Nostalgic Novel of Japanese expat children (1) An Imagined Homeland

 

 

“Ema, that’s not right. Put your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Again.”

Mum’s sharp voice rang through the living room.

 

Me and my little sisters were all born and grew up in Tokyo, under Japanese parents.

 

It was 1977. 

From the age of seven, we had English lessons at home every single day.

My sister was four, and the youngest was only one year old.

 

Mum was our English teacher, and she was tough. She showed no mercy, even with my sisters.

Mum had spent large part of her childhood in America.

 

She often told us about those days.

Wide roads. Big houses. Kind teachers. A sense of freedom.

And she always ended with the same words.

 

“America is our homeland. One day, we’re going back. If you can’t speak proper English, people will think you’re a foreigner and look down on you.”

 

I was too young to understand what “look down on” really meant.

But the word left me with the impression that it was something frightening.

 

Dad also grew up in America since he was a small boy. He came back to Japan for college, is now working for the Japanese branch of an American company.

 

“One day, we’re all going back to America.”

Dad and Mum kept saying that.

 

Going back.

 

It was a country neither of them had ever lived in as adults, and yet they always called it “going back.”

 

Little by little, English became the language we used more and more at home.

My sisters adapted especially quickly.

Whenever they were together, they spoke English.

 

I loved reading English books. I devoured Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and The Book of Three. I read almost every fantasy book in the elementary school library.

 

But even I, who loved reading, could never bring myself to enjoy Mum’s lessons.

Whenever a Japanese accent crept into my speech, her expression would darken.

“That pronunciation won’t do. Speak like an American.”

She repeated those words every day, like some kind of spell.

 

Then, in the spring of 1984, when I was thirteen, the day finally came.

 

“Girls, we’re finally going back to America !”

Dad announced it with a huge smile.

 

My sisters cheered.

I was happy, too.

The “return” I had been hearing about ever since I was little was finally happening.

 

Mum brought out a large cardboard box.

“Put in only the things you wanna take to America. We’ll get rid of the rest.”

 

I filled it with books.

My favourite novels.

Video tapes of movies I had recorded.

I could always buy clothes once we got there.

Surely America would have so many more wonderful things.

At least, that was what I believed.

 

June 1984.

We flew to Los Angeles on United Airlines.

My sisters were bouncing around the cabin and kept getting told off by the flight attendant.

“The movie’s going to start soon. Why don’t you sit down and watch it?”

Her voice was gentle.

These 10 and 7 year olds finally sat down, excited with the movie.

 

I stared absently at the movie playing on the screen, occasionally looking out the window.

We were flying over the Pacific.

On the other side was our “homeland.”

Our “homeland” that I had never seen.

 

The moment we stepped off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, the heat clung to my skin.

It was hotter than Japan, yet the air felt dry and light.

Above us stretched an endless, brilliant blue sky.

 

“Welcome to Los Angeles.”

At the airport employee’s words, my heart began to race.

 

This is America.

This is where we belong.

 

Dad had flown over ahead of us, and he was there to meet us at the airport.

As we drove through the neighborhoods, I couldn't take my eyes off the view outside my window.

The wide streets.

The tall palm trees.

The giant billboards.

It looked just like the movies.

 

The house Dad had rented was bigger than anything I'd ever imagined back in Japan.

 

White walls.

An orange-tile roof.

A living room with a soaring ceiling.

There was even a swimming pool in the backyard.

My little sisters squealed and ran toward the pool.

"You can jump in later," Dad said with a grin.

 

Upstairs, each of us had our own bedroom.

Our names were written on the doors.

 

EMA

 

It was my name...

But somehow, seeing it in English made me feel like I was becoming somebody else.

 

That night we had dinner around an enormous pizza.

Dad laughed.

"Can't have my American girls turning down pizza."

Mom was smiling, too.

"From now on, we're all gonna live like real Americans."

 

As I listened to them, I sank into the huge couch.

Sleep washed over me.

Maybe it was the long flight.

I don't even remember how I made it upstairs that night.

 

The next day, the English lessons started all over again.

Mom and Dad were making a point of speaking less and less Japanese at home.

Everything was becoming American.

The food.

The TV.

The way we lived.

 

That afternoon they took us to Little Tokyo.

Dad looked around and said,

"We'll come here whenever we're craving Japanese food."

Then he smiled.

"But let's get used to American food as fast as we can."

 

As we walked down the streets lined with Japanese signs, I was overcome by a strange feeling.

