With the temple visited, we kids transformed in the sunshine into our gay American-Japanese-Canadian-gaijin selves and began to sing “Hey Jude.”
A miracle had occurred: I belonged.
Something else had occurred: my assumptions had been shaken. I’d thought Christian missionary kids would rigidly disdain all other religions, but these kids delighted in Shinto and Buddhist ideas. Zen Buddhism was the spiritual practice most revered by the kids at school. It was as though Christianity was assumed—and then there was this other possibility—nearly unattainable, set up on a pedestal above everything else. To be able to withstand the rigors of Zen training—to sit for hours in motionless postures, to empty the mind and dissolve the self, to achieve enlightenment or satori: that was the greatest attainment.
Over the two years ahead, these kids and their families would shake up my sense of the missionary endeavor. Such fine people—offspring of educators, farming experts, translators—they would broaden the knee-jerk sense of missionaries I’d hardened up in Borneo. I’d sneered at the Mormons on the Kuching streets; the Catholic priest in the jungle hamlet had turned me cold. They’d seemed to me to be committing sacrileges themselves, violating the culture of another people. (And what was my father doing?) A couple of years from now, when a friend’s missionary father would take a gang of us skinny-dipping in a Hokkaido river, I would gain an even more acute sense of how variegated and unpredictable the world was. I added to my repertoire a new kind of Christian: those who were open-minded, embracing, and curious.
We tend to repeat ourselves, and I had done so in place after place, but here something different happened. This move to Canadian Academy taught me that schools were very different—each from the next—that place really did make a difference, and that moving could be beneficial.
Because I had been to the States recently, here at CA I was like a messenger from the old country, the bearer of special knowledge. Also, I was unique because I lived in faraway, exotic Borneo. Suddenly—magically—I had status. Here, where I didn’t expect to fit in, I felt in the running.
Filled up on Bornean sun, fecundity, and excess, I felt potent, full of seeds like a pomegranate. And in a reversal of my normal approach, here in Japan I didn’t relinquish the self I’d had across the sea. Instead, I added to it. And I called upon the Foreign Service child’s specialty: instant intimacy. This time, faced with the question, “Who am I?” it wasn’t such a fraught affair.
I trudged up the stairs to my room on the third floor and the girls were in an uproar. The other girls on the floor were standing in their doorways rooting, and Agnes, Pippa, and Ginny were in a scrunching race. These were three of the girls in the rooms next to Gretel’s and mine. Ginny, with flying feathers of mango-colored hair, strong, freckled legs, and a sergeant’s commanding voice, was a girl who, despite her basic solidity, played a little too freely in the fires of drugs. Scrawny, electric-haired Pippa was sure she had a brain tumor, went wild with worry about her boyfriend’s faithfulness, and alternated between escapes into hilarity and deep, hair-twisting desperation to go home to Hong Kong. And Agnes was a beauty with cheeks as pink, cream, and perfect as porcelain, and a matching perfect figure, who, despite her breath-stealing beauty and the shrieking delight she showered on those around her, viewed herself as a sinner and treated herself as though she were a piece of chewed gum to discard in the nearest barrel, her self-image tattered by a frantic despair of some unknown origin.
Agnes had heard that if you sat on the floor with your legs straight in front of you and scrunched along on your bottom, you’d lose weight in your thighs and derriere. She was speeding down the hall on her tiny rear, yelling out “I’M SO FAT! GO FAT, GO!”
It so happened that Pippa had had chicken pox and was covered with scabs. She could only stand to live in her body if she went around naked these days, so she was racing down the hall on her naked, skinny, spotted bum. Ginny was way out ahead of Agnes and Pippa, athletic even in this kooky sport. It was hilarious: these three skinny girls absurdly scooching down the hall, laughing hysterically, all of them troubled and delightful in different ways. I rode on the magic carpet of my new friends’ high spirits.
