The Story of Me: Chapter 1

by Ivan Kling

Chapter 1
Us

If pressed to classify us, I would say we were probably lower middle class. We were a military family moving around from base to base in Japan. Papa was a career Navy man who never rose too far in the ranks. He was a good man and a hard worker, but, as he put it, wasn’t willing to kiss the necessary ass to get promotions. Mama was an angry depressed Japanese housewife. She was never too loving or affectionate, but she made sure we got fed. Looking back on it now, I guess I can understand why she was angry and depressed, but I’ll get into that later.

Papa, like any good sailor, liked his booze. As he got older, he switched from liquor to beer, but he still drank a lot of it. I never saw my dad hit my mom, but they were always fighting and arguing. It wasn’t uncommon late at night to hear mama and papa going at it, dishes flying and furniture being tossed around. It was almost always because there wasn’t enough money. Mama liked to gamble and papa liked his drink. I guess you could say they were a match made in heaven.

For the longest time it was me, my brother Justy and sister Juli. Juli, the oldest, was four years older than me, and Justy was two years older. As far as siblings go, we were not particularly close. I’m not really sure why. Justy and I had a lot of the same friends and we did things together a lot, we even shared a room most of the time, but to this day I couldn’t tell you what his favorite color is or what his thoughts on life are. Juli was older and she was a girl. We liked to terrorize her and steal pencils and erasers from her collection, but I can’t remember ever playing at the park with her or anything like that. She would grow up to be the trouble maker. But again, that’s for later.

As a sailor, one of the things you do is go sailing. Not necessarily because you want to, but because it’s your job. So, every now and again, papa would go sailing. Sometimes he’d be gone for six weeks, sometimes he’d be gone for six months. But, whenever he went, the homecoming was always a huge deal. When he got off the boat, we would run up and give him a big hug, then he would grab mama and give her a big nasty “I’ve missed you” kiss, and then we would go home. I bet that’s the greatest feeling in the world having your family there waiting for you when you get back from a long trip. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what kept mama and papa going for so long.

When sailors come home to their wives after long journeys, sometimes they forget about contraception and where babies come from. As a result, at least in my family, sometimes you get a couple of extra children. The fruits of my father’s lapse in judgment came in the form of Cassy and Emi. What am I talking about? I think we were all a result of that same lapse in judgment! Anyway, the last two members of our family came ten and eleven years later than me. That huge difference in age made the emotional distance between me and them even greater than with the older two. To be quite frank, I was a dick to them. I was the meanest older brother in the world. I still don’t really understand why, but it probably had something to do with the fact that after they were born my parents’ fighting got worse. Mama was not the least bit happy about being pregnant, and I think she wanted to end both of her final two pregnancies, but papa wouldn’t allow it. My parents don’t really talk about the subject, that’s just what I’ve pieced together from overhearing their arguments over the years. I can only imagine how it makes Cassy and Emi feel to hear shit like that.

So, there we were, good ‘ol drunken Iowa boy dad, gambling addicted Japanese mom, and now five kids. Talk about the picture of dysfunction. My mom wasn’t the best housewife in the first place, but now, at the age of 41, she had to take care of two babies and the rest of us. I honestly think I would have run away or killed myself. Papa was never a big help around the house. In his mind, he brought home the paycheck so he should be able to come home to a clean house and a meal sitting on the table. But that rarely happened. I think at some point, the cultural differences and frustration and miscommunication made them both shut down. By the time I was old enough to really know anything about anything, mama was already into her routine of depressed late night insomnia and television viewing. She rarely got up to help us get ready for school in the morning and most of the time she was sleeping on the couch when we got home. This became a huge problem when Cassy and Emi came along. It’s ok to expect 10 to 14 year old’s to take care of themselves to a certain extent, but not looking after toddlers can cause a lot of trouble. When mama was sleeping they would go upstairs and get into mine and Justy and Juli’s stuff. Not only that, but once they learned to get their diapers off, they pooped and peed wherever was convenient. I can’t count the number of times I came home to find a terd in the middle of my bedroom floor. They also loved to roam the neighborhood with only a t-shirt on. It was a regular scene. I would come walking home from school and find Cassy playing at the park that was adjacent to our housing complex, no shoes, no diaper, naked from the waist down playing on the equipment. It all seems so surreal now, like it couldn’t have really been like that, but that’s the way it was. It’s so bad it makes me laugh when I think about it.


