Born Feminists

My daughters are born feminists.

I tell people that and they always smile and say that I obviously had something to do with it. I'd like to think that I did. That I've served as a good example to them: a strong woman with her own mind who can support herself. Who believes passionately in equal opportunities for women and men. Who can open her own bottles of olives and pound a nail into the wall without ruining the plaster -- or the nail. But the fact is, although I am independent, and mildly fiery under duress, although I can kill my own cockroaches and catch my own mice,I also tend to be mealy-mouthed and self- deprecating. I am physically a wimp, too, incompetent at all sports and, truth to be told, still nervous in the dark. I am neither ashamed nor proud of these personal characteristics and failings, but I've learned to live with them over the years.

They say that you pass on this sort of thing to your children -- that willy-nilly, they take on your values, habits and mannerisms whether you want them to or not. You'd have to meet my kids to see just how untrue this is. If I've unwittingly managed to inculcate my obsequious, self-effacing ways into them, they're doing a great job of suppressing it.

In line with their innate feminism, my kids are outspoken. I listen to them debating with their friends and my head swims. My eldest could debate the back legs off a donkey. You cannot win an argument with her; she is eloquent, confident, and determined -- and very shrewd at finding her adversary's weaknesses. The youngest is not as well-spoken, but she is every bit as clever. She is a watcher and -- when she is not day-dreaming -- a listener. She will sit there apparently not taking anything in, then in the midst of a dispute, when you are least expecting it, interject some astute little observation, completely refuting your argument.

Even if I don't take personal responsibility for their feminism, I am proud of it. The eldest has learned how to use a rifle. She can climb mountains, swim a mile, and work out physics problems. She knows what she wants to be, too: British ambassador to Japan. I find this mind-boggling: when I was her age I could barely make up my mind about what I wanted for dinner. The youngest was telling me the other day about a girl she cannot get along with. "She makes fun of overweight people behind their backs," she said contemptuously, "and girls who get good grades." I don't think she was trying to impress me, but even if she manages to fail all her exams, I'll still be enormously proud of her for that one observation.

Once, when the eldest was four, she scornfully told me that several of the boys in her nursery class seemed to think that girls were inferior to boys.

I asked her if she thought that girls were superior and she looked at me as though I were insane. "Of course!" When I asked her why, she had a long list of reasons, but my favorite was: "We get to sit down when we pee!"

On her first day at school, when I went to collect her she was bursting with pride. "Guess what I can do?" she demanded.

I wondered if she had finally discovered that 99% of the other kids weren't bilingual, or that she was the only one who knew all the lyrics to Puff the Magic Dragon, but no, it was nothing like that. "I can pick up all of the boys in my class!" she proudly proclaimed. "And only one of them can pick me up, but he can't lift me off the ground!"

Later I met the only boy who could pick her up. Naoki, his name was, and he was already well on his way to becoming a sumo wrestler. "I'll be able to lift you off the ground too someday!" he told her happily, without a shred of meanness.

When my youngest was three, she and the eldest were engaged in a very nasty dispute over the use of a particular toy one day, and I happened to be in the next room, all ears.

"You stupid pee-pee!" the youngest screamed in Japanese.

"Dumbo pee-pee poo-face!" the eldest shot back.

I could hear the three-year-old spluttering. "You -- you..." she began. I tensed, wondering if I should intervene. I knew something big was coming -- some huge, awful insult, perhaps even one of the Forbidden Words. I peeked into the room.

A triumphant top-this look came over my youngest's face. "You -- you BOY!" she screamed.

The eldest recoiled, overcome by shock and indignation.

"Mommmmmy!"

Seeing Beyond

I visited my friend Dina the other day and got depressed.

Dina is the sort of person I would hate if I could. She has been blessed with more talents and skills than any one person I know: she can sew and cook to a professional level, she can draw, paint, sculpt, and embroider. She can wire a house, plaster walls and put in her own tiles. Dina can build and fix things, she can butcher road kill, she can skin animals and raise her own vegetables. And she knows the name for every goddamn plant under the sun.