But the girls’ troubles often rode roughshod over their native exuberance. The graveyard behind school was a hallowed, mysterious place—a ramble of grey, li-chened Shinto and Buddhist headstones leading up the mountain slope. I escaped there to think, to write poetry, and to experience quiet. For some kids, though, it was a place of the illicit, a place for drugs, kissing, and the forbidden.
One day Agnes appeared and plopped herself on my bed. She was tearful, looking down. “You’d be ashamed of me if you knew what I just did,” she said. “I let Greg feel me up in the graveyard.” Then she was hysterical, crying and laughing at once.
“Are you okay?” I asked, patting her back.
“The problem is, I liked it,” she said, sniffling. “Oh Sara, what am I going to do?”
Another girl, Dottie, an eighth grader, did the same thing: plopped down on Gretel’s bed and said, “I’m bad, Sara. I’m bad. I got a D on my math test and my dad will kill me. Anyway, I went out in the graveyard with Davy and we smoked—not cigarettes. I couldn’t help it.”
Some of these missionary girls had been taught that playing cards and dancing were forbidden; kissing was not even in the realm of possibility and drugs grounds for excommunication. They were so self-flagellating, so never good enough, that they seemed to have a headlong need to go to extremes in order to obtain even a sip of self-determination. If only some of these missionary parents could have realized a little leash went a long way.
Agnes was the one whose being expressed the most conflict. Though she was all fair and pink beauty—eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, hair an unruly, playful bob—she was constantly wailing, “Oh God, I’m so ugly.” Though she was a warm and giving friend, she was always telling me she was bad. She shrieked with gay pleasure when she saw a friend, but there was another shriek in her that you sensed would shatter one day.
Somehow I had quickly become a kind of mother-confidante to some of the younger girls. They seemed to see me as a standard-bearer. While I had grown up in an institution with strictures and rules—to be unfailingly polite and diplomatic—their institution made an even greater, more nebulous, and basically impossible demand—to be everlastingly “good.” In any case, some of them sought me out for common sense, for self-respect.
Then there were boys—or one, in particular.
The first week of school, I had peeked at all the new boys from behind my hair. There was one, a tall Japanese American guy who was always talking to one girl or another. A boy named Will—with a smile like a movie star’s. He was naturally friendly and nice, so he smiled at everyone. The thing was, when it hit, that smile beamed out and rayed into my body in a spreading warmth that melted my entire insides.
I tried not to look at him—his beauty hurt. His shining, black-rain hair framed a face so open and genuine—and he had those Asian almond eyes, like two melted chocolate kisses, the eyes of my earliest childhood.
I gave myself lectures. “Don’t even look at him, Sara. He’d never like you. He can have any girl he wants. . . .” But I couldn’t not peek at him.
Annie and I laughed at him from our table in the dining hall. He was across the room, slouching against the wall, talking to one of the twins who’d started the year late. While he was talking to one he tossed a wadded-up napkin at the other.
“What a flirt,” Annie said.
“You’re not kidding,” I said.
At sixteen now, I didn’t just obsess about cute boys. In Kobe I was finally old enough to deliberately take in a culture—to study it and seek to absorb it. I asked questions about Japan of my peers who had Japan in their bones. The other students taught me about their country, and thereby my sense of the world deepened and complexified.
A girl in a bath taught me about Japanese subtlety. One night early in the year, I followed the
girls who were rushing about in their yukatas with towels on their arms, and buckets of shampoo and soap dangling from their arm-crooks. “Ofuro! Ofuro!” they called out as they trooped down to the first floor.
The downstairs bathroom, I discovered now, was literally that: a room for the bath. And the bathtub, it turned out, was a square, tiled box set against the back wall, big enough for six girls to fit in, with water up to their chins. From the doorway I beheld a half dozen or so girls squatting on the expanse of tile before the tub, shoving plastic buckets under low faucets, swishing themselves with water from their pails, soaping themselves and rinsing off with more water from the buckets. Once they were done with this peculiar washing outside the tub, they clambered into the steaming bath.
