Prologue
I still remember it like it was yesterday. The day that my father told me we were moving to Japan. I knew that something was up because he had taken me out to a nice restaurant; something which was out of the ordinary for him. I was excited by the news, which came some months my mother’s passing. Although he didn’t say it in as many words, I think that even at the age of 9 I on some level understood and even agreed with my father’s reasoning: He wanted to get away from it all by starting a new life in a foreign land. Although I was excited at first, the following years mostly saw things get worse.
Things didn’t improve once we got to Tokyo. Once the school year started, it felt as if my classmates wanted nothing to do with me. I figured that it was because my Japanese wasn’t very good, and so over time, I became obsessed with making sure that I could speak Japanese perfectly. For most of my first year in the country, I would do very little after I got home from school but do my homework and practice my Japanese. I also gained an obsession with my appearance, making absolutely sure every day before school that my hair, face, and uniform looked exactly as they should. Some time passed, however, and I eventually realized that it wasn’t working. What I learned was that there wasn’t anything I could do to make people like me. I could try to change who I was, but at the end of the day, I was still a white kid from California who, as those around me saw it, was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. From this, I learned that in Japan, it didn’t matter who you were. You could come from anywhere, have any skin color, be young or old, and you would always be the “weird foreigner;” unable to truly fit in no matter how long you had been there.
As for my father, I don’t think starting a new life really helped him much. After a while, we started mostly going our separate ways after I got home from school and he got home from work aside from us eating dinner together in silence. At the time, I didn’t really mind (I’ve always been the kind of person who values his alone time), but looking back on it, that sort of dynamic couldn’t have been good for someone at that age. If there’s a silver lining to this chapter of my life, it’s that it enabled me to be more self-sufficient than most people my age, something which became invaluable for me a few years later.
After a few years in Tokyo, I suppose my father realized that living there wasn’t making him feel any better about the loss of his wife, and so he decided that it was time for us to move again, this time to a quieter, smaller town in the south. It was at this point that I really stopped feeling sorry for my father. Whereas before, it felt like we were both in the same boat, it now felt as if I was simply being dragged along with whatever he decided to do, unable to do anything about it at the age of 11.
But in some ways, things got better for me after the move. My father started giving me an allowance, which I suspect he did in order to help me keep my mind off my mother. It didn’t work, and I continued to lay awake at night imagining what could have been if she were still on this Earth, just I had done before. It did, however, have one positive, if unintended, effect. It allowed me to take part in a hobby that I had previously only been able to see others do on the internet. In Tokyo, when I wasn’t busying myself with homework or Japanese practice, I found solace in watching people repair electronics on YouTube. It captivated me, the way they would seemingly bring these old devices back to life, almost as if they were playing God, in some sense. I wanted to try that for myself, and so I saved up my allowance money to buy a soldering iron and a late 90s PC that was listed on eBay as being “for parts.” It took me over a month of research and testing, but I was eventually able to get it working again. I was very proud of what I had done, especially as a 12 year-old who in the past had spent a great deal of time watching adults do the same thing. From this, I learned a valuable skill that I would carry into the future.
Although things continued to improve, they still weren’t great. I was, after all, still a 12 year-old with no mother and an absent father. Although I did as best as someone at that age could at being self-sufficient, I was still unsure of what to do with myself, moving from day to day unsure of what my future would hold. But like so much in my life, this too would change, as soon after my 13th birthday, Charlotte Anderson moved into my neighborhood and changed my life for the better and, some would argue, for the worse.