I’m Not Well-Versed

Hideko Mitani

Read the Faculty Introduction.

As I am paying the old 阿姨 behind the counter, I cannot help but zone out. I blankly smile at her and nod, not quite sure what I was agreeing to or if she was asking a question I was meant to respond to but was too busy pretending to be a local for my mediocre Chinese skills to go unnoticed. I quickly bag my groceries before there is any more time for the 阿姨 to make small talk, but it doesn’t take her much to realize I am not from here.She asks, “你是来自哪里?” (where are you from?). My heart sank a little as I answered with the exact same phrase I always use to introduce myself no matter the language, “我的妈妈是中国人。 我的爸爸是日本人。 但是我是在智利出生长大” (My mom is Chinese, my dad is Japanese, but I was born and raised in Chile). Saying these words in my noticeable foreign accent came with a stabbing feeling in the gut. This time, I did not have the upper hand of boasting my Chinese and Japanese background like I used to in Chile, deluding people into believing I am more well-versed in my heritage than I am. I can’t precisely remember how the conversation followed. I can imagine the 阿姨 said something along the lines of “Oh, that is so interesting, so you must speak many languages?” or at least that is what I am used to assuming based on my past experiences. Walking back to the dorms felt like a walk of shame, where the sense of failure I thought I had conquered was looming over me. This moment was ready to take away all the courage I mustered to accept I was never going to be  well-versed in the necessary subtext to intimately understand my Chinese heritage and culture, much less the Japanese side of my background.

I always wonder if there was anything I could have done better to not end up in this situation, perhaps going to Chinese and Japanese school every Saturday and Sunday like other 华裔 (overseas Chinese) and Japanese kids. In retrospect, I definitely should’ve taken the sparse Chinese and Japanese classes I did take more seriously––but I couldn’t help wishing the lessons were over quickly. I always felt there was going to be enough time in the future to catch up with all the things that makes one a “true” Chinese and Japanese. Maybe as a product of my environment, it was inevitable that I alienated my Chinese and Japanese heritage, and it is precisely my not being well-versed in my background that recounts the legacy of my grandparents and parent’s sacrifice. Or at least this is how I like to view it – because if not, the rejection of my Chinese and Japanese identity would have been in vain.

Like many Japanese in the 70s, my grandparents on my father’s side traveled for 45 days on a ship, the Argentina Maru, to move to Brazil in search of a better life. After eight years, when business got complicated and the company my grandfather worked for went bankrupt, they drove for 12 days and moved to Chile, which would be home for the next 43 years and counting. On my mother’s side, my grandmother moved from Taiwan to Paraguay with six kids – none of whom spoke a single word of Spanish – while my grandfather stayed back in Taiwan.

A few years later, during a backpacking trip, my mother coincidentally arrived in Chile and decided to settle there until wherever her next adventure took her. During a visit to my mother, my grandfather’s instincts of Chile as a safe place to raise his children prompted him to reunite the entire family in Chile. Shortly after, my grandfather passed away at ease, knowing that Chile would be a welcoming and nurturing place for his family. From a young age, I always understood and was well aware of all the sacrifices and hardships my grandparents and parents went through for my siblings and me to have everything we could possibly need and endless opportunities to explore and enjoy the world in ways they never got to experience. All my grandparents left everything; their families, culture, memories, and home with the selfless desire to provide their children and grandchildren with a more comfortable life, with the purest intent to give with no expectation to receive, only for me to resent all the precious things they gave up.

I am now racing against time to pick up the scraps of the fragmented comprehension of my languages and cultures to share with my grandparents before it’s too late. Before their only memories of us are countless meals spent in silence and exchanging glances of unspoken words, unexpressed love. I always think about all the things I would tell my grandparents if I’d learned Chinese and Japanese earlier. I wish I could say to them how grateful I am for their sacrifices and sorry for not embracing their cultures sooner. I wish I could hear my grandparents’ stories through their wise and humble voices instead of listening to them from third parties who fail to convey the complex and emotional narratives that lie in the calluses of their hands, in their gray hair that have years of advice to offer and in their beautiful wrinkles that trace the journey of their laborious life. My broken Chinese and Japanese are proof of the shame I felt for being Asian, and funnily enough, I now feel guilt and resentment towards myself for not appreciating my cultures sooner. I guess this resentment was a feeling I could not explain until I experienced the exclusion of my background.

