I talk a lot about my Japanese mother in this newsletter. It’s easier to talk about her versus my dad, because I’ve always felt that the questions in my life originate in her story as a war survivor in Japan and an immigrant to the U.S. I’d never thought very hard about the impact my dad has had on me. He was a white American, a veteran, born and raised in the south. He had a boring desk job and worked a lot of hours. He wrote poetry, hated television, and I was not allowed to use Hawaiian pidgin in his presence, despite the fact that Hawaiian pidgin is what I spoke at school and with my friends. I guess I have my dad to thank for the fact that I could speak proper English—I’m not sure he even knew that I spoke pidgin. But I also felt that my dad was a mysterious presence in my life, someone I didn’t really know, so it’s hard for me to write about him.
My dad was a dreamer, zoned out, constantly muttering to himself about who knows what. No matter what happened, he never lost his cool. It wasn’t that he had low blood pressure; it was more like he had no blood pressure. He never seemed to be paying attention, even when he was paying attention. He seemed to be unplugged from the world around us.
When I spoke to him, he often had no response. He would look at me as if I had just said something incomprehensible, and if he did respond, he was often the one who said something incomprehensible. He wrote me letters throughout my college years, and I often couldn’t get through them because I couldn’t follow his train of thought. I was always bad at philosophy and religion, so I don’t necessarily think his letters were at fault. I think I just didn’t understand them, the way I didn’t understand my theology class. Our minds were simply not in sync.
As a kid I could not figure out how he came to be married to my mother, someone who can’t help calling out anything she perceives as stupid. She is more afraid of the cognitive dissonance of dishonesty than she is of hurting feelings. Whatever she says is what she really thinks, and may the aftermath of her comments fall where they may, probably on your head. I could have an argument with her—and I often did—in ways that I could not with my father. She made sense to me, even if I didn’t like her take on things.
I’ve always assumed that I was just like my mother. I’m cross-grained and frequently irritable, and my dad’s patience and love of daydreaming were not relatable for me. I’ve never been accused of being vague or tuned out, and I have my mother’s short fuse. When it was time to learn to drive, it was my dad and not my mom who happily got into the passenger seat, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to tell me to use my mirrors. If I’d had to rely on my mom for driving lessons, I might still be without a driver’s license.
My dad died in 2007. My parents had moved to suburban Boston in the 80s in order to take care of my sister’s kids. I think my dad thought he would love it there, as he had never managed to fit into the Asian immigrant culture in Honolulu, but as it turned out, his southern upbringing clashed rather spectacularly with the famously cranky New England vibe. My kids love quoting Vermont singer-songwriter, Noah Kahan, from one of his songs, Homesick:
Hawaii had not really worked out for my dad, and he never did find a place for himself in New England. He had no friends, did not keep up with his family in the south (where he’d declined to take my mother when he first returned to the U.S. after marrying her in Japan—interracial marriage was illegal in his home state of Mississippi), and seemed to have no purpose in life except to take care of my mother, and now his grandchildren. He spent long hours pouring over books and writing poetry. He seemed to fit nowhere, and this time we couldn’t blame Hawaii. It was he, and not his surroundings, that did not fit.
I think I’ve always been a little afraid of this conclusion, because I fit nowhere, too. Did this mean I was actually like him? Was DNA speaking loud and clear here, too? And is that better or worse than being like my mother?
My Japanese relatives loved my dad because he always had a book in his hand. As a teenager at the end of World War II, my mother was taken out of school and put to work in a munitions factory, and she has always said she was “not educated” as a result. But she reads voraciously and has an opinion on everything—when talking to her, you would never think of her as “not educated.” Nonethless, this has been a sore spot and a disappointment to her for her entire life. By marrying my dad, I think she was trying to pick up the pieces of her life that the war had wrecked. My “scholarly” dad was a symbol of her values and her disappointments.
I love to study, too. I just enrolled in a classical Chinese class, and I’m reading up on ancient Japan before watching the latest Japanese historical drama on NHK. I self-study Korean in order to relax from Japanese study. Sitting at my desk for long hours is not a chore for me—it’s a luxury. To me, the world is an exciting place because there are so many things I can learn.
And I do remember this very clearly about my dad: he was always reading, writing, or thinking. His written Japanese was quite beautiful, much better than mine, and he read well. He did not speak Japanese well, but as I now realize, that’s just a different skill. He taught himself Latin and Hebrew for fun, and never stopped studying Japanese.
He must have been disappointed that New England, which he regarded as the stomping grounds of Emerson and Thoreau, did not live up to his expectations. I think he thought that there would be pipe-smoking philosophers in every coffee shop, but instead he found that people were practically affronted when he smiled and said hello. The scholarly New England of his imagination did not exist in the New England he saw.
I’m sorry that he never found his people. Writing and studying is such a solo effort, but there are lots of us who do this work. The internet has made it easier for us to find each other nowadays, but it’s still solitary and can feel quite lonely. As I sit here at my desk, looking out at a snowy New England landscape, I realize that I’ve inherited both my dad’s studiousness and his sense of alienation from the world. I’ve long felt that it was my mixed ethnic background that made me feel like a stranger everywhere I went, but I think my dad also felt like a stranger everywhere he went.
Maybe that’s how he managed to feel comfortable in Japan, and comfortable with my mom’s folks. They didn’t see him as an oddball, because they didn’t actually know or care about the things that clashed with his reading and writing. He was a soldier, but that was his day job. In spirit, he was a scholar, and they saw that in part because they had to get to know him through the gaps in understanding.
I’m coming to realize that this is how I understand things, through the gaps. It’s like reading a book where you don’t know all the vocabulary or can’t make out all the ideas, but you come away with a “gist” that is half made-up out of your own thoughts and impressions. If I am wrong about my father, if I am wrong about what he felt and why, I hope it doesn’t matter. Like viewing things through a screen, I feel I’m getting what counts.
Spanning the waves your pen is like a bow of a ship parting the seas. Separation, distance, discipline to express yourself and father’s, mother’s views. Laughed at New England makes you mean. “It is what it is” see life in three months summers. The other 9 months gestation to await delivery of seeds in the mail
For spring planting. Glad you had chance to grow up in Aloha state of bliss.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am also an introvert she spends a lot of time reading and studying and what you wrote about your father really made me think about effects of isolation and alienation that I’ve been experiencing since returning to the US and my inability to adjust. Both of your parents sound like incredible and fascinating people!!! Enjoyed reading this so much.