The first morning I woke up on a futon resting low on tatami, I had an acute sensation of falling. Everything was too high and my head too low, the air too thick to breathe and my limbs unresponsive after the 14-hour flight from Los Angeles to Osaka. At the end of the futon my toes poked out from a blanket that had good intentions but couldn’t deliver. On my first morning in Suzuka, Japan, I was — as I would be for the entire summer — a poor fit.
Suzuka is several hours south of Tokyo along the east coast of Japan’s main island. It has about 150,000 people spread out in small, sensible houses along the shore and for several miles inland. Not many foreigners penetrate to this place where the biggest attractions are a racetrack and a small amusement park. Little English is spoken, and that’s why I came: to teach English classes for the summer at Suzuka Kyokai, the local church.
The first half of the summer I spent with a family of three: Takashi, Atsuko and their small daughter, Mari. They welcomed me to breakfast the first morning with miso soup, rice, green tea, daikon radish slices, a Tupperware container of smoked fish and a packet of miniature dry fish and seaweed to shake onto my rice. When I couldn’t identify the smoked fish, Atsuko smilingly looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary.
“Eel,” she announced — it would give me energy in the sledgehammer heat. She watched approvingly as I transferred a chunk of eel to my rice bowl with slippery lacquered chopsticks: The first morning was no time to be a squeamish gaijin, or foreigner. “Gaikoku-jin” — “gaijin” for short — are literally “outside people” in a society where to be an insider is the goal of all social interaction. Cautiously I imitated my 5-year-old hostess and obeyed her imperious directions about how to hold my chopsticks.
The first real test came that night when the family graciously took me to a very nice sushi restaurant and insisted that I consume every tentacled, raw, unidentifiable item on a vast tray of sushi and sashimi while Mari giggled and mimicked the faces I was trying not to make. I had been a vegetarian for two years prior to that day, but suddenly nothing in the world could have persuaded me not to follow willingly wherever my hosts might lead.
I bowed, I smiled, I knelt, I ate and it was remarkably good. In these entirely foreign surroundings, no generosity could be refused, no shocking peculiarity (the ubiquitous Turkish toilets come to mind) complained about, lest I shame all of America before these kind people who would know America best through me. I had fallen into the deep arms of Japan’s saltwater embrace; there was nothing to do but drift with her warm tide.
That summer, the tide took me wholly. With my new companions I walked the secret chambers of a ninja castle and the singing “nightingale” floors of an ancient imperial palace. I left my offering to Shinto ancestors and sat with Buddhists while we performed the tea ceremony in an open-walled room far above a misted valley town, surrounded by shades of green I thought existed only in Ireland. At home I drank so much chilled green tea that eventually I was required to brew it myself to replenish the supply. I was introduced to the quiet arts of flower arranging and calligraphy by elderly women and men who had seen the horrors of the great war and were still capable of bending their bodies around a young American to teach me the right postures and perspective. Their touch was dry, soft as parchment, excruciatingly gentle.
“Breathe,” they would say to me, then sit quite still and wait for silence to rain into us.
I was ushered into a private family shrine on an exquisite prewar estate, where we all bowed flat to the ground before advancing toward holy things I did not comprehend. I learned to sit with my legs folded under me, aching, for longer than I had ever sat in any position. I enjoyed those moments in which no one looked at me, when my height, my round eyes and my ignorance could be forgotten.
Up in the mountains at a traditional bathhouse I joined a dozen other women in a ritual of cleansing and relaxation that lasted hours. Everything seemed to last hours, and I stopped keeping track. Atsuko dressed me in a light cotton summer kimono, perfect as a doll in a wide belt and wood sandals, and took me to the bon-odori summer festival. We danced traditional dances, moving in large circles among people who occasionally looked into my gaijin eyes and smiled broadly, relishing my incongruous presence. I was astonished much later to discover that we had danced most of the night while I was simply moving, going where the dance went, sucking at a Popsicle someone handed me in the thick night heat while time washed along like water.
My loneliness started the first time I walked alone into the streets of Suzuka and a little girl turned suddenly toward me, realized that I was not Japanese, screamed and ran to her mother babbling, “Gaijin! Gaijin!” Other children made circles with their fingers around their eyes at the sight of me, just as a Caucasian child might pull out the corners of her eyes to mock Asian features. Mari came up to me once and pulled gently at the edges of my eyes to see if they might be coaxed into a more pleasing shape. A student said shyly, intending to compliment me, “You don’t seem American. Americans are fat.”
