While I Was Away Read online

  “So many ladies compliment me when I wear this dress,” Obaasama continued. “In Japan, the older a woman gets, the more boring her clothes get. Blacks, browns, grays, like dull little sparrows—bah! No one gives them a second glance. I think the older the woman, the fancier she needs to dress, the more eye-catching her jewelry should be. I might not have my youth, but at least I can make up for that with style.”

  I wasn’t a fan of her tiger dress, and her accessories felt a bit over-the-top . . . but her logic did make some sense.

  “I have to buy some chicken for dinner.” Obaasama stepped outside. She dragged a small shopping bag with wheels behind her. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She ambled down the street and sure enough, people definitely gave her a glance, a second glance, sometimes even a third.

  As soon as she closed the gate behind her, I turned my attention back to my aerogram, which was a special type of letter sent from overseas. Since postage was more expensive depending on how much mail weighed, aerograms only cost thirty cents to send since they were made out of whisper-thin paper. I sliced open the edges with the letter opener, careful not to rip anything because I didn’t want to lose even one word. I unfolded the pale-blue paper to reveal one and a quarter pages of connection with my family. It was in my sister Aya’s handwriting.

  Dear love, cutest, sweetest Waka,

  Mommy wanted me to write you about the presents you’re supposed to give the people. The ones with names, give to the people whose names are on them . . . The boxes of chocolate without names on them, give to the people around the neighborhood who help you the most. If you don’t know who, ask your grandmother’s advice. You can give the Jell-O to Grandma or you can use it yourself. You can do whatever you want with the Pop Tarts and the Pepperidge Farm cookies. If you need anything, write a letter and don’t call us—we’ll call you (joke, haha). If you absolutely have to call, call station-to-station and not person-to-person. Since you’re gone, nobody can go on a trip so we’re all suffering. You’re an adult so do everything you can and don’t bother Grandma too much—be nice to her. Mommy will give you thousands of kisses when you come home (Mommy dictated this letter). Love xxx Mommy

  On the back my sister and mother left room for my five-year-old little brother to include his own message to me: a picture of my classmate Eric.

  Although I never, ever told my siblings I had a crush on Eric (which I no longer did because he was actually a dope) they still thought I did, and they didn’t let me forget it.

  Hmm. Not the most satisfying letter ever—I mean, really, Mom? I knew to give the gifts with names to those people. But who cares—it was a letter! I read it again, and again . . . and again. By the third time I read it, I appreciated the drawing Taiga included. It was a pretty good drawing for a five-year-old! It actually kind of looked like Eric too.

  Then a feeling, almost like a fog—a fog of missing—settled over me. All of a sudden, I missed my mommy. I missed my daddy. I missed my sister, my baby brother, even my older brother.

  Stop. I took a deep breath and let all the air out slowly. Stop. I wanted more letters. More and more letters. How could I get them? I could write.

  I sat down at the little dining table and composed a letter to my parents, but I ended up crumpling it up and throwing it away. The Japanese I included was messy and even though I used a plastic eraser to correct it, the end result was sloppy. So I wrote the Japanese parts on a separate sheet of scratch paper before I started another draft.

  Dear お母様、お父様、

  Okaasama, Otousama,

  Thank you for the letter. How is Kansas? Japan is fine.

  I paused here. What else would my parents want to hear about? I didn’t want them to think life was easy for me here.

  I don’t sleep in like I would at home since I have school every day, even Saturday. Around 7:00 every morning this past week, I woke up, got dressed, folded my sheets, blanket, and futon and put them away. A couple days I woke up even earlier because of Obaasama’s 5:30 a.m. English lessons on the radio.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to complain too much . . .

  Obaasama is fine. She’s not that bad. She makes me food every day. She even grilled shishamo for breakfast! It was really good. The shishamo were fat with their eggs and since I’m allergic to chicken eggs, it was nice to be able to eat fish eggs. I ate it with grated daikon and left only the heads. Even the tails were crispy and delicious! All that grilling and grating seemed like a lot of work, though. I don’t want to be any trouble, so I told her I could make my own breakfast. The past couple of mornings, I toasted a roll with cheese on it instead.