Four years ago, she and her husband bought a house. I went to see it with her before they moved in and was not impressed. It was an ugly, graceless box of a place with no distinguishing features. The kitchen stank, the floors were manky, the bathrooms were small and pokey, and the extensive back and front yards were filled with rubble and weeds. There was a view of a telephone pole in the backyard, and a row of ugly, stunted little bushes, plus a big black hole where someone had burnt a lot of junk. But the very worst thing was an ancient Victorian greenhouse which was falling down in a rather spectacular way: every single pane of glass was shattered or broken, the outer wall looked to be crumbling, and the inside was filled with rubble and weeds. The area around the greenhouse had more dock weeds and dandelions than I've ever seen in my life.

Dina stood, surveying all of this, and smiled. 'This place is great,' she said. 'Look at that little bubbling brook!' I was surprised: she was right! There was a lovely little brook a stone's throw from the house, but you could barely see it for the trees. Beyond the brook was a beautiful field dotted with gorse and heather, but you could hardly see that either. What you COULD see was a whole lot of junk and rubble. It was depressingly, overwhelmingly obvious that the place was a dump. To everyone, it seemed, but Dina.

During the past four years we have made many trips to Dina's house, and the transformation has been amazing. First she knocked out the two back windows and made them into sliding glass doors. All of the bedrooms were painted and decorated, walls were knocked down here and there, and the change was phenomenol. A huge deck was built outside, trees were chopped down, opening up a fantastic view of the neighboring fields, a hedge was established to hide the telephone pole, and the large burned area was dug out to form a fish pond. The greenhouse was demolished over a few scary weeks, and in its place is now a stunning artist's studio of glass and wood surrounded by a tiered herb garden with driftwood sculptures artfully placed.

But it is her gardens that fill me with envy. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful or interesting. Near the brook is a fairy garden with a wood-chip path surrounded by woodland flowers and whimsical touches: crystals hanging from trees, tiny hand-crafted sculptures strategically and unobtrusively placed. On the far side of the house is a wildlife garden shaded by tall trees and bursting with a splendid selection of wildflowers. The house is surrounded by every climbing vine you can imagine: wisteria, honeysuckle, climbing roses, golden hops, clematis, ivy, Virginia creeper. Her herb garden is a riot of different colors and textures: soft, wooly lambs' ears, fluffy bunches of bright green parsley, silvery green and blue catmint, variegated lemon balm in butter-yellow and green, dainty plumes of fennel, and golden clumps of marjoram. Her vegetable beds are filled with neat rows of strawberries, runner beans and Chinese broccoli. There are roses and peonies and hydrangea and azaleas -- flowers and shrubs too numerous to mention. Everything is thriving and a lot healthier than the plants I've been agonizing over in my humble garden for the past two years. For God's sake, I've paid to go into less attractive gardens than hers.

What amazes me most is Dina's vision. I saw what was in front of me: a nasty, drab, dull-as-dirt box of a place surrounded by a world of junk; she saw endless potential.

Last year, I happened to go to the beach with Dina and we found an old rope which she insisted on dragging back to the car.

"What in the world do you need an old rope for?" I asked. It smelled, after all, and it was falling apart.

"I can use this in my garden."

I should have known, but all I could think about was how much trouble she'd have getting rid of the thing once she'd realized how gross it was.

Yesterday I noticed it hanging down the side of the house from the balcony on the second floor. It is smothered in wisteria and looks like a million bucks. Driving around the area, I've noticed a fair amount of wisteria about, creeping up frames and trellises and spreading up garden walls, but you've never seen anything like Dina's wisteria-up-a-ship's-rope garden feature.

Like I said, I'd hate her if I could.

Then and Now

I've got a picture of my eldest, aged four months, sitting in her grandfather's arms. She is grinning up at him in a beguiling way, her face radiating perfect unstudied innocence. Her face is also just the tiniest bit dirty (I suspect that she is wearing part of her lunch on her cheeks and her grandfather has not realized this), and she is clapping her tiny hands, which look wet, as though she has been chewing on her fingers, and the clothes she is wearing are a mess. Her hair looks like it hasn't been brushed in the past twenty-four hours. In short, she is a rather slimy, ungroomed, mucky pup. But oh, what a beauty.

