Irasshaimase
It’s Friday night, and you call late. I’m sitting on the floor, rifling through piles of receipts and bank statements. Checking my laptop screen, I punch the numbers into my calculator again, willing the number to change. Nothing. Still eight hundred and seventeen dollars short.
At that moment, my phone flashes fluorescent, and I pick it up before it rings.
“Hi Mom,” I say, defeatedly closing my computer.
Your calm voice echoes the greeting back. “Hi, Emi.” In the background, I can hear the loud cawing of teenage voices on a Friday night, and the familiar ping of the bus wire.
I frown. “You’re not home yet?”
“My shift went late. A big group came in right before we closed so I had to stay. But I’m almost at Town Centre. Did I wake you?”
“No, I was just doing school stuff.” I can see you tucked into the corner of the bus, the way you sit with your pink puffer zipped right up to your neck, feet dangling an inch off the ground.
“Already? I thought school starts next week.”
“Just some prep.”
“Are you excited?”
I glance at my calculator, keeping my voice enthusiastic. “Some of my Communication and Bio credits transferred over so I get to start Sociology as a second year. My schedule is amazing.” When I told you I was changing degrees again, you hid your disappointment well, but I could see it in the way you brushed your bangs aside and smiled, too brightly, at me. You asked me about jobs, and in my vague descriptions of different careers, I felt your worry. That this would not be enough, and you had failed to show me how to survive in this country.
“Good,” you say, as I hear another ping cut through the call. “I’m home now. Say hi to Naomi for me?”
“I will. Goodnight, Mom.” My phone clicks off, and I stare out the window. From our apartment in Kits, the downtown skyline shimmers across the water, and I think of you on the other side, shuffling up the uneven stairs behind the Korean kimbap restaurant into the same apartment we lived in since I was seven.
I still remember our first outing in Vancouver. Dad worked weekdays, so the three of us took the bus downtown, overheating in our Canadian winter outfits, all layers of turtlenecks and leggings. It took us almost two hours. Naomi and I spent the ride arguing about who got to pull the stop cord while you sat there under the stale heater reading Harry Potter, occasionally glancing up to search for glimpses of the ocean. When we got to Stanley Park, we stumbled down the beach. The water was an opaque grey, unblemished, like a sheet of ice, and you closed your eyes, breathing in the salt air. I remember not liking it, the smell of seafood. But you just smiled, dipping your fingers into the waves despite the cold and marvelling at the bright expanse of our new life, away from the bad luck that stuck to us like the thick, unrelenting snow in Calgary. “Vancouver,” you said, almost a prayer. Only, it came out as “Ba-n-cou-ba.”
That night, we came home like tourists, clutching bags of new clothes and silly Vancouver themed trinkets. During dinner, you slid a newspaper page over to Dad. He put down his fork, peering at the tiny print.
“I’m going to an interview on Friday,” you announced, cheeks pink. “Near Downtown.”
I blinked, surprised. You didn’t work in Calgary.
“The waitressing job looks like a good opportunity,” Dad said, passing the paper back.
You frowned. “No. Not for me.”
“They’re looking for someone who speaks Japanese.”
“I want to be an office worker,” you said, pointing at the advert circled in blue ink.
Dad paused, looking at you. “Mom’s been practicing her English,” Naomi beamed, proudly. You grinned back, raising an eyebrow at Dad.
“Office worker, it is,” he declared, a smile on his face.
On the first day of the semester, Misaki finds me hunched over my laptop at the Nest. “How can you have homework already? Class just started.”
“Tuition,” I say, gesturing for her to sit.
She peers at my screen over her gold-framed glasses, wispy bangs falling into her eyes. “How much do you need?”
I groan. “Six hundred.”
“Can you apply for scholarships?”
“Fat chance with my incredible, top of the class GPA.” I hesitate but blurt out the next sentence. “I might take a gap year. This might be my chance to figure out if school is the right thing for me.”
Misaki frowns. “What about asking Naomi?”
“She’s saving for grad school right now. I can’t ask her for that.”
