Missing Link
While in this course, I’ve set time aside to look back into my own life as an American raised in Asian culture and wonder, just how far have I come since I first started to learn about my identity.
For those of you who don’t know, my family had me raised around Japanese exchange students, whom I now call my sisters, and will always be to me. For years, I assumed that my family is on the same page as me. That the way that I was being brought up was right and appropriate. It’s only now as an educated adult that I see how wrong I was.
In 2017, I made a promise to my sisters Megumi and Yuka that I would return to Japan in the year 2020 to be reunited with them and that my parents would accompany me. I would be their translator, guide, financial aid, and all around show them just how to function in Japan. But tonight, they told me that they don’t care to go anymore.
Our original promise, so many years ago, was to one day visit Japan and see my sisters. That we would come to their homes like they came to ours. That we would see Japan, eat local food, meet their families, create more memories. That, we would show just how much we loved them…now they don’t care.
When I came to Japan in 2017, just before I left, my sister Yuka told me that she thought that we would never make it to Japan. Those words burned into my soul and left me feeling so much heartbreak that we, that I, never would have made it.
This afternoon I had to leave my parents in disgust after watching my mother bang on a drum that she got from the Puyallup tribe. She was showing off how she could make music with it, banging on it with a drumstick that my father had made for her. I asked her immediately where she had gotten it from. Did she ask for permission? Who had given it to her?
“They gave it to me. They think that I’m Indian.”
Within five minutes I had collected my things and left, not even saying a proper goodbye. The amount of disgust and shame from hearing these words, even correcting her to say Indigenous and being told “no, they think I’m Indian,” nothing could stomach my shame.
I left their house worrying who I am. I’m not like them, absorbing a culture or stealing from it. I’m just a woman that was raised in a culture that they decided was the best for me rather than my blood. Now, how am I supposed to identify when brown faces look at me and say, “why don’t you speak Spanish?”
When I first started to look into the history, etiquette, language, art, film, music, politics, and religions in Japan it wasn’t so that I could stomp around and say “look at all this stuff I know! I’m a Japanese now.” NO. It was so that the day that I went to Japan, that I could understand my sisters and the culture that they raised me in. To try and see what is it that my parents saw in them to make them want to have exchange students in the first place.
Now, with everything I’ve seen and felt, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just thought that all Asians were nerds.
I still have a year to go until its time for me to return and there’s only one question that’s weighing on my mind now. How am I going to tell them that my parents, who made them a promise that they would come to visit them in Japan one day, now don’t care?