Fast forward sixteen years. My eldest is getting ready to go to work, a process that can take up to two hours, especially when there is anything like physics or chemistry homework to be done or it is her turn to do the dishes. Her thick, bushy hair has been ironed to an unnatural metallic smoothness, her beautiful eyebrows have been plucked to a ridiculously thin line. She has done things to her face that I wish she had not done (though I thank God that she has thus far restricted her piercings to her ear lobes), and her lips are glossy with fruity stuff that she seems compelled to refresh every thirty minutes. She is wearing clothes that make me want to run up to her and cover her in a burqua, and shoes that I cannot believe are comfortable. In short, she is a gussied-up, under-dressed over-groomed young thing. But oh, what a beauty.

Don't Try this One at Home, Kids

I'm not the first one who has said this, but it is still true: all marriages are mixed marriages.

While it is true that some marriages are more mixed than others, we all come from different countries and different cultures so to speak. Even if you marry the girl or boy next door and and you happen to be from the same ethnic background and class, educated at the same schools and raised in the same town, you are bound to find differences in your habits, lifestyles and expectations. All families are unique in their own special ways, and so are all individuals. When we're new in our relationships, we generally try to hide our weirdness, but once we are married it inevitably comes out.

I know that the term 'mixed marriage' is generally used to describe a marriage wherein the couple are of a different race, religion or nationality, but this is a relative term and a very flexible one, too. My mother was from the south and my father was from California: I would argue that theirs was a mixed marriage even though they were both more or less Caucasian. I am from the States and my husband is from Britain; again, despite the fact that our racial backgrounds are similar, ours is certainly a mixed marriage. When I was in graduate school, I knew a black American woman who was married to a man from Nigeria; never mind the fact that their racial background was roughly the same, they had one of the most mixed marriages I have ever seen, and I know they would agree. Ditto for my friend Caroline, a Japanese-American woman married to a Japanese man for over twenty-five years. There are no marriages that are not mixed; some are just higher up on the mixed scale than others.

In this day and age, when more than half of all marriages seem to end up in the gutter after less than ten years, I take my hat off to any couple who manage to stay together through the bloom of youth and past middle age. But when I meet a till- death-do-we-part couple from a very mixed marriage, I can only shake my head in awe. Like a dangerous magic trick performed by a skilled magician, the end result is there for all to see but the craft is hidden. How in the hell have they managed it?

A few years ago, our family got to know Edward and Marie, a couple in their mid seventies who had just celebrated their fifty-fourth wedding anniversary. Having noticed that Marie had a French accent, I asked her how long she had been speaking English.

"Fifty-three years," she told me.

"So you started learning English after you got married! Wow!"

"Yes, and don't think that wasn't tough! We used to have fights and I couldn't express myself. So I threw eggs at him! And he'd always duck, and I got stuck cleaning up the mess!"

When Marie and Edward got married, they did not share a language. Fifty-five years later, her English was still accented but virtually flawless, and Edward's French was good enough that he could translate into it from English. But however great an accomplishment their language learning arguably was, for me it was as nothing next to their fifty-four years of marriage. My husband and I have muddled through a couple of decades together, but the fact that Marie and Edward managed to stay married to each other so long in spite of their language differences ought to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

"And I don't need to throw eggs at him anymore!" Marie told me proudly. "I can swear in English now!"

My friend Ivy from Hong Kong met her husband Toshio when she was twenty, and for both of them it was love at first sight. She was already divorced with a small daughter, and when she told her parents that Toshio had proposed and she had accepted, they were understandably appalled.

"Fool! You don't speak Japanese! He doesn't speak Chinese or English! This is madness!"

Back in Tokyo, Toshio's parents were even more disgusted with him. "She has a child! You cannot communicate! It will end in divorce, just wait and see!"

Thirty years later, they are still married, and you have never seen a happier couple. Toshio never managed to learn Cantonese, but Ivy's Japanese is fluent and colloquial.