We had only just arrived from Japan, yet somehow I was already looking at Japan from the outside.

 

That summer, Mom and Dad enrolled us in a language school.

There were kids from all over the world.

My little sister wasn't impressed.

"The other kids all talk funny. I wanna learn real American English."

So Dad found us a private tutor instead.

She was a woman in her twenties from California.

"My parents were immigrants," she said with a gentle smile. "But we only spoke English at home."

Then she looked at us.

"Your accent really matters. We'll work on that together, okay?"

 

Intonation.

The way we used our voices.

I wanted more than anything to sound like the kids who had grown up in California.

 

By July, American flags were everywhere.

It was the Fourth of July.

Dad spent the afternoon grilling enough burgers and hot dogs to feed an army, while Mom went over the words to The Star-Spangled Banner with us one more time.

"When they play the national anthem," she reminded us, "put your right hand over your heart."

The neighbors couldn't have been friendlier.

Everyone was laughing by the pool, drinking beer, swapping stories across the yard.

Kids ran around waving Stars and Stripes flags.

When the anthem started, everybody sang.

I sang along, too.

For some reason, I felt like if I didn't, I'd be the only one who didn't belong.

 

By the time summer was over, we'd gotten pretty comfortable with the way people talked around us.

My little sisters had started playing with the neighborhood kids, and before long they were speaking even more English at home than they had back in Japan.

"Guess teaching 'em English before we left Japan paid off," Dad said.

Mom nodded, but she wasn't smiling.

"This is the important part."

Dad looked at her.

"They've gotta fit in. They've gotta grow up as Americans."

"What about Japanese culture?"

She thought about it for a second.

"I don't think that's what they need right now. First things first. They need to feel like they belong here."

I sat quietly, listening to every word.

 

September came, and school started.

For the first time in my life, I climbed aboard one of those big yellow school buses.

It was exactly like the movies.

"You must be the new kid. Welcome to Los Angeles."

The driver, a cheerful man in his forties, flashed me a smile.

For some reason, hearing him say that made me feel proud.

 

There were kids from all kinds of backgrounds on the school bus.

Korean.

Mexican.

Japanese.

Somewhere I couldn't recognize.

Almost everybody had a little bit of an accent.

At the same time, it seemed like everybody was trying their hardest to sound as American as they could.

I became friends with two Korean-American sisters, Eun-young and Min-young.

Their family had immigrated when they were little.

"You know what really matters?" Eun-young said, completely serious.

"Your accent. If you sound weird, kids'll make fun of you."

Her words sounded an awful lot like Mom's.

 

Later, In the school office, the three of us took an English placement test.

The teacher looked a little surprised when she went over my results.

"You hardly have an accent at all. And your scores are really good."

I was thrilled.

For the first time, it felt like all those years of studying had finally paid off.

When I found out I wouldn't have to take ESL, I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders.

For the first time, I felt like I was getting closer to being a "regular American."

 

When the bus dropped us off after school, Mom was already waiting at the stop.

"I figured I'd come meet you girls."

That's what she said.

But somehow, I had a feeling she just wanted to see the school bus herself.

After all, she'd ridden one when she was a little girl.

Maybe seeing it again brought back memories.

 

That day, Mom told us about when she was a little girl.

It was the first time she'd ever really told us about it in detail.

The 1950s.

How Grandpa and Grandma had taken her to America, and how much fun she'd had there.

How she'd forgotten most of her Japanese and started speaking English even at home.

How her parents had always told her she needed to grow up to be a good American.

She'd thought she'd live in America for the rest of her life.

But after ten years, they had to go back to Japan.

 

"Japan felt so confining," she said, as if she'd suddenly remembered something.

At the time, I didn't quite understand what she'd found so confining.

"We've finally made it back to America," Mom went on. "So let's all be happy here together. This time, let's be good Americans and give something back to this country."

 

Time passed quickly.

Schoolwork was anything but easy. In science and history, there seemed to be an endless stream of words I had never heard before.

After school, I would bombard my teachers with questions.

 

But English was the one subject I truly loved.

Mark Twain.

Dickens.

Emily Dickinson.

Reading literature in English felt slightly more distant than reading it in Japanese.

But even so, it had a fascination all its own—more than enough to make up for the distance.

 

Around that time, things in our home began to change, little by little.

Emi, the youngest, finally stopped answering me in Japanese.

“Japanese feels weird.”

From then on, she spoke only English.

Whenever I got a pronunciation wrong, Emi would correct me.

