LOUISVILLE, 1953 by Judy Copeland
“It is generally assumed that children will find it easy to adapt [to a new culture].” (Elisabeth Marx, 2001)
In my memory the sky over Louisville, Kentucky, is always dark and starless. I know it couldn’t have really been this way, but in my memory the time is always night, and my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Stowe, the most wrinkled person I’ve ever seen, is always towering over the class, her hands on her hips, her steely blue eyes boring into ours, as she says in a dark, husky voice: “And do you know what happened to that little girl after she took the candy from the stranger? She didn’t come home that night. Or the next night. Or the next. Everybody searched and searched until they gave her up for dead. Then one day someone found her standing in the middle of a field. They found her standing all alone, crying in the rain. And do you know what else? The little girl couldn’t remember her own name.”
As I listen to Mrs. Stowe, I tell myself I’ll never forget who I am. My name is Aiko, the “Beloved Child.” Even though my freckled face and light-brown pigtails make me look like the other six-year olds in this Louisville classroom, I’m really Aiko, a missionary kid from Fukuoka, Japan. Until my parents brought me to Louisville a month ago for our furlough, I used to like getting lost. I used to like ending up among strangers. Just for fun, I’d escape from my front yard, bolting over the bamboo fence, across the college campus where my parents taught, past workmen hammering on downtown buildings, and beyond the trolley tracks. Then I’d disappear into a maze of little alleys lined with stalls of kewpie dolls and pinwheels and wooden train sets. I liked to run among the stalls, not even stopping to play with the toys, just running, running, dizzy with the joy of being lost.
I remember collapsing, worn out, on a little stool next to a white-radish stand one day, and I realized I was thirsty. It was the hottest part of summer, so hot I could hear cicadas trilling over the calls of the grownups selling toys and fish and vegetables. I needed a soda. So I began to rub my eyes the way crying children do in Japanese storybooks. Almost instantly, a crowd of strangers were bending over me to ask what was wrong. A couple of minutes later, I was enthroned on a cushion on top of a desk in a police station, drinking fizzy Ramune from a dark-green bottle with a marble that rattled around in its neck, while men in black uniforms made silly faces to get me to smile. As soon as they’d cheered me up, some of the policemen would tiptoe back to work at their desks. Then I would rub my eyes again, which always brought me more jokes and silly faces.
I’m used to grownups dropping whatever they’re doing whenever I cry. I expect it. Like everyone in Fukuoka, I know that children are gods come down from heaven for big people to worship, gods who must be placated. I’ve never doubted the power of my tears. I’m a child: I know this as surely as I know that my name is Aiko.
Stage One
“During the first [stage of culture shock] most individuals are fascinated by the new” (Oberg, 1954). “Throughout this stage the foreigner can be characterized as a largely passive . . . spectator.” (Lewis, 1986)
I’m sitting at the window of our first-floor apartment in Louisville, watching a squirrel stuff its cheeks with nuts. This is the first squirrel I’ve ever seen – we don’t have them in Fukuoka – and its face looks like it’s about to explode.
Up in a tree, another squirrel screeches at the fat-faced one on the ground. Suddenly, it rushes down the tree and kicks dirt at it. The fat-faced one drops the nut it’s eating, flips sidewise, then chases the other. As the squirrels careen around the yard, I notice how pointy their noses are, and giggle. The squirrels’ noses look like the people’s noses in America.
For the first time ever, I don’t want to go outside. When we arrived here yesterday, Mama told me I mustn’t run away from home anymore. She said there are bad grownups in America. Grownups who hurt children.
Mama said I could play outside so long as I don’t leave the yard, but I don’t especially want to play with squirrels. I’d rather just watch them from in here.
An American girl with brown pigtails like mine comes skipping through the yard, and I think, “Oh, a girl” just as I earlier thought, “Oh, a squirrel,” content for America to stay on the other side of the glass. The girl stops, glances toward the neighbors’ yard, crooks her index finger, wriggles it up and down, and yells, “Come here, Patty Lou!”