Whenever I meet or hear of couples like that, I feel like warning my children: "Don't try that one at home, kids!"

Understanding

I was the new teacher in the factory, and my students, a group of some thirty male engineers, were looking me up and down and making me feel even more nervous than I'd felt to begin with. Mr Sugimoto, a fussy, self-important little man who worked in the administration, stepped smartly up to the microphone to introduce me. I'd already decided that I didn't like him; he was an unctuous fellow with a condescending manner and poor English skills -- not that he knew it.

"Here she is, then," Mr Sugimoto began unceromoniously in Japanese, gesturing roughly in my direction. "Your new teacher. Her name's hard to pronounce, but maybe she'll help you by pronouncing it slowly. Foreigners' names! Ha, ha, ha!"

I began to feel even more nervous. His tone was worryingly disrespectful.

Mr Sugimoto wiped his eyes, still chuckling over my impossible foreign name. "Sorry she's not younger!" he announced, casting a sideways glance at me as though I were a side of pork he was casually inspecting. "I've looked at her resume and it says she's 30. Too bad! Next time we'll see if we can get one in her twenties!"

My jaw dropped. The bastard obviously didn't realize that I understood Japanese!

"She's not too bad looking I guess, but --" He suddenly stopped and frowned. "What?" he barked at a man sitting in the front row who had been watching my reaction and was nervously waving his hand in a frantic little 'Stop -- stop!' damage-control gesture.

"Um, Mr Sugimoto, I think she understands Japanese," the man half-whispered.

"Don't be silly, of course she doesn't!" He glanced over at me quickly, a furtive look in his eye. "Do-You-Understand-Japanese?" he asked in sentient-being-to- idiot tones.

I stared back at him, appalled. "I understand," I said frostily.

His reaction was so extreme it would have been funny if I hadn't been so irritated. He actually blanched right there in front of me. His face went a sickly color and his attitude did a nose dive from cocky and supercilious to slavishly apologetic. He actually bowed to me, and from that day on, Mr Sugimoto was kindly and respectful, and he watched his mouth around me. It was highly gratifying.

Two years later, I had a similar experience on yet another first-day-of-class.

"I can always tell the difference between Brits and Americans," boasted Mr Osaragi to a fellow classmate just before I took roll. "Usually it's their skin color." He gave me a long, speculative look. "Now her -- you can tell she's British by her skin color and her attitude."

The classmate made an appropriate noise, and Mr Osaragi went on.

"Very proper, see. Reserved." They both took a long look at me and I cringed. I was only reserved because it was the first day of class!

"Americans," Mr Osaragi continued, nailing himself right in, "they're all noise. Talk, talk, talk. The British? Very quiet. Like her."

I couldn't stand it any longer. Not only did I feel irked by Mr Osaragi's know-it-all attitude and his outlandish assumptions about Americans' skin color, I felt affronted for every single quiet, reserved American and noisy, boisterous Brit I happened to know.

"I'm American!" I blurted out. "I'm not British at all, I just work in a British school!"

Unlike Mr Sugimoto, Mr Osaragi never forgave me for understanding. Go figure.

Two Tiny Miracles

There aren't enough miracles around these days, so I thought I'd share these with you.

TINY MIRACLE NUMBER ONE

The note arrived three days ago in a white envelope. It was addressed to my husband and myself and in an unfamiliar hand. Nowadays, receiving anything by surface mail that isn't a bill, a political pitch, or a charity appeal is pretty amazing, and this one had me stumped. My husband opened it and began to read -- and his jaw dropped. I could barely contain my curiosity.

"What is it? Who's it from?"

"It's a thank you note," he said, a tone of hushed wonder in his voice. "From Sam."

Sam, I will have you know, is a twenty-one year old man we have both known since before he could use the toilet properly. He can now do that, plus he's graduated from high school, acne, and adolescent angst. Sam is in university and has a part-time job. He is tall and robust enough to pick up either my husband or myself. But what is more, we now know that HE CAN WRITE THANK YOU NOTES.

