dreaming of Japanese

One of my favorite things about living in Japan was that I began to dream in Japanese.

I had studied Japanese for about six months before I left to live in Japan for part of my sophomore year in college. Once there, I threw myself into an intensive language program: With five other American students, I sat in Japanese classes for four hours a day. We had hours of homework and memorization to do every night. The families we lived with were instructed to speak to us in Japanese only.

Of course our little group of American college students cheated, and we spoke English when we were away from our teachers and our families. But Japanese surrounded us. Every night I went to bed mentally exhausted, worn out from listening hard, from learning new words, from memorizing more kanji. After a month or so I began to dream in Japanese, which our sensei seemed to believe was a sign of crossing a certain line in the learning of a language. It was progress; if you could dream in Japanese, your consciousness was accepting the language, you were thinking in Japanese, rather than thinking about Japanese. Thinking in Japanese was a mantra of sorts, a shining, elusive goal repeated by every teacher of the language I ever had. “If you can think in Japanese,” they said, “soon you will be fluent.” Fluent was a magic word among us. We longed for fluency, but none of us knew how to get there. How can you force yourself to think in Japanese?

I loved dreaming in Japanese, in part for the satisfaction that I might be making the progress my sensei described, but also because when I spoke Japanese in my dreams, my command of the language was much, much better than it was in my waking life. I did not hesitate, I did not fumble for words, or ask for prompts from those I spoke to. I didn’t act out words I didn’t know, and I didn’t flip hurriedly through one of the many dictionaries I carried with me to Japan. In my dreams Japanese soared out of me. I spoke fluently, understood by all. Thought and speech merged, and my sentences contained words I hadn’t studied the meaning or usage of, words that I’d heard on TV or in someone else’s speech. My brain, my dreams revealed, was studying all the time. I was unconsciously storing vocabulary, grammatical structures, speech patterns — fluency — and my dreams let me know that it was all there.

When I woke up I returned to myself — a student struggling to learn a difficult language. Sometimes I said the wrong words, and I needed dictionaries and prompts. It was some time after I’d arrived in Japan that I understood that you can’t force yourself to think in a language you did not grow up speaking. But through some secret combination of study, time, immersion, and desire, it happens. There was no one point at which I noticed it. Gradually it just got easier, I learned more, or perhaps my sleeping brain shared a little of its knowledge with my waking brain. I began to need my reference books less, and I found myself having conversations with people in which I didn’t scramble for words or grammar, and I could make myself understood. My speech became smoother, the Japanese language became more … available. Like in my dreams.

Last night, for the first time in a long time, probably years, I dreamed in Japanese again. Only this time my dream language skills mirrored the state of my waking Japanese. I was rusty, and fumbling for words that I’ve long since let slip away. I switched back and forth between Japanese (when I knew how to express what I wanted to say) and English (when the conversation moved beyond my current grasp of Japanese). The couple I was speaking to in my dream were people I knew in Japan, people who, just like my language skills, I’ve lost to time. I’m no longer in contact with them in my waking life, but their presence in the dream was unremarkable, unsurprising compared to our use of Japanese. I kept repeating, “I’ve forgotten how to speak Japanese, I’m sorry.” After I’d said it for the third or fourth time it occurred to me that I was speaking Japanese even as I said it, that I could say that much without hesitation, and that I understood their polite denials of this fact when they responded.

I woke up feeling as though I had seen an old friend. Despite our awkwardness together, I was pleased that my friend had returned, but I missed the way things used to be.

All of my Googlegangers are from the 18th century.

There’s an interesting little rant on the Guardian’s book blog about “new” words, the faddish choices that dictionary publishers and other groups make when choosing words of the year, and those words’ staying power (or lack thereof) in literature. w00t.

the digital age woke me up

I keep reading articles that use the mysterious phrase “the digital age,” as in, “we live in the digital age.”

As in, for example today’s NY Times magazine, in an article about the growing popularity of buying handmade items and crafting:
–”‘Buying handmade helps us reconnect.’ The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.”
– “… (crafting) provides relief from the digital world and, yes, is a form of “political statement” against the dehumanizing global supply chain.”

As in today’s Los Angeles Times, in an opinion piece about the 60-year anniversary of the invention of the transistor:
– “Along with its descendant, the semiconductor chip, it ushered in the Digital Age.”

I don’t know who or what ushered the digital age into my house this morning, but I sort of wish we’d had a bouncer around. This morning, at 5:30 a.m., a high-pitched electronic alarm beep-beep-beep’ed into the quiet of our upstairs, waking everyone, including the dog.

