America-sick

Not too long ago, my son identified almost solely as Japanese.  Once, when I suggested he eat corn on the cob with butter and salt, a la americaine, he refused, saying rather haughtily, “Japanese don’t eat corn like that.”  And when exasperated with the amount of homework I oversee each evening I suggested moving to the States where the load is not quite so heavy, my son became panicky and wild-eyed.

Well, now Jio is going through an American phase.  He says that George Washington is his favorite president, and he’d like to see Miley Cyrus in concert.  He often brings up anecdotes from his last visit to South Carolina, and frequently evokes his slightly older cousin.  He says that he can’t wait to go to America this summer, which I am happy to hear, and that he is even a bit “America-sick” (as opposed to homesick).

I know that for kids like mine, identity is a moving target, but for the moment I’m enjoying his interest in my country’s culture.

Dinner with a FEW good women

Yesterday evening I was the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of FEW Kansai.  The event was held at the Osaka Hilton.  I dressed up, but I still felt kind of gauche hefting my 15-year-old L.L. Bean back pack (stuffed with books) past the Chanel boutique.  I arrived kind of early, so I treated myself to a ten-dollar cake set in the hotel coffee shop.

With a name like Foreign Executive Women, I was sort of expecting intimidating CEOs in power suits, but the women who turned up were all very friendly and interesting and fun to talk to.  I met an aeriliast, the vice counsel, a former journalist and an aspiring journalist, and even some women with connections to South Carolina.   In short, I had a great time. 

I’d thought about staying overnight in Osaka, but when I found out that there was a ten thirty bus I decided to come home.  I got up this morning to make my son’s bento, then went back to bed for two hours.  Bliss!

 

 

 

When it Rains, it Pours

I’ve been away from the blog for a bit because I’ve been busy as a bee with other projects.  (How’s that for alliteration?)  Two major pieces of writing that I first completed a couple of years ago, are now in the publishing queue and came up for revision/copy edits at the same time.  One is a long-ish short story (10,000 words) called “Pilgrimage” about a girl with cerebral palsy who travels to Paris with her sculptor single mother.  This one will appear in the young adult literary journal Cicada.  The other is an essay written for an anthology, One Big Happy Family, edited by Rebecca Walker and to be published in February by Riverhead.  On top of that, I’ve been working on my speech for a presentation in Osaka tomorrow night for the monthly meeting of the Foreign Executive Women AND my editor at J-Select just asked me to write an article by NEXT FRIDAY.

I will resume the story of how Love You to Pieces came to be shortly.  Stay tuned…

 

Boys will be Boys

For nine years I’ve been shrieking, “No toy guns!” and vetoing every attempted purchase of said items.  You’d think it might have had some effect.  But no.

Today we went to a nearby strip mall (yes, they have those in Japan, too) because the kids wanted to get out of the house and had a little money to burn.  We looked at pets for awhile.  I was amazed to see chipmunks for sale.  They looked wild and totally hyper.  One of them kept falling off the exercise wheel, he was going so fast.

Lilia bought a chunky comic book full of sparkly-eyed girls with her money.  I told Jio that he should save up for Legos or whatever, and that he didn’t necessarily have to spend the money he got as a reward for getting 100 percent correct on his kanji test.  (Only the second 100 percent in two and a half years.)  But then, when we were just about to go home, he mentioned something that he wanted to buy.  An action figure, I thought.  I waited at the entrance with Lilia while he paid for it with his own money all by himself.  It wasn’t until we got into the car that I saw what it was - a toy gun.

It’s supposed to be a policeman’s revolver, and it came with a badge.  Okay, so better than a robber gun, I guess.  The funny thing is, he got a toy policeman’s kit for Christmas a couple years ago in the U.S.  It included a vest, a walkie-talkie, a badge, a bullhorn, handcuffs, and a pad of paper for writing tickets, but no gun.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Japanese policeman packing heat, but here, you get the gun.

 

A Democrat Abroad

Last week, after Barack Obama became the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, I got online and joined Democrats Abroad.  I’ve voted democratically all of my life, but I’ve never joined any sort of group.  (My brother, on the other hand, was a member of the Young Republicans when we were in college.)

I also started reading a collection of essays put together by Shari MacDonald Strong, the senior editor at Literary Mama (sort of like my boss), called The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change.  Some of my favorite writers (such as Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Lamott) are represented here, alongside some of my favorite Literary Mama columnists such as Ona Gritz, Susan Ito and Violet Garcia-Mendoza - and Jennifer Graf Groneberg.  (I haven’t read her essay yet, as I’m reading in order, but I skipped ahead and read a couple of paragraphs about a deaf girl with cerebral palsy who was homeschooled by her mother after school officials said that she’d never be able to read, but who got herself into nursing school years later).

