Читать книгу We’re Pregnant and I Can’t Speak Japanese - William Hay - Страница 5

The year was 1972. It was time, as the Whitlam Labor Government successfully campaigned, for Australia to get out of the Vietnam War and to give equal pay and rights to women in the workplace and society. It was time to make universities and education free for all Australians so that the size of our intelligence and not our parents’ wallets allowed us to go as far as we wished with our education. It was time to give land rights to indigenous Australians after generations of ignorance and arrogance towards their entitlements, as well as introduce a universal health care system, which was fair and equitable to all Australians. It was time to embrace the future by relearning that water froze at zero degrees and boiled at 100 degrees Celsius instead of 32 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was time to stop doing our sums with paper and pencil and to start using a pocket calculator.

It was my time.

I was twelve years old in my last year of primary school. I was the School Captain, captain of the rugby league and cricket teams, President of the School Council and captain of my sporting house, Macquarie. I was destined to achieve greatness as a leader of the community or as a captain of industry. I would enter Hurlstone Agricultural High School, a selective boys’ school across the train line from where I lived and exploit the potential locked inside my pre-pubescent mind and body. Academically, I would be accepted to all of the universities in the country and on the sporting field I would play in the school’s First XV Rugby Team and go onto national representative honours.

I just had to cruise through my last year in primary school, as I wasn’t required to sit the entrance examination to Hurlstone, and voila. Each year, a certain number of places were allocated to our school, because we were in the same town and loosely connected. It fluctuated from year to year, but seldom was it was lower than four. I always finished the year in either first or second place in the class, so the thought of not going to Hurlstone had never entered my or my parents’ heads. It was my destiny. My mother had already altered my Hurlstone school blazer, which had been handed down from a family friend whose son was in his fourth year. Then for the first time ever only two places were offered to the Year 6 boys at our school.

I placed third.

I never again reached those lofty heights as I did as a twelve-year-old. High school was a blur of long hair, rock and roll, and trying to impress girls at my co-educational school instead of the examiners of the Higher School Certificate Examinations, who would determine my academic future. Then there was the fog of dropping out of colleges and universities; three in a matter of three years. Somehow, I thought I should be an accountant to honour a line my father had said about becoming an accountant, because accountants always got work. He failed to mention how boring accounting classes could be.

I never became an accountant or anything closely resembling a professional person. I just worked jobs, which were low on salary and satisfaction. At twenty-six, I finally completed a degree in communication, which was a relatively new discipline at the time, and should have pursued a career in the media or as a public servant with the Department of Communications in Canberra. Instead, I ended up teaching communication at technical colleges to apprentice tradespeople and trainee office workers, students who needed to develop their communication skills, but couldn’t see its worth over typing or bricklaying practicals.

In one of my stints with the Labour Market Programs Department, which re-trained long-term unemployed people, I stumbled across a job advertisement for me rather the students I was trying to place with local panel beating shops. The advertisement asked if I had a passport, a degree, and a yearning to spend a year teaching English in Japan. It wasn’t necessarily a yearning, but the idea of working abroad sounded interesting, so I bought a plane ticket.

That was in another century, a fading memory, a time when Prince sang about how he wanted to party in 1999 like it was the end of the world. The changing of millenniums wasn’t such a big deal for me. My computer, like all computers around the world, wasn’t affected by the Year 2000 Bug, and the new millennium party wasn’t so different than any other New Year’s Eve party. At 12.05am, it started to wind down and people wanted to go home. That, too, is fading from my memory as I pass my own milestone, a decade of living on and off in Japan, but only admit to being here eight because I don’t speak Japanese. Somehow, not being able to speak the language after eight years; sounds better than ten years.

It’s crazy in more ways than you can imagine. Half of my genetic composition says I should speak Japanese. This is the homeland of my mother who taught my sister and me to count and write to ten in Japanese on one rainy morning during the school holidays. Half of my B.A. in Communication also says I should speak Japanese. My minor in Japanese forced me to learn most of the grammatical patterns and enough kanji compounds (Japanese characters) to read a Japanese newspaper. It might have taken me two days to complete reading the front page story with a kanji dictionary, but I was somewhat literate in Japanese. Then there was my year of Japanese lessons in Tokyo with a real life Japanese sensei, who immersed me in the language. My wife is Japanese. I live in Japan and I am in contact with the language almost every minute of my waking hours.

I should speak Japanese, but somehow I squandered all the advantages and opportunities I had to pick up the language, by being lazy, unmotivated, dispassionate, and not smart enough to realize my life could be much easier speaking the language of the country which I chose for my residency. Most of what I learned on those aborted attempts is forgotten.

