Untangling My Chopsticks (16 page)

The room echoed with
V
s. But in seconds the aping game was over. I pointed to myself, said my name, and then pointed to Saki. She placed her index finger on her velvety nose and in a jittery I-am-about-to-pee-in-my-pants voice, cackled something in Japanese. The whole room broke up. She turned around to the row behind her, obviously pleased with her comic flair. I gave her a closed mouth smile then tried to redeem myself by convincing
the rest of the children to say their names. I was met with perplexed looks and sputters of laughter.

I pointed to myself and again said my name. Silence. My eyes flicked to the clock. It stared back: 3:12. I looked down at the children. They gazed up at me. And then I realized I had nothing to say. The teacher before me had not explained the curriculum. Tomiko had not filled me in.

“Let's play Simon Says,” I finally announced, gesturing for them to stand up. I told them to touch their fingers to their heads. Blank stares. I repeated the command, saying the word “head” and patting mine several times with my hand. They patted their heads and laughed. I opened my eyes wide, craned my neck toward them and said, “H-E-A-D. Simon says, ‘touch your head.’ ” More laughs and head pats. The clock read 3:15.

“Okay, Simon says, ‘touch your knees.’ ” I touched my knees and repeated the noun several times. Someone got the hiccups. The room broke up. Then I tried the word “head” again, not sure whether they were getting it. Getting anything for that matter. Laughter had become the language of the hour.

“Simon says touch your fingers. Touch your toes.” I had forgotten that one wasn't supposed to touch the body part unless Simon commanded. Hey, at that point, it didn't matter. I figured we were learning body parts. We were passing time. 3:17. More hiccups.

At that moment, Tomiko stole into the room, carrying a folding metal chair. Several kids ran toward her. She spoke rapidly in Japanese, then shooed them back to their places. “I'm just here to observe,” she said, glancing over at me and setting up her chair. “Continue.”

I cleared my throat. The room became so quiet I could actually hear the clock tick. Tomiko looked over at me expectantly,
as if to say, “I hope I've made a good investment.” Frankly, I wasn't sure.

Tomiko, at the age of thirty-nine, had just established English Fun World, while at the same time teaching English as a second language at a school in downtown Kyoto. She understood Japan's need to enter the international market and knew the art of speaking English would be a critical skill for future generations. So she had turned a spare bedroom on the second floor of her home into a classroom.

Looking at Tomiko perched on her chair, I thought about how different she was from most Japanese women her age. Not only did she run her own business but she also had no children. She had gotten married late in life, perhaps because she did not fit the mold of a traditional Japanese woman. Instead of appearing modest and weak, she exuded a sense of confidence and strength. Instead of being slim and petite, she was quite tall and thick around the waist. A touch of makeup smoothed her ruddy complexion and nicely softened her strong features and pixie haircut. A slight underbite gave her an endearing grin, which she flashed often. She had a terrific sense of humor.

Saki jumped up and said something to Tomiko. Several other kids got up and started clowning around. “Okay, okay,” I said, clapping my hands, “let's sit down, PLEASE!” Several of the children mimicked me and started clapping.

Tomiko shushed Saki and sent her back to her seat, along with the other kids. Saki nudged her seatmate. What an imp, I thought.

Suddenly, I had a brainstorm: birthday party games! That's it, I would amuse them with birthday party games. I ran through my childhood years trying to remember the different games I had played at friends' houses and my own: Stepping stones, similar to
musical chairs, only instead of chairs you used colored squares of construction paper. Forget it, no paper. Under the broom? No. Pin the tail on the donkey? No. Red light green light. How did that go?

Saki got up and whispered something again to Tomiko, who must have scolded her because she came back and plopped herself down on the bench with a frown. Ha, serves her right, I thought, meanly.

I took a deep breath. Lullabies? Limericks? 3:28. Come on, brain, help me out. Then, suddenly, I was back at the North Shore Nursery School in Manchester, Massachusetts, singing along with my teacher Mrs. McDiarmid.

“Eeeeeeeensy weensy spider crawled—” Several tiny hands flew to their mouths to cover the laughter. 3:31. A little boy farted. Everyone broke up. I changed songs, telling myself I wasn't getting paid enough to do this.

“All-rightee, Old Macdonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o. And on that farm there was a cow—mooooooo,” I bellowed. Saki doubled over. So did most of the other kids, who were still laughing over the fart. Balled fists punched into tummies as they wheezed and guffawed. I mooed again. More laughter. I smiled, not so much at the kids, though they were kind of cute and funny all scrunched over, but more at the absurdity of it all. What was I doing here? A psychology major in pink slippers mooing in a bedroom in Kyoto to a bunch of preschoolers. The same time a year before I had flown down solo to Trinidad and Tobago to meet with the head of the Tourist Board, since I had just been put in charge of the advertising account. I thought about how far I had fallen. Or had I? Maybe, given the paradoxical nature of Japan, I was on my way up!

With renewed enthusiasm, I started the song again. “Okay,
Old Macdonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o. And on that farm there was a pig.” I glanced over at Tomiko. Her eyes registered a mixture of amusement and hope. Even though I had put myself in the ungainly position of mimicking a sow, I still represented America, the place Tomiko had become enamored with on her first trip to California so many years ago. I was the country that said it was okay for her to feel different and live her life against the tide. So I continued oinking frantically to show her that she had fallen in love with something worthy.

