The Summer of the Ugly Car

Christmas, at our house, encompasses many things and one of those is the gift of remembering. Somewhere after my husband's feast of roast pork cooked on the outdoor smoker, the conversation meanders to tales from the past. These stories usually start with, "remember when?"

This Christmas we joined in a lengthy account from childhood that had nothing to do with fruitcake or Santa, but rather, when my brother, parents and I drove across the United States from L.A. to Richmond, Virginia. The 1970 green Ford Maverick my parents purchased in California was any car owner's nightmare. The used car salesman must have known that my jet-lagged missionary father was a prime target for a car that had been on his lot for much too long. It seemed that from the moment that my brother, parents, and I set out in this vehicle to tour this great country, one disaster after another happened. The worst was when the transmission froze coming down from The Rockies.

Eventually, the ugly thing with the hole in the back floor and no rear windows, did get us to my grandparents' in Virginia, but not without a series of unfortunate events. I recall that summer of 1974, as the summer of swimming in motel pools while our car was being repaired. I think I remember motel water slides much better than I do scenic views of the Grand Canyon.

Stories make our times together traditional and it's fun to watch my children's reactions as well as my husband's. "Did you really almost drive off the Rockies?" "Did you really get told by a policeman that you weren't allowed to have a picnic lunch by the side of the road in Arizona?" "Is it true you threw your suitcases away and had your clothes in trash bags?" That question inevitably gets asked by my husband. He finds it most amusing to hear that we had to abandon our suitcases since they wouldn't fit into the car's small trunk. Mom brought trash bags and we crammed our belongings into those and packed them in the trunk and two had to be placed between my brother and me in the back seat.

To entertain ourselves as we drove through long stretches of scorching deserts and placid wheat fields, my brother and I either fought or listened to cassette tapes on my Sanyo tape player. The melodic voices of Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Young traveled with us.

There are other memories we share, but lately, that trip is one of the most peculiar and fun to recall.

I hope everyone had a festive Christmas and are continuing to gather with family and friends to celebrate, to enjoy, and to remember.

~ Alice J. Wisler is the award-winning author of six novels. The most recent, Under the Silk Hibiscus, is about a Japanese-American family interned in a camp in Wyoming during World War II. You can read more about it here.

Remembering Japanese Kindergarten

1966

On a white sheet of paper I take from my dad’s office, I draw a picture of a square brown home. The front door is created first—smack-dab in the middle—and on either side of it I draw two windows at the lower level and then two matching windows above those. A tree, resembling a stick of broccoli, is on the right side and a clump of three pink flowers sit in the grass to the left.

This is not at all what my house looks like. The house I live in with my parents and brother is creosol-black, rectangular, and one story. In the back yard, we have a mammoth-sized magnolia tree and a cherry tree which the caterpillars love in the spring, but neither of them look a thing like broccoli.

I also draw a picture of my mother. I don’t have to ask Dad for a sheet of paper this time because I’m at kindergarten and each student is handed a thick piece of paper by the teacher. The kindergarten is just a brisk walk from our house, in the opposite direction of the train station. Ogawa-san, our live-in maid, a short woman with short permed black hair and dark eyes, walks with me there each morning and comes to fetch me before lunch.

Days later, moms come to the school for a celebratory Mother’s Day program. Upon arrival, each mother receives a red carnation to pin to her clothing, and then is ushered into classrooms to view some of the best artwork southwest of Tokyo.

Wearing a floral dress, her carnation, and a hint of perfume, my mother enters my classroom, ready to find the portrait I’ve drawn of her.

Removing her sunglasses, she glances around the walls which are decorated with faces. She steps closer in, scanning the heavy oil-based pastel-colored creations. Then with an emphatic sigh, she looks at me. “Alice, where is your picture?”

Gingerly, I move toward the wall. Standing on tiptoes and raising my hand, I point to the motherly face I created in class when all of my Japanese classmates and I were told to draw pictures of our mothers.

Mom studies my artwork as I hold my breath. I’ve given her a nose, mouth, two eyes, hair and even a neck. She looks stunning. I even added a little curl to one of her locks of hair.