  I walk to school with Reiko, and during morning assembly all the students do rajio taisou exercises, just like Daddy. Although they’re a little different from the ones Daddy does. Maybe they have changed over the years?

  My teacher is nice. Nice to me, anyway. He can be more strict with the other students, though. My classes are hard. In Language Arts, the lesson we’re on is on 「短歌と俳句」(“tanka to haiku”).

  I paused again, wondering if I should let my parents know that when I first opened my textbook, the title “Tanka and Haiku” looked like this to me: 「?歌と??」. One of the only two letters I could read was written in hiragana, the letters most five-year-olds could read. The other characters, 短, 俳, and 句, were some of the seven hundred fifty plus kanji characters I hadn’t learned yet. The one kanji I could read, 歌, was part of my name—the “ka” part of Waka—so that was the only reason I knew that one already. If my parents were aware of just exactly how little I could read, would they make me go to even more school? No way would I chance that!

  I wrote the kanji 「短歌と俳句」five times on my piece of scratch paper before including it in my letter.

  I actually learned about haiku in Kansas. But I didn’t know what tanka were before. “Waka” was part of the lesson too, so that was interesting. Of course, I already knew waka was a type of poem. We also went to the school library and I checked out a book.

  We went to the library all the time during summers back home. My mom brought a box and my sister, brothers, and I loaded it up until it was so full we could barely carry it. Should I confess I couldn’t read the one book I checked out here? I could read the books in the first- and second-grade section. But since I was a sixth grader, I knew my parents wouldn’t exactly be proud of me for that. I decided to leave out these details.

  Now, to end the letter with a healthy dose of guilt.

  I have been trying very hard to be good and not a burden to Obaasama. I make sure to wash my own clothes every night before I get in the deep o-furo tub. Sometimes I get cold because it takes a while to clean clothes by scrubbing them on a washboard, but then it is nice to soak in the hot bath. I miss you and Kit Kats, Twix bars, and English books. I am almost finished with the ones I brought since there are no TV shows I like here.

  I reread the letter. Perfect. Just the right combination of “I’m trying my best to learn and enjoy myself, what a good child I am,” and “How could you do this to me?”

  “Waka, it’s dinnertime,” called Obaasama from inside the kitchen.

  I looked up. The rest of the afternoon had sped by in the blink of an eye! When did my grandmother return? I hadn’t even heard the door open, let alone her preparing dinner! I cleared the table off as quickly as I could to make room for the ginger chicken I could smell sizzling in the kitchen.

  Eight

  Just like my parents said would happen, I was learning a lot, being thrown into the culture. As warm May transformed into rainy, muggy June, I learned and learned. Just maybe not always the things my parents thought I would.

  Like one morning when I walked to school, I stopped in front of a place with a large sign in front that read “PACHINKO.” I couldn’t tear my eyes away at the men dropping plastic discs at the top of what looked like an upright pinball machine. Plink, plink, plink went the discs as they bounced off pegs until they fo
und their way to slots at the bottom. I asked Reiko if she’d ever been inside one of these Pachinko places before.

  Reiko responded with a shocked “What? No! I would never!”

  “Why not?” I asked. “It looks like fun.”

  “Oh, Waka.” Reiko shook her head. Only she didn’t seem exasperated with me like Obaasama sometimes did—she seemed more amused. Her explanations were always kind. She spent the rest of our walk to school describing the shady nature of these places and that if I ever went to one, all the teachers at the school would be shocked, and that they’d tell my grandmother and my aunts who would also be shocked, and there would be meetings about how young girls should never set foot inside places that seemed as harmless as these. I found this description of how everyone would freak out almost as fascinating as the Pachinko parlor itself.

  So that’s one thing I learned. That Pachinko parlors were evil and young girls should never go inside one no matter how much fun they seemed.

