Oh, on the contrary, some like it Japanese

This little frijolito loves books.  We have a select handful of Japanese language kids books that I read to him to the best of my ability, and John narrates according to their illustrations.  This leads to hilarity when the Anpanman character is interpreted as a friendly drunk with his shiny red nose and bicycle, or awkwardness when the little brown haired girl character in the pottybook about pooping is interpreted as “Mama,” but we make do and John John seems to be happy with our efforts.

My mom was here and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get more Japanese in the frijolito’s ear, so I brought out a few of the books she had given us (that had been in storage because he’s been too little anything but board books until recently).  Both have weird, slightly sad lessons...but that’s a different story.  

John John would bring books and ask to sit on her lap, so I would just passively observe the bed-time routine.  I took this picture – they are happy:

One of the times, he chose a board book of very selected Original Mother Goose Rhymes.  When we first inherited this book, I was surprised at how many of those rhymes were still there in my little grey cells.  And when my mom went to read them, I also realized how culturally exclusive, bizarre, and strange some are.  My mom did not have my same ingrained understading of them and responded accordingly.  There were some keepers.

  

Reaction from my mom, upon reading “Hey Diddle, Diddle,” out loud to John John:     “What a weird story.”

Reading No. 1 (misspellings indicate pronunciation):
“Pussy cat, pussy cat”

Pussy cat, pussy cat where have you bin?
 I’ve bin to London to look at the Queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat what did you, uh, 
what did you? do there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chain.
(Oh, chair.  The ‘R’ looked like an ‘N’)

John John started to get a little restless at this point.  This was not his mother’s Mother Goose.

Reading No. 2:

“Mary, Mary”

Mary, Mary quite…CONtrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle? Cockle? shells?
And pretty maids all in? a row.

I’m laughing now.  John John turns the page to what is arguably his favorite rhyme:

Reading No. 3:

“Pease Porridge”

Pea…peeez? What is that? Peeessse? 
(“It’s just pronounced ‘peas’," I told her)
Pease Porridge? Hot?

John John squirms to get off her lap. I thought he was done with Mother Goose and was going to go choose a new book. 

Nope.  He took the book from my mom, turned and gave it to me. “Read please Mama.” Then sat down in my lap.  I was dying of laughter and almost couldn’t read it myself.

Someday when everything is digital this won't be funny much less understood. But until that day:

My mom recently bought a Kindle and has been enjoying using it to read books on this trip to the US.  She bought it not only because it's lighter than carrying around a bunch of books, but also because in Japan it is easier to find English language books for Kindle than in print.

The biggest problem turned out to be that she doesn't know which books to buy, so she asked John and me for some suggestions.  We looked up a Jonathan Franzen book on the Kindle store app and the search pulled up multiple versions of the same book.

One was more expensive than the other, which I thought was kind of weird for a digital medium. 

"Maybe that one is the hardback," my mom reasoned.

Hearty laughter ensued.

We are not translators, not by a long shot!

I have found myself in a position where I am having to attempt to translate some of the photo captions from my picasa site. It is inordinately difficult. My mom and I struggled through a few, agreeing and disagreeing on the Japanese or the English or both. Talk about vexation! We were not even speaking a language by the time we took a break. These words actually passed my mom's lips: "Like I’m always looking for a new word kind of way." Wha? Meaning is completely up for grabs. I'm sure that's not English either, but I'm beyond caring right now.
We arrived at the photo of the girl with her cell phone down the back of her pants. The caption, "From this girl, I learned the best place to store your cell phone is your butt-crack," seemed straight forward enough, so I was typing the Japanese as my mom quickly and easily dictated her translation because she, too, thought it should be a breeze. Oh, how wrong we were.

Here is her Japanese translation retranslated back into English:
"From this girl, I learned the best place to store your cell phone is your butt-hole."

I almost laughed out my lung.

She was never allowed to Rock the Vote, not even once

I just received my sample ballot in the mail for the November elections. My mother, who was never naturalized, had never seen a ballot in all her 37 or 8 years in the US and so was curious to see what they looked like. I assured her they were nothing interesting, but she pressed, so I showed it to her. She was nonplussed in general and remarked that she hadn't realized it wasn't just a presidential election, that there were other things on the ballot. "Of course," I told her. "But this time around I'm registered to vote in Los Angeles, so there's a lot on the ballot I don't know anything about. I'm going to have to...," but before I could finish my thought about needing to do some research before the end of October, she conveniently filled in my words for me.
"...fill them in randomly?"