Maybe, I never really flourished as a Japanese speaker because of this cock-eyed notion of pride. In English, I am a competent speaker with a well developed vocabulary. But, in Japanese, even with my years of attending classes and with my barely passing grades, I have never progressed beyond sounding like someone who had been dropped on their head at birth and stopped developing intellectually beyond that of a six-year-old. It is difficult to sound stupid all the time. Or maybe, I am as my mother once said to me when she called after I had been in Japan for a few years. She asked if I could speak Japanese and when my answer was no, she fired back, You’re stupid! Coming from a lady who had none of educational advantages I had to learn a second language, but picked up English anyway, it rang quite true. I really am an idiot, but a proud one at that.

Also, I can bumble my way through everyday life with my retarded language skills and not be too inconvenienced. What does it matter if I buy a pair of socks which are too small or take thirty minutes to find a can of coconut milk on a shelf in a supermarket instead of asking the staff for help to find it? However, for important matters such as filing tax returns or dealing with government departments where an error can be costly, I rely on my wife.

There was nothing notable about meeting my wife; no kismet, no serendipity, no, What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? We worked in the same place where most relationships develop in Japan. I don’t know if it is true, but I’ve heard certain Japanese banks have an unwritten policy of hiring attractive female staff as bait to lure the best university graduates into their fold. Bank workers are known for the long hours they put in after the bank doors close at 3.30pm. Hence, their social lives evolve around the conversations between desks and the late night drinks after work. We didn’t work for a bank but a language school. Her job was to sell lesson packages mostly to young office ladies looking to snag the star performers in their offices, who would be posted overseas at sometime during their tenure with the company. English would bolster their stakes in being the perfect corporate wife. My job as a teacher was to give them a formulaic forty-minute lesson which mostly consisted of listen and repeat exercises. Fortunately, most Japanese have six years of English classes in junior and senior high school, so there is a reservoir of English in their heads, which classifies them as false beginners.

My wife was the latest staff member to join our small suburban branch in a revolving door of sales staff who either quit after a few months due to the lousy pay and long hours or were transferred to another school in the network, which spread nationwide. I wasn’t actually impressed on being introduced. The novelty of seeing pretty new sales staff walk into the office had worn off for me. Most were friendly, polite, helpful, hardworking and exceptionally cute. The cuteness was the biggest turn off. Everything in Japan seems to be cute. There are the cute characters, which endorse products and companies, and the cute boy and girl singing groups. With average ages of around fourteen, they dress, sing and act in a way that can only be described as cute. Imagine living the rest of your days as a prisoner in Disneyland. It wouldn’t take too long before you wanted to strangle the oh-so-adorable Mickey Mouse.

For the first few months, I hadn’t said much to my wife beyond the morning greetings. She was doing a language exchange with a Canadian teacher from another school on Sunday nights so she never joined the staff for an end of the working week drink. During their lesson, the first hour would be in English then they would switch to Japanese for the second hour. Most romances between teachers and staff developed this way so I guessed he was her boyfriend.

One morning, when we were the only staff and teacher pairing on duty for the quiet period she told me she had just come back to Japan after two years living in Melbourne. Being the only Australian in the school, I was impressed, as most Japanese seem to look to America, as the leading country for English language learning and as the purveyor of true western culture. The brief conversation ended with an invitation for a drink one night after work. She asked me and of course I said no. How forward of her! We had just met and here she was hitting on me in the staff room. I had grounds for a sexual harassment complaint if this had happened back home.

She wore a dress and Blundstone boots on our first meeting outside work hours. The last time I saw someone wear a pair of Blundstone’s, he was concreting a new section to my mother’s driveway. I have a pair of Blundstone’s, the all-purpose boot you can wear while mowing the lawn or attending a friend’s wedding. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more about this girl, but as the night progressed I discovered one huge disincentive; she had an Australian boyfriend who had come back to Japan with her but was teaching for a school in our network at the other end of Japan, down in Kyushu. There was no ulterior motive to her invitation; she just wanted to have a drink and a chat with someone else who was missing Australia.

We went out for the occasional drink over the next few months until she realised sales were not for her and quit her job. We kept in contact through a mutual friend at the school until it was my turn to quit and return to Australia. I only intended to stay in Japan for a year or two and now, approaching three years, I needed to get away from the endless feeling of claustrophobia of life in Tokyo.

Back in Australia, I was thirty-seven years old without any job prospects and a shrinking circle of friends who had kids in school, soccer on weekends and mortgages to service. I was living with my mother.

After almost eight months of not really trying to find a job or a place to live, and with my working visa for Japan getting close to expiring, I started to wonder whether I should return to the relative ease of teaching English in Japan or let the door to Japan close permanently. The crunch came when my application for a post graduate course at my old university was rejected on the grounds it was received too late; Australia Post had let me down. The plan was to complete my course and possibly join the public service in Canberra, which wasn’t so sensitive about the age of applicants for positions.

The next day, I booked a one-way ticket to Tokyo.

