I held on to his arm as I lifted one foot up at a time and took off my shoes. I placed them under a table and joined him and the rest of my now larger family.
I didn’t worry about what I looked like or that I didn’t quite have the movements mastered. I didn’t worry that Tara was going to record my awkward dancing. I didn’t worry whether I was making a bad impression or about how I looked in this stupid dress. I didn’t worry about what might come next for the world.
I was dancing with my grandfather. He loved me as I was, and that was more than enough. That was everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Farizan is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of the young adult novels If You Could Be Mine, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, and Here to Stay. Her short stories have been featured in the young adult anthologies The Radical Element: Twelve Stories of Daredevils, Debutants, and Other Dauntless Girls, Fresh Ink, All Out, and Hungry Hearts. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, lives in Massachusetts, kayaks way too much, and thanks you for reading her work. You can follow her on Instagram @sara.farizan.
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