NO! NO! Thank God she's never voted! Argh!

My civic self had a total hissy fit, then my actual self dissolved into hysterics. Plus, it reminded me of a story about my mom's Japanese colleague who gave a talk in the US in the 70s or something about how progressive Japan was becoming and made the fatal L/R pronunciation error and told a bunch of people at a lecture: In Japan, even women can now have erections.
Ah, but that seems more civically responsible than filling in a ballot like your SATs when you've run out of time.

The results are in: Couscous ≠ Panko crumbs

She was going to make fried pork cutlets à la tonkatsu tonight. I just went down to check it out because it was smelling pretty good and she informed me that she didn't have any panko bread crumbs, so these are more like schnitzel or whatever. But the flour batter was a second attempt. The first time, she tried covering the meat with dried couscous. "But it was too hard," she told me. I immediately started having a conniption and had to run away. Who in their right mind thinks to substitute panko crumbs with couscous? It's like putting cornstarch in a bread maker instead of flour just because they are both white and powdery. It just doesn't make sense to me. "At least I only made one," she said in her own defense, "because I had my doubts about it, too." Well, that does show at least a little bit of foresight on her part. In any case, it's an improvement.

The Yoko Edict

"My brain is so...," my mom began and then trailed off.

Lately she has been picking up conversations that we had started hours, sometimes days, earlier. This morning, she called up the stairs to me to tell me she had found two more books but they were at least 10 years old, too. You think I'd know what she was talking about and that maybe I had just been asking her about books but our conversations today have not even remotely touched on the subject of published chronicles. My only choice was to let those words settle in and let the natural synapse connection process occur. Eventually I remembered I had asked her the other day if she had any of her old French conversation books still. She'd found one. It had been published in 1968. I decided against using it.

But anyway, back to today. "My brain is so....," we looked steadily at each other, her trying to find the words, and me trying not to crack a smile so as to interrupt her 'thought' process. After a longish pause, she continued, "...not used to being used." What a declaration. What an amazing declaration!

People like that

The technological miracle that is Japan has things that would be useful the world over. For example, our washroom has an overhead light, of course, but the mirror over the sink has its own florescent lighting that allows you to see every flaw in your skin clearly, as well as a heater for the mirror so that it won't fog up. It is brilliance that only costs two light-switches extra. Well worth it.

As some of you know, I've been enjoying James Thurber's short-stories lately. He had a line about an aunt in the story about his various misadventures with cars that I felt, had I been a great writer and able to make good sentences like this one, would have worked well in the June installment of mctm, Wishful Thinking. Here is the line:
"She enjoyed the hallucination, among other things, that she was able to drive a car."

This guy who died almost two decades before I was born surely had a way with words that pummels my funny-bone like a sledgehammer. Anyway last night as my mom was getting ready for bed, brushing teeth etc in the washroom, I read her some of the more hilarious excerpts from this story about cars, "Recollections of the Gas Buggy." One recounted how he had taken his suddenly overheating car to a mechanic who fixed the problem:
I was standing outside the car, staring at the dashboard and its, to me, complicated dials, when I noticed to my horror that one of them registered 1650. I pointed a shaking finger at it and said to the mechanic, 'That dial shouldn't be registering as high as all that, should it?' The garage mechanic looked at me with the special look garage mechanics reserve for me. It is a mixture of incredulity, bewilderment, and distress. 'That's your radio dial, Mac,' he said. 'You got her set at WQXR.'

"The world really does have people like that," my mom tells me. This from the woman who asked me this morning if she could send a fax from our fax machine to our fax machine. "Um, yeah," I think, "you are one of them." I clearly state this fact as she comes out of the washroom laughing lightly, and turns off the overhead light.

But the washroom is still illuminated. I tell her. She goes back, clicks a switch and comes out again.

The light is STILL on, so I tell her again. She looks back in surprise - she'd obviously switched off the defogger but somehow didn't notice the light still on. I think it dawns on her at this moment that she really is one of those people and I swear we've never laughed so hard. She switched off the light (for real this time) and slowly walked past me, doubled over in laughter with wheezing sounds coming out of her throat and went to bed. I then followed suit.

mchjd post 9: Will I ever grow up?

