A gaggle of fifteen and sixteen year olds giggled and made obscure jokes in Japanese around the lunch table, eagerly awaiting the promised hamburger meal that they had been looking forward to all flight.
They were running on less than an hour of sleep in over twenty four hours but they were finally on their school trip, in a country so far away from home that within twenty four hours, the weather and landscape held a completely different vibe. When we departed, the temperature had been a boiling 30°C but on landing, the weather was crisp and cool, people wore thick sweaters, leaves fell in yellow and orange showers, trees stood larger, lusher and further apart.
They were finally here, in the land of their teacher and of maple syrup.
“Did you come with them?” asks the waiter when I thank him for the cold drink.
He’s charming and handsome and he’s going out of his way to make his tourist guests feel welcome. He speaks slowly but makes jokes that are obviously not being received by the students, although that doesn’t deter him. He asks me if my late arrival to lunch (I already fudged up and missed the lunch time as I was dilly dallying with a group of other students) was due to me being lost. I chuckled and informed him that we lost track of time and got proper told off for it. He looks confused but then fist bumps me in an endearing and warm but somewhat patronizing manner.
“Well, you’re here now. Welcome to Canada!” he says.
Later, when he asks if I’ve come with the students, I tell him that I’m their teacher. He asks me where in Japan I’ve come from.
I laugh.
“I’m Canadian,” I say.
There is a bit of uncertainty and a lot of curiosity that immediately follows once I’ve laid that fact out in the open to basically everyone else I meet for the rest of the trip.
’What are you doing with this group?’ They seem to want to know. It was a trippy exchange for everyone involved, including me.
For one, I regularly speak bilingually with my students. They’re well aware of my limitations with Japanese and I don’t pretend to make every interaction I have with them into a language lesson. I try to build an osmotic relationship based on learning and sharing with my students and willfully push the boundaries that demarcate the standard Japanese authoritarian and hierarchical relationship between student and teacher. In honoring their sovereignty and their boundaries, I have established myself as an outsider by highlighting the gaps in my knowledge and social standing, but in return they reward me with their trust and a willingness to learn. It has worked for me so far, but I guess we’ll have to see how much of this approach is unwise.
In any case, we went into Canada with this sense of dependency on me to guide them through the experience with a familiar hand, but for me, it was a bizarre experience in trying to dig up feelings of identity and belonging.
I had never been to Vancouver before and I still struggle to speak of Canada in anything other than a first-gen immigrant voice. For the Japanese heritage and identity are tied to a geographical space, the peripheral knowledge that Canada is an adopted heritage, a repurposing of your birthright— I found myself unable to convey the weight and magnitude of such freedoms clearly. It was difficult to extrapolate on the kinds of privileges that Canadians are afforded, once physically removed from the spaces that built our foundational identities. Or what it meant to be a settler on colonized land. It wasn’t simply a language barrier, I knew intuitively that this was beyond their purview as first time tourists and even more so because Japan is a country that has never been colonized in its entire recorded history.
Either ways, it was not the time and space for this and they were fifteen year olds who just wanted to have a good time after four years of being cooped up between home and school.
Meanwhile in Vancouver, I looked out into the construction on the streets and drifting maple leaves, basking in the realization of how it feels as though I never left Canada but still missed it so much. Then four days later, I walked home to my apartment feeling as if I never left Japan. This accelerated form of travel is so unintuitive to the human psyche that I didn’t even have the time to parse the vast distance that separates me from everything I have been.
On the flight back home, it dawned on me that the defining characteristics of what I called home had also become as vague and blurry as my memories of India. It was now a mishmash of drifting orange maple leaves, of perpetual in-construction roads, of a dizzying array of delicious food, of throngs of people pushing their way around busy streets, of the 24 hour comfort of conbinis, of the arterial expanse of railway lines, of the smell of Japanese cedar and of winding roads around shrines and temples.
My home is no longer tied to a geographical marking. It is entirely within me, in a liminal space of the past, the present and the future.