Some time ago, an older teacher and I were both discussing our respective reasons for choosing to work in Japan. He brought up the idea of finding one's roots, and how everyone has an idealized perception of what that is supposed to entail. He then asked me if my personal quest to find my own roots was the experience that I was expecting.
I forget what answer I gave him, but it made me wonder afterwards: what exactly was I expecting anyway?
Finding your roots. This is one of the big clichés of Asian American folklore. The means for doing so are varied, but the basic template is something like this: you go to college. You sign up for that Asian language class instead of taking Spanish like everyone else. You start joining student-run ethnic organizations and if you are really fired up, you write a cultural night script where your protagonist walks around onstage with his head in his hands while bemoaning, "Am I Asian or am I American?"
Eventually, it all culminates into you (or your financially generous immigrant parent) finally buying that international plane ticket so that you can experience, with your own eyes and ears and heart, the exact geographical source from which your DNA has sprung.
Finding your roots. This is a phrase that is thrown around so much that sometimes I wonder if it has begun to lost its meaning. Or rather, if it has been repeated so much people don't question anymore what it really means.
I certainly didn't. It was a big, vague term that was wonderfully alluring. Surely, in the immediate time following my college graduation, this root finding business trumped job security, career planning and financial independence when it came to the fulfillment of my own personhood. Stumbling upon a job opening in the exact obscure city where my maternal grandparents lived was not sheer dumb luck, but further proof that destiny wanted me to go to Japan.
Getting reacquainted with blood relatives I haven't seen in eight years was a terrifying and exhilarating experience. I still remember the choked up feeling in my throat when my grandmother and aunt picked me up from the train station and I sat in the back of the car, not exactly sure what to say in this momentous event of my life history. I imagined, in the cheesy flourish of my own mental cinematography, a black and white film reel of my mother in her 20's riding a bike, eventually merging with the present Technicolor footage of my own 20-something-year-old self huffing and puffing past the exact same road of rice fields and sunflowers that lead to my grandmother's house. I woke up every day in a house bustling with activity, savoring the wonderful, surreal feeling of being connected to a larger network of kin that extended beyond my own mother and father.
Fast forward to right now. It has been nearly six months since I've moved here. Sharing a house with five other family members and having no privacy is starting to awaken the sullen teenager in me, and this alarms me. Though I cannot deny the luxury of home-cooked meals and having to pay for no rent, I find myself fantasizing about an imaginary living room where I lounge on an Ikea sofa all by myself until three in the morning with music blasting on the speakers. For all my talk about wanting to find my roots and connect with my family, now more than anything I wanted to move out and find a place of my own.
Finding your roots is important. So is finding that inner voice that first begins as a whisper, and finally starts screaming in your ear every day, "Grow up, grow up, grow up, for the love of God, GROW UP."
It might be the little five-year-old students I have every Thursday. I'm terrified that they are depending on people like me to grow up and act responsible. It might be how the rest of my family wakes up every day, without fail, at six in the morning and like precise clockwork, begin the operations of growing their rice fields. If you want to get things done, there is no time for whining or daydreaming.
I loved finding my roots. But wander-lusting travelers like me can only keep their face in the dirt for so long before they are finally forced to start looking up - and more importantly, looking forward.
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