I have absolutely no idea what the heck that alarm belonged to. An iPod? A phone? A camera? It stopped beeping before we could locate the source of the sound. It’s kind of absurd, if you think about it, that our lives are so full of electronics we wouldn’t know which of said items woke us up. Everything has a beep or a ring or some sound. Batteries run out, and our “smart” appliances remind us it’s time to recharge. Except that we’re not smart enough to know what was talking to us or why.

Maybe crafting would help, who knows?

>:(

So I was reading the New York Times while eating my lunch. Or rather, I was wondering what happened to the New York Times, while eating my lunch.

The reasons? First, I read an article about letters Hillary Clinton wrote to a high school friend while she was in college. It’s a three-page long, seemingly desperate search for juicy gossip that never materializes and made me feel a little sickened at the greed for personal details that is involved in some journalistic endeavors and that is now, sadly, part of our political process.

And then, I moved on to an article about emoticons, and how adults who’d never heard of them or seen them as recently as five years ago are using them to flirt and conduct business. The article says that emoticons have “evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation.”

Um, really? Punctuation?

I hate emoticons. I do, in fact, get them in emails at work. And when I do, I immediately discredit the person who sent the email. As in, wow, that’s unprofessional.

I’m not saying I have never used an emoticon. I occasionally use :) when I am writing to friends or family, or even, rarely, in a jokey email to a co-worker. When I use it, it’s mostly to show that I am being sarcastic or ironic, or whatever.  Which, now that I think about it, just points out that if you have to tell someone you’re making a joke, it’s probably not a very good joke. Also, if you write, for example, “I locked myself out of my house, and it really sucked,” what do you need a :( for? The emotion comes through pretty clearly, I think.

These little symbols seem harmless enough, but in fact they make communication less clear, less focused, and let’s face it, more like we’re all a bunch of teenagers.

Decoration, maybe. Punctuation, no.

conjunction dysfunction

I had drinks with a few friends last week. Several people at our table worked for the same news organization, and they brought up the fact that they are not allowed to use the word “but” in their writing. Or “although.” Or “however.” That’s because those words herald contradiction, which, they said, you don’t want in a news story. I suppose this makes sense, since as a news organization you’d want to provide the clearest information possible.

However. But.

The idea of not using such words in my own writing — creative or otherwise — made me panicky. I am a conjunction addict!* “And”, “so”, “but”: These words are a habit of mine, one I often lean on to create a certain rhythm in my sentences. But is this a mistake? The talk of not using words like “but” made me question my writing style. Am I being wishy-washy, unclear, ambiguous?

So I opened the Word document that contains the first 40 pages of my book that I happen to be revising. There are 70 “buts” in the first 40 pages. Ten “ands” just on page one! Thirty-nine “sos”! Three “howevers.” And that’s just the first 40 pages. Wow.

So this is what happens when I try to think about my writing on the sentence level. I learn about my bad habits. From now on I will definitely be more conscious of all of my “buts”, “ands”, “howevers”, “sos” and so on other such markers of ambiguity.

*”However” and “so” are actually adverbs in most usages. Alas, I did not know that; I had to look it up. When I did, I learned that it’s considered poor writing to begin a sentence with “however,” which I also did not know, and is now another habit I must break.

Labels: They’re not just for high school anymore

My MFA was in nonfiction writing, not fiction or poetry, which always surprises some people. Oddly, it’s writers who seem to be most thrown by this admission.

For example, a conversation I had upon being introduced to an author (of fiction) last year at a party:

Mutual acquaintance, before disappearing to get a drink: This is Elizabeth, she’s an MFA student at [school].
Author: Oh! Great! Are you doing fiction, or poetry?
Me, deflated: Um, I’m concentrating on nonfiction, actually.
Author: Oh.
Author, her eyes darting frantically around the room for chance of escape: So, what kind of things do you write? Biography?
Me: I’m writing a travel memoir about a year I spent in South Korea.
Author: Oh, how … interesting. Memoir. Like James Frey.

Non-writers are sometimes equally surprised, but the judgment is less often there. Many are even savvy enough to ask whether I write memoir or something “more journalistic”? (Both, and thank you for asking.)

I’m unsure of whether the problem lies in the supposed relative newness of creative nonfiction (it’s not, really, but it is newly a part of MFA programs, compared to fiction and poetry) as a literary genre, or in all of the labels and categorizing. There are a lot of labels:

creative nonfiction
literary journalism
new journalism
gonzo journalism
neo-gonzo journalism
new new journalism
the fourth genre*
nonfiction novel
narrative nonfiction
nonfiction prose

Not to mention all of the fancy ones (the literature of fact, the literature of reality, the art of fact, the art of truth….) and all of the sub-genres: memoir, biography, essay… And, there’s also the subject categorizing of nonfiction done by bookstores and libraries (science, history, current events, politics…). All of this, I think, makes for confusion among, well, everyone. I studied creative nonfiction writing and I don’t usually know how to refer to what I do. I tend to just stick with plain old “nonfiction,” because I find that it invites fewer judgments. The word “creative” tends to elicit comments about — and sometimes even comparisons to– James Frey, as in “Oh, so you’re like James Frey?”

