“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.
“Gu-rande,” the barista repeated, and held up a grande-sized cup. “Fu-rap-pu-chiino?”
I nodded, encouraged. “Double chocolate chip.”
Nothing.
“Double,” I said slowly. I held up two fingers and said, “Ni,” for good measure. Two isn’t the quite same as double, but it seemed close enough.
Before I could continue, the barista furrowed her brow and reached tentatively for a second cup.
“No, no,” I said. “Double. Dah-bu-ru.”
She shook her head apologetically.
I looked desperately at my mother.
“It’s not on the menu,” she said.
“So? It’s not on the menu at home, either.”
“That’s not the way it works here,” she explained.
“Well, it should be. That’s the way it works at home.”
My mother shrugged. “You are not at home.”
CHOPSTICKS, AGE 14
The day after the Starbucks incident, my mother’s best friend from high school had us over for dinner at her house.
“Can you use chopsticks?” she asked me.
HISTORY
Mrs. Mintz paired us up to do presentations on different countries and their cultural contributions. Naturally I got paired with Miho, and we did Japan. It was okay, actually, because Japan is pretty great: castles. Samurai. Ukiyo-e. Taiko. Anime. Manga. Yuzuru Hanyū.
Miho wore a fancy kimono. We showed clips of Sailor Moon, handed out manjū, and passed around her collection of manga. Miho wrote everyone’s names in katakana. People thought it was cool. I was proud of us both, and for once, I felt good about being Japanese. Miho smiled at me. I smiled back.
Then someone said, “My grandfather died in Pearl Harbor.”
People looked at me and Miho. Miho looked at me.
I wanted to say, That wasn’t me. That’s not my country.
I wanted to say, What about Hiroshima? My great-aunt died in Hiroshima.
But the thing is, I’m not Japanese.
In the bathroom, I heard Sasha, the alpha girl of my class, snicker and ask her friends if they’d seen the way all the nerds went apeshit over Sailor Moon.
The next day, Miho thought we were going to be friends, and she smiled at me again. This time I didn’t smile back.
CHOPSTICKS, AGE 12
I wore them in my hair once, after seeing a picture of a fashion show online. Sophie and Zayna thought it was cool. My mother thought it was disgusting. “Would you wear a fork in your hair?” she said.
WE
I am home from college, and my dad takes me for burgers and shakes at the diner. While we eat, he asks why I supported a Native American protest of an oil pipeline being built near their land. “First of all, it’s a threat to their supply of clean water. And second of all, it goes through land that’s sacred to them. After we basically wiped them out and forced them to live on reservations, the least we can do is respect their wishes about something that affects their lives now.”
“Why do you say ‘we’?” my father asks. “Our family was still farming rice in Japan when that happened. And you’re not even white.”
“Because...” I have to think about that one for a moment. “Because it was America that did it. And I’m American.”
“What do you say when you talk about Hiroshima, where Haruna-obasan died? Who is ‘we’ then?”
I don’t have a good answer to that question.
“Do you say ‘we’ when you’re talking about America today?”
“Well. Yeah.”
“Even when the government does something you disagree with? Like weak gun control or anti-immigrant laws? Still ‘we’?”
“They.”
My dad shakes his head. “English is hard.”
I don’t think it’s just English that’s hard.
FEAR
Three months after she arrived, Miho went back to Japan to live with her aunt. My mother blamed me.
“You were mean to her,” she said.
“Mom. The girl was a freak. We had nothing in common. You expect me to give up all my friends to be friends with someone like that?”
“If
