For the Time Being

I am Japanese American.

There’s no disputing that.  My Japanese mother and white American father places me smack dab into that category even if my second grade teacher couldn’t answer my race question when I asked her as a small student filling out her standardized test form.

But I don’t always feel so identifiable.  Sometimes I feel more American than Japanese, like when I buy my groceries at my local Japanese store and the most I can understand is the welcome and leaving greetings. Other times I don’t even think about it and just feel like, well, me.

For most of my life, though, it hasn’t been something I could ignore.  The relentless taunting in elementary school, and later the odd comments about blood purity percentages and the selective deafness from strangers never left me doubting just where I stood.

I read a lot of books, but rarely do I read books that strike so close to who I am.  Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, however, struck hard and quick.

It’s a very complicated story, in that I would be doing it a great disservice to try to condense it here.  Trust me when I say that this is truly a tale that crosses boundaries – with time, ethics and age.  It weaves a tale that forces you to question existence, self-identity, and perception.  It questions what it means to be “noticed” and to “not notice” or be forgotten.  It taps into how we view our own agency and what gives our lives value.

I was moved many times during this book and it was the first time when a novel touched something so deep within me that I rarely want to face.

Race has always been up front and center for me.  When your father is American and you’re living in Japan, you get noticed.  When you’re back in America but you’re still the only Asian kid in the school, you don’t forget it. Every time you go to visit someone’s house and realize just how different their home is compared to yours, you don’t invite them over.  It wasn’t shame, exactly.  It was more playacting – trying to separate who I was at home from what I was beyond my front porch.

It was, for the longest time, my way of dealing with being different.

It wasn’t fulfilling.

In fact, it made life even more difficult.  Nao, the teenage girl in the book, lives a double life.  She keeps what’s happening to her at school separate from her home.  The one time it does cross, it brings the reality of her situation into the light and she’s forced to face it.

While I was verbally bullied at school growing up, I was never bullied to the extent that Nao experiences.  However, I can relate to her wanting something that made her special and strong – she developed her “super power” while I did my best to be a “super American”.  I focused heavily on studying and being smarter than everyone else, I never brought up my background in a social setting and pretended that my home life was identical to theirs.  I did whatever I could to make myself be “normal”.

And while it did give me the strength to get through it all, it didn’t help my self-esteem.  I found myself hating what I looked like even more because it wasn’t something I could change.  A new pair of the hottest pants and the latest top might make me fit in, but I couldn’t change my eyes or the shape of my face.

After a few unsuccessful life “resets,” I slowly came to realize that the only way to truly love myself wasn’t to deny who I was or to create a new me, but to be me. 

The girl with the curly blond haired, hazel eyed hubby.

The girl with the house where you automatically take off your shoes at the door and eat mochi at New Year’s.

The girl with the slanted eyes, quirky skirts, and dark brown hair with natural red tints that’s a bit dad and a bit mom.

The girl that’s part Japanese and part American.

I still haven’t fully come to terms with my dichotomy.  Even as I type this, I remember everything and it’s difficult to contain it all.  I want to talk about everything all at once.  There are days when those evil words come and haunt me right back in the mirror.  There are even days when I still encounter people who feel as if they need to remind me of what I am.  I still struggle.

But I have discovered that it’s also okay to be me.  In fact, without the other, I’m not me.

It’s that realization that helps me get through the tough moments.

(Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being is a bit graphic and a whole lot of sad, but it’s a wonderful book about learning to build your life on your own set of rules.  I highly recommend it and would love to hear from those that have read it.)

Frozen Morsels

Lately, I’ve been scanning my parents’ photo albums into the computer to preserve the pictures and to keep a copy for ourselves.  The books are large and unwieldy as I balance them on the old scanner with one hand while pressing the appropriate series of commands with the other.

There are a lot of pictures.

I’m not done with even a quarter of the albums, but I’m slowly making my way through.  Pictures of varying sizes, shades, and grain quality are packed into the books and it isn’t a surprise if a few fall out as I juggle them.

The image captures a moment, but for someone who was too young to remember, many of the moments are blanks – only recognizable if they are holiday or birthday snaps.  I vaguely remember the people in the photos and for many of them, even if I do know them, I doubt they’re the same now as they were then.

I love looking at the old family photos, though.  Everyone is wearing 70s or 80s clothing and the hair to match.  Even though I can clearly imagine the type of birthday or Easter dinner happening in the shot (nothing changes in my family), I feel as if the time-lapse has made the event “special”.   People are caught laughing and pointing at something that no one remembers anymore.  I’d love to go back to that time and find out what’s being said, because we don’t really laugh like we used to at get-togethers.  Everyone is polite, but there have been fewer and fewer convulsive moments of laughter.

In one shot, my great grandmother is caught smiling radiantly off camera. Her  bright white hair sits atop her head, just like I remember seeing it styled when we used to visit her.  As a very young child, those visits were always a mixture of dread and fun.

We  would play ping pong in her basement and pretend there were ghosts hiding in the dark corners as we chased after the balls.  My cousins would raid her candy jar (always filled again at the next visit), and I would sit precariously on her old rocker.  When it was time to leave, I would always scrunch up my face in childish disgust as she’d give me a big wet kiss on the cheek.  Never once did she take offense and instead laughed and smiled and told me that she couldn’t wait to see me the next time.  This would happen without fail until her progressed Alzheimer’s took it away.

And her smile.

My parents bought the house once she died and they remodeled it a bit, but it still has the garish pink and black tiles with blue tub in the bathroom, a few pieces of her furniture in the bedrooms, and the large rhubarb at the side of the house.