She takes another look at my picture and then turns to me—her daughter, her firstborn, her artist. “But, Alice, I don’t have black eyes or black hair!”

Well. Of course not; I know this. Seeing her every day, I know what she looks like. But did she think that I was going to use a brown crayon or blue one to draw her hair and eyes? Really? A whole room of kids seated right next to me did not reach for their blue or brown crayon. It was the black crayon that was popular, did my mother not know this? I’d given her a pair of eyes and hair to match my classmates’ work. She looked just like all of the other mamas on the wall.

Mothers with students in uniforms enter the classroom, mothers with folded sun parasols that kept the bright May sun off of their skin as they walked to the kindergarten for this celebration. One mother smiles at me and says to her son, a tiny boy with rosy cheeks, “Gaijin no ko segatakai desune?” (“The foreign child is tall, isn’t she?”)

My mother’s face tightens. I know this look; it is all too common to me. This is the expression she gives when she feels she has been wronged. It is usually followed by words which are spoken without restraint.

As I tug at the hem of my uniform, I pray. I pray that my Mama doesn’t respond to this woman. For she has been known to say things. Once when children pointed at us in the street and called us gaijin, she pointed back at them and called them gaijin.

But she simply turns her eyes toward me and says matter-of-factly, “I don’t know why you would make my hair black, Alice.”

Relief expands from my lungs. She might not be happy with the picture I have drawn of her but at least she hasn’t mimicked another mother for her rudeness.

There are always worse things that could happen.

I thank God for sparing us all.

The boy snorts and grimaces at me before he and his mother exit the room.

His reaction causes something vile to overcome me and that’s when I know I am back to being myself. As the two of them leave, quickly, I offer another prayer. God, you have my permission to zap him on his way down the steps.

Ready to leave the room, I take my mother’s hand and we follow the other parents and children to another room where we are served hot tea and seaweed crackers.


~ Alice J. Wisler grew up in Japan as a missionary kid. She now lives in North Carolina and writes southern novels (Rain Song and How Sweet It Is were Christy finalists) and teaches writing through grief workshops at conferences across the country. Visit her website here and her Carved By Heart shop where her husband is the artistic one.

Stranger in the Graveyard

I suppose meeting a stranger in a graveyard and inviting him to church is not the strangest evangelism story. The man my brother and I saw was young, curious, and even though he followed us into the cemetery that foggy October afternoon, we weren’t spooked.

At first, we ignored him. There was no malice in our behavior; it was simply our way to cope with what we had to put up with each day—being different. Caucasians in an Asian country stand out, and from our birth, we’d gained the attention of the locals. We adapted to that gaijin (foreigner) role, and learned how to carry it, like an actor plays his part.

On this afternoon, we made the trek up the stone steps to the edge of the graveyard. The tombstones were arranged closely together on tiers, like the way tea grows on the mountainside. Japanese cremate their dead and often the burial plots are squeezed near each other. Trees fenced in the area, and although the subdivision we’d just moved to was new, it was obvious that this cemetery had been around a long time. The gray markers were tinted in green moss, the earth around them clumped with decaying leaves and blades of grass. We felt secluded at this location, as though we were in a make-believe world. Wandering around in this world, we never saw another person.

Until that afternoon. That’s when we met the stranger.

He wore a flashy beret which struck me as odd. Old Japanese men wore hats and young kids wore school caps, but the whole little French look on a young man was a bit peculiar. Slung over his left shoulder was a lumpy black camera bag and in his hands was a Nikon. He looked like he belonged on a set for a movie, not in the silent resting spot for the dead.

Perhaps we’d found ourselves the cemetery photographer.

When he approached us, I refrained from pretending I knew no English and that I could only speak French. My fellow missionary kid friend Jo and I once spouted off fake French to try to deter a man wanting to converse with us in English on a train.

Vince had plopped down on a stone in the shape of a Buddha.

Even though my parents’ work included bringing people from the enlightenment of Buddha to the redemptive light of Jesus Christ, I motioned for Vince to stand up and move away from the stone. I always believed disrespect should not be tolerated inside a cemetery.