Another day at the train station a young man struck up a conversation with me. He was a mechanic at the Suzuka Circuit racetrack, and he told me point-blank that he wanted to go on a date with a foreigner. A few days later in a movie theater that smelled like a new car, he ran his hand up and down my arm with a fetishist’s appreciation. There was no further advance, no words spoken, and at the end of the movie he thanked me politely and took the next train home. I unlocked my bicycle, watching the raised hair on my arm slowly subside as if the flesh no longer belonged to me.
There were uglier incidents, too, that made me feel how far I was from belonging — or perhaps, inversely, that I had made some progress toward seeing the real Japan rather than the tourist’s paradise my friends so beneficently offered to me. One afternoon, riding a bicycle home from work, I noticed a car slowing down beside me. Two young men were inside, laughing, and the near one thrust a magazine at me so hard I veered and nearly fell. The picture I saw before they raced away was of a Caucasian woman on her knees fellating a black man.
The erotic is not far from the untouchable. At the lovely bathhouse in the mountains, as I made my way to the hot indoor pool, two elderly women glanced anxiously up at me and, murmuring to each other, hurried out of the water before I entered it. Even more dramatic was the old man in Nara who rushed at me angrily, shaking his fist and calling me American along with other words I didn’t understand and that my companion refused to translate.
Americans travel with ease into the exoticism of others; we relish and eroticize it. We are less comfortable with voyages into our own exoticism, and that, I realize now, is the voyage I undertook. As my way of seeing became more Japanese, I felt my height and my features acutely: They were appendages I carried unwillingly in public, things I would have cast off, if possible, to reveal a more suitable Japanese form. My own ways had grown too loud and large; one day soon I would fly back to Los Angeles and feel physically alarmed by the size and sound of the Americans rushing by me.
One day I came up behind a crowd of schoolchildren in the street and noticed a few of them whispering “gaijin” to each other as they pointed back at me. I hurried to catch up with the last few children, bent down and whispered, “Gaijin! Gaijin!” to tease them. They turned and shrieked at my nearness, as I had expected, but then came an unexpected reward for my boldness: All the children, dressed identically in kindergarten uniforms, began to laugh with me, surrounding me with their merry energy, sweeping me along on an irresistible riptide of children’s laughter back into a welcoming sea.
Sophie, my 7-year-old Newfoundland, gets more anxious
and alert the farther north we drive, and the route is
nearly straight north — out of Iowa City, Iowa, across
the entire length of Minnesota toward the Boundary
Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. She sniffs the August
chill as we pull into a motel parking lot late the
first evening, stands up on the back seat of the
borrowed van and inquires with an earnest black nose
about this new place and the unexpected pleasure of
cool air in summer. My husband, Andy, and I are
stupefied from the drive but she is eager: Water is
very near now, and outside town there were deer running
so close to the road that she cried for them. Going
into the north, Sophie is becoming more alive, and as
I stagger upstairs with my backpack I draw on her
panting energy.
Tomorrow we will drive out to North Country Canoe
Outfitters, load a 17-foot canoe with a week’s
waterproofed supplies, drive deep into the north
woods, coax Sophie into the middle of the boat and
paddle away from leash laws into a wilderness where we
will compulsively keep her tethered. The risk is too
great should she chase something and get lost: Any
large animal could finish her off, and even coyotes,
far smaller than my 120-pound bear of a dog, are
capable of luring her away from camp and taking her
down as a pack. And wolves — let’s not even get into
wolves. My great, lumbering pup, whose presence
ensures my security among humans, will be ironically
dependent on me in the woods. Perhaps she could
survive without me, but afloat for a week with no one
to rely on but we three adventurers, we are stronger,
faster and safer together.
That, whether we admit it or not, is what has brought
us here to the jumping-off point of civilization.
Andy and I have been married less than two years and
we adopted Sophie at the age of 5. By taking this
rash leap into a wilderness that could devour us — no
guide, no cell phone, no safety net — we are asking
how much we can trust each other. Modern life offers
so few opportunities to answer that question; there
are always hidden agendas and ulterior motives.