She was well known for her canning and pie making.  Having lived through the depression, canning came second nature and she was doing it all the way up to the point until she couldn’t anymore.  In fact, it was the proverbial straw meet camel’s back in her stages through Alzheimer’s.  After she burned herself in the middle of canning and it was deemed that she couldn’t live alone anymore, she was never the same.

I’m not certain whether the rhubarb growing at my parents’ house is the same one, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s in the same spot and therefore the same one in my mind.  Delicious rhubarb pies, crumbles and jams came out of the plant every year and I developed my taste for tartness from it.  My mother had given me a big bag of freshly cut rhubarb to use last summer, but the timing was never right. I wanted to make a strawberry rhubarb pie, because it combines two of my favorite flavors, but there were other desserts to make.  Other things to eat.  If only the freezer could freeze more than just food.

I had the opportunity last week when the bright red berries went on sale and we didn’t have any other desserts to get in the way.  I made it using a combination of recipes to achieve the flavor, consistency and just rightness I was remembering.

The pie was like a memory explosion on the tongue.  Even though it wasn’t her recipe, the fact that I will always associate rhubarb with her and only eat the rhubarb that comes from that plant meant that each bite was filled with a smile, a pair of bright eyes and a soft feeling.  There’s a lot of pain wrapped up in the memory of my great grandmother, too, (Alzheimer’s saw to that) but like the tartness from the rhubarb, it’s a part of her, and her overall joy at being with us and being our great grandmother blends with that tart feeling to become one of happiness every time.

The following pie recipe is a product of two recipes and two different cookbooks.  I didn’t want a double crust pie, so I looked up a great crumble recipe in my William’s Sonoma Baking book and used the filling from my Pillsbury Complete Book of Baking cookbook.  The result was absolutely delicious with a dollop of whip on top. Hubby and I both agreed that it was the perfect pairing of flavor and texture.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Ingredients

1 pie crust (I used Trader Joe’s pie crust since I don’t like making pie crust and we love the flavor of the TJ one)

Filling

• 3 cups rhubarb, diced (mine were frozen)
• 3 cups strawberries, diced
• Sugar or splenda to taste (the original recipe called for 1 cup of sugar, but I added a couple tablespoons of Splenda with no problems)
• ¼ cup cornstarch (I used potato starch mixed with a little water)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Crumble

•  1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup old fashioned oats
• 1/3 cup firmly packed brown sugar (or 3 tablespoons Brown Sugar Splenda)
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2-3 dashes of ground ginger
• ½ cup butter, melted (I used Country Crock)

 Directions

1. Form crust in pie pan and set aside.
2. Mix crumble ingredients together in a small bowl and set aside.
3. Mix filling ingredients except for the starch in a pan and bring just to a boil.  Stir in starch and take off heat as it gels together.  Stir gently.  Don’t overcook or over stir  (we’re not making jam).  Just mix it up a bit to blend in the starch.
4. Pour filling into the pie crust and top with crumble.
5. Bake at 375 F for 40 minutes or until crust and crumble turn golden brown and filling bubbles.
6. Cool completely before serving.

Life, meet peace.

Consider a flat tire.

Perhaps you’re on your way to get groceries.  The early morning is sunny and mild.  Your car runs over something sharp, suddenly puncturing the supple rubber, and your car bumps and jars until you stop.

“Oh!” you exclaim as you pause in confusion.  Did I just run over something?  Did the car break down?

It isn’t until you feel the thwump, thwump of the deflated tire that you realize your quick trip is now a long, tiring journey.

Now imagine you’re on the same road.  The skies are blue, the sun is shining and the breeze pleasant.  You’re riding your bike, a bit uncertainly, and a bit carelessly – why not, you think, the day is beautiful!

You come up to a stop sign and stop.  A car approaches, but you think you’re at a four way stop so you begin to accelerate.

The speeding car trundles down at you and you swerve a bit to avoid a collision.  As it passes, the driver looks directly at you and angrily shouts “Stop signs are for bikes, too!” and keeps on going.

Flat tire, meet angry man.

For the rest of the day, I couldn’t get the shouting man out of my head.  I knew I was in the wrong and could have been seriously injured.  I immediately learned from that lesson and treated the roads as if I was driving a car and not like I was 9 again.  However, even with all of that self-culpable admittance and correction, I couldn’t shake it off.  It was like the thwump of the flat tire, reminding me of his anger and my powerless response every time it rolled around.

Sometimes I could “patch” it and forget, but then my mind would drift back and I’d be right back at the intersection, watching ineptly as the car drove away.  My hurt feelings, my near death experience, my shock would ball up and make me want to just eat and eat and eat.  Ever notice how it isn’t the nice, ripe pineapple but the box of cookies you want to grab when upset? Hormones! 

I was letting him, letting that blink of an eye anger filled moment, rule me.  I was giving him more power to make me even more miserable.  I had already “fixed” my behavior, but I wasn’t moving on.  More than likely he had just blown off his steam and was sitting down to dinner having forgotten all about it while I was still morosely trying to resist the food in my pantry and grumping at my (also not happy) hubby.

But then, driving into work, I remembered something I used to have my students read.  It was a section from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (Bird by Bird btw is so worth reading, even if you don’t write) about dropping all of the critical voices into a jar and capping it silent.

So, I imagined a tin jar (because I honestly didn’t want to see him again) and stuffed the imaginary man into it and stuck a stop sign painted cork over the lid.

Man, meet jar.

I didn’t need him to rule my life, ruin my mood and make me miserable.  I didn’t need to give him the power to make me stuff my face and make me feel worse.  Life was too short and too precious to give him more valuable time.

Learning to let go isn’t easy when all you really want to do is track him down and have your belated say.  However, when you finally do, it’s like going back to that beautiful day with the blue skies and the bright sun.

Life, meet peace.