If You Follow Me (12 page)

“One,” I say, “My name is…a) Miss Marina…”

“Is Miss Marina's name Miss Marina?” Kobayashi-sensei translates the question into Japanese before I finish listing the options.

“Hai
!” the children yell in a self-assured chorus.

“That's right,” I say. “My name is Miss Marina.”

“My name is Miss Marina,” the second graders repeat unprompted.

“No,
my
name is Miss Marina,” I say. “Your name is…” I look around the room, but I can't read the characters on their nametags. “Your name is Koji,” I say, pointing to the gray-eyed little boy wearing the giant ski gloves.

“Your name is Koji,” Kobayashi-sensei says. “
Mo ichi do.
”

“Your name is Koji,” the boy repeats, looking out the window. Following his gaze, I expect to see something special, but find only the anemic sky of early February.

“Is Miss Marina twelve years old?” Kobayashi-sensei translates the next question before I can even ask it in English.

“Hai
,” Koji replies.

“Come on,” his teacher says. “Your brother is twelve. Could Fu
miya be a teacher?” The other kids laugh and the boy scowls, glaring down at his desk. When the teacher asks the kids if I'm fifty-two, every hand in the room shoots up.

“It's because of your eyes,” Kobayashi-sensei says in a conspiratorial whisper.

“I have old eyes?” I whisper back.

“You have foreign eyes,” he says. “Foreign eyes have more folds.”

“I'm twenty-two,” I say, writing the number on the board.

“I'm twenty-two,” the class repeats after me, getting into the game of it.

I'm surprised when every student guesses that I'm from Seoul, Korea, even though I'm holding up a dollar bill and a picture of the Empire State Building. Then they all guess that I speak Korean. “No,” I say. “I speak English.”

“What's English?” lisps a little girl with a jack-o'-lantern grin.

“This is English,” I say, wondering if it's possible she really doesn't know.

“This is English,” they repeat.

“You will all have to learn English,” Kobayashi-sensei informs them.

“Why?” asks Koji.

“Because it's required,” he says wearily.

“If you learn to speak English,” I say, “then you can go abroad and talk to people from all over the world!” This is a direct quote from
New Horizons
. I look to Kobayashi-sensei to translate.

“If you learn to speak English,” he says, “then you can talk to Miss Marina.”

 

The kids finish the worksheet in just fifteen minutes. Since I have nothing else planned, Kobayashi-sensei rewards them with an early recess.
The two of us sit on the ledge of the empty swimming pool behind the school. A crusty layer of snow lines the cement basin, porous and hard as coral. In the pool, dry leaves chase each other around and around, while the kids do the same on the field. Only one child doesn't join in the fun. A tall thin girl with two long braids and a voluminous uniform skirt hanging almost to her ankles stands an arm's reach away from us, kicking up clods of dirt. In Japanese, Kobayashi-sensei explains that this girl's name is Kim, that she moved to Shika from Pusan, Korea five months ago, and that she can't speak Japanese yet.

“Probably that's why the students thought you were Korean,” he says, and then he quickly corrects himself. “Of course, you speak Japanese very well. You are fluent,
ne
?”

I ask why the girl moved to Japan and he tells me that her father was hired by Shika's nuclear power station, to ship
gomi
back to Pusan.

“Garbage?” I translate.

“Waste,” he says.

“You send nuclear waste to Korea?”

“Not me,” he says brusquely. “Mister Kim.”

In Japanese, he tells me that the girl's mother died when she was a baby, that her father works long hours and the teachers take turns visiting her at home, checking in to see if she needs anything, but since she can't speak Japanese, they don't really know.

“Are the other kids nice to her?” I ask.

“Yappari
,” he says. Naturally. “Why do you ask this?”

