Paint by numbers

Train station in Tokyo. Summer 2010. 

Sometimes life feels like a paint-by-numbers kit. Like, it starts off slow and it doesn’t make sense and it’s not always beautiful at the beginning (and all the new mothers stopped reading my blog at that last statement....) But, if you follow the directions, if you just keep painting, everything seems to turn out alright in the end.

I know, I know, of course this isn’t always true. Sometimes life is more like a surrealist painting than a paint-by-numbers, but go with me on this.

I’ve been reflecting on the fact that recently I’ve made a number of full circles.

This week I finished my last test in Japanese at Bellevue College. Golly, it was difficult. After the test, I walked straight to the little piano room that I used to spend so much time in back when BC was my college. That was, of course, before I ever enrolled at Northwest, before I ever decided on my major. I used to play the same two songs over and over and over as I talked to God and didn’t know what to do with my life. I couldn't figure out if I wanted to major in photography, or philosophy, or music, or, God-forbid, I had been tossing around the idea of English. I was always in that piano room. I was often playing that piano even though I was never any good. 

Yesterday, I sat down at the same piano bench and played.

The difference, of course, is that now I have a much better idea of what I’m doing and what *the future* looks like.

I’ve been thinking about the beginnings of everything. And really, recently, I’ve been feeling so grateful.

I took my first literature class at Bellevue in the fall of ’07. We read Life of Pi, James Joyce, Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House,’ poetry by Kim Addonizio, and so so so much more. It all stuck with me; permanent. That fall, I brought my anthology home to my roommates and read to them poems and paragraphs that I loved. They laughed, and I think were maybe a little annoyed with me. They could think of better things to do with their time.

I couldn’t.

I aced the Introduction to Literature class, but I wasn’t seriously thinking about becoming an English major. Not at the time.

At BC, I took my first philosophy class and my first photography class and the world opened up to me in a new way.

In spring of ’08, I took a combination class called Whosespace which focused on immigration in America. It was fifteen credits of photography, expository writing, and political economics. We read The Names, and Catfish and Mandala, and The Beautiful Things The Heaven Bears, and Breath, Eyes, Memory. But my favourite novel that we read was Native Speaker by Chang- Rae Lee. It’s about a man struggling with English as his second language, it’s about language and culture and the alienation you feel when you don’t entirely belong. The class made me think about Genesis and the story of Babel. At the end of the class, we all had to write something. I wrote a poem and it came to me, like nothing else had ever before. It was the first time I’d ever written in an inspired frenzy where the words just poured out of me. And, to top it off, for the first time ever, something I wrote elicited a standing ovation from a classroom of my peers and my professors. 

The piece I wrote had lines like this:

She scribbles black on white figures

and I can’t imagine what that could possibly mean

and

And do you dream in Japanese? Or think in English?

Are you constantly translating your thoughts?

Now, here I am, at the end of all of this, and I’m the one who’s spent the last year scribbling black on white figures learning the language I thought I’d never understand. What was once a wall to me is now a bit of a door. Mind you, it’s a big heavy door that takes all my strength to even crack open, but it’s still more of a door than it is a wall. Now, I’m the one who has been dreaming in Japanese, I’m the one who is always translating her thoughts.

Recently, I’ve been thinking so much of how I didn’t know then what I know now. I’m so grateful to be able to look back and connect the dots. I’m in awe over how much my own words, my own artistic expressions, have guided and steered my life. I didn’t know when I wrote ‘persimmons & bamboo shoots’ that I would go on to study Japanese,  go to Japan,  delve deeper into this whole cultural assimilation mystery. But in many, many ways, it’s because I wrote it that all of that has happened. That's why I named my blog after that poem from Whosespace. In ways, I feel like writing it was the seed for so much of what has happened since then. 

The summer after I took Whosespace, I turned 22 and a friend took me to Korean food for the first time. I was introduced to kimchee, barely tea, and the cute guy who waited our table. The moments of that day are indelible to me because the dinner was expensive and it was my best friend paying and it was just us and that’s how I’ve always preferred to do things, in small groups.

That fall I took a geology class at Bellevue. We learned about rocks using a very simple textbook. It was science for liberal arts majors at it’s best. My lab partners were two Korean guys who were fresh out of ESL classes. The professor didn’t partner us up, we choose our own partners and I don’t know what drew us all together, but we met the first day of class and after that we were inseparable. From them I learned about Korean drinking culture, Jeju island, and the two years required in military service for every Korean male. I learned about Korean names and, gosh, it was a lab class and we had time on our hands and nowhere to go. I learned a lot, and none of it was about rocks. Among other things, they talked about homesickness and how you gain weight so easily when you move to America. I became their English tutor. We’d keep in touch for years afterward.

At the time, Korea was this fearful mystery to me because I only ever heard about North Korea. I knew nothing else about it. I certainly wasn’t ever going to go there, although, I had to admit, Jeju island sounded nice.

The next summer I moved out of the house on Juanita drive and into a house where the main language was Japanese. I became the go-to English expert. I also became the foreigner. I mean, literally, they called me the gaijin. It was incredibly difficult at times because it was literally like living in Japan, but at the same time, I loved it. I didn't realize then how strong that experience would make me, how much I would need that strength later on.

That fall, I enrolled in classes at Northwest. The first class I took was Slavic literature with Martha Diede. There was only four of us students and I was terribly nervous about everything, but I loved it. I loved listening to Diede and I loved our class talks. After Dr. Diede returned my first paper to me with the words YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR scrawled in bold in one of the corners, I took a trip to her office and I changed my major. Sometimes I think maybe all you need is a little encouragement to act on what you already know.

A word after a word after a word is power. That’s Margaret Atwood, for you. I love the power of words. Specifically, I love the power of encouragement I’ve seen my teachers yield to change lives. It’s part of what has inspired me to be a teacher.

I had no idea that fall that the members of that tiny little Slavic literature class would come together to form writer’s workshop two years later; Jessie, Michelle, Meghan, even Sarah who was just down the hall in the writing lab at the time; life is full of such beautiful surprises.

The next fall I moved in with new roommates, and Jessie, from Slavic literature was one of them. It wasn’t really something that I wanted to do because I didn’t really know those people, but it all sort of worked out since, in time, I found out that they liked to read aloud from books, too. Another full circle.

Now, it’s almost three years from when I first started at Northwest. When I started, I was purposefully not trying to make new friends. I already had enough friends from being part of a megachurch and I felt like it was hard enough to keep in touch with them. I didn’t want anymore. I know that sounds terrible, but it's true. 

Gosh. I’m so glad it didn’t work out how I planned.

In my opinion, the best thing I’ll take from Northwest won’t be the university diploma, even if it is a first in my family. Rather, the best thing I’ll take will be the people I’ve found who’ve changed my life along the way; comrades and mentors who were completely worth the fact that I overpaid for my private school education.

I’ve been connecting the dots and thinking about how I never could have figured it all out on my own, but looking back, it all makes sense and I fully, completely, 100% believe that Providence had everything to do with it. Paint-by-numbers. I was simply following the vague directions and hoping to God that it would work out alright.

And it did.

I’ve tried to tell as many people in person as I’ve been able, but for those of you who don’t know, I’m currently going through the process of applying to teach English in South Korea with Michelle Meade. That’s part of what makes all of this a full circle for me, the fact that we’re going together, the fact that when we first met, neither of us had any idea that we’d embark on such an adventure together. I couldn't be more grateful. I couldn't be more surprised at where life has taken me. 

I’m excited for the future. I’m excited to share new things. That’s why I started this blog.