The young man smiled and said, “Hello. Do you live in Kuzuha?”

His English wasn’t too bad. I said, “Yeah, we do.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Kyoto International School,” I said.

Vince said little. While I was the talkative one, my brother was subdued.

The conversation continued, with the textbook questions in English until I finally responded in Japanese.

The stranger’s eyes grew wide. “You speak Japanese,” he exclaimed in Japanese.

After that, one thing led to another and this man learned why we were in Japan. Our dad was a pastor.

“Which church?” he asked. “Catholic?”

It seemed that many Japanese associated churches with Catholic.

I told him the church was protestant, gave him name of the language school where the church met and explained that we didn’t have our own sanctuary yet.

When there seemed like there was nothing else to say, I told the man we had to go home now. Vince and I weren’t really finished with our trek among the dead, but it was obvious we wouldn’t be able to amble freely over the ground in seclusion anymore.

In public, we were like characters in a movie and our audience, depending on the time of day, was the commuters on the packed morning train, the shop owners sweeping their front stoops with bamboo brooms, and the drunks teetering home after too many bottles of Asahi beer. With so much fanfare at our presence, there were days I thought of myself as a celebrity. Men and women, even children, acted as though I was not in earshot or couldn’t understand Japanese. But I usually heard every comment. “Here comes the American.” “Isn’t she tall?” “She looks like Princess Diana.” “Look at her blond hair. I would like to touch a strand of it to see how it feels.”

The next Sunday while the small congregation sang a hymn, in walked the man.

When it came time for introductions, held after the nearly two-hour long service, he said his name was Nakayama.

“How did you hear about our church?” my dad asked him in Japanese.

He smiled. “I met your children the other day.”

When Dad asked where, the man said, “In a graveyard.”

He became Vince’s friend. It wasn’t creepy to us even though he was ten years older than my brother. Friendship meant he took Vince out to eat, bought him ice cream and a badminton set. Of course, he practiced his English with Vince, but mostly they spoke in Japanese when out together. He continued to attend our church services.

I'm not sure whatever became of this man but even to this day the story of our encounter continues. It has become part of the remembrances told in our family. “Remember the man you met in the cemetery who came to church?” Mom might say.

We fondly recall that time in our lives, and so many days from our quirky Asian childhood.


~ Alice J. Wisler grew up as missionary kid in Japan in the sixties and seventies. She now writes novels and articles for various publications in Durham, NC. Her first novel, Rain Song, has a Japan connection and is free on Kindle and Nook until the end of this month. Her lastest book is a devotional, Getting Out of Bed in the Morning: Relfections of Comfort in Heartache (Leafwood Publishers).

"I'm Bored!" Three Reactions Parents Have to This Sentiment

So it's the second day of summer vacation and you suddenly hear something that makes you want to smack the wall.

It's your kid and she stands there in front of you and whines, "I'm bored!"

What?! You are certain that your child has taken up a new language, one you don't quite understand.

"I'm bored." With a pair of sad eyes focused on you, she slumps into an armchair, looking like she just might cry.

Your blood boils, your blood pressure rises and you sputter, "What? How? Why?"

There are three reactions parents have when the words "I'm bored" are said to them by an offspring.

First, looming large, is their reaction of guilt. Oh, no, parents think. What is wrong with me? I haven't provided enough for my child. If we had more money then she would be able to go to that wildlife camp in Alaska and have the time of her life. If I wasn't working a fifty-hour week, I could take her to the mall every day. If only . . .

The next reaction parents hold after hearing this line and feeling guilty is one of complete disbelief. "How can you be bored?" asks the mother who is working two jobs to support her family and wishing for just an hour to sit and do nothing. This mother would almost sell her gift certificate for the nail salon just for the opportunity to feel bored (but not quite because her nails are nasty and she would like to have them looking nice in case she does ever get the chance to lie on the beach and do absolutely nothing). "How can you be bored?" this mother repeats as visions of what she'd love to find time to do dance through her head.

