Genuine gratitude naturally leads to hijinx

Despite my mom's request that I not give birth until she arrived to the Bay Area on August 4th, at the end of July we were surprised by the slightly early arrival of our beautiful son.  My mom arrived one week later and will be here for several weeks to fawn at the cuteness of her grandson and help around the house.

On the second day of her stay, after finally having eaten several proper homemade meals, I truly felt overwhelmingly thankful to have her here.  So much so that at the end of dinner, I decided to express my gratitude in a rare but genuine expression of my feelings.

"Thank you so much," I said, maybe tearing up a little, "for coming to help.  It really makes a huge difference just to have an extra pair of hands around and I am so thankful you are here!"

The blank stare from my mom rendered this tender moment totally awkward.  

"What did you say?" she asked me.

So I repeated my sentiment a little more perfunctorily. 

"Just that it is a real help to have an extra pair of hands to cook or take care of the baby is all."

"Ohhh," she said, "I thought you said 'extra pair of pants.' "

Like "Nass" but maybe better

My mom arrived a few days before our wedding and bore many cards and items of well-wishing from people in Japan. At dinner the night before the wedding, she gave me one of those half-size ziplock bags with a folded kleenex inside.

Before I could open this weird package, my mom gives me some instruction: "Look inside the tish!"

I skipped just a beat while my little grey cells computed and said, "You mean tissUE?"

Then we all laughed. Anyway, in the tish was a pair of teeny-tiny cranes made by Jun-chan, my friend / mom's ex-student / future mctm for another generation. They really were absolutely amazing.

But TISH? Does it get any cuter than that?!

'Nass,' 'chako cake' and other cute things my students intuited

The confusing thing for many English learners from Japan is that there is an ever-expanding segment of the Japanese lexicon derived from a foreign language - often times English, but also French, German etc. Thus the word for bread is 'pan' after the French 'pain,' the word for backpack is 'ryukku' after the German 'rucksack' and things like apple and orange are simply that, with some necessary vowels thrown in: 'appuru' and 'orenji'

This leads all kinds of people to make the error that they can assume reverse conversions are effective, applying a rule that doesn't always apply. Like how little kids sometimes say 'runned' instead of 'ran.' One of my favorite stories entails a group of 5 & 6 year-olds who would enthusiastically shout the English for the things depicted on my flash cards: "APPLE" "ORANGE" "CABBAGE"

Then they see an eggplant, that purple 'onasu' and shout "NASS" much to my glee.

Or the half-Japanese boy who spoke with nary an accent and proudly informed me that for his snack he was going to get some chako cake.

I had an adult student tell me that she was 'grading up' her computer system, and another who wanted to talk about the new designer 'G-pan' she got.

The seamless blending of the world - it ain't easy. Anyone know where we stand with the whole Esperanto effort anyway?

A rock and a hard place

My mom suffers the same inclination of many people from her generation which is to refer to all people of Asian descent as 'Orientals,' a term that, growing up in the PC 80s, was eradicated from my vocabulary long ago but persists in hers despite my valiant efforts to update her outmoded terminology. Or maybe it's in spite of my efforts, but I digress. Talking to her about perpetuating this semi-racist usage only inspires her to argue about her rights since she herself is Oriental. My people-are-not-rugs-logic has never gotten me anywhere.

On her trip to NYC in February, of course she said Oriental and I expected to have this perennial interaction of me saying, "Use 'Asian'" and her saying, "Why?" followed by the usual back-and-forth ending with her above-mentioned go-to justification: "I'm one so I can say it if I want to."

Not to say that we didn't have just that, but after the requisite (and now more than two-decades old) song-and-dance, my mom paused, looked at me thoughtfully then announced her compromise.

"Well, can I just call myself a Jap then?"

A rock and a hard place.