I had a student today, a woman a little younger than my mom but contrarily very proper and polite; a most agreeable student. Today's lesson covered things you might need to know should you need to visit a doctor, with phrases like "the flu" or "food poisoning." Naturally, the word "diarrhea" was also in the text book, but I am enough of a professional at this point that I didn't even crack a smile. Not to say I didn't want to but, proudly, I repressed the juvenile urge to giggle. What happened next made this valiant effort worthless, though.

You see, she had trouble with the word's enunciation. The first time, she said DI-a-rrhe-a. So I corrected her. "The stress is on the third syllable," I said in a teacherly way. di-a-RRHE-a
I felt proud that I was keeping it professional.

Then there was a dialog between a doctor and patient. Of course the writers of this text book couldn't give the patient the flu. Nooo, it had to be food poisoning. At this point, I'm still holding it together, but when my student gets to the line in question, she makes the same error, "I have DIarrhea." So I remind her, "It's diaRRHEa." I'm still holding up.

Here, she begins to chant to get the correct pronunciation firmly into her brain. I'm used to this behavior from students - repetition really does help - but all of a sudden I'm aware that she's saying, "I have diaRRHEa. I have diaRRHEa" over and over again and the second grader in me comes flying out full-force. Tears of laughter begin welling up in my eyes and I can't breathe. She looks concerned and asks me if she's said something wrong. I shake my head 'no' and force myself to think of something-anything!-else. But it's too late; I'm laughing and no longer feeling any pride, but rather that I'm going to get fired if I can't pull myself together. The rest of the lesson was me reminding myself not to remember this incident, forgetting it, then wondering what it was I was trying to not remember, remembering it again and having to quell any hysterics. It was this pattern over and over again, but I managed to survive the remainder of the lesson without incident, though I don't know that 'teaching' accurately describes what I was able to do in those 20 minutes.

Generational gap defined, much to her chagrin

I was vaguely partaking in a conversation my mom and one of her former students, Jun chan, were having this morning, when I heard a word I was not familiar with.
"What's ohbehjin," I asked.
"It's what you are," my mom said. A brilliant definition that clarified close to nothing for me.
A giggle escaped my lips. "I don't know what that means."
So she clarified. "Da white people."
I swear to god she said 'da' and not 'the;' I was laughing so hard. But Jun chan didn't agree with this explanation. My mom said that the characters that make up the word come from the words "Europe" and "America" to which Jun chan agreed, but she said that while elderly people might still think that means 'white,' the younger generation may not be so narrow in their interpretation.

As for me, I was just recovering from my loss of control over my mom's 'da white people' comment when the words 'elderly people' passed Jun chan's lips. Of course I had a total relapse. My mom didn't scowl, though. She just laughed. I'm kind of glad that that scowl is reserved only for the disparaging comments that I make. Kinda makes me feel special.

I still have no idea; it is still hilarious. Barbara.

We all hate spam so when my mom created a new email account I advised her to use her old one for on-line purchases etc as an attempt to avoid future spam. Apparently she forgot to use the old address when she bought that sheet music recently, and so is receiving ads from that company at her new email. Not spam yet. Just junk mail. So, I told her that usually those kinds of emails are easy to stop. "Scroll down to the bottom, there will probably be something that says 'click to unsubscribe.' "

So, I watched her scroll and I watched her face as it inched closer and closer to the screen, searching, before turning back toward me with that blank expression. I knew something good was afoot. I waited. The blank expression continued and then finally, in that perplexed voice, she said, "Barbara?"

I have no idea but it was hilarious. I'm sure she scowled not that I could tell through my tears of joy. Then the cat meowed, and she said to him, "It's not funny, is it," but I think his meow was in solidarity with me. He knows. My mom believes cats have the mental capacity of a 10-year-old because she saw it on TV one time (I'm not sold), so I also know she knows he knows - it was hilarious.

