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April 1993 - Hawaii
Although we left Japan by air in April, most of our worldly objects were traveling by sea and thus were moving much slower than we were. For this reason (among others), we didn't go straight to our new home but instead to the Hawaii home of my eldest uncle and his almost Italian wife (almost Italian, as in she was 4th generation Italian American, but liked to pretend that she was first generation). The idea was that the rest would do us good. It would give us the chance to stretch our legs after the long journey and to meet up with the rest of the family, and meant that, by the time we reached America, our things would be waiting there for us to unpack. A Quiet Time Both my grandmother; who was Polynesian (Oahu), and my grandfather (Hawaii) had been born on the chain of islands, and one of my uncles, a former navy officer, still lived there. So I had been there a few times before, and it wasn't really anything new for for me. The area that my uncle lived in also had a substantial ethnic Japanese population, and so the feel of the place wasn't wholly unfamiliar to me, either. Owing to this, I didn't fully appreciate the enormity of what lay ahead. I thought that America was probably just going to be a bigger version of Hawaii, but with a few more of the traits that I had seen in the compound and the base thrown in for good measures. I had absolutely no idea what was in store for me, or exactly how different life in America was going to be from what I had known before. Particularly now that I was no longer going to be able to retreat away from American influences by simply stepping outside my front door. Disagreement While I didn't appreciate the size of the step that my Mother was taking on my behalf, the rest of my family did. I didn’t understand half of what was said then then and I don’t remember half of what was said now, but my uncle and aunt were both traditional people with strict ideas when it came to marriage and family. The didn't believe in divorce, they didn't believe in running out on your spouse, and the most certainly didn't believe in separating a father from his children. They also disagreed strongly with my Mother about the fact that she had just uprooted Lucy and myself at a moments notice, and was about to drag us into a new life in a country that we knew only through second hand sources. I know all of this because they said so, rather loudly, every time that they thought Lucy and myself where asleep, or where otherwise out of earshot. My Mother, on the other hand, had a different set of beliefs which drove her. My Mother blamed my father for holding her back and for keeping her tied down to life on the base which she had grown to despise, and so she wanted to stay far away from him in case he tried to take her back to the base and to the life of a housewife. Which, in truth, my workaholic Mother never really was. Not by any stretch of the imagination. She also blamed my Father for the fact that I thought of myself as being Japanese before being American 9despite this largely being down to the fact that she had farmed me out to Japanese relatives and teachers for much of my life, rather than raising me herself) and believed that if she took me to America, far away from my father's influence and the influence of his culture, I would instantly become an American boy. Which was simply madness. Epilogue Despite having been born in Japan, and having lived there for almost 20 years, my Mother spent much of her childhood and teenage years in the vicinity of New York City, where she lived with an aunt and was schooled. She thought of the move to America simply as going back home. For me, however, having been born in Japan and having seen America through the eyes of ex pats, America was a foreign country. All taking me to America would do would be to isolate me from the only life that I had known, and to make me cling all the more desperately to my Japanese characteristics. For my Mother, Japan was to become nothing but a fading memory. For me though, it was to become the missing half of my spirit. |
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