A week before I left, my mother started to complain of a sore back. She was rarely sick and very active for a lady in her late seventies, so we dismissed it as something muscular. A month or so later, when she finally went to the doctor to find out what was causing the discomfort, she was told she had a tumour the size of a clenched fist in her stomach. At first, the prognosis wasn’t good, but after a year of chemotherapy, the tumour shrank to a size where it could be treated with blasts of radiation. She was going to beat cancer, a real tough old bird, which I’d know all my life, so I didn’t go home for Christmas. The plan was to go back when she was in good health and my bank account balance was in a healthy condition, as well. But, over the holiday period when she was given a reprieve from her treatment, the cancer spread rapidly to other parts of her body and there was nothing that could be done to stop its march. A few months into what should have been a much better year for her, she was dead. She was seventy-eight years old.

I caught up with my wife again at a farewell party for someone we both knew. She was now working for an American company in the centre of the city and comfortable in her skin as a Japanese person in Japan; no more longing to return to Australia. Our first conversation in almost a year unearthed lots of useful information. Her Australian boyfriend didn’t want to move up to Tokyo and she wasn’t asking him to make the move, anymore. Also, her language exchange partner, a potential new boyfriend, had moved to Hong Kong for work. She was free and still wearing Blundstone’s. This time I asked if she wanted to go for a drink, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lately, my wife has complained of sore breasts, which is something that is not uncommon in our household because my wife always has sore breasts just prior to the start of her period. It has been a signpost that her period was coming and that we were entering the PMT zone where the terrain could get a little rough for the next few days. Don’t mention her hairy armpits in winter, which usually gets a laugh under normal, hormonally balanced circumstances. For the year, year-and-a-half, however long we’ve been married, I watch what I say for those few testing days.

Yes, that’s right, I don’t know when we were married. No, don’t I have the memory of a cicada or the sensitivity of a feral cat in heat. And yes, I have an explanation.

Normally, getting married in Tokyo is a simple process of stamping a marriage application with your personal seal, lodging it with the city office, and you’re married as of the date you have chosen. No ceremony or exchanging vows or waiting period is involved. Similarly, getting divorced is just as easy as long as there are no child custody issues involved or contests over joint property.

For us, the simple process of getting married was an administrative mess, for which I am happy to blame my wife. Based on a phone call she made to the city office in her hometown, as a foreigner in Japan I needed to provide a copy of my Alien Registration Card, which is my temporary resident’s I.D. card and not a membership to the Star Trek fan club, my birth certificate, and “one more thing” with our marriage application. We didn’t submit that “one more thing”, because, even though my wife has never been married before, she felt she knew more than the city office and dismissed it as something trivial and not really necessary. It was so unnecessary that we were given the run around in standard 14-day bureaucratic response times, required to lodge our paperwork twice then resubmit it a further two times. Each time the wedding date changed from the original January 13, because naturally you can’t backdate things.

That insignificant “one more thing” turned out to be a Certificate of No Impediment issued by the Australian Embassy. It seemed the blessing from my wife’s parents wasn’t enough. Now, I needed the blessing of the Australian Prime Minister to get married. My wife’s parents were happy with a fuddled three-line request in elementary Japanese and a small box of traditional Japanese cakes. The Australian government wanted cash, about $120 worth after the conversion from yen to dollars for a single sheet of A4 paper stating they had no problem with me getting married. I never imagined the Prime Minister thought so highly of me.

With the “one more thing” finalised, all we had to do was choose a new wedding date, any date we liked, even something as novel as 5 May 2005, which would become 05-05-05. If we chose to get married at 5.05am on that date, it could be 05-05-05-05-05. That is, if May 5^th was considered a good day for getting married according to Japanese superstition. Each month there are good, bad and ordinary days. How these days are allocated is a mystery, but not something my wife was willing to dismiss. She wasn’t about to tempt fate or put up with my ranting that it was just a load of mumbo-jumbo, outdated bullshit that has no relevance to modern day existence beyond selling calendars. She would tell me to go smash a mirror. To her it was just a looking glass; it was just like breaking a drinking glass. But to me, it meant seven years bad luck. I left the decision of the wedding date and lodging all the paperwork up to my wife.

We were either married in February, March or April. I know for a fact it wasn’t January 13 the day I had engraved on my wife’s wedding ring because it came free with the price of the ring. And, somehow the small wedding reception we had discussed to placate the relatives in Japan remains just a discussion. My wife was happy to settle for a wedding photograph. That meant spending a few hours on a Saturday morning in a photography studio posing in rented wedding attire to mark the ceremony and reception we didn’t have. I was reluctant to play dress up, but conceded it was a huge sacrifice for my wife who probably would have had the complete wedding shebang with the traditional white kimono, the five-star hotel banquet room with the exquisite French cuisine, the flowers and bouquets, and the chauffeured limousine had she married a Kenji Suzuki when she was younger. For me, the wedding photo thing was like going to an amusement park and sticking your face in the cut outs above the bodies riding long boards on a Masonite postcard that read: “Having a great time in Honolulu!” We didn’t really go to Hawaii just like we didn’t really have a wedding reception. Somehow, the wedding photo, too, remains something my wife brings up every so often, but thankfully we never get around to doing. I wonder if there are good and bad days for getting wedding photos.