"Thank you for the fun present for my birthday," Sam wrote. "It was great seeing you at my party, and I hope you had as much fun as I did."

And get this:

1) The hand-writing was legible
2) There was humor in it
3) Sam's grammar and spelling were irreproachable

We're thinking of approaching the Smithsonian with Sam's note, because let's face it, this is no ordinary document. A thank-you note sent in the year 2007, by snail mail, written in pen, posted barely a month after our visit to this boy's family, the author of which has just turned twenty-one and, as I have mentioned, is a male. And I ought to point out that our gift to him while certainly 'fun,' was so cheap I blush to think of it.

With notes like that written by twenty-one year olds, there is hope for the world.

TINY MIRACLE NUMBER TWO

Our eldest has recently turned sixteen and is prone to all of the nonsense many teenagers succomb to: the unnecessary fiddling with near-perfect hair, acquisition of superfluous cosmetics, and a worrying clothes addiction. I am still wearing a jacket I bought for myself in Tokyo back in 1985, whereas she, whose last jacket was purchased barely a year ago, has been nagging us for a new one for the past two months.

I know that there aren't many people who can boast that they are still wearing a jacket 22 years after buying it, and I admit that I am an extreme case, but one year, in my humble opinion, is not long enough for a decent jacket to get old. So when I took the kid into town for a new birthday jacket, I felt like an idiot.

"Let's just try the charity shops first!" I wheedled.

She sulked, but finally gave in, and I laid down some basic rules. We would visit all five of my favorite charity shops and spend no longer than five minutes in each shop, adding up to a mere 25 minutes of her precious time wasted. Once I was satisfied that none of them had anything that would suit her, I was prepared to compromise and cover 50% of the cost of a new jacket, provided it was under a certain price. She didn't like this, of course, but acquiesced after realizing that it was the best deal she was going to get. I figured our chances of finding a jacket she liked at a thrift shop were about 10%; finding one such jacket that actually fit her was going to be like stepping on a snowball in hell, but I was damned if I was going to fork out good money for a jacket she didn't need without making a point.

Now comes the miracle.

We walked into the very first charity shop. The kid sniffed in disgust at the elderly clientele (she was the only one in the shop under 50) and looked about her furtively, obviously terrified that she would be spotted by someone she knew. I walked over to a rack of jackets and took one down. "How's this?"

The kid looked up reluctantly, and her jaw dropped. Suddenly a look of wonder filled her eyes. I haven't seen that look since she was about five, so I knew we were on to something. The jacket looked too small and I said as much, but she tried it on anyway. It fit perfectly.

"It fits perfectly," she said, obviously shocked to the core. "And I don't think it's ever been worn."

"Do you like it?" I asked, hoping against hope.

"I love it." Her voice sounded awed and -- I swear it! -- humbled. Now both of us were shocked to the core.

We bought the jacket for £5. Three minutes later the kid found a bag for £3; like the jacket it had never been used. Next, she saw a pair of earrings she liked for £2, and I spent £10 for the lot. Needless to say, this is a lot less than half the price of any department store jacket my kid might have deemed acceptable.

So there you have two miracles. Nothing spectacular, some might say. No waters were parted; no grape juice was turned to wine. But a 21-year-old young man who can write prompt, legible and grammatical thank-you notes and a 16-year-old who likes the first coat she finds in a charity shop will do for me any day.

Out of the Air

March, 1999.

My eldest, who has a flair for the dramatic, is itching to tell me all about the film she's just seen in her social studies class.

"And the enemy planes kept coming!" she says breathlessly, as I walk her home from school. "The sky was filled with them, like so many dragonflies! Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, they went, and they dropped their bombs. In no time the ground beneath them was consumed in flames!" She pauses briefly for dramatic emphasis. "Tokyo was burning!"

Uh oh.

Off work with a cold for three days, I've lost track of the date. But sure enough, it's that time of year again: the anniversary of the Great Kanto Air Raid of March 10, 1945. No wonder they've been watching a film about it in school, and how weird it must have been for them showing it, too, with my half-American, half-British kid integrating the class. I look around quickly to see if anyone has heard; the kid is speaking in Japanese and her voice carries. I try to think of a way to phrase what I have to say.

