As you might expect, when my family moved to the small Midwest town that was to become our home, we created a certain amount of interest from our new neighbors.

Give that we were moving in to a small community, that most of our things had arrived almost a week before we did (thus giving our neighbors plenty of time to speculate on who we were), and particularly given that my Mother was a white woman with two Asian children in tow, we created quite a bit o interest

For the most part, out new neighbors just wanted to know the normal things. Such as who we were, where we had come from, and what we were like. What created the real stir, though, and caused some less conventional questions to come to mind, was that, even after my Mother had settled us in to our new home, no husband arrived to support her.

In Kyoto

In Kyoto, pretty much everybody that I had know had known that I didn't have a father at home. They knew by the way that I never mentioned my father, and by the way that I was never comfortable talking about anything to do with fathers in general. Similarly, I knew that they knew by the way that my friends would look embarrassed, and try to step around the issue of fathers when I was around, and by the way that their parents so readily accepted it the idea that when my Mother wasn't able to do something, or was too busy to do something, there was nobody else at home who could.

I also know from the solace that my teacher, friends, and their parents, occasionally tried to give me that most of them had looked at my situation and presumed that the reason my father wasn't around was because he had died.

In the Midwest

While the people in had known in Kyoto had looked at my situation and reached one conclusion, a great many of the people in our new home town looked at our circumstances and reached another. One that wasn't quite so nice.

Not long after it became apparent that my father simply wasn't going to arrive , than the rumor mill started to turn, and it got nastier with every revolution. Starting small, and then working its way up.

Put simply people regarded our depleted family, and they came up with all manner of nasty reasons why my Father wasn't present. The favorite of which, and the one that most people seemed to settle on was to look at the rather distinctive age gap that exists between my sister and myself, and then concluded that my father was very much alive, and that he had upped and left to find a relationship that didn't include a baby.

Worse still, once the idea that my father had abandoned my family had hit the local rumor mill there was no stopping its spread, and no changing its course. Within about a month the rumor had reached pretty much every pair of ears in the gossip circuit, and a great many outside of it too, and by the end of our first year it had become so embedded in local rumor that it was practically a part of the welcome wagon that was handed out each time a new town resident became established enough to join the gossip circuit.

Whispers

From very early on, the town's adult population worked out that I was sensitive about the subject of my father, but also that I was also fully capable of demolishing an adult several time my size I got angry, and thus that it was not a good idea to use my father's absence from a ball game or similar as a way of hurting me (making hurtful comments about others was a well known pastime for members of the town's resident Weekend Men families.

So, for the most part people reframed from making hurtful comments about him in front of me, and chocked themselves off part way through their sentence if they found themselves about to say something snide.

They did, however, continue to gossip rampantly in private, and a few of them managed to something inopportune things in front of their children. So, from time to time, one or two of them would be unfortunate enough to say something in front of me that their parents had told them (usually something along the lines of I must be a no-good boy because I had a no-good father, or that I hadn't been raised right for the same reason). I usually let such comments go unless they were repeated, or would simply issued a blanket denial of the accusation rather than the situation, which didn’t really do much good, but there were a few occasions when I did loose my temper and I did do some damage to other people.

Fortunately for me, most of the children who were unfortunate enough to make a stupid remark in front of me, and who were unfortunate enough to find out exactly why I was a black belt, were either too embarrassed to tell their parents who it was that knocked some sense into them, or they came from homes with parents would give them a beating of their own if they had found out that their children had embarrassed them been repeating gossip in public. So I didn't usually get into trouble for doing so.

For my part, despite the presence of the whispering and the rumors, I didn't say anything to put things right. I was an image conscious teenage boy who had come from an background where divorce and separation simple wasn't part of the vocabulary, and I was too ashamed to talk about it. Even if it meant that people continued think that my father had left my Mother, and not the other way round.

Even if I had tried to correct people, I'm not sure how many of them would have believed me, and how many of them would just have that I was trying to cover for my father; like the boy who tells everybody that his father is out of town on business, and would be back soon, when really he’s found a younger, prettier woman and filed for divorce.

For my mother’s part, she also didn’t say a word to correct anybody about what had really happened to her husband. Or to add to the rumors for that matter. It suited her to be thought of as a hard working lone-parent, who hadn’t chosen to be that way, rather than one who had. She maintained a fake air of dignified silence that allowed other people to jump to conclusions.