Which brings us to the final reaction parents have and perhaps the best one. "You're bored." Calmly stated. No rise in tone of voice or blood pressure. "Good. This is a time for you to learn that from boredom comes creativity." And the father or mother goes into a long discourse about when he or she was a teen and experienced this so-called boredom during the lazy days of summer.

One mother I know well has even been known to say to her children, "Being bored is not at all a bad thing. Growing up in Japan away from all my American friends in a remote area, I learned how to handle my boredom. I learned to cook, to write stories, and my brother and I even invented our own radio show. We called it Talk a Mile a Minute and recorded each episode on a cassette recorder. It was a spoof on the Japanese radio shows that promised music but talked more than they played music." (This particular mother's teen-aged children are so sure she is wacko that they would rather be bored to tears than listen to her go on about those old days. They silently recant to their rooms.)

So this summer, when your kids say they are bored, say, "Good. You will appreciate what you gain from this experience when you are older. This is the time to discover the artist within, the writer, the reader, the dancer, and the chef." And if that doesn''t send your kids into a nirvana of happiness, then as a final line, it is perfectly okay to say, "There is a house to be painted, a car to be washed and a lawn to be mowed." Watch for their fearful faces before you hand them a bucket and then it is fine to ask, "Are you still so bored?"

And leave it at that.

Alice Wisler writes southern fiction from her home in North Carolina. She's the author of the novels RAIN SONG, HOW SWEET IT IS, HATTERAS GIRL and A WEDDING INVITATION from Bethany House and STILL LIFE IN SHADOWS from River North/Moody. Her newest devotional, GETTING OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING, is a companion through grief and loss. Thanks to the bored days of the summers of her youth in Japan, Alice learned to cook, write, fight with her younger brother and co-host the radio show, Talk a Mile a Minute. Check out her recent radio blogs and writing workshops.

Abandoning Suitcases to See the Country in a Ford Maverick

My first encounter of being a nomad was when we had to abandon our suitcases. Up until that time, I had never walked away from perfectly good items that belonged to me. Missionaries and their children know the value of hanging onto things. For a long time. That’s why they recycle everything, especially clothes and aluminum foil.

It’s a daunting task to leave two large suitcases in a parking deck and then drive away. But the need to do this was unavoidable. As much as they tried, there was no way that my parents could cram those two large Samsonites into our recent purchase, a 1970 Ford Maverick.

Had my parents been the hippie-types with tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans, I might have felt the leaving behind of suitcases as an anti-establishment protest. On to living with less, peace, hang loose, smile, go with the flow!

But neither my dad nor my mom were of that nature. Dad wore ties. He didn’t own a pair of Levi’s or Wranglers. Mom’s hair was always neatly permed, and like Dad, she only reminisced about once wearing dungarees.

When we abandoned our suitcases, I was afraid that the police were going to come after us, citing us for leaving items on the pavement next to a lonely metal trash can.

As Dad pulled away from the deck, I waved good-bye to those items that had successfully carried our clothes over the Pacific Ocean. Sadness as well as fear crept in. What kind of people had to throw away suitcases? Who had my parents become?

I worried until I heard laughter. My parents were laughing. It really couldn’t be all that bad then, could it?

“Look at us,” said Mom as my father grinned. “Look at us.”

As we sailed down the streets of Los Angeles in the Maverick, the wind blowing my blond hair, Mom, reminding Dad to drive on the right side of the road, I managed a smile. My brother was already making himself comfortable, resting against the plump trash bags that separated us in the back seat.



When my parents realized that the suitcases were going to have to be emptied, Mom rushed across the street from the hotel to purchase plastic trash bags. Our clothes were stuffed into these bags; three in the trunk and two plunked between my brother and me. For the next month, we would not be living out of suitcases, but out of trash bags.

We were on our way to see America from coast to coast. In a green Maverick. With two doors. And no air conditioning. A tiny hole in the back floor consumed my attention as Mom guided Dad to the Interstate. I could see the road from that hole.

Look at us!

I’m not sure which aspect of this picture should have alerted my parents to their mistake. It would be only a few days later when the car broke down for the first of many times that they would realize that this was car was a product of jetlag mixed with naivety. I’m sure the used car salesman knew he had a real live fresh-off-the-boat sucker when my dad entered his lot. Who else would have paid sticker-price in cash for this clunky heap of metal?

