VIII

When I was nineteen I spent a year in Japan living with a Japanese family, attending the international division of Waseda University as part of a study abroad program during my junior year of college. It was a transformative experience in many ways, not so much because I immersed myself in Japan and Japanese, but because of how alienating and difficult the experience was. It was during this time that I rediscovered how much I love English and reading, and spent many hours up in my room when I could of been out there, talking to people and being in the world. Instead I was reading Haruki Murakami novels in translation, smoking cigarettes, listening to American indie music, drawing pictures, and doing just enough homework to get by. I was unskilled at Japanese, but more than that, I was shy, had no social skills and not much motivation to reach out. My host family was very kind but not the most talkative people. They generally let me do my own thing. Tadaima, itarakimasu, Gochisousama deshita , and that was about it. I had friends, two close American friends who were both fairly skilled at Japanese, and we spent our time in the arcades, wandering the streets of Tokyo, or at karaoke singing to each other.

During the ninth month, on a break from school, the program sent us out to families in western Japan, in Shimane province, outside of a small town I don't remember the name of anymore. I got along much better with the new host family, and the host family got along better with me. In the span of a month my language ability improved ten fold, talking with the host mother and father, and the elder daughter who I had an unrealized flirtation with. That's another story. But I liked this family. In part because they required that I hang out with them. They insisted. I would sit around drinking with the father and his neighbor trying to understand their jokes, or go for hikes with the mother and the younger siblings. I don't know if it was a difference between small town people and city people, or that fact that I had been studying Japanese for the previous eight months, or just the change in scenery, but I figured something out about learning a language in Shimane: that for me, connecting with others is essential for my language learning since I don't have strong intrinsic motivations. When I came back to Tokyo, my host family was impressed, but we quickly returned to the silence, my Japanese stagnated, and I came back to the States.

In retrospect, my time in Japan was not very successful from the standpoint of language acquisition. The problem was not my aptitude for learning, or my teachers, or the differences between English and Japanese, but that I was utterly unmotivated. I wanted to speak Japanese, but I had no intrinsic motivation, no vision of who I wanted to be or direction I worked towards. My lack of language learning vision has not really changed. I don't have an idealized version of myself as a multilingual cosmopolitan globe trotter. I don't have an immediate economic need to communicate in Chinese. And though I might appear to have more intrinsic motivation in the form of my job and my broader academic trajectory, I'm not sure this kind of motivation is all that different than having homework to do. Thus if what really works for me is connecting with others, then I need to be patient in terms of sifting though relationships towards lasting ones while steadily improving my basic Chinese such that I can be ready to engage. Little things then, like my desire to read the Chinese names of NBA teams because I find them amusing (e.g. the Philadelphia 76ers are 76人), or joking around with my Chinese tutor are in part what has been pushing my Chinese forward. I do not wish to bask in alienation such as I did in Japan. But then again, I am a much more productive writer when I do.