East: Far And Near

For the past two weeks we've been trying to get letters from our local muchtar so that we can apply for residency permits. A muchtar, as far as I can tell, is a neighborhood official whose job is sorting out all the paperwork and odd bits no one else wants to concern himself with. We've been trying to meet ours for the past three weeks and he's been an elusive guy to hunt down.

The first time we went to his house, we had a Turkish-speaking friend with us. We were on our way back from work and had all the kids in the car with us. Two of them were not on speaking terms with each other (or us) and all of us were tired and hungry. My husband and I picked our way over broken concrete paving in the dark, past pots of geraniums and portulaca. The air was scented with rotting citrus and jasmine and the smell of someone's laundry detergent.

But the muchtar was not at home. His little boy had a fever and he'd had to go to the hospital with his family. We talked to his neighbors instead. They were eating dinner, but seemed friendly.

"Maybe next week he will be home," our friend translated. "Inshallah." God willing.

The second time we went to his house, I had a fever myself, but thankfully we didn't have the kids with us. I huddled in the car, shivering, while my husband went to talk to the neighbors who at least spoke a little English. Again, they were eating dinnner. The muchtar still wasn't at home.

The third time we went to the muchtar's, our Turkish-speaking friend could not go with us. With some embarrassment and great trepidation, we went and knocked on the muchtar's neighbors' door. They were all eating dinner again, but the mother of the household obligingly got up to take us over to the muchtar's house. It was dark and I stumbled on the uneven pavement.

The muchtar was not at home.

The next time we went, he wasn't home either, but the neighbors, once again, were eating dinner. They invited us to have a cup of tea. We declined.

There are times we find ourselves wondering why it always has to be so hard at first. And we've had to remind ourselves what it was like when we first went to Japan with a nine-month-old baby.

During our first months in Tokyo after our eldest was born, we stayed with friends while I went to work and searched for suitable housing. My husband was not employed at the time, and although my school gave me a generous salary, unlike a lot of other companies, they would not sign on as rental guarantors. It is very difficult to rent in Japan if you don't have someone to agree to be your guarantor, so the only places we were able to consider were those so old and dilapidated no one else wanted them.

For three weeks, I made the rounds of every real estate agent in our area. Sometimes they took one look at my face and wanted nothing to do with me.

"No foreigners!" several called out as soon as they saw me at the door. Most were more polite, but you could see it in their eyes: they were certain we would not be able to communicate and dreaded engaging in tedious bilingual wrangles. I quickly learned to barge right in, speaking Japanese, before the agent could open his mouth to send me away. That way I was able to tell when the prejudice against me was nothing more than a perceived language barrier. Once we'd started talking and the estate agents saw that my Japanese was sufficient, everything was fine. The only problem was getting around that pesky guarantor issue. The minute prospective landlords heard we had no guarantors, they got cold feet.

After two months of imposing on our long-suffering friends, worried sick that our baby was keeping them up nights, we were ready to give up and fly back to the U.K. And then one day it happened: we found a house with sympathetic landlords whose daughter had studied abroad herself, in Vienna.

"We know how hard it is," the wife murmured. "Looking for a place to live in a foreign country."

"Our daughter has some real horror stories," the husband agreed. "It's not easy for someone who plays the piano to find a place. And I imagine it must be a lot harder with a baby."

Three days later we had moved in. That house was our home for over nine wonderful years.

Last night we went to the muchtar's house again. It didn't look like he was at home, but he was.

"Come again tomorrow and I will give you the letters," he told us as we stood in his veranda, surrounded by washing on the line and his children's scattered tricycles.

We've got our fingers crossed.

Have Angst, Will Travel

Ismail runs a very successful auto repair shop. I've never met Ismail or had need of his services, but I know he is successful because his shop is directly across from the guest house we are staying in and he gets a lot of business. At all hours, from fairly early in the morning until well after seven, Ismail or one of his workers is out there revving up an engine -- vrooom, vroooom, VROOOOOOOM -- and chatting with his customers. His work also entails the dragging of extremely heavy items over a gravelled stretch of tarmac, and the sound this produces really has to be heard to be believed. If you are the sort that grimaces at the sound of a fingernail dragged along a blackboard, you'd definitely have to give Ismail's gravel-dragging a miss.

It is hot here, and dusty, but it is also unbelievably beautiful From the minute our plane touched down in Istanbul, I have marveled at the trees and shrubs that grow here in profusion -- ones I grew up with, but have not seen for decades. There are eucalyptus, pepper trees, bougainvillea -- a whole botanical world I used to be familiar with. Just walking outside and seeing olives, figs and oranges on trees is enough to make me cry. And things have gone so well here that for a long time, I wondered what to write. I'm not a huge fan of travel writing where everything goes right; I'm the nasty sort who enjoys reading about the passport that went AWOL, the bottle of shampoo that decided to make a break for it, the umbrella that the traveler toyed with taking, then left behind, only to encounter the first rainfall of the year at their travel destination. So how could I be a hypocrite and treat readers to stories of balmy Mediterranean beaches and affable Turks? True, the area we are now living in resembles a building site. There are many British expatriates here, and they and the people who cater for them, seem to feel the need to post billboards every square meter, generally in lurid colors. A huge boom in property development has obviously come and gone, with many of the building sites abandoned in various stages of development. It is not unusual to see a completed villa with mature and manicured garden stuck between the concrete foundations of two other buildings, piles of bricks and bags of electrical cables still in evidence, all just a stone's throw from a massive billboard advertising a casino in flashing purple and magenta neon. Think of the tackiest stretch of road you have ever seen in Southern California, add signs in Turkish, a light, but somewhat destructive earthquake, plus a great deal of hastily-executed half-finished buildings and a generous sprinkling of rubbish, and you will have a pretty good idea of the landscape we currently enjoy. But who really cares about that when you can get freshly squeezed orange juice every 200 metres? When you have a job you were trained to do, and could, if you wished, swim in the sea up until October?