Chasing the Rainier Dragon

We stopped at a konbini (which is the Japanese word for convenience store, which, unlike any States side, actually are full of convenience) to get some coffee as we hit the road. Shirking away from the coffees in cans which are also readily available, I bought us each a cup from new brand of coffee which my mother had tried yesterday - it's called Mt. Rainier. It comes pre-packaged in what looks like any to-go cup from an espresso bar and this place was selling several varieties. You could differentiate because the colors on the cups varied but as far as what the actual differences were, anyone's guess was as good as mine since they all basically said 'espresso latte.' My mom had gotten the one that said 'Premium' (and whose only other difference, aside from the word 'premium' in front of the words 'espresso latte,' was that it was ¥50 more expensive than the regular kind); she'd said it was really good yesterday, so I got it again. It was pretty damn good.

As she drank it in the car, she commented, "They must put something in this coffee."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Like, drugs or something," she replied.
"Why?" I laughed.
"Because, every time I taste it, I think 'Oh, this is so good!' Every time it touches my tongue I think it. It's not normal!"
"Are you sure it's the coffee's fault? Perhaps it is you who are not normal."

I don't think there's anyone else in my life who would immediately attribute the deliciousness of something to it being spiked with drugs. I tried to convey this to her but maybe I should have just said "Yeah..."

Yoko don't need no instructions

We'd bought some walnuts near a temple in Hakusan on our trip and they've been sitting in a bowl with a nut-cracker for a few days now. Today, my mom told me that she'd tried to crack one open but it was too hard. "So, I tried smashing it with a hammer, and look what it did to that cutting board Ogura san made! I even wrapped it in a towel first."I thought I'd give it a try, too, and damn if it wasn't the hardest nut I've ever tried to crack! I gave up and sat down. "You're right. It's too hard!" I told her.

"They came with directions," she then told me, "that said to boil them first, but I'd never heard of that so I threw the directions away." I nearly had a heart-attack in the laughing fit that followed. She still doesn't understand what I found so funny. I'm still laughing.

Head of the Crass

It was a good way to start the day.

I went down for a quick bite before heading off to work this morning. As usual, my mom was already downstairs and was reading her email. I got my breakfast and sat down at the table, sipping coffee and trying to get ungroggy, when my mom turns to me and says, "Seizo's assistant."
I sat, eating, drinking, waiting for more, but nothing was forthcoming.
"You know that's not enough information," I told her.
"Well," she said, "I was gonna say 'fucked up' but I didn't think it was very nice."
It was a proverbial 'milk-out-my-nose' moment, though coffee and toast was decidedly more painful.

Event two happened just moments after this one, when the cat was whining and meowed his super high and lady like meow even though he's really an old-man kitty. "It's because he has no balls," my mom informed me, "Like the castrati, you know?" This I knew, but still it seems remarkable that his voice is so clear and high. To me, he'll always just be the Gramps, the Queen.

'mfa≠job steve' has it right: Yoko you so crazy

Last night my mom was talking about this kind of light, orchestral music that is not really classical but not really pop and as such is extremely popular among many Japanese. She couldn't remember the name of the composer and so started to try and describe the music to me. She didn't even make it through one sentence.
Y: It's really soupy...
N: You mean, sappy...
Y: No, SOUPY. You know, light and not really very serious, sentimental.
N: Yes. Sappy. Cheesy.
Y: Soupy.
N: I don't understand. You are telling me that the music has the quality of soup? I have no idea what that means. I think you are using the wrong word.
Y: No, I've used it for years and no one has said anything before.
N: That's probably because they thought you were meaning 'sappy.' But, please, explain to me exactly how music can have the quality of soup, and what that means to you.
Y: (laughing) Well... (long pause)
N: (laughing) You don't even know, do you!
Y: Yes I do! It's nice and it's sort of runny...

She couldn't get any further than this though which told me enough, not that I would have heard her over my cackling. I can't really give her any grief since I'm sure there are a million things I know how to use but probably couldn't give a definition if my life depended on it. Actually, I've discovered I have this problem with many idioms. I guess adjectives are to Yoko what idioms are to me.

those little throw away moments

"If I see it, I want to stop it." This declaration was made with gusto today as we drove to the cemetery. What heinous offense is my mom so against? Nothing. She was telling me about a little farmers' market kind of place and, while I had a good laugh, it was just a case of pronoun/adverb confusion: it, there, whatever. These are the little moments that don't get shared but happen daily, sometimes hourly. Let me tell you, the scowling abounds each and every time.