“Quick cash…,” Misaki pauses. “You could do something crazy and become Tik Tok famous.”
Giggling, I poke her arm. “A solid idea.”
“What about selling your furniture on craigslist? Or selling pictures of your feet? You could be a sugar baby?”
I gasp in exaggerated shock at hearing my introverted friend make these jokes and point at my rumpled sweatshirt. “I’m definitely not sugar baby material.”
“It doesn’t matter what we look like. Don’t you know we’re desirable now?” Misaki tries to keep a straight face.
“We, as in, broke university students?”
“Us. Asian girls. Asian baby girls.” She laughs, covering her mouth with her hand, before leaning in to whisper. “It’s like a fetish. I heard some girls in my dorm talking about it. You don’t even have to do anything to make money.”
“Shut up.” I roll my eyes.
Outside the window, I see a black BMW pull into a parking spot. The silver logo winks at me in the stark sunlight like a diamond.
I nudge Misaki again, pointing out the car. “What do you think? Sugar baby?”
Misaki waits until the driver emerges out of the car. Waist length black hair, Gucci sunglasses. Bubble tea in hand. “Definitely.”
The night before your interview, we gathered in the bathroom. You sat in the bathtub with a towel around your neck. Perched behind you like birds, the cold ceramic pressing against our legs, Naomi and I carefully dipped gloved hands into the plastic tray and spread thin layers of dye on your hair. Back then, you had the longest hair I had ever seen, glossy like a sheet of nori.
Flicking through a magazine, you stopped to point at a picture of a woman dressed in a pencil skirt, brown locks twisted into a bun. “Like this,” you said. “An office worker.” You talked deliberately, stretching your mouth around the r sound. The words came out as if you were talking underwater, but you smiled, satisfied.
I leaned over to look, scrunching my nose at the sharp smell of hair dye. “What will you do at work?”
You pretended to type on a keyboard, and Naomi laughed. “I get to answer the phone and send emails for important people.” You gazed at a postcard from Okinawa framed on the bathroom wall. “And the office is ten minutes away from the beach, so I’m going to eat lunch there everyday.”
I bounced up and down, and in my excitement, I accidentally knocked the plastic tray off the ledge. Naomi lunged for it, but it fell onto the new bathmat. A dark brown stain bloomed across the white yarn, like dirty snow. Blotting at it with a tissue, I waited for your anger or disappointment, but you just patted me on the knee. “Daijobu. It’s okay. I’ll buy a new one on the way home tomorrow.”
The next day, I watched you get ready. Magazine open, you carefully copied the hairstyle, twisting brown strands away from your face with bobby pins. “R-r-r,” you practiced over and over, reading from the script you wrote. Naomi’s corrections were scribbled over it in hot pink pen. “My name is Reiko. I am here for the interview.”
Reaching over to touch your hair, I stared at this stranger. “You look pretty, Mom,” I said, as you applied red lipstick in the middle of your lips. You looked at me, smiled, and lightly dabbed the last pigment of red across my lips. “Only for special occasions, ne?”
We looked in the mirror together. I always looked more like Dad, with my curly brown hair and pale complexion, but that day, we looked alike.
My sociology professor drones on in an endless tirade of dad jokes and badly timed puns. I sit in the very back row of the lecture hall, staring blankly at the application instructions on my screen. Writing bursary letters is a game of public humiliation. There’s always someone more qualified, someone more hindered by adverse circumstances, someone more willing to spill their story into a word doc and send it off to be assessed by a group of important people wearing suits in some conference room. I never understood why you were so proud of the list of scholarships and awards Naomi won, until I realized you had never filled out one of these applications.
The first words are easy. Name, date, and address. Dear _________ Scholarship Committee, I begin. Then pause. My mother is an immigrant, I type, then delete it, feeling a flush of shame because you did not escape violence or hunger to be here. You chose it. You chose to leave Okinawa, where you spoke in words that flowed together like wind through rice fields for our city of umbrellas and rain boots.