So I’ve started to think it comes down to truth, or more perhaps, as Stephen Colbert says, “truthiness.” Because the uncomfortable reactions to the writing of nonfiction tend to escalate, I think, along with people’s discomfort levels over the idea of truth being bent, massaged, or exaggerated. It’s a topic that can really set people off (including me). Everyone has an opinion about this, opinions that are, I’ve found, pretty steadfast. For example, someone I was talking to recently kind of shrugged off James Frey and said that memoirs are all pretty much fictional … that memoir authors always bend the truth.

The point is that we all, whether we realize it or not, approach the writing that we read with certain judgments or assumptions already in place. I used to approach fiction thinking that everything is made up and was pretty dismayed to find out how much of some books wasn’t — I was dismayed to find out how much was true! Me, the nonfiction writer. It’s the same way with nonfiction; everyone approaches nonfiction in all of its forms with different ideas of what kind of liberties with the truth are ok, and which ones aren’t ok. When those assumptions are upended, we are generally either pissed off, as if we’ve been duped, or thrilled at the artistic license, the bending of the rules, and the blurring of the lines. Mostly just pissed off though.

It’s kind of strange writing in a genre that elicits such visceral reactions even in introductory conversations, like the one I had with that author. I suspect that genre fiction writers get similar reactions, particularly in MFA programs, where sci fi, romance, and mystery are pretty much absent from the curriculum. Hmm.

*The Fourth Genre is a label that irks me, as it implies that nonfiction is somehow last, after the first three genres of fiction, poetry and drama. What’s with the ranking?

Revisiting Japan through books

We have started packing up our apartment already. We aren’t actually moving for nearly a month, but we are eager to get on with it, and we don’t want to leave all of the packing til the end.
Aside from this meaning that our apartment is in a complete, utter state of disarray, strewn with boxes (both full and empty), packing means that I have been revisiting some beloved possessions.

It’s strange how you can live with the same books, pictures and other knickknacks on the shelf in your living room for five years, but still forget about them. This is particularly true of books. I have so many, and there are quite a few that I insist on lugging from one apartment to the next simply because I can’t bear to give them up.
Some of my favorites are my travel books, Lonely Planets and the like, which remind me of places I have been. But equally treasured are my language books, particularly my Japanese texts.
I guess I have quite a collection of books about Japan, which I am quite proud of. All those kanji dictionaries remind me of how hard I worked to learn Japanese, how many hours I spent flipping through pages, counting strokes, squinting at radicals and trying desperately to figure out the correct reading of a combination of characters.

(Of course, now learning Japanese –or probably any other language for that matter– is sooo much simpler. Not to be all “I walked barefoot in the snow uphill 10 miles to school” or anything, but seriously, I am amazed at the tools now out there to study Japanese. I stumbled upon Rikai not long ago, and wow, so cool. No more flipping through kanji dictionaries for hours to read just a few sentences. You just run your cursor over the characters you don’t know. This dictionary is pretty unbelievable too. Just click the boxes on the radicals you recognize that make up the character in question, and it pulls up possible matches. So, so cool. But I digress.)

All those fancy tools don’t make me want to give up my many dictionaries and other language textbooks. If anything, I want to hold on to them more. OK, so I don’t look at them much anymore (my Japanese is horribly rusty, something I hope to do something about once I finish my @#%!! thesis), but it’s nice to know they are there for when I am ready to pick up my studies again.

And it’s nice to be able to remember how far along I was in Japanese. Occasionally, I pick up one of my old textbooks and see my scribbles and notes in the margins of page-long Japanese texts, and I wonder who the heck it was who could understand Japanese so well. Because now, not so much. I blink at the characters and know that I once understood what they meant. Which I guess is a little depressing.

One last thing…One of my other favorite Japan-related books is my Bilingual Atlas of Japan. It’s a fun book to flip through, to examine the geography of the country, to remember where I’ve been. But as I’ve said, I love maps.