My first memory of feeling singled out was in kindergarten for international food day, when every student was meant to bring a traditional dish from their home country. I was already conflicted on which country to choose. I knew I definitely couldn’t choose Chile because everyone would question the authenticity of whatever I made because of my face, imprinted with Asian features. I opted for going with a Japanese dish because I was convinced it wouldn’t receive mean and snarky comments since, after all, all the insults I heard and was told were concerned with being Chinese, not Japanese.

The morning of, my mom and I carefully and lovingly prepared the onigiri (rice balls) wrapped in nori (dried seaweed) and made enough in case anyone wanted seconds. As I arrived at the class, I realized I brought the least conventional food––everyone brought cakes, cookies, bread, pies and candies that no one dared to question whether they would taste good or not. I opened the tupperware with the onigiri with the slight hope that others would give it a chance, but it only took for one kid to point out that the seaweed was dirty and that it was gross how the rice stuck to his hand for all the other kids to decide not to eat it.

I remember going home with the tupperware full of onigiri.

At home, I found comfort in my mother’s gentle voice and warm eyes saying there was no need to be sad because we, as a family, were going to enjoy the onigiri, and they wouldn’t go to waste. I ate the onigiri with a bitter-sweet feeling. I was grateful for having a loving and supportive family, but no matter how appreciative I was of them, that sentiment was overshadowed by the shame and embarrassment I felt in representing my background and family. I was mad at myself for desperately wanting the validation of my classmates, of which most of them never took the time to learn and value my cultures.

Throughout elementary school, I would slowly and silently open my lunchbox and thermos, hoping no one would ask why my rice was red or why my food smelled the way it did. It wasn’t the questions themselves that bothered me; rather, the dismissive and disdainful tone they asked them in like there was something about my food I should be ashamed of.

In middle school, I began receiving comments like, “you are so pretty to be Asian,” or “your eyes don’t look too Chinese, they’re quite big,” and the worst part was that I believed this was the highest form of praise or compliment, anything that would remove me from my Asianess. I got used to and sought refuge in these microaggressions as if by doing so, they would take me one step closer to fitting the Chilean socialite beauty standard of having big blue or green eyes, blond hair and tan skin.

By the time I reached high school and graduated, the list of things I am not well-versed in became longer and longer. I am not well-versed in the full-out patriotic sentiment Chileans have when independence day celebrations come around the 18th of September, in the origin and reasons for Lunar New Year traditions that I blindly follow every year and why my Japanese grandma makes us eat specific food like su renkon (pickled lotus root), kuromame (sweet black soybean) and ozoni (mochi soup) every 1st of January.

Realizing I am not well-versed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures my grandparents tried so hard to pass down or the decades of Chilean traditions that transcends the extent of my parent’s experiences and their arrival in Chile came with more questions than answers. How can I embrace who I am and share myself with the world when I live as a construction of what I think people expect of me? I’m not sure to what extent the expectations of others reflect my identity and vice versa, nor do I know what moment or things could’ve made me love myself more for who I am instead of the image I wanted people to see.

Now I find myself in college, peeking at the silhouette of the Pearl Tower through the window outside the elevator I take every morning to catch the bus to the campus. If the elevator takes long enough to reach the 21st floor, I sometimes catch myself smiling at the sight of the Pearl Tower, feeling invincible, as if the day before, I wasn’t curled up in my bed, questioning whether I’d made the right choice. The choice of forcing myself to realize that no matter where or what the circumstances of life are, I will always be intensely longing for the feeling of being well-versed that is bound to be absent in my life. It is precisely navigating this space of ambiguity where I cannot be too quick or confident in claiming any identity that makes me, me. From my upbringing and not being exhaustively cultured in any field or regard, I learned to become well-versed in not being well-versed, which does not have to be bad. Identities are ever-shifting and changing, and the beauty of it all is that we get to be a multiplicity of things that shape us to be unique and distinctive, particular to each one of us. There is no right or wrong; there just is. I get to say that for breakfast, “me voy a comer su buen pan con palta (avocado toast),” to later in the day eat some warm rice with sticky and slimy nattō (Japanese fermented soybeans) and end my night with my all-time favorite soup, tang yuan tang (glutinous rice balls soup).