Given how illness and overwork have decimated Citizen of Somewhere Else for the past month, it's time once again to consign another programming schedule to the recycle folder of history. I have a bunch of posts in various stages of ye olde writing process that are worth putting out there whenever I get them done, not on a day of the week that no longer even corresponds to my teaching schedule. My grades are due on the 27th, so don't expect too much going on here before then.
In honor of this being the last Family Friday post for awhile, however, let me note that onechan is like Tiger Woods in having a birthday come during the holiday season. Hers, though, is ten days before his, and, unlike his folks, we don't get her one shoe for Christmas (not least b/c we don't celebrate it) and one for her birthday, although we are almost as cheap. But when you have an imagination as rich as hers and a little sister as cool as hers, you don't need much stuff.
Case in point: onechan has been adding to our pantheon of imaginary characters. Unlike the mythical Saja and Suweet, however, her imaginary friends Nashi and Kurari are pretty much normal little girls. They're both Spanish, and they may be 6-year-old twins, although I have to check on that, because sometimes it seems like Kurari is Nashi's friend and sometimes her little sister. And sometimes it sounds like Kurari's parents are dead. My uncertainty stems from the fact that onechan rarely gives me updates on their lives, preferring instead to tell stories to herself about them and play with them. It was a really funny moment to me last night in my parents' hotel room (they made it for her actual birthday and will stay through her girls' party on Sunday, weather permitting--yeah!) when, in the midst of playing with her gift from them (a wood block stamp/colored pencils kit), she started telling them about her new friends. I don't know how much they caught, because she was kind of distracted and sounded like she was talking to herself, and they were very distracted for other reasons that I shall not be getting into here, but it was striking to me how casually she was speaking of characters she invented (and knows full well are "pretend"). It's amazing to watch onechan become a story-teller and to see how play and storytelling are so intertwined in her head and in her actions....
Showing posts with label Family Friday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Family Friday. Show all posts
Friday, December 21, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
"I Don't Wanna Be Die"
That's what onechan told me a little over a week ago. She's been figuring out what death is and what it means over the past couple of months. It's hard to recall how it started. She knows that she is named after the tsuma's grandmother and has gone with us to visit her grave site every time we visit Baba and Gigi in Chiba. She likes to listen to the wind-up music on the photograph we have of her great-grandmother, especially on the anniversary of her death. But lately she's been putting two and two together and asking all sorts of questions. She knows both sets of my grandparents are dead and she knows you visit the graves of those you love, so now she wants to visit my dad's parents in Syracuse this Thanksgiving. She's aware that animals die, too. She was fascinated by the dead skunk that nobody would remove for weeks from the edge of the factory parking lot we drive by almost every day on the way to her hoikuen. When I was reading her a story about Thanksgiving last night, she got very upset that the Wampanoags and Pilgrims hunted wild turkey; when she saw the bows and arrows and processed my explanation of them, she exclaimed, "But the turkeys may get hurt!"
She's still trying to get her head around the notion that everybody dies and you never know when it might happen. For a while, she insisted that she didn't want to turn 10, because she thought she would die soon after. It's not that she doesn't know bigger numbers--we've gone up to 100 in English and over 10,000 in Japanese (thanks to our efforts to teach her about takai [expensive] and a dollar still being worth over a hundred yen)--but it took me a long time to convince her that 100 is old, not 10.
Here's what she knows about death as of right now (she's next to me and I'm translating her answers into complete sentences: if you hurt yourself bad, you can die; after you've been dead awhile, you lose your skin; when you die, you rest in cemetery (which she keeps calling a temple or a church). Gotta go--she wants to type ("on a big big page, ok?")....
She's still trying to get her head around the notion that everybody dies and you never know when it might happen. For a while, she insisted that she didn't want to turn 10, because she thought she would die soon after. It's not that she doesn't know bigger numbers--we've gone up to 100 in English and over 10,000 in Japanese (thanks to our efforts to teach her about takai [expensive] and a dollar still being worth over a hundred yen)--but it took me a long time to convince her that 100 is old, not 10.
Here's what she knows about death as of right now (she's next to me and I'm translating her answers into complete sentences: if you hurt yourself bad, you can die; after you've been dead awhile, you lose your skin; when you die, you rest in cemetery (which she keeps calling a temple or a church). Gotta go--she wants to type ("on a big big page, ok?")....
