Reading Memoirs of a Geisha has had me thinking a lot lately.

Throughout my life I have struggled with who I am. Not just the ideas and thoughts that run through my head, but the very fabric of who I am, the breakdown of the component nuclei that run in my veins. These elements are strewn from geography and cultures so different that I simply don't understand how they could have ever met up at all.

My father is Japanese. My mother has Dutch, French, Irish, and Native American descendents, with Dutch being the leader in terms of percentages. My father immigrated to America when he was 16, while most of my mother's ascendents had been hanging out in the Wild West for quite some time. Mash all of this together, and you have a gene pool that's the strangest cocktail I have come across.

My Dutch great-grandparents and grandfather were stoic, calm, and reserved in their expressions of affection. One of my other great-grandmothers, descended from (by all accounts) a bitchy French immigrant and an Irish/Native American man, was into the hoodoo voodoo of palm reading, the Freemasons, and the Gaelic way of thinking. Which leaves me, who is often so confused by the cultures that I was raised with and the cultures I am currently living in that I often don't know if the fabric of who I am is coming or going.

I battle the hardest with my Japanese heritage. Not only do I struggle with it when I look in the mirror and see whiter-than-white skin, hazel eyes and freckles, but I sometimes deal with it when I jam my U.S. size 10 feet into shoes the length of a canal-boat. Sometimes I often think of my grandmother and the shoes she wears, delicate flats that come in children's sizes as they grace feet the size of a stick of butter.

Growing up in a Japanese family was often a battle. Almost every meal came with rice-real rice, Japanese-sticky rice cooked in a steaming rice cooker, none of that Uncle Ben's fluffy white bullshit thank-you-very-much. As a little girl I used to yearn for mashed potatoes or clam chowder, but often was presented with sukiyaki or the dreaded nato instead.

The day I left home I swore off rice, and I didn't touch it for years.

I battled my father, too. I always felt imbued with the stinging disappointment that I was the first-born and was not only a book-worm female, but would in the end turn out to be the whitest of all the children and grandchildren. My father and I were like oil and water, except mix us together and we became an atom bomb instead of a salad dressing. Looking back I realize that the two of us were simply too competitive to find a way through actually talking to each other. He was too impatient, too angry, too caught up in the confines in his world to see that I had confines in mine. And for me, it was a constant battle to be the best, to earn the best grades, to try to get my father to love me despite my two left feet in sports and my complete disinterest in all things Japanese.

And now that we have both grown I find that we have both become people capable of having a relationship. The competition is gone. I don't have to be the best, I can just be me. And he has softened and changed as he ages-he hands out Halloween candy to the neighborhood at Halloween. He cares about people. He goes hiking with friends.

And I now love Japanese sticky rice.

I used to stay in my Japanese grandmother's house a lot when I was a little girl. She always had Japanese scrolls on the walls and she had glass cases as tall as I was with Japanese dolls in Kabuki stances. Those dolls freaked me out no end. I remember at night watching the glass cases, completely convinced the dolls were alive and watching me. I swore they moved-the fan one held flittered just a bit. The dark ebony of the kimono shifting at the knee.

My grandmother was adopted into a supremely wealthy family in Japan that stood something like 8th in line to the throne when she was a baby. She used to tell me stories about her childhood-she was carried to school on a litter, held by four servants, laughing at the children who had to walk. She never once brushed her hair, as she had someone who did it for her.

I wonder if she knew her life would end up as it did-a war bride married to a retired Army man in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, so sheltered and pampered that when I was 8 years old and the self-service pumps were removed I taught her how to pump gas.

I went to Japan some years ago. It was only a short stay, I had a 24 hour layover at Kansai when travelling back from Singapore and Bali. I got out of the airport and, completely knackered and suffering from pneumonia, checked into a nearby hotel and slept. The hotel room was compact. Spotless. Armed with many polite suggestions and reminders. And even then, I both understood the culture and didn't like it.