Then Saki opened her mouth. And out of that little gap-toothed space came the shaky words, “O Macu-Donu ha-du ferm, e-ri-e-ri-ro.” Why she chose to sing then, I'll never know. Perhaps giving in to my quiet desperation was simply another game. Or maybe she figured compliance would sponge away the dirty crumbs of her disruptive behavior before her mother came to pick her up.

Whatever it was, she clapped her tiny hands when she had finished. At 4:00, Tomiko stood up and announced the class was over.

I don't know how much the children understood that day, but in the end it didn't really matter. “They are here to learn the sounds of English,” Tomiko assured me over tea several days later in her sitting room. “You can't expect them to learn grammar. That's not your job. Your job is to correct their pronunciation and help them feel comfortable speaking English.” She bit into a biscuit and went on to explain that most Japanese read and write English exceptionally well but freeze when they have to speak it.

“They are afraid of making mistakes,” she said, wiping cookie specks from her lap. “They are afraid of feeling ashamed.”

The longer I stayed in Japan, the more familiar I became with the concepts of respect, obedience, and abiding by a com
munity. Although I had been brought up in a society that prized individuality and independence, I came to understand the ways of a culture that encouraged people to let themselves be judged by those they loved and respected.

Tomiko had clearly found a haven of safety in our friendship, which worked because I offered her a mixture of the inside and outside. I could share in her native interests, such as a love of Japanese food, cooking, and art, yet as a foreigner, I would perpetually float outside her inner Japanese planet. This distance enabled her to share with me the Western side of herself that had no outlet in Japan.

But because Tomiko looked, thought, and acted differently from most Japanese women, she lived in a world of her own. And this made us both outsiders and ultimately good friends.

9.

hey nicknamed me “the Bullet.” It was a term of endearment I owed all to the tomato-red bicycle that Tomiko and Yasu lent me when I moved in with them the second week of December. They had invited me to live with them several weeks earlier over a dinner composed of
obanzai
(Kyoto home-style dishes), such as caramelized beef and potato supper pot and slow-braised radish wheels. The couple knew I had been looking for an apartment and offered the use of an empty classroom in their house. I had jumped at the chance to live with a Japanese family and experience their lives firsthand.

Their Western-style wood and stone home was located east of the Guesthouse in the same northern region of Kita-ku, so close to the mountains that from my bed at night I could smell cedar wafting through the open window. Cabbage patches, family
restaurants, and modest homes dotted the neighborhood, often filled with the melodious croaking of local frogs.

Almost every morning, I would zoom off on the shiny red bicycle with my knapsack and books wedged into the front basket. After a day of teaching and studying Japanese, I would hop back on the bike, squeeze in an errand or two, and pedal madly uptown. After veering left at the neighborhood rice paddy, I would glide into Tomiko and Yasu's driveway, flushed, out of breath, and eager to catch up on their day over dinner. We were more or less like family.

Which was tremendously comforting. As everyone knows, living in a foreign country can be lonely. Japan magnifies this feeling because its natural geographic seclusion, combined with two centuries of self-imposed isolation, from 1638 to 1853, has made the culture more tight-knit and impenetrable to outsiders than almost any other country in the world. In fact, the Japanese word for foreigner is
gaijin,
meaning “outsider.”

The culture also makes a strict delineation between interior and exterior. A carefully made-up face is what you show the outside world. Your true emotions stay locked behind the façade. What you do at home is your business. How you act in public is determined by the cultural code.

These rules of conduct evolved in feudal times when the various strata of Japanese society were given carefully prescribed ways to interact with one another. From the courtiers down to the samurai, craftsmen, merchants, and farmers, each class was forbidden to speak, eat, dress, and walk in any other way than what had been delegated to it.

A related hierarchy exists in the business world, where education and job achievement have become more important than class. This explains the vital practice of exchanging business cards.

At a glance you can determine a person's place in the corporate strata, then adjust your word choice and body language accordingly, using extremely polite language and a very low bow for a company president and casual language and a moderate bow for an entry-level worker. Many women even alter their voice pitch, using a higher tone for formal settings.

Outside of the business world, the “way” to behave emphasizes Confucian values of self-denial, obedience to authority, and silence over individual expression. Through observation, I rapidly learned how to conduct myself in public. When purchasing a drink from a vending machine, for example, I trained myself to stand next to the machine to finish the can's contents, then place it in the nearby recycle bin, instead of sipping the can on the go, which the Japanese consider rude. When wiping my hands with the moist washcloth in a Japanese restaurant, instead of leaving it crumpled in the basket, I remembered to neatly roll it back up just as I had found it, only with the soiled part hidden inside. And whenever I ordered something off a restaurant menu, such as a chocolate sundae at the Kyoto branch of the American-based Swensen's Ice Cream Company shop, I learned to scrape off the plastic whipped topping at the table, instead of making a fuss when ordering.

But Japan's cultural code can be elusive. Even among the Japanese, questions arise as to what is “appropriate.” This was evident one afternoon when Tomiko took me to a female friend's art opening. After we had viewed the artist's ceramics, she served us each a cup of brewed green tea and a small sweet bean cake wrapped in tissue-thin rice paper. As I drank my tea, I noticed Tomiko tuck the cake in her purse, so I followed suit. Later when I asked Tomiko why she had taken the sweet, she explained that in Osaka, where she grew up, she would have left it behind. But in
Kyoto, she had learned to take the sweet with her to avoid insulting the host, who considered it a little gift.