Wendy – Issues

Identity. Cultural identity. This is certainly not an innate trait that you are born with. Black hair, brown eyes, maybe. But an understanding of enryo, an appreciation for New Year’s mochitsuki, a penchant for Pokemon, Power Rangers, or all things Sailor Moon? Certainly not. This is something you actively (insert verb): uncover, grapple with, soak up, resist, siphon out of a greater cultural knowledge that is presented to you by family, community, pop culture, or etc. So the question becomes: What is Japanese American identity? And the answer is blurred because, at least hearing from our own group of NCI interns, this identity and the understanding of this identity is different to each of us.
Does it revolve around JA basketball? But then what about those of us who never stepped onto a gym court or would have had no idea what to put down for that Cranium “mind meld” question of what defines JA basketball (myself included!). Does it have to do with the Japanese language? But how many JAs beyond the Nisei generation do you know that are fluent in nihongo? Then it must be the food- inarizushi at potluck dinners, furikake as a perk me up for any bowl of rice, anpan, udon, tonkatsu, and on and on. Surely food is one glop of the glue that keeps a cultural identity sticking together, but how can a whole understanding be built on just that one element? Which brings me to my host CBO, JCYC, and its wonderfully exhausting summer day camp, Tomodachi. Whenever I tell someone that I’m working at a day camp in Japantown, they always assume that it’s a Japanese language or at least Japanese cultural day camp. You know, like, ooh, so does everyone speak Japanese? But the answer is, no, and the extended answer is that I certainly wouldn’t be working there if it was since I am far from being fluent in the language. And that the counselors and kids are all different ethnicities, although mainly Asian, and that there is such a variety of cultures that when we go on field trips out into SF, I sometimes feel like we are the poster children for some colors of the rainbow campaign.
Adults view race and ethnicity as a defining characteristic of a person, sometimes pushing it as far as to eclipse anything else. Kids are much less concerned, if at all, and it becomes one fact in the queue of interesting tidbits about themselves along the lines of their favorite color or what they would do if they had a million dollars. It’s simple, it doesn’t need to be explained, it just is. And what I’ve been noticing more and more is that there is so much mixing and exchanging of cultures with these kids: one little girl who is definitely Asian tells me she likes Fridays the best because at her preschool they have Shabbat and get to eat challah bread. When I ask a group of kids if they know about the festival of Tanabata, the only one who raises his hand is a red headed boy who has heard the story before and seen the bamboo branches adorned with the tanzaku wishes in the Kintetsu Mall. And every week at Tomodachi, they have multi-cultural day where, hopefully, each kid will take away at least one little tiny fact they learned about a new culture, even if it is something as simple as the fact that piñatas are a Mexican tradition.
So the point I’m heading towards, albeit in a circuitous and somewhat tangential manner, is that we are (and always have been) moving towards an increasingly multi-culutral society. Not just one that has a number of different self-contained cultures all bumping shoulders with each other but a society in which cultures mix and blur between each other, trading traditions, wandering into and out of boundaries or deliberately crunching those boundaries down. We’re a melting pot-fruit salad meld, not a completely homogeneous mush of cultures, but not the separate spheres of each community only circling warily amongst one another. Especially since the JA community, as we have talked about and heard about frequently throughout this internship, is itself one of the cultures with the most hapa families.
And so, if cultural identity is something that is mainly learned, it should not be only the people who are born Japanese American, for example, that can learn about being Japanese American or who can experience all the wonderful (and delicious) things the culture has to offer. We should be able to (and strive to) learn as much about other cultures as possible. This includes the way different cultures view the world, the different values- in some cultures its modesty, others individuality, standing up for yourself, or putting others before you. And it is this diversity of values that is extremely important to learn or understand from culture to culture, because this is where, it seems, that so many arguments and misunderstandings arise from, in the bubbling pot of communication where whatever jumps out can look very different from one person to another. Cultural identity is not something you are born with, it is something you learn. And, therefore, the more we learn about many different cultures, the more fluid the lines between each culture and the understanding between each culture will be.