At the age of six, I thought “American” and “English” meant the same thing—white people. After all, Americans spoke English. You have to understand, this was at an age when I also wondered why “onion” was spelled with an “o.” It seemed to me that it should be spelled with a “u,” except that would make it “union,” which was a different word altogether.
I never thought about what I was. My parents referred to us as “Nihonjin“—Japanese. “Nihonjin” meant us. “Hakujin” (white people) meant them. Being Nihonjin meant having straight black hair and a certain kind of last name. The Chinese kids looked like us, but had one-syllable last names.
When I was in the first grade, I got into a fight with Lucinda Lee because she claimed that she was American. “You’re Chinese,” I accused her. She started to cry. Later, I told my mother about the disagreement, and, to my outrage, she sided with Lucinda. It had never occurred to me that Lucinda was American. That I, too, was American. Other kids never asked me if I was American. It was always, “Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
That’s how I found out that I was American—one kind of American. I still wasn’t sure how I could be both American and Nihonjin (was I English, too? I wondered.)
Then a little girl who was REALLY Nihonjin moved in next door. Her father worked for a Japanese company, and the family had moved to San Francisco straight from Tokyo. Kimiko wore dresses all the time, even when she didn’t have to. She covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed, and sounded like a little bird. When I stuck the nose of my wooden six-shooter in her back and called her a “low-down, dirty tin-horn,” emulating my heroes on television westerns, my father, sitting in the next room, shot me a dark, warning look that made me quake in my boots. It was no good insulting Kimiko, anyway, because she wouldn’t get mad and fight back. If Kimiko and I were both Nihonjin, well then, all I could say was that there must be different kinds of Nihonjin, too.
(First published in Into the Fire: Asian-American Prose, Greenfield Review Press, 1996.)
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