Leaving Gently

Waking early a few mornings back, I spent the night with my life as an English teacher flashing before me. My six month stint finished and I am called to account. So what do I have to say for myself? 

Right now all I can think of is Y. She has three young children and attended an English class with me on a Wednesday morning with her son, T, who is close to 3 years old. Every week, in response to my question how are you, she says busy. On my last day another mother, T, asked the School Director to take a photograph of us and in the late afternoon she returned to the School with the photo, requesting it be given to me. Y’s expression in the photo, although literally masked, looks like a quiet request for help. Am I right? Does it matter? Am I nervous I left something behind? The keys, my passport, my wallet, my lip balm, the directions, the usual pat down? Perhaps it is me that is quietly requesting help? The thing is, when I was facilitating the classes for the little ones and their mums, I felt a very natural desire to help. These women perhaps had relatively easy lives and help was not what they needed, but in this 30 – 40 minute moment, I could, I thought, offer something settling. I wanted to be part of the village. This is an interesting reflection for me. If I did leave something behind I hope it was a gesture of kindness and care. And a salute to what it takes to keep a family’s heart beating, when, given all, one must still attend an English class for their 2 year old.

M. Who teased me in my penultimate week. Offering gifts. Like the clock on the wall or the illustration of the spilled salad in their lesson book, or the staple found wedged in the carpet, or the old pencil bereft of lead. I want to call her a woman. But she is a girl, about 8. With a sophisticated sense of humor and someone I would like to call a friend. M with her compatriots, G, K and S created the scaffolding for each class. Unfortunately I had no skill in behavior management. So they played merrily on the metal bars while I continually clobbered myself. I am not against behavior management. We had training in the use of stars and teams. Stars for positive reinforcement and teams to create the will to behave well. I just couldn’t pull it off. I watched other teachers do this flawlessly. But I felt like a dickhead trying to make it all work. I was very clumsy. And I couldn’t fool my charges. The really interesting thing about this class was that it was my favorite class. That is, while it was M, K and G. When S arrived, the dynamic changed and things went awry. M decided it was her role to ensure S was included, K decided she needed to be in charge of the games. G decided; actually G doesn’t decide, he is a gut man, he just Does, that he had a partner in crime. S couldn’t believe his luck. Many times I tried to riff off their antics. Listen, watch, feel carefully for my moment and jump in, building on the momentum they had created. This worked really nicely sometimes. But not all the time. These kids had spent the day at school, after school they spent an hour with a Japanese teacher learning English grammar, now they had an hour with me. Susan sensai. When it was three it was an organized mess, with four it pretty much was just a mess. On my last day M said “Sensai, present?”. I said. “Oh the clock, or the spilled salad?” M said “House” and “pocket”. She sat down with me and gave me a wrapped gift. It was a small towel. The kind Japanese people use to dry their hands after washing them in public bathrooms. The kind to reside in one’s pocket. My towel had the design of a house on it. M showed me her towel. It was exactly the same. Then the card. The envelope stuck down with the English letters M and S. Momoko and Susan, she said explicitly. I love her. 

“Susan Sensai!” Susan Sensai!” Says S as he gives me a Chinese burn, aimed at securing my attention, but lulling me into a quiet reverie. Imagine a 4-5 year old boy seeking to hurt me by putting all his energy into his face rather than his hands (eyes bulging, mouth twitching, jaw tightening). Fortunately for me Sota’s Chinese burn felt like a delicate massage. Poor Sota however looked like he was somewhere between the clean and jerk. He did get my attention though. I miss his Chinese burns. I miss him.