“Ema, that sounds so Japanese.”

Every time she said it with a laugh, I felt as though a piece of cold ice had pierced straight through my heart.

Marie was the same.

“Ema, your English doesn't really sound American.”

Maybe they didn't mean any harm.

But their words hurt me, every single time.

Before long, I found myself trying to get rid of the sound of my Japanese voice.

Japanese and English sounded different—not just in the words, but in the very way the voice resonated.

Japanese seemed to fall forward, while English seemed to resonate deep in the chest.

The flat, strong vowels of Japanese.

The deep, resonant voice of an American, coming from the back of the throat.

I wanted to sound even a little more Californian.

And so, little by little, I began speaking even Japanese with an American accent.

 

The years went by, and I was old enough to take the SAT, getting ready to apply to college.

I wanted to study English literature at UCLA.

I had never once wavered from that dream.

And then, suddenly, it happened.

Dad's company decided to pull out of its business in Japan.

The Japanese employees were going to be laid off.

Dad and the others fought it as hard as they could. They hired lawyers. They protested. They did everything they could.

But nothing changed.

If Dad lost his job, we'd lose our visas, too.

We wouldn't be able to stay in America.

“I don't wanna go back to Japan!”

My sisters cried out in protest.

“We're Americans!”

Mom stood there silently, her head bowed.

Only Dad smiled sadly.

“We can always come back.”

But there was no longer the same certainty in his voice.

The night before we left, my friends threw me a pajama party.

When it was time to say goodbye, everyone hugged me.

“Don't forget us.”

“Let's meet again.”

I nodded through my tears.

Three years.

Only three years.

And yet America was no longer a “foreign country” to me.

 

After we returned to Japan, my sisters completely rejected Japanese.

Eventually, both of them went to college in the States, found jobs there, and got married.

"We're never going back to Japan."

They said it almost in unison.

And I found myself wondering: What had all those years of "going back to America" really meant?

Had our parents, in the end, raised us according to an ideal because they were trying to reclaim the America they had lost?

Maybe that was the America they'd been chasing all along.

 

Their dream of “becoming American.”

An imagined homeland.

I couldn’t carry that dream on.

My two sisters chose to carry it on willingly.

 

After we returned to Japan, I went to visit Grandma at her house.

She showed me a whole stack of old photographs.

There was Little Tokyo, just as I remembered it.

Grandma in a kimono.

Mom in Western clothes.

Grandpa in a suit.

Looking at those old black-and-white photographs, I suddenly realized just how long ago it had all been.

"Back then, everybody wanted to go to America," Grandma said. "There'd been a war, of course, but America was still the country so many people dreamed about."

"Your mother looked so happy there. She was a real American girl."

"She was supposed to live there for good, but after ten years, we had to come back to Japan."

"Why did you come back?"

"Because of your grandfather's work. Coming back to Japan was hard on your mother."

"Really?"

"She didn't have any friends who were like her."

"Were there really so few people who'd been to America?"

"Of course there were. There wasn't a single one at your mother's school. We spoke English at home, but once she stepped outside, she couldn't speak English anymore. That was awfully confining for a child, don't you think?"

Another photograph caught my eye.

It was an old, faded photograph, its colors turned sepia with age.

A man in a fine frock coat stood beside a woman in a kimono.

Next to them was a little boy dressed in Western clothes.

"Who are they?"

“Oh, they’re relatives of mine—my cousins.”

"It's such an old picture, but they're wearing Western clothes."

“They were the ones who immigrated to Chicago… When I was young, they used to send me photographs and little treats.”

"What were their names?"

"Yoko-chan. What was her last name again...? Tanabe, I think? Or was it Watanabe...? I can't quite remember.

"And the boy... I think his name was Toshiyuki. I heard he could only speak English by then.”

 

The moment I heard that name, I felt strangely unsettled.

 

Toshiyuki.

 

Could that boy, too, have been someone who, like us, had “come back to Japan from America”?

Even though he had been told he would live there permanently.

 

After Dad retired from the company, he and Mum went back to America once again.

They still live in California.

They run a small winery and are enjoying a quiet retirement.

The “return to the homeland” they had longed for so desperately had, in the end, really come true.

But sometimes I wonder.

How can just a few years of childhood experience change a person so profoundly?

Do the words and dreams planted in us when we are children really never disappear, even after we grow up?

Even now, every once in a while, I catch myself speaking Japanese in a voice that sounds almost American.