Basically you cross your fingers when you get married
and hope that the weaving of the years will show a
good pattern in the end. To find out what someone
will do when rain starts pouring into the tent at 3
a.m. or you can’t find the trail is valuable information that you can’t get easily in the information age.
The first day is sunny and easy. At the first portage
we forget our fishing poles and have to go back, but
the second, through marshy, uneven ground, we complete
with professional efficiency. In our practice paddles Sophie developed the
habit of jumping in one side of
the canoe and out the other into shallow water, but
portaging teaches her new lessons. This time when she
jumps out the other side it’s into black water that
swallows her completely and leaves her gasping and
scrambling while we laugh ourselves limp. For the rest
of the week Sophie climbs obediently into the canoe
and sits. Forget the theories about repetition and
reward: When it counts, she learns instantaneously.
As the days pass, I learn new things about my
companions. For example: Sophie is inexhaustible at a
steady trot. With a fully loaded backpack, doing a
2-mile trail three times because we must carry the
heavy aluminum canoe separately, Sophie leads the way
as if we were Lewis and Clark depending on her
guidance. She is businesslike in her pack, less
likely to sniff or wander, and extremely careful to
stay between us and the other parties we encounter.
The backpack, I imagine, returns to her some ancestral
sense of duty and I am touched when she pauses at a
bend in the trail or comes back to get me so that we
are never separated, even by sight.
My husband’s woodsmanship is a revelation too. I knew
he could do remarkable things with a computer, but now
he’s telling stories about Boy Scout merit badges and
suspending our gear from trees with elaborate knots.
When he gets tired he grows exasperatingly patient and
quiet until, if I whine, I hear it echo back out of
the stillness and feel ridiculous. Andy takes all
this very seriously: He does not take chances, and he
watches over me and Sophie with a manly strength and
self-assurance I haven’t seen in him before. There
are things that he can lift and I can’t; my small
fingers manipulate gear that his fumble with. He
pulls the canoe along powerfully; I steer and navigate
with increasing skill. We are separated naturally,
against all egalitarian principles, by what our bodies
can and cannot do, and these complementary roles are
inexplicably reassuring as we go farther from
civilization, deeper into utter interdependence.
As we rinse out dirty socks in the lake at an isolated
campsite at dusk, Sophie joins us in the water for a
long, relaxed swim. She moves confidently away from
shore, her long, dark body a vessel in smooth water,
watching birds, clouds, the shoreline, us, paddling in
the element she owns so certainly. This is my aging
girl with the beginnings of cataracts, and at the same
time a creature of places and times wilder than
anything I know. The water loosens our bond
distressingly; at last I swim out to her just to feel
her lifesaving instinct turn her toward me, to see how
she cares for me in water, even though she knows by now
that I don’t need rescuing. She circles me, scratches
me in long whip marks in an attempt to nudge me toward
shore until I acquiesce and she and I swim in
together, reunited and content.
The most telling moment, as always, comes in crisis.
We are on Bald Eagle Lake one afternoon, foolishly
striking out in unreliable weather for a campsite on
the far shore. A hard, sudden wind catches us
port-side and we must tack. I navigate, terrorized,
from the stern with my limited sailing skills, keeping
the bow into the whitecaps just enough to prevent us from capsizing while making some small progress toward shore.
Other than death, Sophie is my greatest worry. Before
she became accustomed to the canoe, she had a habit of
standing and shifting her weight alarmingly if
anything upset her. Now, sitting flat on the cold,
wet bottom of the canoe for stability, I talk softly
to her under the wind’s slap and cry: “It’s okay,
Sophie. Shhhh. Stay, Sophie. Good girl.”
I imagine her jumping up and spilling our fragile
craft, or panicking and leaping overboard in the
middle of the wide, deep lake where we can barely help
ourselves, let alone a shipwrecked Newfoundland. I am
steering with all my strength and Andy is paddling
hard, glancing back at me occasionally with wild,
determined eyes, but Sophie’s reaction will decide our
fate.
My girl holds steady. In the rocking, pounded canoe
she lies still and tense, watching me as if I had a
steak strapped to my forehead. Whatever I do will be
her sign, so as long as I sit tight, so does she.