Friday, November 02, 2007
Onechan: Poet, Scientist, Myth-Maker
The day before Halloween, onechan was running down the stairs in tights and socks and slipped when she transitioned from the carpeting on them to the hardwood floor and tried to change direction too quickly. "I slid like an ice cube!" she exclaimed with a smile. It sounded to me like her first really poetic simile.
This came in the midst of a period that's started even before our return to the States in which she's been trying to get her head around the difference between U.S. time and Japan time. In the morning, she'll seek out confirmation that "It's getting dark in Japan" or "It's bedtime in Japan." At night, before she goes to sleep, she'll tell/ask me, "People are eating breakfast in Japan now?" This has lead to questions about why day and night alternate, which she's been asking often enough that we've moved from "the sun goes up and the sun goes down"-type answers to trying to get across the notion that the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun (though the latter is more relevant to discussions of her birthday, which is coming in less than two months, and why she has to wait for it to come and can't just turn four tomorrow). We've explained it and showed her shadows on various balls using lights and flashlights. But now she wants to know why the Earth spins. Partly b/c I can't really explain it (b/c I don't really know), partly b/c I'm swamped and stressed, and partly to see how she reacts, I haven't gone online with her to look it up or asked the storytime librarian at the local library for a good book on the subject for an almost-four-year-old, but I have encouraged her to come up with an explanation herself and played devil's advocate on all her attempts. She's really into it b/c she's moving from the definite "that's why" to "probably..." (her new favorite word) as her favorite way of attributing a cause to something. So she likes searching out alternate hypotheses, so to speak.
She started with the wind. "Probably the wind makes the earth spin, daddy," she told me in the car on the way back from her Fredonia hoikuen a couple of weeks ago (she seems to like to have these kinds of conversations then and there). When I tried to explain that the wind was probably an effect of the Earth spinning and get across the idea of a vacuum in space (hah!), she grew tired of that hypothesis or my questions and comments or all of the above. So she hadn't said anything about it for awhile. But last evening in the car ride home she informed me she had figured the whole thing out. "There's this big giant, a nice one. She makes the Earth spin. She's pretend." So of course I had to ask her a few questions. Name? "Suweet." What does she do? "She does homework and takes care of her little sister. She goes to school." Wait, what's imoto's name? "Saja. She's three and a half." Oh, how old is Suweet? "Three and a half, too." So they're twins? "Yeah. Saja was born in April. And Suweet was born on the same day."
Not a bad start for onechan's first myth. Suweet and Saja have joined the Powerpuff Girls, Pretty Cure, Sparkychan and Gojochan, Iki and Ika, Jayla, Kake, Trak, and Zavis, the Super-Prius, and various friends and animals in our storytelling pantheon. Which, I freely admit, doesn't inspire as much hysterical laughter as my dad's stories about adults who can't do things right (eat, stand up, walk, etc.) and alternate worlds (say, where things fall up) did from onechan and her oldest cousin, the only other girl among all 7 of them, last weekend in Hershey, PA. Or my mom's playing the TV Teacher for them. But onechan's stuck with me and the tsuma (whose stories are more about everyday life in Japan, from what I can gather, and who tends to gravitate more toward Socratic dialogues with onechan to get her to think through a moral or interpersonal issue than straight storytelling). So tell me, what questions should I ask her about Suweet and Saja?
This came in the midst of a period that's started even before our return to the States in which she's been trying to get her head around the difference between U.S. time and Japan time. In the morning, she'll seek out confirmation that "It's getting dark in Japan" or "It's bedtime in Japan." At night, before she goes to sleep, she'll tell/ask me, "People are eating breakfast in Japan now?" This has lead to questions about why day and night alternate, which she's been asking often enough that we've moved from "the sun goes up and the sun goes down"-type answers to trying to get across the notion that the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun (though the latter is more relevant to discussions of her birthday, which is coming in less than two months, and why she has to wait for it to come and can't just turn four tomorrow). We've explained it and showed her shadows on various balls using lights and flashlights. But now she wants to know why the Earth spins. Partly b/c I can't really explain it (b/c I don't really know), partly b/c I'm swamped and stressed, and partly to see how she reacts, I haven't gone online with her to look it up or asked the storytime librarian at the local library for a good book on the subject for an almost-four-year-old, but I have encouraged her to come up with an explanation herself and played devil's advocate on all her attempts. She's really into it b/c she's moving from the definite "that's why" to "probably..." (her new favorite word) as her favorite way of attributing a cause to something. So she likes searching out alternate hypotheses, so to speak.
She started with the wind. "Probably the wind makes the earth spin, daddy," she told me in the car on the way back from her Fredonia hoikuen a couple of weeks ago (she seems to like to have these kinds of conversations then and there). When I tried to explain that the wind was probably an effect of the Earth spinning and get across the idea of a vacuum in space (hah!), she grew tired of that hypothesis or my questions and comments or all of the above. So she hadn't said anything about it for awhile. But last evening in the car ride home she informed me she had figured the whole thing out. "There's this big giant, a nice one. She makes the Earth spin. She's pretend." So of course I had to ask her a few questions. Name? "Suweet." What does she do? "She does homework and takes care of her little sister. She goes to school." Wait, what's imoto's name? "Saja. She's three and a half." Oh, how old is Suweet? "Three and a half, too." So they're twins? "Yeah. Saja was born in April. And Suweet was born on the same day."
Not a bad start for onechan's first myth. Suweet and Saja have joined the Powerpuff Girls, Pretty Cure, Sparkychan and Gojochan, Iki and Ika, Jayla, Kake, Trak, and Zavis, the Super-Prius, and various friends and animals in our storytelling pantheon. Which, I freely admit, doesn't inspire as much hysterical laughter as my dad's stories about adults who can't do things right (eat, stand up, walk, etc.) and alternate worlds (say, where things fall up) did from onechan and her oldest cousin, the only other girl among all 7 of them, last weekend in Hershey, PA. Or my mom's playing the TV Teacher for them. But onechan's stuck with me and the tsuma (whose stories are more about everyday life in Japan, from what I can gather, and who tends to gravitate more toward Socratic dialogues with onechan to get her to think through a moral or interpersonal issue than straight storytelling). So tell me, what questions should I ask her about Suweet and Saja?
Friday, October 19, 2007
Onechan-sensei
So the other day on the ride back from school/day care, with both girls in car seats in the back, out of the blue onechan tries to teach imoto about the best way to cover your mouth when you sneeze, a fitting topic as both have been dealing with the sniffles for about two weeks now. She carefully explained how it's better to sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands, as you can pass along germs to other people much more easily the latter way. I reminded her about it this morning accidentally when I was telling the tsuma this story, and she proceeded to repeat the lesson, complete with the big idea, the rationale, a demonstration, and an attempt to move imoto's arm in the prescribed manner (this last part didn't go over so well). It's good to see she's learning something useful (about teaching as well as avoiding pandemics) at her hoikuen. As the elder child, I've followed in my dad's footsteps profession-wise. Now I'm wondering if onechan is predisposed to be a professor, too. I don't know whether to be proud or worried.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Kid-Free Family Friday (Almost)
My dad has landed a pretty cool gig. The tsuma knows Michel Foucault's social security number. Moral of the story: interesting things come your way when you follow what you love. For him, it's sports and philosophy (not always in that order); for her, it's libraries and archives.
P.S.--OK, one kid thing: imoto is now following onechan's exercise program...on one of her bedposts, about 3 feet in the air. Now we can't leave the two girls alone in onechan's bedroom. I wonder when imoto will get a sense of danger.
P.P.S.--Well, one more: onechan is starting to tell some pretty surreal stories. Like the time in the car this past week when, fed up with missing all the animal carcasses on and to the sides of the local roads we've been driving on lately, she started telling us a story about a kaba (hippo), no, wait, a mama and a baby, who jumped over the car on their way to a really big puddle--but you missed them, daddy. Well, yeah.
P.S.--OK, one kid thing: imoto is now following onechan's exercise program...on one of her bedposts, about 3 feet in the air. Now we can't leave the two girls alone in onechan's bedroom. I wonder when imoto will get a sense of danger.
P.P.S.--Well, one more: onechan is starting to tell some pretty surreal stories. Like the time in the car this past week when, fed up with missing all the animal carcasses on and to the sides of the local roads we've been driving on lately, she started telling us a story about a kaba (hippo), no, wait, a mama and a baby, who jumped over the car on their way to a really big puddle--but you missed them, daddy. Well, yeah.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Sister Acts
I only have one younger brother and no other siblings, so I'm familiar with a certain kind of brotherly dynamic. The tsuma only has one older sister and no other siblings, so I'm pretty dependent on her experience to figure out what to expect from onechan and imoto as they grow up. What I'm looking for from Blogoramaville are a broader set of perspectives. Feel free to respond any time.
Imoto is almost a year and a half and onechan will be four at the end of the year, so we've already been living in interesting times, so to speak. Not so long ago, Imoto got jealous of our watching a home video from the first month of onechan's life for the first time since she was born. At times, it seems as if onechan is the "m" and imoto the "s" in a sadomasochistic relationship. We've drilled "don't hurt the baby!" so successfully into onechan's head that lately I've been sounding like a self-defense instructor: "Don't just lie there crying! She'll only keep pulling your hair!" Overall, of course, they love each other to death, and there's nothing cuter than listening to onechan chatter away in cutesy Japanese when she's trying to teach imoto something or convince her to do something. We're even beginning to feel comfortable letting them play alone together in another room for a half an hour at a time (or until the screaming reaches a certain pitch, whichever comes first), relatively confident that the metaphor in the previous sentence will remain merely metaphorical.
It's just that as an imoto herself, the tsuma tends to see things from imoto's perspective more easily than from onechan's. As an onichan, I suppose I do the opposite, although of course it's easier to see when someone else is doing it. So if we can just get enough descriptions of sister acts from the netizens of Blogoramaville, we might be able to temper our natural sibling biases enough to...I don't know, be better parents? That seems a little ambitious, doesn't it? Just give us some good stories and we'll be satisfied.
Imoto is almost a year and a half and onechan will be four at the end of the year, so we've already been living in interesting times, so to speak. Not so long ago, Imoto got jealous of our watching a home video from the first month of onechan's life for the first time since she was born. At times, it seems as if onechan is the "m" and imoto the "s" in a sadomasochistic relationship. We've drilled "don't hurt the baby!" so successfully into onechan's head that lately I've been sounding like a self-defense instructor: "Don't just lie there crying! She'll only keep pulling your hair!" Overall, of course, they love each other to death, and there's nothing cuter than listening to onechan chatter away in cutesy Japanese when she's trying to teach imoto something or convince her to do something. We're even beginning to feel comfortable letting them play alone together in another room for a half an hour at a time (or until the screaming reaches a certain pitch, whichever comes first), relatively confident that the metaphor in the previous sentence will remain merely metaphorical.
It's just that as an imoto herself, the tsuma tends to see things from imoto's perspective more easily than from onechan's. As an onichan, I suppose I do the opposite, although of course it's easier to see when someone else is doing it. So if we can just get enough descriptions of sister acts from the netizens of Blogoramaville, we might be able to temper our natural sibling biases enough to...I don't know, be better parents? That seems a little ambitious, doesn't it? Just give us some good stories and we'll be satisfied.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Toddlers Gone Wild
So it's somehow fitting that just as I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which is a funny take on familial embarrassings, imoto decided to show me what it's all about. At this semester's Women's Studies symposium the other day, she got it into her head to head for the podium, try to stare down the speaker (a new colleague who specializes in 19th C American women writers), and then toddle off, yanking off her tank top as she went. As there were only about, oh, 20 people out of the 50 there with an angle to see her doing this, it wasn't so bad, but by the third time she tried it (yeah, I kept bringing her back in the room after wrestling her shirt back on in the hallway--victory of hope over experience, fine line between bravery and stupidity and all that), pretty much everyone had checked out her belly button.
So was this as embarrassing as onechan's love of "exercise," which entails finding the nearest pole-like object (it started as the kitchen table leg in our apartment in Fukuoka, but quickly graduated onto many other tall, thin, cylindrical things) and kind of, well, embracing it, suspending herself above the ground for as long she can? Well, yeah, except for the time at the wedding of one of the tsuma's best friends a few weeks ago when onechan found a pole holding up a tent covering the outdoor dance floor and proceeded to get her exercise in front of, oh, about half the guests at this very big post-wedding dinner.
Clearly imoto was just hot and onechan wants a strong upper body so she can climb to the top of any playground structure whenever she feels like it, but to be on the safe side I'm brainstorming ways to talk them out of exotic dancing as a career path. Just in case.
So was this as embarrassing as onechan's love of "exercise," which entails finding the nearest pole-like object (it started as the kitchen table leg in our apartment in Fukuoka, but quickly graduated onto many other tall, thin, cylindrical things) and kind of, well, embracing it, suspending herself above the ground for as long she can? Well, yeah, except for the time at the wedding of one of the tsuma's best friends a few weeks ago when onechan found a pole holding up a tent covering the outdoor dance floor and proceeded to get her exercise in front of, oh, about half the guests at this very big post-wedding dinner.
Clearly imoto was just hot and onechan wants a strong upper body so she can climb to the top of any playground structure whenever she feels like it, but to be on the safe side I'm brainstorming ways to talk them out of exotic dancing as a career path. Just in case.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Onechan's a Storyteller
Already. Just don't be taken in when she says with a straight face that her imoto is solely responsible for the mess in the playroom or just pulled her hair! (She's going to have to learn to stop lying to her mom eventually, right?) After telling her I played great for the first time in a long time in the faculty noon-time basketball games I've been joining fairly regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays since I returned from Fukuoka, onechan regaled me with a long story about how she played basketball, volleyball, and soccer with her sensei and tomodachi at the Fredonia hoikuen yesterday--and even "all by myself." I don't know what Plato or Zora Neale Hurston would say, but I'm certainly enjoying her stories.... And no, the fact that she painted me my birthday present yesterday has nothing to with it. Nothing, I say!
(Yes, I'm a little bit more relaxed about her adjustment into English and western NY now. If only I could say the same about imoto.)
(Yes, I'm a little bit more relaxed about her adjustment into English and western NY now. If only I could say the same about imoto.)
Friday, September 14, 2007
Story Time
In Japan, onechan never really needed or wanted bed-time stories. Sure, she'd have her mom read her books from the library as often as she could get her to, she'd ask me to read her the few books in English we brought from home, and when she was really desperate would get me to read to her in Japanese. But now that we're back in the States, she's really wanted to get back into the bed-time rituals we had established before we left. With some changes.
For one thing, she definitely likes certain stories for their nostalgia value now. Big Sister Dora is a big hit with her, probably because it takes her back to the winter and spring before imoto was born when we were frankly trying toindoctrinate train prepare her for her changing role in the family. Some stories take her even further back in time, like Goodnight Moon and Pat the Bunny (bed time edition). In Japanese, she's gotten even more into this series of stories about two little bear friends, Guri to Gura, which we originally received as a gift from the wife of one of my colleagues and which we now have access to thanks to the library at onechan's UB yochien. Since it's going to take her awhile to figure out how to invent that time machine she's been implicitly asking for lately, narrative will have to do for the time being.
For another, she's into me making up stories at bed time for the first time. These characters I invented several trips ago in Japan based on her and her oldest Japanese cousin, whom I'll call Iki and Ika here, are now doing double duty here. In the past, I told mostly action-adventure or silly stories about Iki and Ika's interactions with her favorite cartoon characters like Dora and the various Pretty Cure superheroes. Now, taking a page from Bill Benzon's Sparkychan and Gojochan, I'm having Iki and Ika go through versions of the problems onechan is going through. So one story has had them discussing how to make new friends in a new place. Another has had them figuring out what to do when a kid at hoikuen is being mean to them.
All this has gotten me thinking about imoto. It's clear that onechan is motivated to develop her English through listening to these stories. But in part because imoto is too young to really understand the shift from a Japanese-saturated environment to an English-saturated one and in part because she's been on this physical rather than verbal kick ever since she figured out how to roll over, I'm not at all confident that she's going to get the idea of using (more) words any time soon. So figuring out how to change her bed-time ritual to get some story time into it is going to be a big deal in the next several months. The problem is that she's so used to going to sleep with her mom in one bed and onechan is so used to going to sleep a little later with me in a different bed (after staggered baths most of the time) that it's going to be difficult to change things around so that I'm reading imoto a story in English before she goes to sleep with her mom. I can see adding a post-bath step, where the tsuma reads to onechan in Japanese while I read to imoto in English and then reversing it to end up with the familiar pre-sleep situation. Shouldn't be too big of a change, given that the current pattern fell into place only in the last two weeks, when it became clear to onechan that imoto is such a bed-hog that it's really difficult for all four of us to sleep together comfortably. But it does mean adding another 10-20 minutes to the process of putting the girls (and, usually, ourselves) down for the night (or in our case, a few hours before heading downstairs to talk and work for a while and then back upstairs to sneak a few hours of sleep together with imoto). Still, imoto's getting close to the age when we started building in regular bed-time storytelling to onechan's good night ritual, so it's going to have to happen sooner or later....
[Update (9/16/07): Thanks to Uncle Bill Benzon, I can point you toward this new University of Waterloo psychology study on very young children and stories!]
For one thing, she definitely likes certain stories for their nostalgia value now. Big Sister Dora is a big hit with her, probably because it takes her back to the winter and spring before imoto was born when we were frankly trying to
For another, she's into me making up stories at bed time for the first time. These characters I invented several trips ago in Japan based on her and her oldest Japanese cousin, whom I'll call Iki and Ika here, are now doing double duty here. In the past, I told mostly action-adventure or silly stories about Iki and Ika's interactions with her favorite cartoon characters like Dora and the various Pretty Cure superheroes. Now, taking a page from Bill Benzon's Sparkychan and Gojochan, I'm having Iki and Ika go through versions of the problems onechan is going through. So one story has had them discussing how to make new friends in a new place. Another has had them figuring out what to do when a kid at hoikuen is being mean to them.
All this has gotten me thinking about imoto. It's clear that onechan is motivated to develop her English through listening to these stories. But in part because imoto is too young to really understand the shift from a Japanese-saturated environment to an English-saturated one and in part because she's been on this physical rather than verbal kick ever since she figured out how to roll over, I'm not at all confident that she's going to get the idea of using (more) words any time soon. So figuring out how to change her bed-time ritual to get some story time into it is going to be a big deal in the next several months. The problem is that she's so used to going to sleep with her mom in one bed and onechan is so used to going to sleep a little later with me in a different bed (after staggered baths most of the time) that it's going to be difficult to change things around so that I'm reading imoto a story in English before she goes to sleep with her mom. I can see adding a post-bath step, where the tsuma reads to onechan in Japanese while I read to imoto in English and then reversing it to end up with the familiar pre-sleep situation. Shouldn't be too big of a change, given that the current pattern fell into place only in the last two weeks, when it became clear to onechan that imoto is such a bed-hog that it's really difficult for all four of us to sleep together comfortably. But it does mean adding another 10-20 minutes to the process of putting the girls (and, usually, ourselves) down for the night (or in our case, a few hours before heading downstairs to talk and work for a while and then back upstairs to sneak a few hours of sleep together with imoto). Still, imoto's getting close to the age when we started building in regular bed-time storytelling to onechan's good night ritual, so it's going to have to happen sooner or later....
[Update (9/16/07): Thanks to Uncle Bill Benzon, I can point you toward this new University of Waterloo psychology study on very young children and stories!]
Friday, September 07, 2007
Saturday School Then and Now
Just like my little brother and I did, my two daughters go to Saturday school. Just as my parents drove us to New Hartford for Hebrew school, the tsuma and I drive onechan and imoto to Buffalo for yochien. I wonder if the resemblances will end there.
My parents both grew up in heavily Jewish communities in post-W.W.-II era Brooklyn and, later, Long Island. My brother and I grew up as two of the four Jewish kids in Clinton, NY. So we went, rather unwillingly, to Hebrew school, until we had our Bar Mitzvahs--and then stopped. We were only taught enough Hebrew to make it through our Torah readings--and that's about as much as we learned. We identified as upstate New Yorkers, not as Jewish Americans.
Onechan and imoto have dual Japanese and U.S. citizenship. The tsuma and I hope their year in Japan came at just the right time, linguistically speaking, and that Saturday yochien in Buffalo can tide them over until we get back for our next extended stay. From what I've seen of the teachers and the set-up, they have decent odds at keeping connected with Japanese language and culture. Onechan is already loving to learn the hiragana and katakana writing systems that I struggled over last fall. She was "drawing words," as she put it to me later, for an hour straight last week. She seems to really like her sensei, too. But as good as they are, what's really going to keep her Japanese developing is her peer group there--and so far, only she and a 6-year-old girl whose Japanese is far behind her are the only ones in the class. We've heard two more kids might join up this week, so we'll see tomorrow. Her Fukuoka yochien friends and her cousins in Okinawa are mostly too young right now to enjoy talking on the phone with her (that is, over Skype), so she's going to have to rely on her Buffalo yochien friends until imoto gets old enough to start having conversations in Japanese with her.
So both girls are light years ahead of where my brother and I were at their ages. Perhaps if my grandparents had tried to pass down Yiddish, we could have become bilingual at a young age, too. But it's clear that they wanted their children to be monolingual in English. When my dad's mom was in late stages of Alzheimer's, a long time ago now, there was a period when she was mostly living in her memories of the Depression era. She would often correct our English when we visited her and our grandfather in Long Island, particularly irritated by my brother's and my upstate accents and bad pronunciation/enunciation according to her standards of correct English (which were quite correct). Although she spoke Yiddish with her sister and her husband her whole life, she didn't try to teach more than a word here or there to her grandchildren.
That's history for you. Our grandparents came to America just before anti-immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment peaked with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act--a time when the KKK was reviving, when nativism and 100%-Americanism set the standards of inclusion and exclusion, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were of ambiguous and uncertain racial status (not-quite-white, at best). Our parents were born at a time when the U.S. racial order was undergoing a historic shift, one that has proven to be more deeply-rooted and extensive than the unfinished revolution of the later civil rights movement: the opening-up of whiteness to the previously racialized immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, first on a kind of conditional "white ethnic" status and later simply white. Perhaps if we had grown up downstate, my brother and I would have taken part in the "ethnic revivals" of the 1970s, but most likely not. Between our grandfather's Holocaust-induced disbelief and our father's profession of philosophy (not to mention our childhoods in the college towns of Clinton, Chapel Hill, and Palo Alto), it's difficult to imagine us being seriously attracted to Judaism or Jewish culture.
So do our stories fulfill the classic melting pot script? With my brother marrying into a big Polish Catholic family and their four kids growing up in the classic suburban mode, perhaps so. Or maybe the ethnic similarities (we're part Polish and part Hungarian) outweigh the religious differences there, so that onechan's and imoto's cousins' childhoods will echo their grandparents' somewhat. In any case, it's pretty clear that onechan's and imoto's childhoods will be something different. In what ways and with what effects remains to be seen.
My parents both grew up in heavily Jewish communities in post-W.W.-II era Brooklyn and, later, Long Island. My brother and I grew up as two of the four Jewish kids in Clinton, NY. So we went, rather unwillingly, to Hebrew school, until we had our Bar Mitzvahs--and then stopped. We were only taught enough Hebrew to make it through our Torah readings--and that's about as much as we learned. We identified as upstate New Yorkers, not as Jewish Americans.
Onechan and imoto have dual Japanese and U.S. citizenship. The tsuma and I hope their year in Japan came at just the right time, linguistically speaking, and that Saturday yochien in Buffalo can tide them over until we get back for our next extended stay. From what I've seen of the teachers and the set-up, they have decent odds at keeping connected with Japanese language and culture. Onechan is already loving to learn the hiragana and katakana writing systems that I struggled over last fall. She was "drawing words," as she put it to me later, for an hour straight last week. She seems to really like her sensei, too. But as good as they are, what's really going to keep her Japanese developing is her peer group there--and so far, only she and a 6-year-old girl whose Japanese is far behind her are the only ones in the class. We've heard two more kids might join up this week, so we'll see tomorrow. Her Fukuoka yochien friends and her cousins in Okinawa are mostly too young right now to enjoy talking on the phone with her (that is, over Skype), so she's going to have to rely on her Buffalo yochien friends until imoto gets old enough to start having conversations in Japanese with her.
So both girls are light years ahead of where my brother and I were at their ages. Perhaps if my grandparents had tried to pass down Yiddish, we could have become bilingual at a young age, too. But it's clear that they wanted their children to be monolingual in English. When my dad's mom was in late stages of Alzheimer's, a long time ago now, there was a period when she was mostly living in her memories of the Depression era. She would often correct our English when we visited her and our grandfather in Long Island, particularly irritated by my brother's and my upstate accents and bad pronunciation/enunciation according to her standards of correct English (which were quite correct). Although she spoke Yiddish with her sister and her husband her whole life, she didn't try to teach more than a word here or there to her grandchildren.
That's history for you. Our grandparents came to America just before anti-immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment peaked with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act--a time when the KKK was reviving, when nativism and 100%-Americanism set the standards of inclusion and exclusion, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were of ambiguous and uncertain racial status (not-quite-white, at best). Our parents were born at a time when the U.S. racial order was undergoing a historic shift, one that has proven to be more deeply-rooted and extensive than the unfinished revolution of the later civil rights movement: the opening-up of whiteness to the previously racialized immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, first on a kind of conditional "white ethnic" status and later simply white. Perhaps if we had grown up downstate, my brother and I would have taken part in the "ethnic revivals" of the 1970s, but most likely not. Between our grandfather's Holocaust-induced disbelief and our father's profession of philosophy (not to mention our childhoods in the college towns of Clinton, Chapel Hill, and Palo Alto), it's difficult to imagine us being seriously attracted to Judaism or Jewish culture.
So do our stories fulfill the classic melting pot script? With my brother marrying into a big Polish Catholic family and their four kids growing up in the classic suburban mode, perhaps so. Or maybe the ethnic similarities (we're part Polish and part Hungarian) outweigh the religious differences there, so that onechan's and imoto's cousins' childhoods will echo their grandparents' somewhat. In any case, it's pretty clear that onechan's and imoto's childhoods will be something different. In what ways and with what effects remains to be seen.