  I also learned that not only was I taller here, but I was faster too. In PE back in Kansas, I was one of the fastest girls in the class, second only to Jenny C. If Paige P. was in my class, I was second to her too. Toward the end of the year, Angie W. suddenly got a lot faster. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t always the second fastest girl in class. Depending on who was in my class, I was the third, sometimes fourth fastest girl in the class. On an off day, the fifth.

  In contrast, I felt like an Olympic champion when I ran here.

  The first time our class raced, I finished second out of all forty students, and second only to a boy. “Wow,” exclaimed Emi-chan. “Why are you so fast? What did you eat in America?”

  I thought about what food I hadn’t eaten here that I ate a lot of back home. “Steak.”

  My classmates went bananas. “Steak? Steak? You’re so lucky! How often do you get to eat steak? No wonder you’re so fast!”

  Steak was my older brother’s favorite dinner. My parents thought he was too skinny, so my mom made sure we ate steak once a week.

  “Yum!” my brother greeted his steak every week.

  “Again?” I groaned.

  My mother tried to make it different by disguising it in different marinades. Wishbone Italian Dressing was the worst. When we had steak, my dad always said, “Kansas beef is the best.” I hadn’t missed it at all since arriving in Japan. Only with my classmates’ comments did I realize maybe steak was a luxury, even if they were just chuck steaks. For my parents, even the cheap cuts were better than any beef they ate growing up. So I learned maybe I should be grateful for all those steaks that made me big and fast.

  I also learned my mom was right when she said I was really behind in my kanji. During language arts, my classmates read aloud, one right after the other, straight down the rows. Through this class routine, I learned who was a good reader, and who was not. Tall and reserved Fujita-san was always ready with the correct answer when asked, and never received a head slap. Clearly, she was one of the smartest girls in class. Midori-chan’s friend Yamashita-san struggled, though, and she always played with the ends of her ponytail when it was her turn to read.

  “Yamashita!” Mr. Adachi would yell. “Focus!”

  That made Yamashita-san stop fidgeting with her ponytail, but it didn’t help her read any better.

  For now, I wasn’t nervous as my turn approached. Mr. Adachi already told me he’d skip me, at least until I caught up—and who knew when that would happen (if ever)? Sure enough, when the student behind me finished, there was a brief pause. In the silence, I thought I felt my classmates’ glares as I held my breath. Or did I? Maybe I was being paranoid. Still, when Mr. Adachi pointed to the kid in front of me and she started reading, I exhaled.

  Skip.

  Reading was a doozy—so much of a doozy I didn’t even attempt it except during my tutoring sessions with Mr. Adachi. Writing was even worse. Take, for instance, the kanji for “study.” If you look at the first character for “study” 勉 (ben-) it takes ten strokes to write it. To write it the correct way, we had to follow the kakijun or “stroke order” for each character. The stroke order for it looks like this:

  If we didn’t write the strokes in the correct order, it was wrong. Even if it looked right! It was hard for me to memorize these kanji so I made up stories about them. For instance, this kanji looked a little bit like an alien with a hat (免) holding a chair (力) with one of its legs. But if I drew the chair (力) part of the character before the alien-wearing-a-hat (免) part of the character, it was wrong. Even though Mr. Adachi didn’t watch me write the characters on the quizzes, he knew when I wrote the strokes out of order. When I showed Reiko some kanji I wrote, she agreed.

  “Oh yeah, I can tell you wrote the strokes out of order.”

  “You can? How?” I asked.

  “You can just tell. It’s shaped funny. Can’t you see the difference?”

  I could not.

  On my first kanji quiz, I scored a 2 out of 10. Buzz-Cut Suzuki-kun caught sight of my quiz before I could hide it. He nudged his henchman, scrawny Ito-kun. “Baka Waka,” they laughed. Sweat broke out across my forehead when I heard them. I felt sick and embarrassed and mad all at once.

  Baka. Stupid. None of my American classmates ever called me stupid. In fact, I was most definitely a brain. I only had two Bs the whole time I’d been in school: a B+ in handwriting in third grade, and a B in fifth-grade science. The rest were As. In sixth grade, Mrs. Davenport didn’t give kanji quizzes, but we did have vocabulary and spelling tests that were easy-peasy for me. At one point, Mrs. Davenport had me find my own spelling words but then stopped me when I only quizzed myself on words like “Quetzalcoatl.”