*

We traveled from motel to motel, seeing America along the way. When we grew bored, my brother Vince and I smacked, pinched and punched each other over the trash bags between us. We listened to music on a battery-operated Sanyo cassette player. We ate Milky Way bars and wondered what our friends were doing back in Japan.

The motel swimming pools were my respite and we spent plenty of time in them as the Maverick got repaired in various shops.

Mom broke down and prayed one morning after handing me a Pop-tart. I don’t think the Pop-tart made her cry because in her prayer she only asked God to please get us back on the road again. She grew tired of the trip. Apparently, the thrill of driving from L.A. to Richmond, Virginia lost its luster after a week. She wanted a place to lay her head, familiar faces (in addition to ours) and a residence to call home.

I overcompensated for her dismay, acting like this nomadic life was perfect for me. I was no wimp, I could handle it. Daydreaming played a big role as it had in Japan. Only in this country, I daydreamed about meeting and actually talking to one of the cute guys I’d seen at the pool. Of course, I knew it was only dreaming. There was no way I knew how to approach a real American guy, even one my own age. Besides, these born and bred males couldn’t understand me, my culture, or the language I spoke. So I just swam, glanced at them when I was sure they weren’t looking and continued to dream. In my dreams, I wasn’t wearing hand-me-down clothes out of a trash bag and I always knew what to say. I sure had everyone mesmerized.

Days later, my daydream was interrupted when our car nearly went over a cliff. This time the ol’ Maverick had suffered a frozen transmission on the way down from the Rocky Mountains. Dad was able to break the car just before it dove off the side of a steep embankment.

After the tow truck came, and we found a motel room near the repair center where the Maverick was taken, the four of us huddled on our knees, thanking God for sparing us.

“Thank you, God, for protecting us,” Mom prayed and each of us added our own amen to her flow of gratitude. I think she was ready to abandon the Maverick after that and take a plane to Richmond where her parents were anticipating our arrival.

But Dad insisted that we had more of this great country to see.

And so, once the car was repaired, we set out again to continue.

In between my daydreams, I thought about our home we'd left behind in Japan, about the local candy shop where I bought bean paste frozen treats on sticks, green tea candy and cans of iced coffee. The streets that led to home and the houses of my American friends in Osaka and Kyoto seemed long ago and far away.

But somewhere outside of Kansas City around midnight, when my brother elbowed me off his side of the back seat in his familiar fashion, I realized that for now, in this old car with him and my parents, was home-----no matter where our travels took us.

~ Alice J. Wisler is an author of five novels, speaker, and writing instructor. She grew up in Japan as a missionary kid and continues to wonder about what home is, where it is, and what it means. Her lastest book, Getting Out of Bed in the Morning: Reflections of Comfort in Heartache (Leafwood Publishers) is a companion through grief and loss---loss of a loved one, broken relationships, loss of health and dreams. Read more about this new devotional here.

Crying with my Ancestors

Sometimes I think you need a little of your own history in order to be able to understand history. I can’t remember never knowing about those relatives. They were on my Grandma Hall’s side, residing on the farm in Amelia County, Virginia. Patsie — we never call her Grandma — would sit at her oak dining room table, framed by the gold wall paper and talk about these people — Nonnie, Lou, Ralph and countless others, all making my head swim with Old Relative Fatigue.

Although I had visited the country, fed the cows and had my picture taken in front of the tobacco crop, I had yet to value these relatives. By the time I met them, they were well over sixty, country folk, and most with only an eighth-grade education. I was a city-raised missionary kid, spending my childhood in Japan. These relatives hugged me too often and acted like they knew me. After the turkey sandwiches, lemonade and a few rides on the porch swing, I was eager to go home.

