Motherland
She sits by my side, with our old pug snoring at her feet, laughing at the sitcom we watch every night when I get home. She has no idea of the extent and importance of her role in my life. My mother is my culture.
As I sit with her, I trace the lines on her face and palms and am taken back to Japan, a country that is part of me, but one I don’t fully belong to. Without her hand on my back and her reassuring smile urging me to go on, I would not know how to navigate the great distance between now and before, between Brazilian and Japanese.
She played remixed versions of Japanese music when she picked me up from elementary school, turning folk tales into catchy tunes for her two little girls because, according to her, “the original ones would definitely make you fall asleep.” I grew up singing songs about lovers who become constellations, boys born from peaches who fight demons, and writing our own fairytale endings. I knew these songs by heart long before I knew what they meant. Now, I think to myself, this is what culture is.
As a child, I fell asleep on her lap while watching Hayao Miyazaki movies. I snuck beside her to listen when she was on the phone with her parents, seamlessly code-switching between the melodious Portuguese I knew and the fascinating Japanese that still stirs little recognition in my mind. When she was at work, talking to her clients—surly and serious Japanese businessmen—I watched as she charismatically chatted with them, managing to pry some smiles from their stern faces. At home, I scribbled through my own Japanese homework minutes before class, tired after watching hours of Hollywood romantic comedies with my mother.
Growing up, my mother didn’t cook much, but her repertoire of flavors is uniquely Japanese. Since she worked most days of the week, she would only cook a few meals during the weekends, mostly eggs in the morning, because we would eat the other meals at my grandparents’ restaurant. I also grew up taking some flavors for granted because familiarity breeds normality. Nowadays, my tongue recoils at the taste of many foods I eat when I am abroad, missing the savory tang of soy sauce and pepper in my breakfast. Stepping out of my home is much like this—a constant, unrealized recoiling as these contrasts reveal the extent to which my culture has permeated my childhood.
Sometimes, I take these pieces of my culture for granted. Only in retrospect do they gleam and reflect like an incomplete mirror, showing me a space in a community that I am part of, yet occupy only partially. Only peripherally. I wonder what makes me Japanese. What keeps me tethered to my cultural background now that I am out of my mother’s house and speaking Japanese to no one but my grandparents? What parts of my culture am I leaving behind that I will not discover until I lose them? Am I becoming too Westernized? Am I Japanese “enough”?
Amid these anxieties about my own background, during this quarantine, my mother and I have traded some of our nights watching TV shows for afternoons discussing culture: her upbringing and the tensions that exist between our intersecting cultures. We talk about the culture of respect and filial devotion in Japan, and the informal culture of independence and camaraderie in Brazil. I take a Literature in Exile course in the Spring and am reflecting upon the ways I am influenced by both parts of my Japanese-Brazilian identity. I walk back into my memory, pinpointing and discerning, and I realize my mother is as much my connection to culture as my disconnect from it. My idea of culture, broad as the sky, a blanket over a community of people, tunnels into a single, individual experience of it.
In my educational endeavors, my mother has been my biggest supporter. Upon the recommendation of a third-grade teacher, she enrolled me in an advanced English class and fell in love with my happiness and curiosity about learning new languages. She asks only for me to do what I love. She tells me not to settle or cut my aspirations short for others, for marriage, or for societal expectations. As much as she teaches me about the beauty of my culture, she steadily guides me away from its pitfalls. She tells me about things she wishes she’d known, the mistakes she made following the expectations of the only culture she knew.
In looking back at the ways I have been brought up by my mother, I find an answer to whether I am Japanese “enough.” I know I am neither completely Japanese nor completely Brazilian by virtue of the mixed environment I grew up in—a community of mixed Asians with our own shared culture of experiences. Nonetheless, the legacies that have come down across generations to reach me are Japanese.
I have lived my Japanese culture as much as my Brazilian one, in ways that echo through my life choices. I am Japanese in an unquantifiable manner, a manner so intertwined with who I am today that it is innately “enough.” And, in watching my mother navigate the tensions between what cultural legacies to carry on and what past pains she hopes future generations will live differently from, I have learned more about the cultures in which I exist and have become more aware of the paths I have paved beyond their norms. I know now that my mother is so much more than my bridge to culture. She is my symbol of choice beyond it.