As a blond girl in red corduroy pants bounds toward her with a happy, expectant look on her face, I giggle again. Patty Lou seems unaware that she just got the nasty finger. Ever since we got off the boat in San Francisco last week, I’ve been laughing at the odd things Americans do with their hands, even though Mama says it’s rude to laugh at people. It’s not just little girls. Even middle-aged church women in America don’t seem to know they’re making nasty gestures every few minutes, and the only way not to giggle is to close my eyes and not look at anyone. Patty Lou and the other girl come closer to the glass but don’t see me. I press my lips together to muffle my laughter.
Next come three boys in cowboy hats who chase the two girls, waving toy guns and yelling. I’ve never seen children play with guns before. I come from a city of broken buildings. Before I was born, bombs fell from the sky, and our schools, kindergartens, zoos, and playgrounds burned down, leaving nothing but chimneys. I remember when I was three and I could still find piles of little rocks that used to be walls. Some of my playmates had to eat orange peels, frogs, and grasshoppers for supper. Now the grownups are working hard to fix all the buildings, and they don’t let us play with guns. Toy guns are too real, they say.
“Barbara! Cut that out!” Mrs. Stowe yells at a girl two rows over from me.
Barbara cries every day. From the time school starts in the morning until the last bell rings in the afternoon, she sits hunched over her desk, face buried in her arms, shoulders heaving with sobs.
Tears get you nowhere in Mrs. Stowe’s class.
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to paddle you!” says Mrs. Stowe, but Barbara just bawls louder.
I think of my Japanese kindergarten teachers, how they used to plead with us in their high, chirpy voices, “Now children, let’s settle down for calligraphy practice,” while we ran around the room and cut up as long as we felt like it; how our teachers used to ask, “Children, why do you think your little classmate is crying? What do you think we can do to make her feel better?” How they used to listen to our goofy ideas – “Let’s give her candy!” “How about balloons?” “Hey, everybody, we could tell her jokes!” – and let us five-year-olds decide what to do.
Here in Louisville we go around the room taking turns, each child reading a sentence aloud from the Dick and Jane book and Mrs. Stowe either bellowing “What?!” or smiling and nodding and patting us on the back. Unsure which fate is worse, I watch the others and dread my turn. I don’t get why the boys think it’s funny to be yelled at or why the girls look happy to be patted. Some of the girls even go up to Mrs. Stowe at recess to hold her hands and hug her, which appalls me. I can’t imagine wanting to touch Mrs. Stowe.
When I read my sentence, my voice quavers.
“What?!” Mrs. Stowe demands, narrowing her pale blue eyes into slivers that almost disappear into her wrinkles.
“See Spot lun?” I try again.
“Since when does r-u-n spell ‘lun’?”
My mouth freezes into a tight little grin of fear. To appease Mrs. Stowe, I hold my body even stiller than before, a Japanese girl’s way of being good, but her sharp gaze keeps on boring into me.
“Read the word, Judy!”
I leave my body and hover on the ceiling like a ghost. Looking down on the fifth desk in the second row, I see the girl called Judy sitting straight and perfectly still. I hear her voice shake as she tries again to say “run.” I see the teacher’s dry lips moving up and down like a puppet’s and hear the teacher make heavy, gruff sounds that I don’t separate into words. Then I, Aiko, sweep my eyes over the whole classroom, all five rows of children, strange alien beings who never stop twitching and jerking and scratching themselves like squirrels. Silently, I recite their names to myself, row by row. If only I study this room – if only I memorize the name of every child and ponder every poster on the wall, every scuff mark on the floor – then maybe I’ll figure out how my world came apart. Maybe by concentrating hard enough on the fragments I can force them back together.
Stage Two
”The second stage of culture shock is in a sense a crisis in the disease” (Oberg, 1954). “Life does not make sense and one may feel helpless, confused, . . . or treated like a child.” (Winkelman, 2003)
A second-grader named Bruce lives in the same apartment complex as I do. Whenever I go outside, he finds me and shouts, “Let’s play amputees!”, snatching away my dolls and ripping off their legs. When I scoop up my legless dolls and run inside, he rings the doorbell and asks my mama, “Can Judy come out and play?”
