Spiss drikk og dœre glad

The first time I visited my grandpa’s farm in rural North Dakota, I was less than a month old. Ever since then, we’ve gone south of the border during most holidays and whenever we could catch a free long weekend. I forever craved knoephla and a patty melt on marble rye from the diner in town. My grandpa would talk to other farmers there when we went for dinner, each with eyes bluer and brighter than the last.

In August, I'd sit in the combine while my grandpa harvested soya beans. I wore cute little cowboy boots and sang Tim McGraw at the top of my lungs. It was no secret that early Taylor was my favourite. Once in an overpriced biography, I read that she used to straighten her hair every morning before high school because she was embarrassed of her natural curls. I remember feeling a tinge of guilt that my hair was naturally straight, I'd never understand that kind of shame.

We always spent Christmas with my American side. My mom said Lutheran services were best because they kept it brief. I agreed, adding that the German version of Silent Night was nice, too. Then we’d eat ham and scalloped potatoes, cookie salad and green bean casserole. In my aunt’s house hung a sign that read “spiss drikk og dœre glad.” Eat, drink, and die happy. We all followed suit. My early holiday memories smell of cigarettes and gasoline, surrounded by smiling faces as white as December snow. It felt like home. I could always find warmth in a state so damn cold.

As I got older I started noticing the stares when we’d walk down the aisle on Christmas eve. As a kid, I told myself it was because my sister and I were just so beautiful, we must be putting all these small town girls to shame. Later, I realized it was because we looked different from most people in the German church, on the white side of town. Maybe if they got closer they’d see that my mom and I have the same nose. If they had started a conversation they would’ve heard my prairie lilt and been assured; or even more confused. I didn’t understand how we were so different. I’d been staring at my mom’s blue eyes and blonde hair for 20 years and of course I knew I didn’t look like her. But she was still my mom.

I didn’t feel out of place until in the small farming town. We had more in common than I did with Asians. Every Japanese kid I knew ate home cooked traditional meals with chopsticks and cha. Most of my childhood was filled with Kraft Dinner and different variations of Hamburger Helper. The only language in our household was English, and when classmates would ask me where in Japan I was from, I’d timidly tell them that I was from Canada (and the United States upon my mother’s request.) Kids would roll their eyes, annoyed that I was being ‘politically correct.’

When other students spoke about pickled herring and lefse my ears would perk up and I’d chirp in excitedly. Often I was met by furrowed brows. 

“You’re not Norwegian,” they’d state. “You’re Asian.” 

Like I didn’t know.

I’d explain that my mom was Scandinavian and they’d nod, clearly unconvinced. Even though most of them only had one Scandinavian parent, I guess it helped that their other parent was also white. Everyone understood what biracials were until it came to culture. Just because my Japanese genes were dominant didn’t mean the culture was, too. 

I was tired of disappointing my white peers by not being straight out of a manga. (They especially didn’t like it when I told them that real Japanese women weren’t all two-dimensional with big tits.) It quickly became clear that I wasn’t the silent, sexualized stereotype they had been hoping for.

Looked down upon for not knowing a country I was generations away from, nobody cared that my Grandpa was born here. It didn’t fit their narrative of a Japanese-Canadian so they chose to set it aside. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that my family might’ve been in Canada as long as they had. Deemed it impossible for an Asian to be anything other than a foreigner. 

Peers and their parents would chastise me for never having been to Japan. (First of all, it’s expensive, just because we’re Japanese doesn’t mean we get a discounted plane flight.) They couldn’t understand that I’d be a stranger in that country, same as them. Refused to comprehend that I might not want to go to the place everyone called my motherland, only to inevitably be rejected.

So, I go back to the farm, where the wheat fields always welcomed me with open arms. Now that I live further away I get nostalgic for rommegrot and krumkake. I wish I could sit by the lake with a book and go into town for supper and be surrounded by people that felt like me, even if we looked different. I still want what every good Midwest Norwegian wants; to eat, drink, and die happy.