Anna Matsushita

There was a deafening bang, followed by a deep, rumbling tremor that shook the ground beneath me.   The elderly pedestrians all dropped to the pavement in unison, as if rehearsed.   Across the street, an old man lay flat on his stomach, waving urgently in my direction. “Down!” he bellowed.   Instinct took over. I flung myself onto the pavement without a second thought.   Moments later, the wail of sirens filled the air—fire engines, ambulances, police cars, all racing past in a blur of flashing lights.   And then, just as swiftly as they had dived for cover, the prone figures around me picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and strode away as though nothing had happened.   I had arrived in Britain in the 1980's at the age of fourteen, dragged along by my parents on account of my father’s job. I hadn’t wanted to come. Life had been perfectly fine back home, thank you very much. Germany was still split into East and West, Marga...

  “Look, Mummy, a Chinaman!” “And a child.” “I didn’t know that a Chinaman has a child.” “I’m going to write an essay about it.” These words were spoken by a young white girl about my father. It was the most overtly racist remark I had encountered at that point in my life. Our family had moved to the outskirts of London from Japan, due to my father’s work transfer. It was the late 1980s, and I must have been around 16 years old. One day, while waiting with my father at a tube station, a white British mother and her daughter were nearby. Suddenly, the young girl began calling my father a "Chinaman." Her mother looked on with pride, as if her daughter had made some insightful observation, beaming at her with a face full of approval. I immediately approached the mother. “My father isn’t Chinese,” I said. “And it’s perfectly normal for any human being to have children. If your daughter can make such blatantly racist remarks, it’s your duty as her parent to correct her. Instead, y...