“I want to stay in here,” I tell her. I don’t tell her about the dolls. I’ve stopped mentioning the odd things the squirrel-children do, because she talks as if she thinks these children are normal.
Mama folds her long legs into a squat that brings her head down to my level and makes her skirt pool over our feet. Gripping my shoulders, she says in Japanese so he can’t understand, “Bruce doesn’t have a daddy.” Her face is so close I can feel her warm breath as she speaks, but it doesn’t smell like her. She’s wearing the same cherry-red lipstick as the other mothers in Louisville, and it smells like cough syrup.
“His mama leaves him by himself all day,” she continues in Japanese. In Fukuoka she always spoke English to me inside our house, and Japanese outside. This switch in language makes her voice sound unnatural. As if she’s no longer my mother inside the house.
“Bruce doesn’t have any friend but you, Judy. Jesus would want you to be nice to him,” and she gives me a gentle push out the door.
We play cowboys, with Bruce the sheriff and me the stagecoach robber, and he hits me while arresting me. I can’t hit him back because I learned in Japanese kindergarten never to hit, regardless of what the other kid does. For one thing, Japanese girls aren’t supposed to fight with boys, and for another, I was almost twice as big as anybody else in my kindergarten class. Besides, Jesus doesn’t want me to hit.
From that moment, I ignore Bruce. When he tries to play with me, I look through him as though he’s not there. When he speaks, I don’t answer. When he bangs me on the head with his fist, I carry on with my own private game, talking and humming to myself and pretending I have a headache.
At school during recess period, I don’t play with anyone. Instead, I sit on the jungle gym, watching my classmates and trying to tell them apart. Though I’ve memorized their names, when they leave their desks for recess they all look alike. All I see is a yardful of identical, pointy-nosed Americans, squealing and chasing each other like squirrels.
A girl is walking toward me, the only classmate that I can identify for sure. She’s prettier than the other blond children because her nose is flat. Three other girls are with her, and she has a notebook and pencil in her hand.
“Hi, Judy,” she says. “I’m going to invite you to my birthday party.”
“Thanks.” I like her flat face, and for a moment I forget she’s American.
“Tell me your phone number.”
“I’ll tell you later,” I say, and retreat to the other side of the jungle gym to ponder her question in private. I have no idea what a “phone number” is.
The pretty one smiles and scampers off with the other three girls.
From my post on the jungle gym, I watch them play. They act out an appalling story about a little girl who gets punched and screamed at by a grownup called a stepmother, and I am all of a sudden sick.
I leave my body and float up into the dark sky. These girls act as if nothing’s wrong with their story. As if they’ve never heard any normal fairy tales. The story’s supposed to start with a man and woman going to a shrine to pray for a baby. Finally, after the praying goes on for so long that the couple’s hair turns white, a child is supposed to pop out of a peach, or a bamboo tree. My girlfriends and I used to try and see who could imagine the most wonderful birth. We’d make babies pop out of mud puddles, out of faucets, and even church offering plates. Then our wonder-babies would grow up to save the world from demons with big sharp American noses.
Once upon a time, beyond this wide continent that took a week to cross by train, beyond the ocean that took two weeks to cross by ship, I was a wonder-baby, a girl named Aiko who had no fear. I remember a day at the zoo. A girlfriend and I, along with a clump of strangers, were squeezed into a narrow walkway behind the tiger’s cage. We were hiding from an escaped elephant that had gone berserk and was charging at people. In the confusion, my girlfriend and I had lost our teacher and classmates, and now we were pressed against the bars of the empty tiger’s cage. Although the door from the cat house into the cage stood open, I wasn’t too worried that the tiger might come in. The elephant, still trumpeting shrilly around the corner from our hiding place, seemed like the bigger problem. Besides, we were children. To my surprise, though, none of the grownups wedged into the same space as us seemed to notice our predicament. Somewhere in the crowd I heard a little boy crying, and everyone’s attention seemed focused on comforting him.