Chapter 2
The move

Part of the reason for the madness of my family is the fact that my parents are of different ethnic backgrounds. They were not the kind of parents that tried to nurture an understanding of both cultures or anything like that. They were the kind that were holding on for dear life and hoping that no one got killed in the process. As a result, I grew up not really having a good sense of national identity. I knew I was Japanese because whenever I looked at mama I could see she was Japanese. I knew I was American because they reminded me every day during the pledge of allegiance. I never really had any problems fitting in when I was in Japan because everyone on the base was a mixed breed like me, or they were Hispanic, or Phillipino, or black. It never really became an issue until we moved to Iowa. Good old Newton, Iowa.

When you go to a new country for the first time they say you experience culture shock. I think that would explain what happened to me when we moved to Newton. Although I am an American, moving to Newton was the first real experience I had with living in America. One could argue that living on an American military base overseas is just like living in America, and it is very similar, but it is also different in a lot of ways. As I stated earlier, most of the kids living on the base are minorities in one form or another. So, just by having lived on the base, you get a real multi-cultural experience. But, when you live in Newton, your multicultural experience is going to the Chinese restaurant just off the interstate. I’m not saying that the folks in Newton are bad people or even that they are closed minded, but they are definitely white by an insanely overwhelming margin. I guess before we moved to Newton, I never really gave a lot of thought to my own ethnicity. I knew I was Japanese and I knew I was American, but beyond that I never really thought much of it. But, when you’re the new kid in a school of about 2000 and the only other minorities are the kid from that Chinese restaurant just off the interstate and maybe two black kids, all of a sudden race and ethnicity are at the forefront. The funny thing about it is that nobody could figure out what I was. Some thought I was Mexican, some guessed Native American, some even asked if I was Eskimo. Everyone was always shocked when I told them I was half Japanese.


Chapter 3
Auto Mechanics

For some reason my sophomore year in high school I decided it would be a good idea to take an auto mechanics class. I’m not really sure what possessed me to do it, but I did. The other kids in class fit the mold of every hick stereotype you can imagine. Every day it was NASCAR t-shirts and working on Firebirds and all kinds of good stuff. Now, again, these probably weren’t bad people, but they were extremely ignorant. And as it inevitably always happened, one day someone asked me what I was. Teenage boys aren’t the most tactful beasts by nature, but when they are the auto mechanics students from the middle of nowhere, Iowa, they tend to have even less restraint or good judgment. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, instead of dodging the question, I let them have it. At first there were responses of disbelief. But then, as I convinced the group of my identity, the ignorance and lack of intercultural experience started to shine through.

“If you’re Chinese then why aren’t your eyes slanted?”

This of course was followed by raucous laughter.

“I’m not Chinese, I’m Japanese, you fuckin’ moron. There’s a pretty big difference. It’s like calling you a Mexican.”

“I aint’ no fuckin beaner! I’m American!

“Hey, my dad told me that their pussies are slanted too!! So the farther you spread their legs, the tighter they get!”

Followed, of course, by more laughter.

“That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

It really was the dumbest shit I had ever heard. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d like to believe that nobody in that room believed what was being said, but honestly, I’m not so sure.

After that, I was a little more careful about who I let in on my little secret. It’s not that I ever felt that I was in any danger or anything like that, but somehow when people found out I was half Japanese, it was like I became tainted in their eyes. Of course, there were those who didn’t care, but everyone had some kind of comment. I had a good friend who affectionately referred to me as “nip”. I never really objected. By that time I had become de-sensitized. It really is funny. When I was a kid in Japan, no Japanese person would have ever referred to me as a “Japanese”, not even mama. The best I could hope to do there was hafu. But, when I came to the United States, the land to which I legally belonged, I was singled out as “Japanese”.