Because my dog is watching, and because she, or all
three of us, may die if I give her reason to panic or if I
pilot the boat astray, I beat down a fear that has
become almost asthmatic and steer, stroke after cement
stroke, to the island where we will take refuge for
the night.
As we beach the canoe on steep rocks and stumble
ashore, Sophie obeys with a clarity of motion that a
thousand obedience classes never would inspire.
Tonight we are bound, my dog, my husband and I, by
the most primitive survival instincts. We are all
quiet as Andy and I work sweatily, bumping and
dropping everything, to get the tent up and make
dinner before the storm attacks for real. At last
there is food on the Coleman stove: pasta eaten from
the pot with spoons. Sophie, usually ambivalent about
dog chow, has developed a wilderness habit of wolfing
her food the instant it appears in her bowl, and
tonight our common hunger and nervous exhaustion
compels all three of us to snatch and gulp at our meal.
Each of us has felt exactly what the others felt in
these last few hours — consuming, inundating rushes of
fear, companionship, panic, trust, relief, hunger.
The species boundaries have fallen, and I doubt that
they will ever be fully intact again. Today we have
saved each other’s lives. It is the only and ultimate
thing anyone can really know about another person or
animal or about oneself: Could I trust him with my
life? Can she trust me with hers? And there is no
way to get to the answer without first offering up the
life.
This essential need to identify our pack, the ones we
can really trust when crisis strikes, is what takes
people into extreme wilderness situations in an era
when we no longer need to put our lives at risk this
way. In the tent tonight under wind and storm — so
worn out that we ignore the basics of hygiene and fall
together sticky and smelly — woman, man and dog are
unable to sleep without the comforting contact of the
other two, a melange of flesh and fur and Thermarest
that is the only safety.
“Things like this don’t happen to people like us,” my mother blurted to a reporter in December of 1992, hours after I’d won a Rhodes scholarship. She repented mightily of those loose words when the nice reporter put them on the front page of the Minot (North Dakota) Daily News. “Minot Woman Wins Rhodes Scholarship,” he wrote. Minot Woman, one of ours.
My grandmother came up with a brilliant non sequitur when I called. “That’s nice,” she said distractedly. “Did you hear that your cousin Julie was on Studs and her date is a weightlifter?” Nearly every woman in my family has had a baby by the age of 21, and I, perversely, was going to Oxford. This was stepping out of line as surely as if Chelsea Clinton had decided to go to a community college. We tell ourselves that American meritocracy makes all things possible for everyone; it’s the logistics that get tricky, the small details of boldly going where no one like you has gone before.
It was Mom’s comment that pinned me like a bug on a specimen card. Contemplate the absurdity of the scene. No long apprenticeship, no proving yourself through promotions or gigs or publications, just a catapult — at the age of 21 — into your 15 minutes of fame. Your brief, previously undistinguished life reels by with digital clarity: the high-school guidance counselor who called you an underachiever. The coach who cut you from the track team. Even your own mother doesn’t believe this sort of thing happens to people like you.
I began to feel like a sea animal trapped in a tidal pool, exiled in a new and threatening environment, unable to get back to my own atmosphere. Although I had gone to Bryn Mawr rather than the University of North Dakota and said shockingly disloyal things about my intention to leave Minot for good, I belonged to my origins. I was still a Minot Woman. Now the Atlantic stretched wide, a physical manifestation of everything I didn’t believe I could do, or should do. It was that moment of disconnected terror we all experience at the shedding of an old identity and the assumption of a new, inchoate one. We embrace the old; it’s everything we’ve ever been. The new garments we hubristically don may well be emperor’s clothes: a public humiliation that will expose us as poseurs.
At times, the disconnect between old and new is so wide it borders on the schizophrenic. The next autumn in New York, I met the American Rhodes scholars who would fly to London with me that night. Bigger than life they were: football and track stars, an aide to Al Gore, actors, a model who would shortly be one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, scientists who had already published technical papers, a successful entrepreneur, someone who had worked with Mother Teresa. In such company, who wouldn’t wait for a hand at ones elbow, the voice saying there has been some mistake? How can you take your place among this group without displaying the inconceivable arrogance of believing that you belong? And when you must stand and present yourself, do your mother’s awed words come back to you, and is it paralyzing? Elbow to elbow with my new comrades in a 747, I felt pressed up against a cold glass that separated us, me on the outside, them on the inside.