I try a different sentence. My dad, I write, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s when I was nine. I stare at the words. What does it mean to reduce someone’s entire identity to an illness? How can I write about Dad without writing about his joy for movement, the hours we spent cycling around parks in Vancouver and kicking around a soccer ball? I delete the words, left again with a blank document.
These bursaries bought Naomi her undergrad degree. I never asked to read her letters, but I still wonder what she wrote. Was she a better writer than me? What stories of our family did she sell, neatly typed in Times New Roman on a single white sheet of 8 by 11 paper?
I fell asleep before you came home from the interview, but something woke me up that night. Light from the hallway crept into our room, and I could see the shape of Naomi sleeping across from me, blankets thrust on the ground. Closing my eyes, I tried to fall asleep again. A muffled sound rose louder than Naomi’s snores, and I crept toward the door, feet stinging from the shock of cold floors, and peered through the crack.
You were in the bathroom. Kneeling over the bathmat, you scrubbed furiously at the dark stain with a rag. I didn’t realize you were crying until you paused to glance up at the lightbulb flickering above you, and I saw the tears falling across your cheeks in silent rivulets.
The next morning, I woke to the sound of cooking. Pot lids clanging, the rhythmic tap-dance of a knife across a cutting board. Dad and Naomi were already at the table, and she stuck her tongue out at me when I stumbled in, eyeing the steaming bowls of miso soup and rice. You were at the stove, frying sausages with long chopsticks.
“I have a surprise,” you said, placing a plate of golden tamagoyaki on the table. “I’m going to take the job at the sushi restaurant.” Dad froze, folding his newspaper, and I stared at you, my mouth full of fluffy egg.
Naomi looks confused. “What about the office job? The one by the ocean?”
“It was too far from home. And the office was old.”
“Reiko….” Dad mumbled, but you waved him off, sliding fruit onto our plates.
“Daijobu. It’s just for a while.” You grinned at me and Naomi. “Guess what? My job means free sushi!”
I gasped. “Free sushi? Even California rolls?” You always complained when we ordered them, pushing around the piles of fake crab on your plate until Naomi or I snatched it up.
“Especially California rolls,” you said, cheeks pink. Standing straight, you bowed deeply. “Like this, ne? Irasshaimase!”
Naomi giggled and swept out her arm. “Irasshaimase!”
“Irasshaimase!” Dad and I shouted at the exact same time, standing up on our chairs like we were on stage. Then, we started laughing, clutching our stomachs, tears springing from our eyes, like we would never stop.
Tonight, you text on time. My phone pings, and I know it’s from you. 8:10. You’re sitting somewhere in the back corner of the restaurant, eating gyudon after the dinner rush and before clean-up. Checking my screen, I see a sticker of a Shiba Inu wagging its curled tail, mouth open in an almost smile. Gambatte-ne, the text reads. Work hard this term. Good night. One of the only Japanese phrases I know, but it’s so familiar I read it in your voice as I text you back. Doing homework tonight! My sociology prof is so cool! Get home safe.
The bus lurches back and forth, the movement like a ship, and I feel nausea rise in my throat. It’s Wednesday, but the front of the bus is crowded with groups of giddy students. I envy these students. The ones who don’t work nights, and instead, sip amber liquid from plastic water bottles, and wake up sticky with hangovers and hickeys, whispering never again while checking to see how much alcohol they have left for the next night out.
We’re almost near Robson. The light from a bar catches the window and I see my reflection. In my mirror at home, I looked ridiculous, like a child playing dress up with her mom’s makeup. But in the dim glow of the bus, I look like a doll. My face appears smooth and white, fake lashes so long they stick together every time I blink, and my hair shines down to my waist. The smell of straightened hair still lingers faintly beneath the cheap perfume I bought today. It’s called ‘Oriental Rose.’
From my pocket, I pull out a tube of red lipstick. A deep red, like cherries in the sun, that matches the shade of my thrift store dress perfectly. I sweep a finger across the smooth surface, dabbing the pigment on the centre of my lips, and feign exoticism. I don’t recognize myself. But I am your daughter, and we survive.
Photo by Alejandro Luengo from Unsplash.
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