And we have been lucky: our kids are more or less coping at their new schools, and our colleagues seem an interesting, kindly bunch. My husband mentioned to one of his fellow teachers that it was difficult to get around without a car, and this man offered us his, giving us the chance to tour the countryside and visit beaches. So I have honestly pondered what to write about. So far, it almost feels like a holiday -- and who wants to hear stories of how delightful someone else's holiday is?

Then yesterday I went to meet my husband and kids after school. Wearing khaki trousers and a rumpled shirt, I got dissed by a memsahib-type in a fancy designer suit, heels, and full make-up. Youngest daughter whined that her best friend Fatima was a jerk because she thought Chinese people were the same as Japanese and insinuated that all Far-east Asians were less than civilized. She said that Ben, who is from Leeds, is a jerk because football is all he can talk about other than how many girlfriends he has. She complained that she had too much homework; that she is tired of singing the Turkish national anthem and marching around the gymnasium. Eldest was in a grumpy mood and informed me that her flip-flops were disintegrating. And flip-flops, I have seen, cost big money here -- more than I am prepared to dish out. My husband called us just after we'd walked all the way to the supermarket in the pounding heat to get muesli, which does not appear to exist in this country, along with other staples like Ryvita or peanut butter. He could not pick us up, he told us; the car had only just broken down, black smoke pouring out of it. And suddenly it hit me: this place is starting to feel like home.

Sounds like Ismail's got another customer out there. I'm betting it's a big one this time -- maybe a Landrover.

Home is where the angst is.

Stranger In A Foreign Land

"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?"

A Nice Cup Of Tea

I make a nice cup of tea.

I know exactly how to do it, too; I've been given precise, if not superfluous, instructions any number of times. I've also been told with wearying frequency that Americans don't know how to make tea properly, and desperate to show people that this isn't always the case, I have become an expert. For what it's worth, here is how it's done. (This is for Americans, of course, who don't know how to do it. If you are British, go ahead and skip this whole spiel unless you're game for a little tongue-in-the-cheek British bashing and a serious rant. My apologies to all of you who have lived, or live, in America. You'll know what I mean.)

1) Pour a little hot water into your teapot and swill it around. Leave it to sit and warm the pot thoroughly, then dry the pot and pop in some loose tea. One teaspoon for every tea-drinker, folks, and don't forget the extra spoonful for the teapot! (Tea bags? What are those? Promise me you weren't even thinking about using them!)

2) Boil a kettle of water. And don't dare turn off that kettle until it has reached a rolling boil.

3) Pour the rapidly boiling water over the tea leaves as fast as ever you can. Go on -- risk burning your wrist; it's that important.

4) Immediately put a tea cosy on that teapot! Don't let it sit uncovered for a single second!

5) Steep for at least five minutes. Pour tea into a mug that already has milk in it. That last part is important; it drives people in my husband's family wild if there isn't milk in that teacup first! (Putting milk in the cup first, I am told, is to protect one's fine bone china from cracking. Our fine bone china happens to be crappy old mugs from Tesco, but never mind; it's the idea.)

6) Smile graciously at the kindly British family member or friend who has been watching your every move with an eagle eye and offering helpful tips, such as "Wait until it's at a rolling boil, now!" just as the water is furiously boiling and you have timidly raised a hand, or "Remember the extra spoonful for the teapot," drowning out your murmured "And now a spoonful for the teapot."

I'll never forget the first time I offered to make the tea at my father-in-law's house. Other relatives were present, and no sooner had I innocently suggested taking over this ritual than there was an obvious hush in the conversation. Covert glances were quickly traded, and if there had been thought bubbles over everyone's heads, all of them would have read Uh oh.

I won't bore you with the details of how often I've had someone follow me into the kitchen issuing precise instructions. It is hard to be gracious and receptive about this; I always reassure people that I will not bring them a cup with a teabag in it and -- horror of horrors! -- an indifferently heated cup of water for them to steep it in. Because no matter how many times I tell them I know how to do it, I still get the exact same reaction as I did that very first time I offered to make the tea. Someone will look meaningfully at someone else and murmur, "Go with Mary, dear. Make sure she knows where everything is." Because they don't trust me with the tea. Without their supervision, God only knows what I might get up to in the kitchen.

Being the family's sole American can be a tiresome business. My husband's nephew is bound to tell me about the obnoxious, loudmouthed Yank who kept everybody at the airport waiting or an inebriated guest is sure to diss the American education system as being vastly inferior to the British. American racism, American obesity, and the unfortunate American fondness for SUVs and the effect this has on world oil prices are also favorite themes and ones that get trotted out at every other dinner party.

And when all else fails, someone will invariably remember that time they visited Houston or Atlanta or Orlando or San Francisco and -- would you credit it? -- they were given a cup of hot, not boiling, water and a tea bag -- and expected to drink it! And boy oh boy oh boy oh boy am I tired of hearing it.

Because I make a nice cup of tea, damn it, and don't you forget it.