WHERE I’M FROM
Misa Sugiura
RUDE
It’s pouring rain the day I move into my dorm freshman year at Duke University. My parents and I walk down the hall, wiping rain off our faces and checking room numbers. 210... 212... 214. My roommate, Chloë, is already in the room with her parents.
Introductions and small talk ensue: what rotten luck we had with the weather today, of all days. What the flight was like from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Raleigh-Durham, where we stayed last night, how the rain caused three accidents on the highway between here and Chloë’s hometown of Charlotte.
“So,” say Chloë’s parents to mine, “where are you from?”
“We live outside of Minneapolis,” my father answers, looking confused—didn’t we just go over this?
“Oh, yes, right. But where are you really from?”
“Mom,” says Chloë quietly. She looks at me, clearly mortified.
“What?” says Chloë’s mom.
But my dad doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or maybe he doesn’t want to embarrass Chloë’s parents. So he tells them, “I was born and raised Takarazuka, Japan.” He nods at my mom. “Natsume is from Ōsaka.”
Later, as we say goodbye outside the dorm, I tell them that they don’t have to humor anyone who asks them where they’re really from. My mom says, “But we are really from Japan.”
“Yeah, well, when I’m asked that question, I’m going to say, ‘Minneapolis is where I’m really from,’” I say, but my mom shakes her head.
“Eriko, that’s rude,” she says. “Don’t do that to people.”
GUARDIAN ANGEL
When I was in eighth grade, a Japanese kid showed up at school. She was awkward and pimply, and on her first day she wore a sort of sailor uniform with a navy skirt and a white middy blouse with a big navy scarf tied in a bow. To top it off, her name was Miho, which is a pretty name in Japanese, but I just knew that the boys were all going to ask her, “Are you a ho? ’Cause that’s what your name says.”
Mrs. Mintz, our homeroom teacher, pulled me aside before class and introduced us, beaming. “Eriko, I’m appointing you to be Miho’s guardian angel for a few weeks,” she said, and she moved my seat partner and best friend Zayna so that Miho could sit next to me instead. “I know you’ll help her get acclimated and make lots of friends.”
How could I possibly help this girl? I didn’t speak enough Japanese to be able to translate anything beyond the simplest conversational phrases. I was suffocating at the bottom of the dogpile that was the eighth-grade social hierarchy, struggling to hang on to my elementary school friends as they changed and clawed their way up and away from me.
Miho looked at me with dull eyes in a round face. She murmured, “Yoroshiku onegai shimasu,”—a phrase I vaguely understood to be a polite greeting of some kind—bobbed her head at me in a deferential little bow and came over to the desk next to mine. She did another head bob at me as she sat down. Now that she was next to me, I could see that she had probably been crying earlier. I felt sorry for her—how miserable it must feel to be new, to not speak a word of English, and to have to start off in that ridiculous outfit that I was sure her mom had made her wear, with that awful name, and she wasn’t even pretty.
But I felt even sorrier for myself. Miho was exactly the kind of person that I feared everyone saw when they looked at me: weird, awkward, foreign. Japanese. I could not afford to take on an anchor like Miho, with her Japanese face and her Japanese clothes and that humiliating little Japanese bowing thing she kept doing every time I looked at her. I hadn’t asked to be her friend, I told myself. It wasn’t fair to lump me with her just because she came from the same country as my parents.
Eighth grade. Sink or swim. Eat or be eaten. I endured Miho’s presence next to me in class, muttering a few broken Japanese sentences to her when I absolutely had to. Once the bell rang, I cast her off and went running to Zayna and Sophie.
“Oh, her?” I said. “She’s Japanese, not like me. Real Japanese people are weird. Look at her. Look at how weird she is.”
CHOPSTICKS, AGE 13
Zayna and Sophie and I spent the day at Schulze Lake Beach that weekend, and Sophie’s mom got us Chinese takeout for dinner. I used chopsticks, they used forks.
“How do you do that?” they asked, not for the first time, and not for the last.
AMERICAN CITIZEN
The summer after Miho, we went to Japan and my mother enrolled me in a sleepaway camp so that I would learn to speak Japanese. I was surrounded by a hundred Mihos, girls who Mrs. Mintz had thought I would understand. No one was unkind to me, but they gasped when I poured soy sauce on my rice. They stared, shocked, when I sat crisscross (only boys do that!). The toilets were awful squat toilets.
One day, a girl asked me when I was going to come home to live in Japan. I explained that I was an American, so I’d probably stay in America.
“You’re not American,” she said.
“I am, too.”
“You’re Japanese.”
“Yes, but I’m also American.”
She gave me a long, hard look. She asked me gently, “Have you not seen yourself in a mirror?”
“I know my face is Japanese. But I am American because I was born in America.” I didn’t know how to say birthright citizenship in Japanese. Or in English, for that matter. All I could do was keep repeating, “I was born in America.”
She shook her head. “Make sure you look in a mirror when you get home. You’re definitely Japanese.”
CHOPSTICKS, AGE 18
My roommate Chloë’s mom visits Duke one weekend and takes us out for sushi.
She asks me, “Can you use chopsticks?”
DOUBLE
Shortly after that week of sleepaway camp in Japan, my mother and I passed a Starbucks on the way back from the train station to my grandmother’s house in Osaka. It was a steam bath outside, and I was dying for a taste of home. I asked my mother to come to the counter with me to help me order, but she insisted I try ordering on my own first. “It’s practically the same menu,” she said. “Even the sizes.”
So I walked up to the counter and ordered a grande Double Chocolate Chip Frappuccino. I said it slowly, so that the barista could understand me.
I got a blank stare in return.
“Grande,” I said. I held my hands in the air, one over the other, grande-height apart. “Dou-ble. Choco-late chip. Frap-pu-cci-no.” I pronounced everything carefully.