“I think we’d better cry too,” whispered my friend.
“Good idea,” I said, and we started to rub our eyes and whimper.
Almost instantly, grownups were pushing us gently away from the bars, trading places with us, telling us not to cry. They moved us to the center of the crowd, bodies pressed all around us. We were cocooned in love.
Phzzzzt! Judy pulls me back into her body. She wants me back because she’s at her desk and a big spider-veined hand is waving back and forth in front of her face.
“Good. She blinked,” says Mrs. Stowe. “I’ve never seen a child sit so still. Have you been staying up late, Judy? Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I’m confused. Is good behavior a sickness?
Mrs. Stowe walks to the front of the room and thrusts her face toward us, forming her thumbs and index fingers into circles and rimming her ice-blue eyes with them like spectacles.
“I have X‑ray vision,” she says. “I can see you at night in your beds, and I know some of you boys and girls haven’t been sleeping enough. Tonight if you’re not in bed by seven o’clock, your telephone will ring, and it’ll be me telling your parents you’ve been bad. You’d better be asleep by seven, or else I’ll get you!”
That night at dinner, I ask my parents every few minutes what time it is. They try to shush me because they’re watching the TV news as they eat, and there’s a story about a missing boy, a six-year-old named Bobby who got into a stranger’s car. A picture of Bobby flashes on the screen. He has on a checked lumberjack shirt that makes him look like a miniature man, only the shirt’s too big for him, his hands dwarfed by the sleeves. American kids don’t get to wear cute outfits with matching caps like Japanese kids; instead their parents dress them like grownups. Inside his too-big shirt, Bobby is crinkling his eyebrows at the camera. He looks small and worried.
The phone rings, and my heart pounds.
“Please don’t answer it, Mama!” I beg, afraid Mrs. Stowe may be able to leave her body as I do mine, fearing she may try to ooze into our apartment through the little holes in the telephone receiver. We didn’t have a phone in Fukuoka, and I don’t trust the strange device.
“Honey, whatever has gotten into you?” my mother says, picking up the receiver. “Yes, Virginia! . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . Certainly. I’ll be glad to speak to your Sunday School class.”
Relieved, I slump back in my chair.
By six-thirty, I’m in my pajamas, in bed with the lights out. Though in Fukuoka I used to sleep on my side or on my tummy, now I’m careful to remain on my back. Since coming to America, I’ve grown afraid of the dark; I need to stay alert for any strangers or first-grade teachers who might suddenly climb through the window or crawl out from under my bed. I hold my eyes open, scanning the darkness, trying not to think about Bobby – his too-big shirt, his worried face – trying not to imagine what gruesome things strangers do to children to make them forget their names. “I’m Aiko,” I remind myself, just in case.
The next morning at breakfast I suddenly remember that Mrs. Stowe has given me a sheet of paper that a parent is supposed to sign. Since Mama has already left to take my two baby sisters to nursery school, I ask Daddy to sign it.
He puts down his coffee cup and squints at the sheet I hand him. “Why should I sign this? There’s no line to sign on.”
“Please, Daddy, sign it.”
“Judy, I can’t do something that makes no sense. This is a P.T.A. flier, not an agreement. There’s no point in signing this thing.”
“But Mrs. Stowe said to. She’ll get mad at me.” I burst into tears.
“You must have misunderstood what Mrs. Stowe asked. She wouldn’t ask something so pointless.” He lays the sheet on the table, picks up his battered briefcase from the floor beside his chair, and rummages through his lecture notes, preparing to go to his college.
I’m frantic now, dancing in front of him as though I’m about to wet my pants. “Please, Daddy, please, please sign it.”
“Why are you acting like this, Judy? I didn’t raise you to obey ridiculous orders. I raised you to think for yourself. Tell her there’s no signature line.”
I’m speechless. My father is telling me not to respect my teacher. I stare at him, at the dark suit and tie, the balding head, the absent-minded face. He looks like the daddy I had in Fukuoka but he’s not acting like him.
