Paint and Okonomiyaki

I love--daresay crave--traveling overseas. I also love meeting new people. All of my experiences traveling abroad center around the same steps: enduring a churning stomach filled with anxiety and excitement for the adventures ahead, hastily packing and rearranging clothes in my suitcase so it won’t pop open mid-flight, and walking around and breathing in the new place as a tourist and foreigner. Tangibility and vulnerability were/are omnipresent through all of those steps and my times overseas. I always end up carrying more baggage with me than I thought. My mind becomes submerged with all the new histories and cultures I find--as well as the partial stories I was taught that go with them--but what troubles me then and now was this: What does it mean to be a foreigner?

In “Stranger in the Village”, James Baldwin writes “Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it”. I believe this is true, for good and bad. We all have our fair share of beautiful and tragic stories of adventure and struggle--especially moments that invite us to reflect. Vulnerability, whether in word or action, is key--I think--to figuring out how we personally fit into the body and identity of “the foreigner”. If I can do nothing else but describe my vulnerability abroad, then maybe that will pave a path towards recognizing the foreigner in me--and possibly others, as well.

There are two distinct places where I had what Teju Cole calls a "body-double moment" in his reflections on James Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village". He describes those moments as when “..the ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant"; an instance in which our actions and presence reflects the past and has an impact on the present. In my case, both of these “body double moments” were connected in some way to my being a foreigner abroad.

August 2012: Ghana

Visiting with friends after teaching a class in Kotokata. 

Ghana is located at the cusp of Western Africa and is surrounded by Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, and the Gulf of Guinea; I was situated in Kotokata Village, a four-hour, bumpy bus ride from Accra, the capital of Ghana. Kotokata contains several different ethnic groups, with Ewe being the most prominent in the village. My job was to teach English to a group of 30 or so kindergarteners, who ranged in age from 4 to 7 years old.

On the second morning of my stay in the village, I had my first “body-double” moment. As I trekked up the hill to the school building with my bag of books and lesson plans, several of my students began to reach for my hands, arms, and/or legs, crowing with laughter as I fumbled from their weight. One of my kindergarten students was rubbing her hand vigorously on my right arm. I turned towards her--halting the entourage of laughs and limbs beside me--and asked what was wrong.

Frown lines outlined her eyes and forehead. She said, “It’s not coming off”.

“What’s not coming off?”

She quickly mumbled some words to her friend, then looked back at me with wide eyes. “The paint.” she said. “It’s not coming off. Why’s it not coming off?”

***

In “Stranger in the Village”, Baldwin explains that “...there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites”. The “Body-double moment” hit me with full force. In that moment, I was a young white woman attempting to help these kids learn English and listen to their stories when decades before 2012 other white men and women trekked to Africa to colonize, to "help" through other, more sinister means. I realized with fear and vulnerability that I wished I was not so ignorant of the lives these children led before I arrived--in that moment, when the paint didn't wear off I felt reminiscent of Cole's words, "I was an interloper; this was not my heritage". I did not want to be placed in contexts of war, of strive, of conquest. But I was unaware, unexperienced, and ignorant. And I could not shy away from history and reality.

My legs buckled a bit and hit the burnt orange dirt.

Why was I there?

Yes, I wanted to help the kids and be a guide for them. Yes, I wanted to travel and see the world outside of my southeast Texas hometown. But, a part of me lingered on this: I was sent there with the intent to change--transform--someone's skills to benefit them. That was "good", right?

One month after my trip to Ghana I gave a talk about my experiences teaching overseas. I told tales of our "exploring time" through the cocoa trees behind the house we stayed in. I shared the stories of the activities we used to learn common English words. English words that described--and hopefully, illuminated--their world. Most of my students were polyglots. They were younger, yet so much wiser, than me. I might have taught them a few English words, but they taught me to be patient. They helped me become a better teacher. A wiser person--a whole person.

The questions I received from the audience shook me to the core:

"Yes, but did they learn English?"

"What was it like in their home?"

"Did it feel weird? Foreign?"

The audience's disregard for the positivity and impact the students had on me, and the other people I traveled with, should have been foreign. But it wasn't.

* * *

Eventually, she and her classmates pulled me up the rest of the way to the school building, clunkily pushed me onto the grass, and began to share their stories--using a vibrant blend of Ewe and English--to pull me out of my "body double" moment and settle into the present. I guess the young girl and her friends knew I was upset. She did not let go of my arm for the rest of the day.

July 2016: Japan

Aerial view of the outskirts of Hiroshima near Yasuda University.

Hiroshima is in southwestern Japan on Honshu island. It's a city rich with overlapping histories of its citizens and foreigners alike, and the backdrop for my second "body double" moment. Through chance and a whole lot of support, I found myself reading The Tale of the Heikke and Black Rain and seeing The Great Torii as part of my MA work. The study abroad trip centered around a Japanese Literature in Context course, and our agenda was to spend three weeks exploring Hiroshima, Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo while reading theory and learning about the history, mythology, and culture of Japan.

My second "body double" moment started with okonomiyaki.

A delicious serving of okonomiyaki from a mom-and-pop restaurant in downtown

Hiroshima

Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) is a Japanese savory pancake that can have different fillings depending on what you like, but this one had cabbage, green onion, noodles, other ingredients, and secret spices with spicy mayo. And man, it tasted divine.

After I shared this dinner with some newfound friends in Hiroshima, my host sister, Aki, went home and told her parents that we needed to make okonomiyaki at home before I left for Kyoto. Two days later, I found myself sitting cross-legged at the dinner table in my too-warm pajamas concentrating on flipping the pancake so it wouldn't burn on one side.

Aki and I had prepped the ingredients and she helped me place them on the hot plate so the conglomeration of veggies, noodles, sauce, and spices would eventually turn into the dish I came to love. We laughed and worked, and the "body double" moment rose steadily--it seemed like the cooking experiences of my ancestors seeped into my bones and hands. So much so that I hastily flipped my wrist and the spatula and the okonomiyaki flipped off the hot place and directly in my host father's lap.

* * *

In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva makes the following observation: "Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder." I'm grateful my host family make the choice to have an American student stay with them, and even more humbled that my host sister and her parents were exceedingly patient and kind to me. Especially when it came to cooking.

But in that moment, my foreignness--vulnerability, excitement, fatigue, embarrassment--became tangible and unhidden and I wanted to huddle in a ball and hide from the world. I failed to recognize in that moment all of our shared foreignness with cooking; everyone has to start somewhere. Although they didn't expect me to flip the pancake off of the hot plate, I'd like to believe my host parents and Aki appreciated my efforts to try and keep trying to learn about Japanese food culture, their customs, and livelihood. My vulnerability and foreignness was, in that moment, welcoming.

The okonomiyaki nightmare, in reality, lasted only a few minutes even though it felt like hours. He let out a huge guffaw, grabbed his translator, and quickly began to type something. A few seconds later, a female, automated English voice said, "Nice try, better luck next time."

Even though there was searing cabbage, noodles, and spices on my host father's pants and shirt, he was grinning ear-to-ear and laughing for the rest of the night.