Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [51]
That mantra shaped their lives. My parents fashioned a racial sanctum within their Boston apartment, keeping their Japanese magazines and newspapers in their bedroom. It was on their king-sized bed, beneath a massive maroon and amber scroll I could not read, that I tested my Japanese on newspapers whose vertical print smudged so easily under my laboring index finger. It was here, too, that I leafed through the back issues of Bungei Shunju magazine, whose stylized covers depicted tanabata bamboo hung with the colorful wishes of children, or snowmen whose features were made of dried seaweed rather than carrots and coal. The public spaces of the apartment, where guests might roam, were filled with other books—books in English—so clearly meant for show I never thought to read them. I once took down David Copperfield from an endless row of navy hardcovers embossed with gold. It was abridged. The shelf looked gap-toothed without it, so I quickly slid it back into place.
But even my parents did not keep the injunction to be purely American in America. Every window of their apartment was fitted with sliding rice paper screens. As a child, I thought this was because my father was a scholar, that even the light had to be read through paper. When I was older, I heard a friend of mine say her Greek mother papered over the windows of her house because she was “tired of looking at America.” I thought my parents had arrived at the more elegant solution.
Nonetheless, as a young child, I took the injunction at face value. I was abetted by the lily-whiteness of my school, which meant I was usually the only Asian child in my classes. Surrounded at all times by whites, I could half forget my difference. Recently, a Caucasian friend of mine who is a Japanese literature professor said the object he most abhors while in Japan is a mirror. In the absence of reflection, he can pretend he is Japanese—surrounded by Japanese, speaking Japanese, what else could he be? Listening to him, I saw my own childhood aversion to mirrors in a new light.
Only when I went to boarding school did I encounter Asian-Americans in any numbers. In one of my first calls home, I mentioned to my father there were many Asians here, that they even had a group. My father asked if I was planning to join it, and I said I didn’t know. “What can they teach you that you do not already know?” he asked. This sounded familiar—in Japan, he had pulled me from the Family School because only pure Japanese could teach me to be Japanese. Here, I heard him saying only pure Americans could teach me to be American. And pure, in this case, meant white. I did student government instead.
In hindsight, I see my father and I misunderstood the purposes of the Asian-American group, one of which was to resist the notion that American meant white. Yet I still appreciate what my father wished for me. He wanted me to be at the center of any experience—Japanese, American, or otherwise. I will always be grateful to him for teaching me to be bold, to be unafraid of the center.
I suspect other minority students were getting similar advice from their parents. Exeter is a bastion of privilege, self-consciously schooling its students for influence. Many of the racial minorities there had a predilection for assimilating to white norms. Some behaviors were common across groups. Avoiding ethnic organizations was one. Exercising class privilege was another. As if in adherence to the Brazilian proverb “Money whitens,” a cadre of minority students outprepped the preps, dressing out of catalogs that featured no racial minorities. And each group followed strategies of its own—Asian-Americans got eyelid surgery, African-Americans straightened their hair, Latinos planed the accents off their names.
The stereotype that plagued me the most was the portrait of the Asian-American as the perpetual foreigner. I came to hate the question “Where are you from, really?” that followed my assertion that I had grown up in Boston. I washed away this tincture of foreignness with language. I wish to be careful