after Lan Samantha Chang’s writing exercise

 

I. Ten Things My Parents Taught Me

1. That I am not important. Everyone else comes first.
2. That I can be important through hard work, unflagging efforts. Today, I still wince at the Chinese character for “endurance.” 忍  is made of radicals for knife edge and heart, a heart carrying what could pierce it at any moment.
3. Not to ask what they ate during the war.
4. “Tokyo is not the center of the universe, let alone the world,” Father said when I came first in the city’s essay contest. I was ten.
5. Mother taught me how to use chopsticks. Or rather, she tried. She would spill a bowl of beans on the tatami and sit by me until I finished picking them with my chopsticks, one by one.
6. The word “global,” pronounced gurōbaru in Japanese. Father would repeat this word while on the phone with his colleagues. So and so is gurōbaru, that project is not gurōbaru, you must live a life that is gurōbaru. I couldn’t picture it. Is gurōbaru like a gumball machine, a giant snake, or a magic carpet? You must learn English to become gurōbaru, he told me.
7. “What a Friend We Have in Yésu.” A hymn young Mother learned from one of the American missionaries after the war. She would sing it every morning doing the laundry. Mother didn’t believe in Yésu, yet her voice brought sunlight and cleanliness all the same.
8. Not to mess with my rice. Don’t spoil its pearly whiteness with sauce. Don’t you dare pour miso soup over it. If a single grain is left in your bowl, you shall go blind.
9. How to bake a chiffon cake. The recipe from Mother’s 1961 copy of Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook. Betty, a woman with perfectly coiffed hair and enough time to whip up egg whites for her family while forming a shiny peak of her own career. Who knew she was a made-up character?
10. A father should be unreasonable, so that his children will learn from (and rage at) his silent back.

 

II. Ten Things My Parents Didn’t Teach Me

1. How to speak English. To speak it with an accent without hating yourself.
2. Baseball. Father was disappointed when I was born a girl. Had I been a boy, he would have named me Daisuke and played catch with me every day. 大輔 means “Big and Helpful One.”
3. The love of climbing. Before my birth, Mother had conquered all the major Japanese mountains with her mountaineering club. She named me Miho 美峰, “Beautiful Peak.” The truth is, I become exhausted before reaching any peak.
4. That it doesn’t matter how many languages you know. There is no one language that lets you express your thought perfectly. This absence makes me long for the Word with a capital W.
5. Not to mix up “Thank you” with “Sorry.” To receive without guilt.
6. That there is a God. Unlike gurōbaru, my parents dismissed God as an infinitely Western idea. How selfish to only be concerned about your own immortal soul. How is the “Good News” good if it can’t be extended to parents, grandparents, and other ancestors?
7. To be at home anywhere.
8. How to stop dreaming about home. I have ridden hundreds of trains by now, my nerves stretching in every direction like rail tracks, passing series of familiar and unfamiliar stations, aching for each missed appointment, fading street, beloved face, never reaching the destination.
9. Mother didn’t teach me how to slice a cucumber so thinly that you could see through each slice, a world looming misty and gentle.
10. That love is an irrational thing, a kind of madness that makes you helpless against your better judgment. Despite all the ways I have failed them and they have failed me, I will always return, my heart turning against their knife edges.

 

 

Miho Nonaka is a bilingual poet from Tokyo. She is the author of The Museum of Small Bones (Ashland) and the Japanese translator of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (Kadokawa). She teaches literature and creative writing at Wheaton College.

 

 

 

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash