My Borderlands: Location “of Potent Unresolve” [by Mari L'Esperance]

The following is adapted from Betwixt and Between: Embracing the Borderlands of My Mixed Heritage, a piece I wrote for Discover Nikkei in January 2013.

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“I wish to work perpetually on the borders—to me, it is a place of potent unresolve—untainted by one culture (camp) or another, a limbo in which I am free to create my own citizenship and, hopefully, my own gods.” —Ocean Vuong

 

    The symbolic and psychological meanings of “borderlands”—both internal and external—have been my preoccupation for years, as a poet, writer, and woman of mixed Japanese ancestry. It’s a preoccupation that comes with the territory. I am the daughter of a Japanese mother from an upper middle-class family and a New Englander father of French Canadian heritage who grew up in a working class, bilingual family. My parents raised my brother and me with both cultures in various locations in California, Micronesia, and Japan. This last is why I also consider myself an adult Third Culture Kid—a person who’s been raised in places and cultures other than her parents’ passport country/countries. TCKs internalize aspects of all the cultures in which they’ve been immersed while not having full ownership in any. Consequently, I’m adaptable, curious, restless, and can live pretty much anywhere. My least favorite question is “Where are you from?” because it is impossible to answer. I’m from everywhere and nowhere. If I were to use a food metaphor to describe my internal experience, Asian hot pot (or nabemono in Japanese) probably comes closest. Although I mostly felt “other” as a younger person, and not in an affirming sense, in midlife I’ve finally learned to settle into and appreciate my unique background and have mostly let go of struggling to “fit in”. I’ve come to learn that I prefer the in-between.

     In late 2012 I relocated to the Los Angeles area after more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. L.A.’s a good place for in-between-ers. In this sprawling metropolis with no center, a place that’s in a perpetual state of transience and flux and whose population represents every culture and continent, I can finally enjoy a sense of internal and external spaciousness. L.A., like Hawai’i, is a place where I can blend in and feel like myself—all of my selves.

    When I’m not in Japan—a country that I consider my spiritual home and love to visit when I can—my primary contact with Japanese culture has been via my excursions to Japantowns in the Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose) and now Los Angeles (Little Tokyo, Sawtelle, and Gardena). I don’t think of myself as Japanese American because that’s an identity, a community’s history, that my mother’s family doesn’t share. To me, the Japanese American experience seems to be intrinsically tied to the internment on U.S. soil of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. That said, there is something deeply nourishing about spending time in J-town, an urban borderland that’s not America and not Japan, but where I find solace—a feeling that’s almost belonging—in familiar objects, images, and food.

    In J-town I can connect with my mother and all the meaning she and her culture have held for me. Few things make me happier than spending an afternoon alone, wandering the narrow arcades and browsing the cluttered shops. I like to eat a comforting lunch of oyakodonburi (literally "parent and child"—seasoned chicken and egg over hot rice) or tempura soba (deep-fried prawns over buckwheat noodles and broth), window shop, and haunt the aisles of Kinokuniya Books—unable to read much Japanese, but savoring the sight of kanji-covered book spines and splashy pop-culture magazines, the sumptuous color photographs in books about Japanese gardens, traditional farmhouses, art, cooking, flower arranging, and more. In downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, there’s the added bonus of the beautiful Japanese American National Museum, an important community resource. The gift shop alone is worth a visit. I once spent several hours there reading through all of Allen Say’s gorgeous picture books. Somehow I feel better, more cohesive and grounded, after these J-town afternoons.

    In Japanese British filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s excellent documentary Neither Here Nor There, she movingly describes her own struggle to define and integrate the various strands of her mixed heritage and growing up between Japan and England. Like Yamazaki, I am learning how to be “other” and yet also belong.

 

Mari L’Esperance 3.5.15

Comments

[Mari]

I should have mentioned above: I've borrowed the word "borderlands" as it applies to mixed/cross-cultural individuals from Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, author of When Half is Whole (Stanford University Press).