As a college student and throughout my early twenties, whenever I’d sit around her dining room table eating fried chicken, biscuits and salad, I’d hear some anecdote from Patsie’s farm-raised days. At age seven, she played in the field one gloriously sunny day instead of sticking to her chore — picking tobacco. She recalled the spanking for her disobedience. Classmates at the county school teased, calling her “Tar Heel” because she and her family had moved from North Carolina, the Tar Heel State, to Virginia. As if this wasn’t bad enough for a young girl to endure, she was also ridiculed for her freckles. Hearing that freckles disappeared if washed with the early morning dew, Patsie often scrubbed her cheeks and nose with the moisture. Not only did her brothers laugh at her for this ritual, but her freckles remained.

Affectionately, Patsie told tales of her sisters and brothers, and Aunt Chachi, who lived with Mama, Papa and the children. What kind of name is Chachi, I would muse. Patsie talked about them like they were a part of us, which made me feel I should be interested. So I’d pose a question or two. Other than my infrequent remarks, it was mostly just Patsie reminiscing as the sun sank into the horizon, ending another day. I don’t have time for this, I’d think. There were exams to study for, dates to go on, and a big world I wanted to travel.

A short while ago, I took my children to visit Patsie. The now ninety-year-old silver-haired woman sat in the red winged-back chair and somewhere in the hot, sleepy summer afternoon I was aware she was again filling me in on the relatives of Amelia County.

I listened to accounts of Ralph and Nonnie and the others. I learned that of her eight siblings, four were still living. Her sisters had recently paid her a visit from the country. They’d brought blueberry preserves and apple pie.

But what I really wanted to learn was much more emotional than preserves or pie. I found my voice asking about Johnny, her youngest sibling. Of course I’d heard the tragic story before; Patsie had told it as she recalled all the other stories. Johnny had been on the running board of the car when he was twelve. Carl, his older brother, had been driving. “Don’t let the boys ride on the running board,” Patsie’s father had warned, but Carl hadn’t listened. Over a bump on the country road, Johnny slid off the running board to his death.

Of all the times I’d heard this story, I’d never cried. But on this afternoon in July, the tears welled and curved along my cheeks. Reaching for the photo album on the coffee table, I held the black-and-white photo of my great-grandmother and looked into her young face. I touched her hair and arms. I knew these arms ached because they no longer were able to hold her precious Johnny. “I know, I know,” I whispered at her picture. While blood had united us as relatives, the more definitive bond was that we were both bereaved mothers. For I, too, had a child die — my son, Daniel. It had not been a car accident, but a cancer-related death.

Although there were six decades between the deaths of Johnny and my Daniel, as mothers our lives had no doubt been similar after the deaths of our sons. Days of anguish, doubt, sorrow and frustration of having chores to do and other children to care for when our newly-broken hearts begged us to sit and sob. I cried for this woman in the black hat; I cried for me.

These days, I am listening to the tales of those relatives. I sit on the edge of my chair and take it all in. For those relatives, though far removed from my city life, are a part of me. Patsie believed they always were. It just took awhile and some history of my own to recognize this.

~Alice J. Wisler wrote this article in 2002 for The Urban Hiker. She is the author of five inspirational novels, including Still Life in Shadows. All of her novels have a component of grief and loss. Her devotional, Getting out of Bed in the Morning: Reflections of Comfort in Heartache, arrives on bookshelves this December. In addition to writing, Alice teaches workshops on writing through the turmoils of life. Visit her website: http://www.alicewisler.com

Growing up as an Outsider

It’s never a good day when you feel those jolts of fear moving up and down your spine like someone’s wired you to an electric circuit. But as she studied my face, I felt them, and I knew without a doubt that I’d done something wrong.

It was Mother’s Day 1967, and the neighborhood kindergarten I attended invited moms to the school for a celebratory program. Each mother received a red carnation to pin to her clothing and then was ushered into classrooms to view some of the best artwork this side of Tokyo. Wearing a floral dress, her carnation, and a hint of perfume, my mother entered my classroom, ready to find the portrait I’d drawn of her.

Removing her sunglasses, she glanced around the walls. She stepped closer in, scanning the heavy oil-based pastel-colored creations. Then with an emphatic sigh, she looked at me. “Alice, where is your picture?”

