of gray filing cabinets flanked the walls. I could see another woman in back sitting at a plain wooden desk with papers stacked in a perfectly straight line. She bent over a keyboard, eyes fixed on a screen, fingers tapping evenly.
The woman with the green binder smiled as she walked toward us, bowing and offering what I took to be extended formal greetings. Tetsunobu-san offered what I took to be an extended formal greeting back. She sat and looked at me, still smiling. “Konnichiwa,” she said. I knew that word, but after a quick head-dip of apology, I blurted out, “Konnichiwa, but really, I speak no Japanese!”
Tetsunobu-san laughed, and then they spoke in one long flow. The woman looked at me and smiled some more and said a few additional words slowly to me, none of which I knew. I smiled tightly at her, my cheeks flushing, my head shaking, my eyebrows raised with my best “seriously, I have no idea what you are saying” expression. How long is this charade going to last? I wondered nervously, a touch annoyed. I couldn’t say exactly why I was so embarrassed, but the practical American in me found this insistence on fixed procedure unnerving, as if I were caught up in a game whose rules had been explained to me but whose overall meaning I still couldn’t puzzle out.
Then the woman opened her binder and passed some papers to Tetsunobu-san. He pointed to each line and explained what I should put there. “Your proper name here,” he said, pronouncing the words pro-paa and then he-yaa. As a New Englander, I took heart hearing his Japanese lack of a final r. Just like a native Bostonian, I thought, pleased.
“Your other name,” Tetsunobu-san said next, sounding aahzaa. “Family’s name, here. Here, passport’s number. And birth date,” he instructed, baas-dat-to. He waited for me to fill in each blank, his neatly trimmed fingernail slowly gesturing from one box to the next. A faint trembling shook his hand as he hovered it above.
At the address line, he took the paper and wrote out his address in Japanese and then Toru’s name in the “sponsor” box. He pulled out Toru’s inkan, his official stamp used in place of a signature, blotted it on the little black ink pad they provided, and soundle
ssly stamped it onto the page, then carefully counted out the deposit fee, one crisp bill after the other. When he put the money down on the table, his hand shook again, and I wondered if the walk from the subway had tired him.
I brought the rest of the payment a few afternoons later, in time for my first class. We sat in compact chairs with individualized desks spread in a small circle, a wall-length blackboard on the right. I expected to find other Westerners in the class, but when I entered, everyone else in the room was Asian. There were two young women—one Korean, one Thai, I would later learn—and two men, one a teenaged-looking boy with skinny limbs, long dark bangs, and a faintly shadowed upper lip; one a stocky man in a suit.
Our instructor was a part-time teacher, a middle-aged Japanese woman with soft eyes and hair carefully curled at her cheeks. We were to call her Fujita-san or Fujita-sensei, the former meaning something equivalent to Mrs. Fujita, the latter an honorific reserved for doctors or educators, in this case translating roughly to Respected Teacher Fujita. She smiled ear to ear, and when she pointed to herself, instead of tapping a finger toward her chest, as we do in the West, she touched the tip of her nose. She wore a high V-neck sweater, a polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top, and a pair of what my mother would have called “slacks”: plain, neatly pressed, and polyester.
Everyone else besides me spoke at least some Japanese, and the two other women, married to Japanese men, used it at home with their husbands. We weren’t supposed to speak anything else in the classroom. The first week, we started studying the first of Japan’s three alphabets. The main alphabet, called kanji, consists of thousands of characters, each one a full word and based on China’s writing system. Only after learning the first two thousand of these characters is a student considered proficient enough to read a newspaper or function in Japanese society; schoolchildren, starting at age six, learn a thousand by the time they are twelve. Our class wasn’t even going to begin studying kanji, though, because we were too novice.