The First Time I Was the Foreigner
A bunch of bananas on my fourth birthday in Japan, a moment on a California playground, and what we learn about who belongs.
On the evening of my fourth birthday, a boy from the neighborhood knocked on our door.
He didn't speak English. I didn't speak Japanese. He simply held out a bunch of bananas and wished me a happy birthday.
I thanked him. I loved bananas.
In that moment, I was a foreigner. I was also a child who had just been given a birthday present by someone he couldn't talk to.
Outside person
In 1985, my father's Navy orders took our family to Yokosuka, Japan. While we waited for base housing, we lived off base in a Japanese neighborhood. The boy with the bananas came to our door not long after we arrived.
The kids across the street quickly became my playmates. We didn't share a language, but we found ways to play together anyway. I picked up Japanese the way children do, absorbing it without quite noticing I was learning.
The Japanese word for a foreigner is gaijin, commonly translated as "outside person." That was me. I knew Japan wasn't my home in the way it was theirs. I also knew it was where I lived, and where my friends were. Being different didn't make the place any less exciting.
Nor did it keep people away. A boy I couldn't talk to had come to my door anyway.
Coming home
In 1989, we moved back to the United States and settled near my father's new duty station in San Diego.
I had spent the formative years from three to seven in Japan. Now I was back in America, a place I was supposed to know, but didn't. The world around me had changed, and so had the way I had learned to navigate it. I had to relearn how to read people: their expressions, their body language, the unspoken rules that governed who fit in and who didn't. Even ordinary social interactions felt foreign. Everyone and everything looked different.
Then came a moment on the elementary school playground that I have never forgotten.
One day after school, I saw a Black woman. I felt a sudden surge of fear and anger.
I don't remember what she was doing, nor do I know why I reacted that way. I remember the feeling vividly, though, and I recognize it now as my first racist reaction.
I was seven, still learning to read the world around me. Somewhere, without anyone sitting me down to teach it, I had already learned who was supposed to be on the outside.
It would be over a decade before I could fully name that moment, and nearly two decades before I began trying to unlearn what I'd absorbed.
Who gets to be the foreigner
In Japan, I was the outsider. Yet a boy who didn't share my language brought me bananas on my birthday.
Back in America, I was learning a different, harder lesson. I knew what it felt like to be out of place, and yet I had learned to see someone else as though they didn't belong.
Looking back, I can see how much of the difference lay not in who was foreign, but in what we learn about how to treat people who seem different from us.
I still think about the boy with the bananas. I don't know what prompted him to come to our door, or whether he remembers that evening at all. I think of the gift often, especially when I feel isolated or see someone else struggling to find their place.
He didn't need to understand me to welcome me.
It took me much longer to understand how easily we can learn to do the opposite.
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