  “It’s nice you’re challenging yourself, but it’s not like you’re going to use ‘Quetzalcoatl’ many times in your life.” Mrs. Davenport added words like “embarrassed” and “receipt” to my list instead. I was disgruntled at the time, but she was right. My ability to spell “Quetzalcoatl” had not come in handy yet. Certainly not here. So what if I happened to be good at remembering a sequence of letters to spell English words? Spelling in Japanese is not a thing since words are spelled out basically how they sound. School here is all about kanji and remembering a dash here, a line here, and what order to put them in. And I’m really, really bad at it. I thought about my classmates back home who always were the first to sit down in our class spelling bees. I had never considered what that felt like until now.

  So I haven’t learned much kanji. But I have learned I’m not very good at it. That’s okay. I was crushing it at PE.

  “What’s going on?” I asked one day when we walked into the gymnasium filled with small, wooden platforms.

  “This?” responded Midori-chan. “Don’t you have tobibako in America?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re lucky,” Midori-chan sighed. “I do not like these at all.”

  Turns out tobibako was like leapfrogging. Except not leapfrog like in the US, more like competitive leapfrogging.

  First, we leapfrogged over the lower wooden tobibako vaulting horses, but then we stacked them higher and higher, until they were about chest high. One at a time, we ran at them as fast as we could, launched off a springboard, pushed our hands off the upper part of the horse, and vaulted over with our legs apart. For a split second, it was like flying.

  It was awesome.

  “Are you sure you haven’t done this before?” Naomi-chan came back from her third try running at the highest tobibako, balking, and then lining up for yet another try.

  Then we had leapfrog races in teams of two.

  “Hey, Waka, wanna be my partner?” asked Fujita-san.

  “No, Fujita-san, she should be my partner. We’re closer in height,” countered Emi-chan.

  “I’m not very good at these, but . . .” started Midori-chan.

  “I’ll be your partner, Midori-chan!” exclaimed Naomi-chan.

  I looked back and forth between Fujita-san and Emi-chan.

  “Come
on, Waka-chan. We’ll beat all the boys.” Emi-chan’s eyes twinkled and her freckles danced. I glanced over at the boys who looked like they were conspiring right back at us.

  “All right.” I nodded to Emi-chan. “Let’s go!”

  Emi-chan looked toward Fujita-san. She smiled and shouted, “Sounds good, just defeat those boys!”

  Ready, set . . . yoi . . . DON!

  We not only won, it wasn’t even close.

  “I can’t believe you boys,” shouted Mr. Adachi. Only he didn’t seem mad. He seemed amused. “These girls ran circles around you weaklings!”

  Emi-chan and I grinned.

  “You mean ‘leapfrogged’?” grumbled Ito-kun.

  Mr. Adachi’s playful teasing stopped as he strode over to Ito-kun and SMACK!

  In America, I was “scrappy” because I tried hard, but I was small. In basketball, the taller girls stuffed the basketball in my face when I took a shot, and in red rover, my classmates always ran right at me. In Japan, I was a jock. Maybe a dumb jock, but I didn’t mind: People like jocks. Back home, people got way more excited about kids who could score points and win races than kids who could spell “Quetzalcoatl.” I learned that the same was true here.

  If my friends could see me now!

  Nine

  After a couple weeks at my new school with my new Japanese friends, I finally received my first letter from an old Kansan friend! Although Annette probably wouldn’t like being called “old.” I checked the date Annette sent it—it was only four days ago! That meant the news inside was less than a week old. Perfect timing too, since today was another long Saturday afternoon. She wrote on Garfield stationery.

  Dear Nermal,

  How is Japan? I’m already bored without you. We played our first game against the local Auburn league. We beat ’em, 20 to 15. Guess what, I pitched! I didn’t strike anybody out, but I pitched pretty good. I was surprised when they wanted me to pitch, they haven’t even seen me pitch before.