Monday, Dec 27, 1999
 Whenever Autumn Arrives
- Aiko Joshi Human rights activist/writer/Graduate student multi-cultural: Korean-Japanese-Nepali"
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Whenever autumn arrives and the leaves turn gold, red, and brown, my thoughts often turn nostalgically to autumn in Japan, specifically, Kyoto, Japan where I spent the first thirteen years of my life. October is a glorious month throughout Japan but especially so in the former Imperial capital. Festivals abound, designated around the giving of thanks to the deities for a successful and abundant harvest. Elaborately magnificent parades are also a highlight, depicting various historical chapters of Japan's feudal past. Outdoor fairs are held in the grounds of various Buddhist temples throughout the city and surrounding area. These fairs are a smorgasbord of sight, sound, and smells. People jostle and stroll their way past stalls selling all manner of things including trinkets and knick knacks, grilled fish, sweets and rice crackers, kitchen and gardening utensils, pottery, hot bowls of udon (wheat) and ramen noodles in soup topped with fishcakes, pork slices, egg and/or seaweed, and roasted corn on the cob. There are also game stalls where the prize is a water-filled bag of small goldfish, or a ticket to get a snack of grilled octopus balls (batter with bits of octopus that is put in a special griddle) slathered with a wonderful teriyaki-type sauce (though not as sweet), and topped with bits of crisp seaweed and red ginger. My family moved to the port city of Kobe when I was fourteen, but those years spent in Kyoto were probably the happiest in my life.
Such nostalgic memories serve to anchor the sojourner-immigrant as they embark on a new life in a foreign land. Dorinne Kondo views these nostalgic looks back into the past as serving as "symbolic vehicles" for ethnic identity for not only first generation immigrants, but also for their children and even grandchildren (Kondo, 1997: 106). It is through memory that immigrants and their families can remain connected not only with each other, but also with their homelands, giving them a sense of always being able to "go back". It is also an important venue through which children and grandchildren can come to understand not only their parents' and grandparents' motivations for emigrating, but also to comprehend the enormity (at times) of their sacrifice. Kondo sees this as a healthy way to keep a sense of who one is, where one belongs, of "[writing Asian Americans] into existence . . ."(106) for the benefit of the host society that does not or will not fully acknowledge their presence and contributions.
Nostalgic memory provides a protective cushion against the pain of separation (Sarup, 1996). It is a "safe place where there is no need to explain oneself to outsiders. . ."(Kondo: 97) The notion that one can always go "back home" often helps in sustaining the immigrant through the often difficult early years. Sometimes, the effect of memory, of remembrance and longing can become much stronger and sharper the longer one remains away from one's homeland. I have discovered that this is especially true for those of us who have - for various reasons, under various circumstances - been unable to return "home" once we left. It is as if because of our inability to go "home", our memories become sharper and we feel the pang of "something" amiss.
Nostalgic memory is not only defined in terms of memories of longing for the foods or festivals of one's homeland; nostalgic memory also encompasses the desire for a place where one belonged, where one's racial ethnicity was not brought into question. For example, for those of us Korean immigrants who made new lives in Japan, many of us were able to "blend into" the general populace because our physical features did not separate us from the Japanese. By changing our names to Japanese names, we were able to function within a society that saw us as culturally and morally inferior. While our parents may have never felt completely at home despite having taken up lives as Japanese, many of the second generation of Koreans in Japan such as myself, came to identify ourselves as Japanese. So while we were not "really" Japanese in the sense that we had not been born in Japan, because our formative years were spent there, and often we spoke only Japanese, it was easy to identify more as a Japanese than a Korean.
Memory is a potent force. It is unpredictable, suddenly descending on the conscious, catching it unawares and flooding the mind with a series of images randomly selected to create a whole. Memory is a picture formed in the mind's eye, a picture that tells a story of remembrance, of a time long forgotten or suppressed. Memory helps to keep alive the vibrantly diverse differences of Asian/Asian American groups. The "homogenizing marker" that has served to deny the differences within the fabric of US society dissolves in the face of remembrance and retention of images of the homeland (or the parents' or grandparents' homeland), food, art, language, music, and ritual. Shirley Geok-lin Lim describes this kaleidoscope of difference as a quilt, and cultural diversity is the complicated, multi-colored knot bringing the quilt together in a shared effort to recognize those differences in a positive, enlightening light (Lim, 1989: 11).
Ultimately, the result of this nostalgic looking back is that forms of romanticizing the past serve as a way of "coming to terms with the present" and "it also helps to recuperate a sense of self. . .The past is what the women can claim as their own." (41) Nostalgic memory thus often becomes distorted in one's mind's eye. Dorinne Kondo asks, is that so bad? It is a distortion not necessarily negative. While much is made of the staticity of memory, at times its seemingly unchanging images evoke a "good-old-days"-sense of nostalgia that acts as a soothing balm to one's (possibly) stress-filled life in the "new" world; as S. Shankar attests:
Summer becomes the season of remembering, of Texas turning India for me. . .in a McDonald's parking lot. The smell of heated concrete in my nose turns a sudden transplanted scent from across half the world. This is the floor of the car-shed in Madras. . .Biting into a greasy hamburger outside Austin, I remember sweet mangoes in Madras. (S. Shankar in Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map NorthAmerica, p.110)
A Very Happy New Year To All.
Till we Connect again, in the New Millenium...
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