Friday, August 31, 2007
On Growing Up Too Fast
Onechan's been saying some things since we moved away from Fukuoka that are really heart-breaking. Here are a few:
These aren't so bad on their own, but in context, they are. I'm not just talking body language and tone of voice. I'm talking about the kind of reception onechan and the tsuma have been getting when they primarily use Japanese out in public here in western NY. (I guess imoto would be getting it, too, if she used more than two words regularly.) Let's just say that they've already gotten more nasty looks and cold shoulders in just over two weeks here than I got the entire year using English in public anywhere in Japan. It would be bad enough on its own, but onechan is old enough to notice it.
Fortunately, it hasn't been all bad. Reuniting with her friends has been great, if awkward at first. With her best friend, onechan slipped into her Fukuoka friendship mode, chattering away in Japanese almost continuously while role-playing various games. In a larger group of old and new faculty kid friends, she went back to her mode on the first few weeks of yochien--quiet observation, tagging along, imitating what the kids were doing, and eventually loosening up.
And it's not like it's not going to get better quickly. Her Fredonia hoikuen is set up remarkably similarly to her Fukuoka yochien, and she started playing with the kids in her room right away when we visited it last week. She's been speaking English her whole life, unlike Japanese, which she's really only started speaking seriously with people other than her mom since January, so it shouldn't take her long to be able to express herself as well in English as Japanese. Her Buffalo hoikuen every Saturday will at least get her speaking and learning Japanese on a regular basis, not to mention interacting with Japanese and Japanese-American kids. And the tsuma and I are doing everything we can to help her stay bilingual, have lots of play time her friends in Fredonia on Sundays, and learn to deal with the eyes on her when she speaks Japanese in public.
But still, it's a complicated homecoming--and worse, onechan is starting to notice the complications. It had to happen eventually, but a part of me was hoping it would come much much later. Staying up worrying about it isn't going to make it any better, so time to sign off. (But I can't help noticing that the day care costs for both girls going twice a week here in western NY are roughly twice what they were in Fukuoka for onechan to go to yochien every weekday, plus get swimming lessons on Fridays with many of her classmates....)
- "I want to be a baby again."
- "I miss my friends at the yochien."
- "I miss my friends at Chiba."
- "I miss my friends at [her old day care place in Fredonia]." [This after realizing that yesterday was her last day there--next Tuesday she starts at the university children's center we're calling her hoikuen to link it to and distinguish it from her yochien.]
- "I want an onechan. A big girl." [This after playing with an 8-year-old all day yesterday and a 5-going-on-6-year-old half the day today.]
These aren't so bad on their own, but in context, they are. I'm not just talking body language and tone of voice. I'm talking about the kind of reception onechan and the tsuma have been getting when they primarily use Japanese out in public here in western NY. (I guess imoto would be getting it, too, if she used more than two words regularly.) Let's just say that they've already gotten more nasty looks and cold shoulders in just over two weeks here than I got the entire year using English in public anywhere in Japan. It would be bad enough on its own, but onechan is old enough to notice it.
Fortunately, it hasn't been all bad. Reuniting with her friends has been great, if awkward at first. With her best friend, onechan slipped into her Fukuoka friendship mode, chattering away in Japanese almost continuously while role-playing various games. In a larger group of old and new faculty kid friends, she went back to her mode on the first few weeks of yochien--quiet observation, tagging along, imitating what the kids were doing, and eventually loosening up.
And it's not like it's not going to get better quickly. Her Fredonia hoikuen is set up remarkably similarly to her Fukuoka yochien, and she started playing with the kids in her room right away when we visited it last week. She's been speaking English her whole life, unlike Japanese, which she's really only started speaking seriously with people other than her mom since January, so it shouldn't take her long to be able to express herself as well in English as Japanese. Her Buffalo hoikuen every Saturday will at least get her speaking and learning Japanese on a regular basis, not to mention interacting with Japanese and Japanese-American kids. And the tsuma and I are doing everything we can to help her stay bilingual, have lots of play time her friends in Fredonia on Sundays, and learn to deal with the eyes on her when she speaks Japanese in public.
But still, it's a complicated homecoming--and worse, onechan is starting to notice the complications. It had to happen eventually, but a part of me was hoping it would come much much later. Staying up worrying about it isn't going to make it any better, so time to sign off. (But I can't help noticing that the day care costs for both girls going twice a week here in western NY are roughly twice what they were in Fukuoka for onechan to go to yochien every weekday, plus get swimming lessons on Fridays with many of her classmates....)
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