I’m A Ten Year Old Child. Where’s My Blanky And Juice?

Opportunities abound for the foreigner living in Japan. One has ample chances to eat fish, enjoy green tea or take nice long soaks in the sweat of thirty mysterious, wrinkly, shriveled, pink old raisins. There are daily occasions when one can turn a cup around six billion times before taking a dainty swig of bitter tea and choking down a densely sugared cake that must be cut into pieces with a knife only ever used by Tom Thumb’s miniature pocket butler. Or perhaps to tone those jigglypuff thighs whilst hovering over a squatter, dangerously constipated from the vast quantities of rice one has ingested. One has the chance to watch in petrified silent fascination as one’s supervisor’s mental cords snap with a twang because the acronym “ALT” wasn’t inserted properly on a sheet of official looking papers. If one is lucky, one might even have the chance to re-ink a teeny red stamp made for a petite pygmy Oompa Loompa a million times in one day to fill in their attendance sheet for the past year because the idea of inking once and drawing an arrow through the other days is just preposterous. There are more than enough chances to jump up and down in a frenzy holding gleaming, firey sparklers screaming, “I AM A REAL PERSON! I AM A REAL PERSON! I HAVE THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, DESIRES AND DREAMS! I AM A REAL PERSON!” as people around you smile nervously and then look down pretending that nothing happened.

Which is why when someone does treat you as a normal person it makes the skies part, the Bluebird of Happiness bring out the entire family for a picnic and glitter course through my veins.

As I walk home from a long day of classes I pass two little girls skipping home from elementary school. They have new square bright orange school bags with silver clasps and are wearing their telltale yellow caps as they trudge on home. One of them is Chiko the girl who lives across the road from me. I say hello to both girls as I pass and they break out their “FINETHANKYOUANDYOUS!” with consummate perfection and grins. As Chiko’s friend says goodbye and turns to run down a windy dirt path home, Chiko and I proceed to have a perfectly normal conversation, leading me to believe that maybe I am not a complete nitwit. She doesn’t look at me like I have ten heads and twelve monstrous asses when I’m speaking as some of my students do. She doesn’t dumb down her speech. She asks intelligent questions and she beams at me when I ask her what her favorite subject is and declares simply, “English.” We have an exchange of basic information that leaves me believing what I think I already knew for sometime: I really do have the persona of a ten-year-old child.

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Published:
1.11.08 / 5pm
Category:
what i call life