Writing these reflections…I think…I really liked this…I liked this job. But as it happens I didn’t. This is confusing. The students were easy to like. All of them. Every person I met. I liked. I am a little prone to over-liking. A bit gushy. I can over-like many people at one time. I am using this adverb (I had to ask Cameron if ‘over’ used in this way was an adverb – he’s the Go-to-Grammar expert in our relationship) because it sometimes doesn’t feel sustainable and I worry that there may be something neurotic about my liking behaviour. I am sensitive. I feel nervous regularly that people don’t like me back or that I have done something terminally wrong, but nevertheless I keep liking. I guess there is bound to be a direction toward a reflected sense of self. That’s difficult to shift. But beyond all my neuroses I do think there is a true enjoyment of other humans and their ways and the interactions I subsequently experience. And being in a different country adds an element that complements the attraction, because now I am even more curious than usual. So how strange to be unequivocal in my negative feeling for a job that enabled access to the same approximately 100 Japanese people every week across 30 or so weekly classes? I have a few theories but the one I find most convincing today is that something about the job, took away something fundamentally human, I can’t tell you what this is, but it felt like a small chunk from my side was missing. And like a drunk person overcompensating for their drunkness by trying to appear very un-drunk, I tried to appear very human, or very un-non-human. But this only exacerbated a sense in me that something was missing. This is confusing still. My brief foray into studies on Personhood, while researching ways to care for people with dementia, taught me that one is human when one is in connection with other humans. At least that reductionist statement is how I interpreted the literature at the time. Clearly, I was with many humans and I would say I felt connected. But walking through the doors of the schools in which I worked, literally inspired me to draw a deep breath in and hold, hoping it would fill the missing part and keep me from despairing. This leads me to my next neuroses, ‘over-thinking’, and a quiet tap on my shoulder suggesting it’s best to leave this one here.

I have been fortunate to spend time with students and Japanese acquaintances outside of the classroom. Some evening gatherings where I drank too much. Nomunication – a portmanteau of nomu (drinking) and communication, a less popular term now (because of its ‘power harassment’ connotations) but echoing still the delight of many Japanese people, and me it turns out, in using alcohol to speak liberally and honestly about all matters personal – a cultural force. Some day time invitations which took Cam and I into people’s homes, experiencing hospitality and a fluid back and forth, learning about each other without alcohol but perhaps the equally lubricating properties of green tea. There is nothing confusing about these experiences. I feel at all times, when meeting students outside of school, or new friends in their homes entirely natural, entirely human and entirely happy. Perhaps there is something about the context of teaching with a large eikaiwa that is disagreeable?

Other experiences have felt like something from a story book. Visiting Shikemichi some time ago, an old preserved town, I found myself gazing in a shop window. I was curious about what the shop was selling. Second hand goods? Was it a thrift store? What would someone find in there? My staring was noticed by an older woman who came outside the shop and in Japanese seemed to be telling me to wait a moment. She returned to the shop and seemed not to return so I left my post and wandered about, only to be found again by the woman and again, I think, asked to wait a minute. This time she disappeared into a small food outlet. I waited. She did not come. I decided I was wrong again. I was after all acting on pure instinct not on anything I understood. I began walking toward home. Until I heard a beckoning. And the woman. Walking quickly to catch me. We reached each other. And she handed me a plastic bag, lifting the contents from it and explaining something to me in Japanese. I received the bag from her graciously, a little surprised to be gifted food from a stranger. Perhaps she cared for homeless people. Perhaps I looked homeless. I found an interesting place to sit beside a bridge by one of the canals. I ate the okonomiyaki. This word I understood.

I have watched many older women walking around town with shopping trolleys, small women, sometimes with backs so hunched it seems impossible that they could walk. But their mobility is on the contrary exceptional. They remind me of crones from old tales. They are not ugly. They are evocative. I am so drawn to them I fear I may meet my fate if I stray too far. But I need to hear something old and true and wise. One woman might of course tell me a story about abuse, about abandonment, about work so hard her back almost broke, or she might say ‘I am 103’, what do you expect gaijin! There are over 80,000 centenarians in Japan. It’s possible!

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For now, while Cam and I consider ways to make money and meet our visa requirements, we will head to Hida. Hida is a town in Gifu prefecture, not too far from where we currently live in Nagoya. It is a forested and mountainous area. We will be participating in a volunteer program at a recreation centre, working in exchange for accommodation and food. We will stay from Oct 1 for a few weeks. The center closes in November because the weather becomes seriously cold. We are looking forward to an extended time outside the city walls. We are looking forward.