I tried it—awkwardly washing myself beside a faucet and then lowering myself into the water, which was alarmingly hot. Even though the other girls were chattering in the tub like it was a party, I was so overheated after one minute that I felt as thought I was going to faint, and had to hurry out and splash myself with a bucket of cold water. Ofuro-bathing was an acquired taste that I wouldn’t comprehend until later, when, at a small bathhouse in a seaside village, I would discover the delightful companionableness of communal nakedness, a Japanese comfort with the body to match my earlier experience of the Dutch strand.
But now, in the outer dressing room, putting on my yukata, I talked to Sachi, the beautiful Asian girl I’d noticed the first day, who lived on the first floor. She said she had a Japanese mother and a Chinese father and invited me to her room to talk about Japan. I looked at her lovely collection of Japanese obis and teacups, and then she offered me a slim volume from her shelf. “Here’s my favorite book of haiku,” she said.
In my room, just before lights out, I read poems like these:
The Little Valley in Spring
A mountain stream:
even the stones make songs—
wild cherry trees
—ONITSURA
Symphony in White
Blossoms on the pear—
and a woman in the moonlight
reads a letter there.
—BUSON
I adored the half-hidden, torn-leafness of the poems, the light brushstrokes, so different from thick, hard-painted American sentences. They seemed more profound for their minimalism—the way they left the reader to conjure a whole garment from a shred of cloth. And they seemed to not just respect, but to revere the infinite range and infinite delicacy of human feelings—to hold the human spirit, like a cloud, in a gentle cup of leaves.
Through the poems I gleaned a sense of the Japanese preference for the suggestive and the shadowy, for the subtle and the hidden. Tanizaki’s words, which I would read years later, express this. “If everything is depicted, the flavor is lost.”
The interrogatory view of life in haiku affirmed my own penchant for questing—it implied that it was permissible to have wonders rather than answers, to have fragmented or multicolored truths, unlike in America, where you were supposed to have a ready, firm, black or white answer at all times. It also seemed to confirm the existence of the mysterious, unrevealed, secretive side of life so slippery-familiar to me.
One late afternoon, a girl named Alice—the russet-haired, queenly senior—invited me to her room, the sole, coveted, tatami -matted room on our dormitory floor. She and her roommate, Bea, slept on futons, which they rolled away each morning, in the Japanese custom.
As the city out the window pinked with dusk, Alice, Bea, and I sat on zabutons at a low table, our feet curled under our bottoms, and ate rice crackers and sipped green tea from small, gnome-size cups.
As we ate and sipped, Alice explained honorifics to me—why it was “O-cha,” rather than just “cha,” the word for “tea,” and “O-furo” rather than just “furo,” the word for “bath.” The “O,” she said, was added to honor the object and its associated activity. I was reminded of the American Indian custom of offering prayers of honor to elk or deer hunted for food.
As the conversation drifted from Buddhist philosophy to Graham Greene—Alice was perhaps my first intellectual—I sipped in a glimmering sense of the Japa-neseness of these two Japan-bred girls. They had a calm reverence about them—reverence for the ritual of tea, for the ritual of talk, for the ritual of friendship. They lived the honorific. Their Japanese attention to honoring, and to courtesy and ritual, offered a comforting structure as contrasted to the free-wheeling, sink-or-swim whirl of American teenage social life. Once again, I found here a station for my proclivities.
As I set about to leave, like Sachi, Alice handed me a book. Her fingers were slender twigs extending from the baggy sleeve of her Shetland sweater. (She was one of the few students from the East Coast American Episcopalian missionary set. There were classes within missionaries too.)
The book was The Quiet American. I read the book, and was compelled by the portraits of American violent innocence and British fatalistic cynicism. Greene seemed to view a change from one to the other as the inevitable change of age—that of a man or of a country. How true this would turn out to be. I would return to the book with profit, over the years, and it would seem to me that my father’s life had patterned itself sequentially on the two figures in the book—at first the idealistic American and later the saddened, almost too worldly-wise Englishman. But I wondered, as I read the book now, Does Alice know about Pop? My stomach fluttered as I thought about this. I had never said those words to anyone.