The moral here is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and you'll just have to experience her yourself someday to fully appreciate what I get to enjoy every day.

catch phrase and wig and the jokes are lame

I was cracking up over the comment Inder posted on my last entry, and was telling my mom about it. I wonder if it was some weird antisemitic thing making Popeye's catch phrase something that is so blasphemous? I'm thinking of those crazy cartoons from that era with Mickey and Hitler etc., etc. Anyway, I was telling my mom that "I am what I am" really was Popeye's catch phrase, and she says,

"I always thought it was 'I am what I eat.' "

I fell over laughing. She also recently told me that she thought Homer Simpson was a plumber. I thought that was pretty funny, too, although maybe it's weirder that the rest of us know that he works in a nuclear power plant.

Technology 7, or, Laptop Viagra

My mom's old student/IT man came over last night to finish setting up her new computer, transferring data and things. This morning, encountering a problem, we clicked 'restart' and waited. "It's taking so long to shut down," my mom commented, so a few seconds later I asked if it was still trying to shut down.

She replied, "It shut down and now it's trying to get it up."

I started laughing immediately, and she said, "It's not funny..."
"It is," I insisted, tears welling up in my eyes. "Do you even know what that phrase is usually used for?!"
"Yes."

A side story about her student (whom I call "The Professor" since he knows random facts about just about anything) is that last night my mom was telling him about my blog and he asked me what the URL was. As I said it, he typed it in to the computer. A moment later I got a blank stare from him and he said that it pulled up an error screen. What?! I thought, but as soon as I saw the address bar, it all made sense. Here is what it said: www.myclazytokyomother.blogspot.com. So close, and yet, so far...

The new name of fear

We just finished watching "The Silence of the Lambs," me for the nth time, but my mother for the first time. It was, as it always is, a very intense experience. My mom asked me if Jodie Foster was the same person that was in the movie "As Good as it Gets" but I said no, that was Helen Hunt.
"Oh, that's right," she said. "And I always forget the name of that actor...what was the name of the guy who played Lester?"
"Who?"
"The doctor in the movie we just saw. Dr. Lester?"

Fear has a new name, and it is Hannibal Lester.

It's a good thing my mom never worked for Hollywood in that capacity. Somehow Hannibal Lester just doesn't have the power to strike anything but glee into my heart.

Sadly, I think the joke was on her

After eating lunch with my mom's friend, the three of us sat around jibber-jabbering and ended up talking about politics in the US, of course making disparaging remarks about Bush. I recounted a funny story I'd heard on NPR about a fictional conversation during the meeting between the then-newly-Nobel-prize-awarded Gore and the prez. It was kind of funny in English, but somehow when my mom translated it for her friend, it simply became tedious and unfunny. I noted this, of course. He agreed.

Then she turned to me and said, "Do you know the joke?"

It was such a random, generic question. I really had no idea what she was talking about (with her it might be anything!), so of course I started laughing, and she said, "So, you do know it!" My continuing laughter made it evident that I, indeed, did not know the joke. I tried to indicate that I didn't even know what she might possibly be referring to, but that's a hard thing to do when you're rolling on the floor. I couldn't stop, even when she gave me that patented scowl of hers. I'm still laughing.

Tea time with Yoko

It's snowing and cold and my mom and I had bought donuts at Mister Donut for our afternoon tea. (Incidentally, Mister Donut makes this thing called a Pon de Ring which is the best thing I've had of the donut variety since my first taste of a Krispy Kreme.) I was making us black-tea and asked my mom if she wanted to put any sugar or anything in hers.
"I want everything," she told me. "Sugar and milk. Or whiskey."
Apparently she likes tea with sugar and Wild Turkey. Anyway, today she opted for the softer version and we enjoyed our tea mit donut as the snow fell quietly outside.

Having eaten our donuts, we were meditating on the quiet mess of the dining room table when my mom started to peer curiously at this tin she uses to keep stamps in.
"What?" I asked her.
"I was trying to figure out where this came from," she answered.
"It looks like it's maybe from England...Let me see it."

I looked at the picture on the front and read the little blurb under the name "Neuhaus."
"I think it must be French. It says 'Neuhaus - créateur de chocolats frais depuis 1857.' "

"I guess so if it says depuis."

The ridiculousness of that sentence hadn't penetrated my heavy Pon de Ring fog before I heard the raspy wheeze of a cackle coming from my mom. Actually, this was one thing I might have even let go except that it was funny that she thought it was funny before I even recognized it as being funny. She finally beat me to the punch.