So anyhow, it’s a wonderful book. 

One thing that I’ve learned is that four out of five people vote as their parents did, and a number of these essays  concern mothers inculcating their children with their political beliefs.  This is all very new and strange for me because growing up, I had no idea how my parents voted.  In principle, they kept their voting habits a secret, because in America we elect our officials behind a curtain with complete privacy.  It’s our right to vote for whom ever we want, and our right not to tell anyone.

I grew up believing that my parents were Democrats.  Imagine my surprise when, several years ago, I found out that I was wrong.  By that time, it was too late for me to be influenced by my parents’ political choices.  I’d already voted for Mondale and Clinton.

My son, by the way, is a keen Obama supporter.  I’m thinking of getting him a T-shirt proclaiming his view.

 

Farewell, Harriet

I just learned with sadness from another blog about the death this past week of Harriet McBryde Johnson.  Harriet was kind of a hero of mine.  When I first found out that my daughter was deaf, I thought of Harriet, who’d gone to law school and become a celebrated published writer in spite of her disability.  My daughter’s abilities are different, of course, but I thought, “It’s okay.  She can become a lawyer like Harriet McBryde Johnson.”

I met Harriet at that writer’s conference in Charleston where I met Bret Lott.  We - and a few other people - hung out together.  I gave her a copy of my literary journal, Yomimono, and invited her to submit.  I figured she had a unique point of view.  But she never sent me anything. 

The second night of the conference, I heard her read in a bar.  The place was packed, and there she was at the mike, in her wheelchair, reading a very Southern story about hunting.  In the next day’s session, Valerie Sayers praised her work, and sure enough, later one of Harriet’s stories appeared in the literary magazine that Sayers edited.  During the conference she also mentioned that she was working on a novel about the camp for disabled kids that her parents sent her to every summer.  It turned out to be a great book.

She wound up publishing an essay about her meeting with Peter Singer in The New York Times Magazine which caused quite a stir.  That essay appeared in her wonderful memoir Too Late to Die Young, which is remarkable not because she suffered from a form of muscular dystrophy, but because of her fine writing, her wit, and her impassionaned political activism.

Harriet, you did good.

 

Writer Mom

Look!  I’m in this month’s issue of Tokyo Families.

Where’s Beth?

Some readers of Love You to Pieces will wonder why I didn’t include Beth Kephart, author of the award-winning and extremely poetic memoir A Slant of Sun, about being a new mom with an autistic son.  This book is one of the first concerning parenting a disabled child that I read, and Kephart writes so beautifully, that each sentence was like a string of pearls.

Okay, here’s the answer:  she turned me down.   When I first came up with the idea of putting together of collection of literature on raising a child with special needs, I sent her a message asking if she’d be willing to contribute.  She responded that she had moved beyond writing about her son’s special needs, and that they were no longer such an issue; he has learned to function in the world.  It’s possible that she was giving me a gentle brush off.  After all, she didn’t know who I was or what kind of a book I would ultimately come up with or who would publish it.  If she had suggested that I excerpt her memoir, I probably would have, but I wanted to respect her wishes.  By the way, if you haven’t read A Slant of Sun, you should.

I also contacted Bret Lott, whom I’d met a writer’s conference in South Carolina.  We’d both contributed book reviews to Manoa, and we talked about that a little, so he had something to remember me by.  At any rate, Bret wrote that my idea sounded like a good one, that he’d be happy to be a part of it, and that he was confident I’d find a publisher.  This was all before Jewel,  inspired by an aunt with Down syndrome, became an Oprah pick, but I feel quite sure that he would have said “yes” even after.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Praise of Japanese Music Class

When I was a kid in Michigan, music class meant that we gathered our chairs around a piano and sang songs from a mimeographed lyric sheet.  Maybe once in awhile the itinerant music teacher would pass out some tambourines and castanets. 

Only now, all these years later as a mother in Japan, do I understand how lame all that was.  We never learned musical notes or how to play instruments or the names of the great composers.  Not during the regular school day.

Last week my daughter was thrilled to get a recorder and to begin learning how to play it.  The kids at the deaf school also learn to play taiko - traditional Japanese drums - and perform at the annual culture festival.  Before the recorder, my kids learned to play something called a harmonium. 

I had a look at my son’s music class workbook and noted that he was learning about Bach and Beethoven.  And although my hearing son has a dread of music class whereas my deaf daughter loves it (go figure), I’m so grateful that my children are being educated in the arts.

 

More on Love You to Pieces

Esteemed translator Deborah Iwabuchi has posted her review of Love You to Pieces.