OK, two last things. This  is my 200th posting. Yay! Thank you, readerly people, for being readerly.

just thinking out loud

I am having a hell of a time writing my final essay for my lit class. I don’t know if it’s because the topic is off in some way, and I am somehow aware that I am writing myself into a hole, or if it’s just that end-of-the-semester feeling — that I just don’t want to do it, because I want to be done. it’s probably both. In any case, I just can’t quite seem to get past the beginning, which my professor has said is good. It’s “off to a very good start,” she wrote on my prospectus. Sigh. What good is a good start with out a better ending? And why can’t I seem to get there?

In the public library near my home, while other kids were reading Ramona or browsing the Judy Blume section, I was leafing through the card catalog to hunt down books about secret codes. I was an only child, and often spent solitary afternoons studying these books, copying out the codes, and writing secret messages. Occasionally I wrote to my best friend Mercy. She liked the idea of getting a letter her older brother couldn’t read, but she was considerably less patient about the fact that she herself had to do some translation to get the letter’s meaning. Most of my secret messages were for my eyes only then, and I imagined that I was a spy. I had been selected by my “superiors” because of my abilities with languages and codes. I would infiltrate enemy territory and succeed because of my fluency in another tongue. I would sneak messages back to my “base” in code. I would be a double agent.

I might not have been able to articulate it back then, but on some level I understood that language could provide a means of escape. Knowing another language, be it a secret code or a foreign tongue, offered the promise of becoming someone new. As I grew older and began to study foreign languages seriously, I saw that each new language was like a cloak. Trying one on was like putting on a new self. A new language was a new identity.

There. That’s the beginning. I’m going on to talk about my study of Japanese, and why it intrigued me so. How I felt I had two identities, one for each language. The question that seems to be slowing me up is why the need for two? What is it about having two that was so important? What was i trying to escape? Why did I want to be someone else? Why was Japanese able to provide that for me?

Actually, I can answer those questions, I think. It’s the fact that I no longer study Japanese, or use it, or any other language for that matter, that i can’t quite reconcile with this whole theory. That, and the fact that my study of Japanese was intimately tied to my relationships with my Japanese college roommate, my Japanese host sister, and my Japanese professor. The identity thing is, perhaps, secondary to those relationships. But every time I try to include the relationships in the paper, I trip myself up in the writing. The paper becomes an hommage to those women, not the story of my two identities, which is what it is supposed to be about. So I am leaving them out, which doesn’t feel quite like the truth. So I am thinking about putting them in. My Japanese identity allowed for a closeness that produced these relationships, I will say. This is a closeness I felt I was lacking in English, perhaps. Blah, blah, blah.

Eventually, in this manner, page 20 will come to be. At the moment, having been writing for several hours and somehow not having managed to grow the paper past its earlier page 6 state, page 20 seems very far away.

I have caught Present Tense.

In my memoir workshop especially, we’ve been talking about using present tense to make something seem more immediate, or to dramatize a scene of importance. A lot of my classmates like to write in present tense. When I read a piece that’s all in present tense, I usually get annoyed by it, because most writers (in my workshops, anyway) seem to trip up on it at some point. For example if I write my whole chapter in present tense, chances are the whole chapter is not taking place at one moment in time. There might be flashbacks or flashforwards, and then present tense gets mighty confusing.

But I am starting to see why my classmates keep writing in present tense. It’s addictive!
I was experimenting with writing a scene in my own book in present tense and it was so much fun to write, I can’t stop.

Everything written in past tense feels so…flat and uninteresting. But this is a bad habit. I think present tense is a lazy way to write, in most cases. As I said, it can trip up readers and writers both.

In some memoirs, however, I think it works. I am reading Katherine Harrison’s The Kiss (an incest memoir) for my lit class. That book is in present tense. But it works…there needs to be an immediacy to a daughter writing about her relationship with her father. (Although I guess you could argue that the subject matter provides enough immediacy.) Somehow, I think that the present tense adds to the tension and disturbing nature of the story, however.

Anyway, I am hooked on writing in the present tense. But unlike coffee, this is a habit I need to break.

Asian leanings

Our bookshelves, when I was growing up, housed a small Japanese-English dictionary. I don’t know where it came from; certainly my parents had no special interest in Japan or, for that matter, foreign languages. But I did.

As a child I memorized the words in a Spanish-English picture dictionary, especially the ones for animals: el pero, el gato. In elementary school, where foreign language was sometimes a diversion, a game played for a week, I was frustrated. I wanted to learn Spanish.

Later, in middle school, it was French that I gravitated toward but couldn’t study. The sixth grade included an overview course called “Foreign Languages” in which students could learn a smattering of Spanish, French, Esperanto and sign language. (I cringe now, at the implications – when did users of sign language become foreign? Why did the made-up words of Esperanto become a language necessary for sixth graders to learn in 1983?) My parents kept me out of the course saying I wouldn’t gain enough knowledge of any one language, real or made up, spoken or signed. I spent my year learning something else, though now I can no longer remember what.