At the end of the first month of school, Dean Kent asked me if I would represent America as one of the year’s Flower Princesses at the annual international festival in Kobe. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The idea of being a princess of any kind had no attraction to me now, much as I would have leapt at the opportunity when I was seven. It turned out this was a kind of international social service and goodwill tour. Flower princesses walked in a parade in downtown Kobe and then, over the next months, visited gardens, children’s schools, and old people’s homes. The dean asked me in such a way that I didn’t really have a choice, so I agreed to serve. It turned out Annie and a younger student from Texas would also be representing America.
My first dilemma was what to wear for the parade. What should I wear to represent Americanness? Should I represent the show-offy America of the movies, the America of the Wild West, or what? I was so ambivalent about my warmongering country I was probably not the right one to stand for it, I thought.
I dragged a bunch of clothes out of my narrow little dorm closet and for days couldn’t figure out what costume to wear in the parade. In the end, I chose the flowered skirt my mother and I had sewn out of black cloth sprinkled with pink and yellow and blue flowers, and a Mexican peasant blouse Sara had given me. Annie wore something similar, while the sophomore who was going along wore a spangled, fringed cowgirl outfit complete with pointed cowgirl boots and a tall Stetson.
The parade was tolerable because Annie was there and she and I could joke as we waved like movie stars to the Japanese crowds gathered at the roadsides. When we trailed through the city gardens and stood on stages at the old age homes, I felt foolish with ladies in kimonos pointing at me, whispering behind their hands, and showering gifts on me. How had I gone from antiwar protestor to this? Over time, though, I began to see that we were actually bringing pleasure to the old people and children and the Japanese people who didn’t often get a close-up look at gaijin. What must it have been like for these old people who’d been through World War II to look at American girls spot-lit on the stage?
Before she’d left, my mother had taken us to see a man named Mr. Tilman, who worked at the American consulate downtown. He was a young man with a wife and a little baby—and lived in a tiny apartment on the side of a hill, perched over the busy street.
One Friday night Mr. Tilman invited Andy and me for dinner. It was a little strange to have this young family invite us over, but we were used to people being polite to us, to being looked after, to being special
when we were abroad.
The evening was fun; it was great to be in a real home, with real American adults, for a few minutes. Mr. Tilman served us delicious Kobe steaks. “I figure you don’t get these at the dorm,” he said.
“We sure don’t,” we said.
Mr. Tilman seemed to like having us there, having a chance to talk to teenagers. As I remember him, I have an impression of fierce brightness, a flirtatiousness, and a coyness. Something had changed. I didn’t have words for it, but I was suddenly under the eyes of men. Only half knowing it, I suddenly had a sense that I was attractive to Mr. Tilman, that I’d be an adult soon.
Mr. Tilman asked what music I liked. He laughed when I said Steppenwolf and The Doors. He said, “Let me play this for you,” and he put on a Beethoven record. As we went out the door, he said, “When you’re older, come back and I’ll play Mozart for you.”
Only years later would I realize the reason Mr. Tilman had had us over: he was one of us, perhaps the only spy in Kobe. My mother had asked him to look after us as one of the clan.
Unlike the missionary kids who’d had plenty of religion and hated it, my favorite class was religion class. I had never really gone to church, so when we discussed Christianity I was fascinated. While my father had raised me to think people didn’t need an external guide in order to be good, some of the Christian kids thought they couldn’t be good without an external, dictating, finger-wagging, and punishing God. This struck me as a crutch or an addiction.
When Dr. Mead, a University of Chicago-educated minister, asked us to write a paper about an Asian religion, I told him about my love of Thoreau and he introduced me to Taoism. I got the Tao Te Ching out of the library and it was like a door opened. “The Way” became my creed: everything that came to pass was natural, the way of the world—and everything contradicted everything else and was part of the “one.” Taoism was a bit like an Escher print.
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