Little Boxes

The other day I had to get my daughter registered at a new school. We sat together in the deputy headmaster's office and filled out a lengthy form.

"Uh oh," groaned my daughter, pointing to Nationality, "I always hate this one."

"Just put Other British," said the deputy headmaster promptly.

"But I can't," she said. "Because I'm not really British."

I craned my neck to look. The categories for Nationality were Scottish, British (Other), and Other.

"Then British, Other," the deputy headmaster said, raising an eyebrow and looking at her surreptitiously.

"But I'm not only British." She glanced at me meaningfully.

The deputy headmaster took a deep breath. "But you were born here."

My daughter shook her head. "I was born in Japan."

"Put down British (other) and add 'American'," I suggested.

My daughter did this, then she groaned again. "I hate this one too!"

I took a look. Ethnicity was next. I can't even remember all the choices, but there were quite a few: British (Scottish), British (English), British (Black -- Caribbean), British (Black -- African), British (Asian), European, and British (other -- please specify).

"Surely you can find one there that best fits you," the deputy headmaster sighed, looking at his watch.

"A lot of them sort of fit me," my daughter said proudly, "but I'm not only one."

I think we settled for British (other) again, but decided not to specify. The deputy headmaster looked happy to see the back of us.

On our way back home, my daughter was a little quiet. "You're okay about that nationality and ethnicity thing, aren't you?" I asked.

My daughter shrugged. "I envy the people who can say 'I'm Scottish' or 'I'm Chinese'. But sometimes I feel proud that I'm lots of different things."

When I come to think about it, though, very few of my daughter's friends can say they are only one nationality or ethnicity. At her last school, most of my daughter's classmates were Turkish. There, her friends were invariably 'others': a Filipino/Spanish girl who looked Chinese and spoke Hebrew, a Palestinian girl who spoke Arabic but called herself Israeli, a Turkish Cypriot girl born and raised in the U.K. Even at the school she is attending now which at first glance appears to be all white and Scottish, there are a handful of kids who were born in England, who have one or even both parents from Europe or Asia or Africa. This year there are more 'others' than there were two years ago, and when I compare the number to what it was ten years ago, the increase is even more remarkable.

In fact, fewer and fewer people fit neatly into any one category anymore. I'll bet those people who racked their brains to come up with all the different options for Nationality and Ethnicity thought they'd exhausted all the possibilities.

It's getting complicated. Ten years from now, it will be even more so. Twenty years from now, very few people in the U.K. or U.S. will be just one nationality or ethnicity. Thirty years from now -- I hope I live long enough to see it.

And I wonder how they'll modify those forms.

Good Will Ambassadors

When our daughters were little, an acquaintance of ours came back from a trip to the U.K. with a disturbing story. Her half-Japanese daughter had gone to a birthday party with a relative and another child there had mocked her and called her 'Jap'. I was shocked by this and I wondered how our daughters would react if they heard this term. They got called gaijin -- foreigner -- occasionally, mainly whenever they were out of the neighborhood where they were known and accepted, but they had never heard the word ‘Jap’, though I had told them what it meant. I wondered what their reaction would be if they heard another child called this.

“What would you do if you heard someone use that word?” I asked our eldest daughter. She eyed me narrowly. “I'd call them gaijin,” she spat.

My jaw actually dropped at this; it was the last thing I was expecting to hear. “Why would you do that?”

She stuck out her lower lip. “Because if I'm a Jap, they're a gaijin.”

For the record, my eldest daughter doesn't look even remotely Asian. She has blue eyes and blond hair.

“No one would call you that,” I assured her. “I meant what would you do if someone called one of your friends that?”

“They'd better not call us that,” she sniffed. “Because if they do, I'll tell them they're a gaijin.”

This was the first time I truly realized how strongly my daughter identified with being Japanese. She'd grown up in Japan, played with Japanese children, spoken Japanese as a first language. She knew she didn’t look Japanese, but she couldn’t help feeling Japanese. And how she felt was everything. I remembered visiting a Caucasian Canadian couple and their little boy in Nagasaki, years earlier, before I even had children. One day the mother was walking through a supermarket with their five-year-old son when he saw a Japanese classmate and his mother in the next aisle. “Don’t say anything in English, Mom,” he whispered, “because they don’t know we’re not Japanese.” I’d thought that was pretty funny at the time, but at least her kid knew he wasn’t really Japanese.

When we first moved to Scotland, our daughters had a terrible time understanding people’s accents. At a classmate’s birthday party, our eldest sidled up to me when I came to pick her up. “I don’t understand a word they’re saying!” she hissed -- in Japanese. They spoke to me in Japanese a lot during our first weeks in Scotland.

I smiled when I first heard my girls developing Scots accents, but it broke my heart when they stopped speaking to me in Japanese. When they stopped wanting onigiri, rice balls, in their lunch boxes. “You don’t get it,” the eldest one told me when I asked. “They make fun of us at school. They call us Japs.”

I didn’t believe this until one day when I saw them walking home on the opposite side of the road where there is no sidewalk.

“Why are you walking on the opposite side of the road?” I demanded. “It’s not safe!”

They screwed up their faces and exchanged a look. “Because we don’t want to walk by Gavin’s house.”

“Why not?”

They wouldn’t look me in the eye. “He and James are always hanging out there. We don’t like them.”

“I don’t care if you like them or not, you stay on the safe side of the road!”

The eldest gave me an exasperated look. “They call us Jap girls.”

I may well be the only non-Asian mother in Scotland whose non-Asian kids have been called Japs. Who has had to go knock on the door of a stranger’s house and persuade her to make her kids stop using this word. Now, the term 'Jap' carries a whole generation's worth of historical baggage that I can only guess at. I’m not daft enough to claim I know how it feels to be heckled and bullied as an Asian minority. But I do think I've at least had a little nibble around the edges. And thanks to our situation, my kids and I have had the interesting experience of being called both gaijin and Jap.

For the record, Gavin’s mother was lovely. She agreed that it was an ugly word and an ugly thing for her son to do, and she got Gavin to stop doing this. James’ mother was nice too. Amazingly, we became friends.

Not long after this, both daughters started speaking Japanese again, even when we were out in public. They started asking for onigiri in their lunch boxes again and writing Japanese sentences on their hands. I would come into the kitchen and find them showing their friends how to write kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese.

Five years later, James started walking our eldest home from school and hanging out in front of our house. When questioned about this, she shrugged. “He’s okay, but I don’t want to go out with him.”

“It’s not the Jap thing, is it?”

“No.” She smiled. “He’s crazy about Japanese now, especially Miyazaki movies. He’s got more anime and manga than I do.”

Our eldest never went out with James, but she did tell him a lot about living in Japan and he could hardly get enough of it. The last I heard, James was learning hiragana and katakana. By this time, he might even have moved on to kanji.