The course foretold of my parents’ threshold with the school, for in seventh grade I was placed in a private school, where I began learning Latin. Joyfully. I loved it. I loved it despite the fact that it was a dead language, despite the fact that I could never, would never speak it in a foreign country. I loved the symmetry of it, the organization, the rules, all of its many secret passageways. I felt I knew something special, a secret only I had been let in on, a code that only I could break. I ran my tongue over words like declension and case and recited amos, amases and amats like a meditation. I loved the precision of it, and it was easy for me; I was a master of memorization. I giggled when our class sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Latin at a holiday assembly, but I still remember the words, and whenever I hear the hymn, they come back to me, an incantation of the past.

Adeste Fideles
Laeti triumphantes
Venite, venite in Bethlehem
Natum videte
Regem angelorum
Venite adoremus, venite adoremus, venite adoremus
Dominum

I returned to public school for high school, and it was there that I was finally able to take my French. I soared through it, coasting through the vocabulary and the grammar, for it was like Latin with an accent. My best friend Mercy took French too, and we spent Saturdays wandering around Annapolis pretending we were, in fact, French. We felt cool and sophisticated and when we didn’t know all of the vocabulary for what we wanted to say, we made it up. My senior year I worked for an elderly Naval Academy French professor, writing summaries of French news shows for fresh-faced midshipmen. I won awards for my French prowess. But I was not loyal. With an extra hour in my schedule I joined beginning Spanish my senior year too. But Spanish held no appeal. The words seemed too simple, the pronunciation too easy.

Still, there was that Japanese-English dictionary on my bookshelf. I discovered the word for love in Japanese and learned to write the character from the dictionary. I didn’t yet know about stroke order when it came to writing out kanji, so I am sure that my ai looked lopsided and childish. I made cards for friends and family that were written in as many languages as I could learn to write my message in. I was attracted to the aesthetic of Asian language though, the intricate details of the characters, and the fact that no one I knew would be able to read what I wrote, or to tell if it was right or wrong. Writing Japanese characters I found in the dictionary was like keeping a secret, or communicating in a code.

I wasn’t loyal to Japanese, however, not then. It was the aesthetic of Asian things that I stuck to. My grandparents used to travel around the world on cruises and bring back gifts from China — jade figurines, and colorful paper cut designs. These I loved too. It has been this way with me. If it looks Asian, it has an appeal. In elementary school, my other grandfather introduced me to stamp collecting. While he was clearly most interested in the U.S. stamps, I had eyes only for the international ones. My favorites were beautiful, colorful stamps from Japan and Hong Kong. They had a composition and a glossy sheen that pleased me, and I liked just to look at them.
Still, I had no conscious desire to learn an Asian language. I guess I just didn’t believe it was a possibility. My suburban Maryland hometown contained no Asian faces then, and the most exotic food you could get a hold of was an egg roll at the Hawaiian restaurant.

When I began searching for colleges, my system was very simple, though undoubtably naive: I read the brochures. Stacks and stacks of them arrived, thanks to registering for the SAT, and I scanned the lists of majors for languages. I thought I might become a French major, but I wanted something more exotic available, just in case. Russian or Chinese or Japanese were all acceptable possibilities. Brochures that listed only French and Spanish or that third-place sidekick German -they were no use to me.

I settled on a school that offered Japanese in addition to French, Spanish and German. After a first year of false starts, I began studying Japanese, and immediately I knew it was the right thing. I relished memorizing the tiny syllables of hiragana and katakana and the stroke order of the kanji. After six months in an intensive language program in Sapporo, Japan and another two years of advanced study, I was quite conversational. I could find my way through a newspaper article, with the help of my kanji dictionaries.

So it didn’t seem daunting to go to Korea after graduation. I had been to Japan and survived, I thought, so Korea can’t be any more difficult. Korean is from the same language family as Japanese, and it doesn’t use as many Chinese characters. Once you learn the Korean alphabet, you can read. I assumed I would have no trouble picking it up. Some of the words might even sound the same. Even the language seemed somehow inconsequential–I simply wanted to be back in Asia again.

Great, albeit snarky, writing

An example of the humorous snottiness the New York Times excels at, read the other day in an article on grilling:

“In fancy restaurants, run according to French rules, the preparation of the cooking area is called the mise en place. Mr. Schlesinger is from coastal Virginia and still speaks with a little of the soft accent of that region. He is also a surfer, and maintains the laconic rhythms of someone used to waiting in water for waves. When he says mise en place, it sounds like a cross between a sneeze and a profanity.”