After he reminds me that my bus will come soon, I pad to the hall closet in my stocking feet to get my saddle shoes. Though my parents have stopped bothering to take off their shoes when they come into the house from the filthy street, I always remove mine and put them in the closet.
I open the closet and gasp. There, slightly to the right of the door, stands a long, skinny, metallic tube, taller than me. It looks like a gun, but how could it have gotten in here? Grownups hate guns.
“Daddy, help!” I squeak.
He comes running, then chuckles, “Oh, that’s all, is it?” Picking up the thing and cradling it in his arms, he pats the reddish-brown wood near the trigger end, saying, “This is my squirrel rifle, Judy. I used to hunt with it when I was a boy in West Virginia. As soon as you get as tall as my rifle, I’ll teach you how to shoot, just like your grandpa taught me.” He looks happy holding the gun, happier than I’ve ever seen him.
Since coming to Louisville, my parents have turned into their opposites. Everything they said “don’t do” in Fukuoka, they now say “do,” and every “do” has become a “don’t.” Yet they act as if they’ve always been this way and it’s I who have changed. As if we never lived beyond this continent that took a week to cross by train, beyond the ocean that took two weeks to cross by ship.
When I get to school, Mrs. Stowe calls us up to her desk, row by row. I follow the boy who sits in front of me. I watch Mrs. Stowe collect signed P.T.A. sheets from the children ahead of me, hoping to hear an excuse I can use, but I am the only one without a signature. After she’s patted the others on the back and my turn comes, I look down at the floor, as it’s rude to make eye contact when talking to a teacher. I try to hand her my sheet but she doesn’t take it.
“You didn’t show it to your parents, did you?” she asks brusquely.
Though I did show it to my father, I don’t say so. Mrs. Stowe has phrased the question in the negative, and in Japan this means she wants me to agree with her that I didn’t do it. To contradict her would be disrespectful.
“No, ma’am,” I answer, staring at the floor. My hand begins to tremble, making the paper rustle, and I worry that I may cry.
Mrs. Stowe opens a little book where those who have done what they’re supposed to get red dots beside their names, and those who haven’t, black dots. She adds a black dot by my name, making no move to pat me.
As I return to my seat, I try not to sigh audibly with relief. I couldn’t care less what color of dot she puts down or whether I tell her the truth. My sole aim is to survive her interrogations without crying or getting a pat.
I try to remember my Japanese kindergarten teachers, try to picture how lovely their faces looked to me, as smooth and placid as moons, and how safe and happy it felt to be taught with love. But I can’t recall their faces anymore. Their voices, too, are distant and fading, floating across a wide ocean, floating like Aiko does when she’s lost and can’t get home. I’m not sure anymore if that other life beyond the ocean really happened or if I dreamed it. I’m not sure if I really went to a school where everyone called me the “Beloved Child.”
Stage Three
“In the course of time, however, the individual makes his adjustment, you do what is essential [to] get along[,] . . . joining the activities of the people.” (Oberg, 1954)
I’m playing alone in my yard, building a fort with twigs, and Bruce is sneaking up behind me. I see him out of the corner of my eye, then feel something prick my arm, like a bee sting, but I’m busy with my fort, so I ignore it. At that moment, my father happens by and calls me aside.
“That boy is a bully,” he says.
“Who?” I ask, looking around. Bruce is in my yard, kneeling over my fort, but I’m used to looking at him without seeing him.
“That one.” My father gestures with his chin, and Bruce runs off. “The boy I just saw sticking a pin in your arm.”
“Oh.”
“Here’s how you deal with bullies, Judy. The next time he picks on you, hit him like this,” my father says, swinging his fist.
I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. This is the father who wouldn’t even let me say “Stop it!” when a kid splashed me in the public bathhouse in Fukuoka. For once, I don’t mind his switching the rules on me.
“Like this, Daddy?” I ask, punching the air.
After he helps me practice my swing, I run off to look for Bruce, conveniently forgetting the “next time he picks on you” part of the instructions.
I find him sitting in a tree on the other side of the apartment complex.