"Honey, you know those enemy planes," I say a little anxiously, "you do know what country they were from, don't you?"

She looks up at me, a little confused. "Um, no, I don't. Germany?"

I sigh. We've talked about the war before, she and I, but she's never been in the habit of paying mind to what I say and she obviously hasn't taken it in.

"No, not Germany," I say quietly. "America."

Her jaw drops. "Uso!" she cries out, "You're kidding!"

"No, I'm not. They were from America, honey. Japan and America were at war."

"But why would they do a thing like that? When they dropped those bombs, they had fire in them! They burned up a lot of people, and their dogs and cats and houses, too!"

"Well, you see, before they dropped those bombs on Tokyo, Japan had dropped bombs too. On other countries. And they'd done lots of bad things. Terrible things, really."

"But two wrongs don't make a right!"

"I know they don't, but it was awfully complicated, the war."

"But they shouldn't have burned up innocent people!"

What can I say to this? I think about the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed by the Japanese in China, the Philippines, and Indochina. But how can I begin to tell all this to a child? Suddenly living in Japan seems a lot more complicated -- for us, in particular. I start to wonder what the Japanese mothers of my kid's classmates will tell their children about the war. Or the Chinese mothers (there are two of them at our school) for that matter.

"A lot of people were upset about the fire-bombing of Tokyo," I say carefully. "And it wasn't just Tokyo either, honey, a lot of other cities were fire-bombed."

"By the Americans?"

"Well, yes. Other countries were at war with Japan too, but it was American planes that dropped the bombs." I can't help but think that the next thing she'll learn about will be Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Great.

"I've got to tell Kunie and Harumi!" she cries. "I'll bet they don't know!"

Part of me hopes that they don't, but I'm willing to bet that they do. Only my kid seems to have remained in blissful ignorance. All I can hope is that Kunie's and Harumi's parents try to be as honest and open as I am when they talk to their kids about the war.

"Look, when you talk to your friends about the war, just remember that the whole world was at war back then. And America didn't just decide to drop the bombs on Japan for no reason. It was horrible for the people on the ground, but it was horrible for a lot of other people too, before that." My heart is filled with dread. How long will it be before she comes home having been told that her mother's country nuked Japan and killed hundreds of thousands?

"I'd be really mad if someone dropped a bomb on Kunie and Harumi," she says with conviction, kicking a stone on the road for emphasis.

"I'll bet you would." Kunie and my eldest have been buddies since they were eleven months old. Harumi and she have been inseparable since they were a year and a half. I've babysat for Kunie a few times and when Harumi spent the night at our place once, I had to cuddle her for two hours before she finally dropped off to sleep. My kid's not the only one who'd hate to see anything happen to them.

"I don't think Kunie and Harumi would like it if their country decided to drop a bomb on us either," I point out. She gives me a funny look. My kid never sees the Japanese as any different from her at all; there is no 'us' and 'them' for her yet. Once, some Japanese-British friends of ours visited relatives in the U.K. At a playground in Birmingham, their young children were taunted by others and called 'Jap.' We were shocked by this. "What would you do if you heard someone yelling that word?" we asked our kid at the time, and she bristled. "I'd say 'Don't call me Jap, you stupid foreigner!'" We were amazed that our blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter saw herself as Japanese. But she's lived in Japan virtually all her life, so I suppose it is perfectly natural that she does.

A plane drones in the sky above us and we both look up. "I'm glad America isn't dropping bombs on us anymore," she says matter-of-factly, squeezing my hand.

I nod and squeeze her hand back. I try to imagine the pilots flying the B-29s that dropped their deadly loads on Tokyo and the surrounding areas fifty-five years earlier in all the madness and confusion of war. I wonder what in the world they would think of my daughter and me, walking hand in hand along this peaceful road in the suburbs of Tokyo, having this particular conversation.

I picture them thinking it's as weird and wonderful as I do.