My picture! We were right in front of it. Could she not see? Although worry clouded my mind, even so, I held it together. Don’t make a scene, never draw attention. Gingerly, I moved toward the wall. Standing on tiptoes, I pointed to the motherly face I had created.

Mom looked at the oval shape that held black eyes, red lips, and locks of black hair.

I had colored a little out of the lines, so there was some pink crayon—the color I’d used for her necklace—rubbed into her collar, but overall, the portrait was one I was pleased with. I smiled at Mom, expecting her to smile back.

There was no smile. “Alice,” she cried, “I don’t have black eyes or black hair.”

With feet now planted on the classroom floor, I avoided her expression. Seeing her every day, I knew what she looked like. But did she think that I was going to use a brown crayon or blue one to draw her hair and eyes when the other children were sharing the popular black crayon? So, I gave her a pair of eyes and hair to match my classmates’ artwork.

Knowing I was a foreigner was as familiar to me as the frequented candy store. Even so, I wanted to blend in. I tried to be inconspicuous, never stand out, or be different, noticed, pointed at, and ridiculed. However, with blond hair, brown eyes, and a light complexion, and even tall by American standards, I was clearly unique in a country where black hair, olive complexions, dark eyes and short statures were dominant.

I was born in Osaka, on a frosty January night in a hospital across from a Hankyu train track. I don’t know if I was born on the right or wrong side of those tracks, but I do know that I had a perfectly shaped round head and was as bald as a snow man. My head was unscathed because I didn’t use it to push through the birth canal. Later, I would realize that I was born lazy and would have to fight that tendency especially when it came time to do my chores or complete algebra homework.

Naturally, my parents gave me a name at birth but the locals called me something else. Gaijin. They called my friends with blond hair the same thing and even that pesky kid who tried to look up my skirt in third grade. (He was cute and gave me a Valentine, but he was still nasty.) My father, mother, and baby brother were also called gaijin.

The Chinese characters for the word gaijin are soto jin, meaning outsider. In Japan this takes care of anyone who is not a native of the nation of Japan, which comes to just about ninety-six percent of the world.

When a small child would see me and lift his finger to point, I wanted to disappear. My mom would sometimes point her finger back at the kids and call them gaijin which only embarrassed me more and made the kids laugh and scream all the louder. Didn’t she know we were to be seen but not heard? Never cause a ripple; be the good American. Besides, they didn’t realize that what she was doing was more than mimicking them; she was calling them foreigners. They didn’t understand that to outsiders like us, even they were soto jin.

One afternoon, young Japanese boys that often slid over the concrete wall from the nearby apartment complex, came to the hospital compound to play. Standing in a grassy field of clover, they saw my little brother by a large oak tree. Picking up stones, one yelled, “Gaijin!” Quickly, in chorus, the other boys followed suit. Stones flew past Vincie, some landed at his feet, while others bounced off the tree trunk. Vincie made his way to our front gate, entered it, and escaped into our home. To his advantage, the kids didn’t have the best aim, and physically, he was unharmed.

Occasionally, the sisters of these boys came over to find me, calling out, “Arisu-chan, asobo!” (“Alice, let’s play.”) Unlike their brothers, they were kind and sat with me in the clover field behind the hospital, weaving crowns and necklaces out of clover for me to wear. Seated beside them in the mass of green, I wanted to play dolls and house as I did with my missionary neighbor Jo Jo. I was weary of being asked the same questions, talked about as if I couldn’t understand, and being stared at.

~*~*

At the time I had no clear concept of the United States, my country of passport, but one day, I would be reminded of how different it was from this crowded island. In my teen years, I would long for things about it, yet not understand most of its ways, and wonder how I fit in.

Little did I know, but I would have a lifetime of figuring out how to fit in.