“Because she's Korean,” I say. The problem with speaking such rudimentary Japanese is that it all comes out so blunt. I'm not trying to accuse him or anyone else of racism, but Miyoshi-sensei once told me that the descendants of Korean immigrants, people born here in Japan, are required by law to carry identification cards labeling them as foreign. He told me that once a year, the newspapers report the number of crimes committed by foreigners. “Koreans commit the
most crimes,” he said. “Then Chinese. Americans don't commit so many. But there are not so many Americans in Japan.” When I suggested that most of these “crimes” were probably simple failures to follow the rules, he agreed. “But for the Japanese,” he said, “there is little difference.”

Kobayashi-sensei stuff s his hand into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out a pack of Dunhill's, walking away from me to light up. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he jogs down the slope to break up a scuffle between two boys. I approach the little girl from behind. Her center part is jagged, one of her braids fatter than the other. A father's work. Her eyebrows are downy, her nostrils pink, her lips chapped. To me, she doesn't look noticeably different from the other children, and I wonder if they can see something in her face that I can't, something ineffably foreign, something she and I might have in common without being able to see it ourselves.

“Hello,” I say. She paws the ground with her toe and exhales noisily and I realize that she is pretending to be a horse. Her solitary play seems brave to me, like she wants to make it clear that she's not to be pitied. “Neigh,” I say, blowing air between loose lips.

“Kim can't speak,” says Koji, the gray-eyed boy wearing the ski gloves who has materialized beside us, out of breath from running.

“She can speak,” I say. “Just not Japanese. I was talking to her in English.”

“Kim-san speaks English?”

“No,” I say. “She speaks Korean.”

“She can't speak,” he insists.

“Shai desu
,” I say.

“Why is she shy?”

I don't know how to say “homesick,” although it's a word I should have learned by now. I don't know the verb “to miss,” either. “
Uchi no byouki
,” I improvise.

“Her
house
is sick?”

“Her house is far away.”

“Not
that
far,” he says. “Her house is near the power station. My mom and I take her home every day after school.”

“But she has another home,” I say, “and that other home is far away.”

“Who lives in the other home?”

“No one.”

“Maybe that's why she can't speak,” he muses. “She has no one to talk to.”

“That's right,” I say. “You should talk to her.”

Throughout this exchange, Kim has remained motionless, looking down at her painfully white sneakers. While I feel guilty for putting words in her mouth, it's thrilling that this boy understands my Japanese with so little effort. Our conversation feels as fluid and choppy as any conversation between children.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

“What?” I ask him.

“It's over there.” He gestures toward the side of the school. I glance at Kobayashi-sensei, who is once more sitting on the ledge of the empty swimming pool, lighting another cigarette off the first. The little boy slips his gloved mitt around my hand. With my free hand I take the little girl's. Her palm is so dry that I can practically feel the whorl of each fingerprint. Linked like a line of paper dolls, we disappear around the corner.

 

A sectioned hutch holds a pair of ducks on one side and two rabbits on the other. The ducks squawk as we pass by, shimmying like wet dogs. The kids lead the way into the cage and I stoop to follow, feeling like Alice after she ate the cake that made her bigger. Alarmed by our
intrusion, the rabbits shuffle to opposite corners of their hutch, noses pulsing, ears pressed flat against their backs. One of the bunnies is fat and white and glossy, with a black jellybean splotch on its haunch, while the other is gray and skeletal, its fur as dingy as a sewer rat's. Koji scoops up the gray one, ignoring its frantic hind leg kicks.

“What do you think rabbits dream about?” he asks. My first guess, carrots, meets with serious disapproval. He picks a flaccid carrot up off the ground and wags it at me. “They get carrots every day,” he says. “Why would they dream about them?” I remember that the pet rabbit I had as a child was eaten by the neighbor's dog. “Maybe,” I say, “rabbits have nightmares about dogs.” He considers this for a moment, then shakes his head. “These rabbits are in a cage,” he says. “They've never seen dogs. How could they dream about them?” “What do you think they dream about?” I ask, and he closes his eyes for a moment. “
Mukou
,” he finally says. Abroad. The other side. It's the same word Kobayashi-sensei used to explain where I'm from. I don't think he means that the rabbit dreams of going overseas. I think he means that it wants to get out of this cage.