The Japanese have a mixed result in terms of global conceptions. They are often caricatures of themselves, like in the movie Lost in Translation where they are portrayed as bizarre yet affable creatures into Hello Kitty and karaoke. But switch directions and head into the darkness and one could view them as people responsible for heinous crimes against humanity in POW camps of WWII. They are also viewed as people who bow and apologize a lot, people with a predilection for samurai swords, tatami mats, rock gardens and suicide.

And what's the truth? Are they any stranger than Swedes who eat rotten fermented herring in the summer and slurp down bootleg bathtub gin? Are they any more bizarre than Americans who drive home from the office in their four-wheel drives and head for a neighborhood barbeuce of hamburgers, beer, and children running through sprinklers?

I remember my grandmother hosting parties in her house in Kansas with the other war brides in the neighborhood. They would play a form of Japanese cards late into the night and then turn on the laser disc karaoke. We would eat Japanese radishes and the kim chee would be on the counter, the fermentation of the raw cabbage making it bubble at room temperature. The smells and sounds in my memories of her Japanese home are so strong that they are almost...comforting.

I rejected it all and yet I didn't. The two tattoos I have are both Kanji symbols that my heart carries around with me. The fairy tales I remember most vividly from when I was a child are from the Japanese fairy tale book I got when I bought Tale of the Genji. When Angus and I walk into the Asian food stores we love so much, my tongue tickles when I see the bags of dried cuttlefish (squid) that were the much-revered treats we were given as children.

My fabric is confused.

My fabric is hard to understand.

But all these years later, I am beginning to realize that my fabric is mine, it is unique, and it is finally beginning to stretch enough to fit me.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:05 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 1248 words, total size 7 kb.

1 Wow... eloquently described.

Posted by: Hannah at April 07, 2005 12:06 PM (0d7ig)

2 Or, maybe, its the other way around and you've grown to fit your wonderful, multifaceted, dynamic fabric.

Posted by: RP at April 07, 2005 01:13 PM (LlPKh)

3 It's odd how we can look around and somehow feel unsatistfied with the fabric of our lives, and be envious of others whose fabric seems to fit better, or look prettier. Only when we realize that everyone feels this way can we step back and see how beautiful our own fabric is.

Posted by: Easy at April 07, 2005 01:15 PM (npJc/)

4 It's nice to remember that we get as many chances as we can grasp with regards to our heritage. Things that I was ashamed of when I was younger are now some of the things I hold most dear about my family. It's just nice to know that we have our whole lives to understand, that we don't necessarily stunt our growth into our fabric when we're young.

Posted by: amy t. at April 07, 2005 03:38 PM (zPssd)

5 Nothing, NOTHING smells worse than natto. But nothing makes better tsukemono, either. Honey, the truth is that you exist, regardless of whence you came or whose genes you've been gifted. You're here. Enjoy it. It will probably never make sense. Really, that's okay. Who among us understands the simplest action, much less the entire mish-mash of our backgrounds? Free yourself from the burden of trying to understand. Just love yourself.

Posted by: Kaetchen at April 07, 2005 04:57 PM (1nMRx)

6 Very... =)

Posted by: indigo at April 07, 2005 05:05 PM (nZ8/D)

7 Loved this, Helen. Thank you for the window into your roots. :-)

Posted by: Amber at April 07, 2005 05:41 PM (zQE5D)

8 Here via Glory Road. Nice post! Makes me think about my own particular weave.

Posted by: Kathy at April 07, 2005 10:10 PM (flb/n)

9 It's strange how we don't seem to appreciate our roots until we are older. I would have given anything to have your interesting heritage when I was younger because I thought my own was so boring. I'm proud of my Scottish heritage now.

Posted by: Lost at April 08, 2005 11:35 AM (aa+g9)

10 Beautiful post; most of us can relate to that and our fabric all stretches to fit at different ages in our lives. I've only just become familiar with mine and it takes a while to get used to it.

Posted by: kenju at April 10, 2005 03:54 AM (Z0YaI)

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