~ An excerpt from Alice J. Wisler's Childhood on the Train, a memoir in progress. Alice is also the author of five novels, including Rain Song (Christy Finalist) and Still Life in Shadows. Her devotional, Getting Out of Bed in the Morning: Reflections of Comfort in Heartache is slated for publication in January. Visit her website: http://www.alicewisler.com

Childhood on the Train

We know that any "seasoned" woman or man from an older generation is accused of telling anecdotes of how as a child she/he used to have to walk to school uphill in the snow. For at least ten miles. Without a warm coat. I didn't have to walk in the snow to school, but I did have to ride the train. That was forty-seven minutes to school and forty-seven minutes back. "So," I tell my kids, "Your mother had it rough." But looking back, I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything.

We were six years old when we started riding the Hankyu line to school in the sixties from Awaji to Karasuma. During the winter mornings, the windows steamed up and we wrote our names on them. In the late afternoons, we crocheted long red scarves, tried to make sense out of math homework, and avoided conversing in English with Japanese men with brief cases.

You had to know a thing or two in order to be a proficient train rider, and the younger children learned the ropes from the older kids.

Rule number one was to walk briskly out our gates from our missionary homes. Once the five of us blond-haired American kids gathered, we marched past the incinerator behind the Yodogawa Christian Hospital, out the hospital gates, to the left, toward the station. Sometimes at 7 AM there was a dusting of frost on the grass. Sometimes one of us lagged behind due to racing back for forgotten homework or a lunch box. We had to pick up the pace; we had a train to catch and it would, sure as tofu is made from bean curd, not be late---even if we were.

Once the train pulled into the station, doors slid opened and passengers boarded the already packed car. Gloved station attendants pushed commuters onto the cars as the whistle blew. Inside the car, we lifted book bags onto the luggage racks or held them between our feet. Then we grabbed the hand rails—loops of plastic suspended overhead—as the train picked up the pace toward Kyoto.

The next rule was to be extremely quiet as the train doors opened at Takatsuki-shi. I think we heard David O talking to himself even before he boarded the car. We held our breath and closed our eyes, as though those actions would keep him from spotting us. As silent as we were, he always managed to find us.

"Hey," he said one morning so that passengers five cars down could hear. "I got this new chemistry set. Wanna see it?" He hoisted a brown square bag.

No one responded.

David O nudged me, his elbow poking both me and a woman trying to read a paperback. "It's really cool."

I was shy, especially around a boy who was two years older than I. While the other kids engaged in conversation leaving me alone to talk to David O, I shook my head and clung to the handrail.

At last, sensing he was being ignored, and the train was too congested to show us vials and test tubes anyway, he offered to show it to us later.

The third rule came into play at our destination. Immediately, when the doors opened, we were to head up the platform stairs as fast as we could. We raced past ladies in gray kimono and weaved between businessmen so that we could be first in line at the taxi stand.

Our final part of our journey was to ride a cab (five of us missionary kids packed into one Nissan) for six miles to our tiny international school where spelling tests and math equations greeted us. At recess, we enjoyed games of Kick the Can and Red Rover, Red Rover.

I have fond memories of those long treks to school. I smile to think how unusual we must have seemed in a land where the natives all had black hair and dark eyes, were dignified and soft-spoken. We were blond, tall, loud and rowdy.

And as for David O and his chemistry set, I did get to see it. One afternoon on a rather empty train car, he spread his set of chemicals and glass beakers onto the seat. As the train rounded a field of rice paddies, the whole car jerked, and my friend Josephine and I watched the green seat turn red and yellow. The conductor raced out of his compartment in a fury, yelling at the Canadian boy for damaging the train seat. David O hung his head while the conductor covered the stained seat with mounds of newspaper.

Which brings me to the next rule for riding the trains---this one became extremely important for survival. When the train conductor fumed over a spilled chemistry set, it was best to run---not walk---away as fast as possible.

And as Josephine and I crouched inside another car, we closed our eyes and were silent, hoping that perhaps no one would notice that we had anything to do with the boy who had caused a scene.

~ Alice J. Wisler grew up in Japan where she rode the train to and from school and dreamed of being an author. Now she lives and writes in Durham, NC and looks forward to the release of her fifth novel, Still Life in Shadows from River North. Her other novels are: Rain Song, How Sweet It Is, Hatteras Girl and A Wedding Invitation (all published with Bethany House). She also teaches writing workshops, both online and at conferences. Visit her website.