"Well hello, dear, I don't remember seeing you here before. Are you new in town?"
I heard her before I saw her, and the woman's voice stopped me dead in my tracks. I'd been wandering through the shopping mall, doing my best to blend into the sea of Japanese shoppers when she spoke -- in perfect English. And it didn't make sense, because the woman speaking was at least seventy years old, and she looked 100% Japanese.
In the small town I lived in, I knew, or knew of, just about every foreigner within a thirty mile radius. There were the foreign students at my university: a redheaded Brazillian woman, three Chinese men, another American exchange student, and a man from Zaire. There were the two foreign lecturers at the university, Bert from America and Reginald from England. There was my friend Nancy, married to a Japanese farmer, and Jack and Liz, a married American couple who taught English in town. There was the elderly Russian tailor who had a small shop near the station and had reputedly lived in Japan since before the war. And now, this woman; she had to be an American with an accent like that.
Then I remembered Liz telling me about a woman she had met in town -- a woman brought up in America whose family had moved back to Japan before the war. And I knew that this had to be her.
"Where are you from?" she was asking me now, her shopping bag of vegetables over one arm. "Are you American?"
"Yes, and you are too, aren't you?"
She smiled. "I was once, after a fashion. My parents took me to America when I was one year old, you see, and I lived there until I was fourteen."
I stood in the mall talking to this woman while the rain hammered down on the plastic awning over our heads. She had an incredible story. Her parents had decided to emigrate to America in the twenties. Japan was in a slump, and they were finding it difficult to make ends meet. Friends who had emigrated to the West Coast told them America was a wonderful land of opportunity and they longed to see for themselves. Leaving their home in Kyushu, they moved to Oregon with their two small children.
"America was all I knew," she said. "My parents bought a small grocery store and put us into the local school. But we were the only Japanese kids there, and it was tough."
"Why?"
"Because Japan was already getting a bad reputation, trying to start an empire. We were the enemy no matter how hard we tried to be American."
"What a shame!"
"It was, really. We kids felt like Americans, you see. And we tried so hard to make them like us! But after the windows in our store were broken for the fifth time -- and so much more -- my parents couldn't take any more. They decided to move us back to Japan. I'll never forget the long voyage back. We were so scared, but they told us that Japan would be better. That we would feel at home there."
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see passers by looking at us in amazement. If this lady had been young, no one would have batted an eye, but the fact that I was talking to a little gold-toothed grandmother gave them pause. That foreigner is fluent! I even heard one woman murmur to a friend. If she had gotten close enough to hear our conversation, she would have realized that we were speaking English, not Japanese.
"What a shame you were treated badly in America," I said, but the woman laughed.
"You may be surprised to hear that we were treated no better in Japan!" she replied. "I know that you are called gaijin here because I talk to many foreigners -- non-Japanese people -- and I hear that they get tired of being called foreigner. But when we came back to Japan, we were called gaijin too."
"Really?" I asked, astonished.
"Yes. We were living in Shikoku then, out in the country where my father grew up. The children would follow us around the playground, poking at us. Gaijin! they would call, Say something to us in English! She laughed bitterly. "We even took to wearing kimono, and we spoke to each other only in Japanese, never English -- but it was not enough. We could never be Japanese enough for them. Whatever we did, they could tell we were foreigners."
I shook my head, amazed.
"And then the war started," she said quietly, "and we knew we would never go back."
"Do you ever think of going back now?"
She smiled. "Sometimes. I would love to see Oregon again -- to see the forests and the ocean there. But I have a child who is badly disabled and who still needs my care. I have never been back."
When we said goodbye, I watched her disappear into the crowd. She looked so much like everyone else.
"I saw you in the mall yesterday talking to that old lady," a girl in my dorm said the next day. "I meant to help you out, but you seemed to be doing okay." She cocked her head. "Your Japanese must be a lot better if you can talk to someone that old. What was she saying, anyway? Was she bending your ear about the war?"
