 © Lisbeth Hamlin
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Elsewhere Click to read Click to |
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© Lisbeth Hamlin
|
Elsewhere Click to read Click to |
Elsewhere
Every place I’ve lived has been a temporary arrangement: I’ve always
known that I’d leave. My father’s work took him from Japan across oceans, and he
carried us with him, back and forth. Believing that we would learn to assimilate more
quickly, he chose neighborhoods with few other Japanese families, schools where I was
among few Asian children. We were to remember that we were merely visiting and to behave
accordingly. What I learned was how to leave places. I’ve come to inhabit a landscape
of displacement—of arrivals and departures. I had already lost each place we lived
years before I ever saw it.
In the mythical America, however, immigrants from the world over can find a place and become anything they want if they work hard enough, if they want badly enough to be American. Or if you at least look like some people’s idea of an American. Third-generation and fourth-generation Asian-Americans are still asked, "Where are you from? No, where are you from really?" Or "How long have you been here? You speak such good English!" Other people tell me that I’m American because I sound like one, though the passport I carry is Japanese. This is a country where you’re assigned a place to "be from," whether you ever belonged there or not. Most Asian-Americans never belonged in the countries their grandparents came from; most have never seen that faraway place assigned to them by others. Their place is here, in America. Yet, in the real America, they’re often robbed of this claim. It is a country where everyone is supposed to arrive from elsewhere, as if to a final destination. I myself have never truly belonged here. I know I have no tangible claim to this place, that I’ll leave it again. The more I’m told I fit in, the more I become uprooted, a foreigner.
In Japan, where I was born and where I look like I belong, I’m expected to think and act like everyone else. It’s the superficial similarities that bring out the profound differences in the way we see things: we have so little in common that we speak only in sharp silences. I’ve become a stranger, among childhood friends and family, in what’s supposed to be my native home. Each landscape I enter is as familiar and as distant and inaccessible as the last. In either country, I feel like an impostor, half native, half foreigner, pretending to belong. This feeling of displacement is an intimate part of me, as well-known to me as my own body. It’s the only constant I can claim.
One year in college, I ran away from the places I’d known and went to France. I felt at ease in being foreign without question, in speaking bad French. I was allowed to feel out of place, being from elsewhere. Where that elsewhere was was another question. It was the year of the Gulf War and later the Rodney King beating. My American friends stuck together under an identity forced onto them by events, and, while I was often seen as an American, I saw myself apart.
Four years ago, I drove with a friend across the United States from a southern Californian "planned community" to a college town in upstate New York. We traversed the crayon-colored deserts, the blood mountains, a two-day stretch of plain. In Iowa, where I nearly drove into the river, six boys and a girl circled the stalled car and asked, "You came all the way from California?"
I live now in Ithaca, the kind of town where people end up staying without meaning to, buying a house to fix up out by Route 366, raising children on organic vegetables from the Farmers Market, growing old. The frost jewels my windows early in winter, which is bitterly wet and sunless. People joke that we have only two seasons: the Fourth of July and winter. Still, the summers are lush and ringing with lilac and children’s voices by the willowy lake. Small shops and galleries on The Commons turn over as fast as the undergraduates; the restaurants close and open again. It is a place that sees thousands of arrivals and departures each year, while the shoe store has been here forever, the deli, the Ph.D.s. Here in this town, someone also from elsewhere told me, "The more difficult and necessary task is staying home—making that place where you’re misunderstood your own."
Maybe it’s true that we are all from elsewhere or going elsewhere; maybe no one belongs anywhere anymore. Listen. I listen to my voice, and it says I am here now.
Profile
Her poems are of geographical and emotional displacement, haunting self-portraits accumulated by a Japanese woman attaining and securing her adulthood in countries not her own. They are appearing here and there, eking their way into print, like persons who once shared a journey going off to their various destinations.
—Mario Hernandez
Bio
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