“This rabbit is sick,” he says, thrusting the gray bunny at me. Up close, I can see that its two front teeth are so long that they're propping its lower jaw open. It's a horrifying sight. I ask what's wrong with the rabbit and he explains that its teeth won't stop growing, that they get longer every day, that it can't eat anymore, and soon it will die. At least I think that's what he says. His delivery is so matter-of-fact that I'm not sure.

“Kawaisou usagi
,” he says. Poor rabbit.
Kawaisou,
the word for poor, pathetic, pitiful, sounds so much like
kawaii
, the word for cute, that I sometimes have trouble remembering the difference.

“Kawaisou usagi
,” says Kim in a surprisingly deep and gravelly little voice.

“Don't repeat,” Koji says, his tone sharp.

“Repeating is how we learn to speak,” I tell him gently.

“Usou desu
,” he says.

“I wouldn't lie to you,” I say. “I'm an English teacher.”

“My mom is an art teacher,” he says. “
Kim-san no okaasan wa mukou desu.
”

Kim's mom is…abroad? On the other side? I remember what Kobayashi-sensei told me earlier, that Kim's mother died when she was a baby. If
mukou
is also a euphemism for dead, or for wherever it is people go after they die, then how confusing for this child, who is from abroad. I can't tell if she has understood any of this. She strokes the rabbit's ears, which are parchment thin, threaded with red veins that match its alien eyes.

“Otosan mo mukou desu
,” I say. My father is also on the other side.

“Honto ni
?” Koji asks me. Really? Then he asks how he got there.

“He jumped off a bridge,” I say in English.

“Janpu
?” the boy repeats, jumping up and down in place.

“No,” I say, amazed that he understood. I arc one hand, balance two fingers from my other hand on top of it, then showing them diving down, into the hay lining the hutch.

“Did it hurt?” he asks.

“No,” I say, although I really don't know the answer to this question.

“Where is he now?”

“Mukou
,” I say again, fighting back tears. I'm afraid that if I start to cry I won't be able to stop, that I'll fill the hutch like giant Alice and drown my tiny companions. Kim looks at me with eyes so dark that her pupils blend into her irises. She has old eyes too. Foreign eyes. Older than any seven-year-old should have. Maybe that's why we look alike. She takes my hand and we walk out of the cage together, into the white sunlight.

We sit at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the front doors of the school. The children are on either side of me, leaning against
my shins, propping me up. Kim strokes my ankle, tracing the outline of an American flag. My mom sent these tights to me after I told her that I was visiting the elementary school. She has been an elementary school teacher for thirty years, and she knows what kids like. Koji jingles the charms on my bracelet and I tell him that I have one from every foreign country I've ever visited. “This one's from Japan,” I say, pointing out a tiny silver rice bowl linked to whisker-thin chopsticks.

“Japan's not a foreign country,” he scoff s.

“It is to me,” I say, “and to Kim too. We're both from abroad.”

Now the little girl shifts so that we're no longer touching. One of the reasons the Ministry of Education places native English teachers across rural Japan is to help Japanese people become more comfortable around foreigners. I signed up for this job. She did not.

Behind us I hear a door slam. “I caught them!” yells a gruff male voice. I turn around to see Kobayashi-sensei barreling down the stairs, fists balled, sweat trickling down his heavy jaw. “Why did you run off on your own again?” he says to the little boy, seizing his shoulders and shaking him hard. When I try to protest that the boy wasn't alone, he says something in Japanese without looking at me. All I catch is, “
abunai
.”

“What's dangerous?” I ask.

“You,” he says.

A woman runs downstairs, her face blotchy. “
Okaasan
!” the little boy cries. Mama! I recognize Keiko Ishii, the art teacher and ikebana coach. She's wearing faded blue jeans and a baggy yellow sweater, her hair is short and messy, and her eyes are the same shade of gray as her little boy's. Koji wraps his arms around her thighs, and when she reaches down to unpeel his hands he starts to sob.