“Come down!” I shout.
“What if I say no?”
“It’s against the rules for bullies to sit in trees.”
“Oh, yeah, what if I say that’s a lie?”
“What if I say you’re a squirrel’s vomit!”
Scowling, he climbs down and punches me in the nose. I sock him in the chin. Encouraged by his grunt of surprise, I slug him again. He punches back and begins dancing around me, ducking and weaving. His stance puzzles me, as I’ve only fought with my two baby sisters, who attack like piranha and require a strategy of avoiding their teeth, not their fists. Unable to get in another punch, I grab his wrists and bite down hard on his nose. He howls, limp with pain, and suddenly blood is squirting down the front of his shirt and I’m raking my fingernails over his face.
“Okay, if that’s how you wanna fight,” he mutters, recovering himself; and he claws me back.
Meanwhile, his howls have drawn a crowd of children, who ring us, cheering, “Go, Judy! Go!” As we punch and whack and claw each other, a strange glee takes hold of me, a delight in the pulpy feel of his flesh when my fist smashes into it, and I am wild. Even after I pin him to the ground, I won’t stop pummeling his bloody face.
“I’ve got to finish!” I shriek, furious as my father tears me away.
Stage Four
“Adaptation . . . does not mean that one must give up one’s identity, values, and culture. Many individuals . . . may effectively manage cultural shock without making major changes in their personality or preexisting lifestyle.” (Winkelman, 1994)
A week has gone by since the fight. I’m sitting just behind the bus driver, by a pole, holding tight to it with both hands, while grownups climb onto the bus: an old man who smells like sour milk, a stern woman wearing a green-and-white polka-dot dress, a freckle-faced man who I’ve seen on the bus before. If any of these strangers are looking for a child to grab, they’ll think twice about picking one they have to pry loose from a pole.
The freckle-faced man smiles at me as he walks by, but I look away. Why is he always looking at me?
Then two blue-haired old American women sit down beside me, and I wish I didn’t have to ride home from school on the same bus grownups use. It frightens me when strangers sit next to me.
“Did you hear they dug up Bobby Greenlease today?” one of the old women says to the other. She lowers her voice, making it thick and husky like Mrs. Stowe’s. “The kidnappers shot him in the head.”
“Land’s sakes! He was only six.”
I don’t turn to look at the women, don’t flinch a muscle, just concentrate on the pole, holding on with all my might, as I think of Bobby’s worried face, of his small body inside a man’s shirt. I wonder if he’s trying to get back inside his body and can’t.
“Have you ever seen a child sit as still as that little girl?” says the woman with the voice like Mrs. Stowe.
“Those noisy kids in the middle of the bus should be more like her.”
I keep staring straight ahead, my grip frozen on the pole. I want to let go and float up to the ceiling where I won’t have to hear the squealing children and raspy old women, where the sounds will fade and I can look down and see the whole bus at a glance. I want to float up, up, far above this bus of strangers, and hang like a crescent moon in the dark Louisville sky, looking down on the continent, the ocean, the world. I want to see it all. To remember it all. But I can’t loosen my grip on the pole. I’m too scared to let go. What if the next time I leave my body, I can’t get back?
Since the fight with Bruce, I’m even more afraid of strangers. True, my father brags about the fight. True, when my mother sees the big girls in the apartment complex asking me over to play, she says things like “I’m glad you’re finally making friends, honey.” The problem is, the girl who’s moved into my body, the squirrel-child they call Judy, the one that likes to bloody other children, isn’t me. I’m scared that the next time I leave, Judy won’t let me back in.
First I was too afraid to run away from home anymore. Now I’m too afraid even to leave my own body. It’s getting so tight in here I can hardly breathe.
“What’s your name, honey?” one of the old women asks me.
I don’t look at her, just stare at the pole, trying to remember a girl who lived long ago in a Japanese fairy tale.
Judy Copeland’s essays have appeared in Water-Stone Review, The Florida Review, Literal Latte, New Millennium Writings, and Travelers’ Tales.