The adjustment to Oxford life wasn’t nearly as difficult as those first hours with the Rhodes class. Few people — certainly not the British — cared who we were, and we made our cultural blunders and discoveries without any intrusive supervision. When I wore a rowing jacket to a session with my supervisor and his kind features rose up in horror, I felt a warm sense of acceptance and nurturing at the idea that he would worry whether I misused my study time.
As foreigners in Oxford we were so free that the rare gesture of semi-parental expectations came as a welcome symbol of belonging. Some of us found, to our great joy, that the burden of success, carefully accumulated throughout frantically busy undergraduate careers, could be laid aside briefly in favor of vivid conversations, sunny afternoons in boats of every variety and voluptuous reading of all the books we’d never had time to open. At its best, Oxford can be a cocoon from which your better self is reborn.
The jolt, then, of returning to the United States was all the more pronounced. It didn’t help that the news came in from every front (friends’ calls and e-mails, publications I stumbled across, even TV once or twice) that other Rhodes of my generation were doing extraordinary things. During a long, despairing year revising my dissertation at Stanford, a sense of vertigo stalked me. I was standing next to a treadmill running at a terrifying speed, unwilling to get on and yet so mesmerized by it and its occupants that I couldn’t walk away. Everyone seemed so sure of themselves, entirely unencumbered by self-doubt or any desire for a different sort of life.
Not that self-doubt is the sort of thing people talk about, especially not young rising stars whose careers rely on an image of invulnerability. Maybe some people don’t feel it. But if you are human, and wake up with a hairdo like the Statue of Liberty, and have no connection to power or influence, and possess a realistic sense of your own importance in the universe, then you understand how truly distant the penthouse looks from the sidewalk below. You may even suspect that the penthouse is not worth having.
The American dream demands that we assimilate. The same dreams and the same roads to them get passed out to all of us, regardless of our histories and secret selves. This is not a plea for sympathy: The few of us who get the golden chances know how lucky we are. But in winning a scholarship, getting the perfect job, starring in a movie, taking first place in a big tournament, or even experiencing more common successes that distinguish one person from the next, we don’t relinquish our connection to the people we were beforehand. If anything, a moment of success provides new clarity about how much the thing you thought you wanted really matters.
That’s how it happened for me. As often happens in moments of indecision, a chance encounter made all the difference. I got the American Oxonian address list one spring morning in California and opened to the name of a Rhodes in Iowa who lists his occupation as “poet and farmer.” Soon after, for no very articulate reason, my new husband and I moved back to his home state of Iowa. There had to be some common ground between Minot Woman and my new identity, and I needed to find it before I went further into the unknown. The possibility of waking up one day to discover that nothing of my previous self existed scared me more than jumping off the treadmill into the cornfields.
In the first weeks, I walked into the long grass behind my in-laws’ house, stood eye to eye with a cow and sighed out the breath I’d held for months. It wasn’t Minot, but it was a place where people would judge me by the way I treated people, admire my home-canned homegrown tomatoes and offer to spend their weekends scraping paint off my cupboards. In short, the real world: my world.
We’ve been here nearly two years. I’ve had several jobs, acquired a house and a Newfoundland dog, planted a garden, made friends with children and farmers and old people. Only from here, in this position of strength, can I walk sturdily away from the treadmill and think about the future free from the star-chamber effect of accumulated expectations. Academic air is too thin, it turns out: I need work that will give me real tools to touch people’s lives and get my hands good and dirty.
I understand at last what my mother meant in those words she regrets. Kneeling in the dirt, planting tomatoes and sweet peas the way Grandma says to in her letters, I am making this otherworldly experience something that does happen to people like us. A woman — a Minot Woman even — can go to Oxford and return to the life she had before without severing the paths to either world.
In the end it wasn’t the Rhodes that widened my horizons, but finding out that the Rhodes is not who I am. No moral, no lesson really, only the peaceful knowledge that ambition will not be my only compass. Failure doesn’t loom as such a Technicolor horror when life’s choices aren’t mutually exclusive, and even the road not taken waits with wildflowers growing in the ditch.
