Beginnings Begotten
On a beautifully bright November morning, exactly six months and one week behind schedule, I took to the skies from the American East Coast, tracing that familiar arc northwest across Canada and Alaska before curving southward over Russia and, at last, landing at Tokyo Haneda a cool fourteen hours later.
More than halfway through the required two-week quarantine in Japan, I’ve been struggling with where and how to begin this narrative that feels bound to the liminal, situated at a midpoint, as it were, between countries, careers, languages, and other possibilities.
This whole year has been at once unpredictable and banal, time rising up and crashing down on itself in waves. I spent this past summer dazed in suburbia: New York was enveloped in a translucent membrane, beneath which pulsed the twelve beautiful years I had accreted in the city. And right next to it were smaller, equally vital masses of memory, telegraphing Californian insouciance or Midwest loneliness, the golden idyll of childhood on different continents. I took stock of all the places and people that constituted my being, revisited and recollected myself at different ages, in far apart eras. My life was at a standstill, it seemed. Beset by bureaucracy, pinioned by a pandemic, I slumped through month after month of uncertainty, wondering how I would ever get to The Next Thing. I despaired over whether it would happen at all.
But here I am. The shapeless purgatory that consumed most of this year has suddenly contracted into a small, dense object that fits in the palm of my hand. Half a year is no time to wait, after all, in the context of a lifetime.
I’ve come to Tokyo to start anew. To recover certain aspects of myself, to redefine others. In New York, I worked full-time for over a decade in higher ed, a career that allowed me to sustain a writerly life and to nurture a translation practice. But a reckoning was long overdue. I’d been itching to break free, to shake things up and reprioritize. All of this led to a PhD, conducted in English (my Japanese is still terrible), at Waseda University. I had planned to begin my studies in the spring, the start of the Japanese academic year. It took half a year and piles of paperwork to finally get here with C., my husband, and our two cats.
Tokyo in this moment feels like a fulcrum, from which I hope to bear and balance the weight of my aspirations with steady and smooth force. I want to use this digital venue to observe the mundane, to record marginalia related to research or leisure. I write to manifest new narratives, and to thread them together with the ones I still carry with me. Maybe most importantly, I hope to seize that which might otherwise elude me. In Japanese, “to memorize” and “to remember” share the same verb stem: 覚える (oboeru) and 覚えている (oboete iru). To remember is the present progressive of committing, however imperfectly, to memory.
Lots more to unpack and unspool from here, but in due time. As for Big Husband? Japanese is peppered with faux amis for Chinese speakers, the paired meanings a casual and bemusing dissonance for the most part. The colloquialism 大丈夫 (daijōbu)—meaning “alright,” “okay,” “all good,” etc.—is pretty ubiquitous in Japanese. Meanwhile, the reading of these characters in Chinese signifies “a man of character” and masculine-associated virtues.
I’m Chinese and American, a dilettante linguist, and a (somewhat) newly married queer man. For all these reasons, the literal Chinese meaning of 大丈夫 seems a perfect name for this endeavor: Big Husband. Easy-breezy, tongue-in-cheek. I am man, I am (big) husband; I am these and other characters. It’s all gravy. 大丈夫だよ。