Asian Expat Series: My Reckoning With Asianness in Japan
2002. Me and my friend Carmina at a convenience store in Tokyo.
What This Series is About
This series explores the diverse array of experiences among Asian American/Canadian expats and nomads. The demographic of people I’m specifically referring to are members of the Asian diaspora who grew up in North America because they or their parents or previous generations were immigrants. After growing up in North America, these Asian folks later live elsewhere and become “expatriates.” Some may be long-term travelers and nomads who move from one country to another. Others may be expats for some time in one location and then return to their home country.
The narratives and images we have of expats are overwhelmingly white. When I look at FeedSpot’s list of the top 70 expat influencers, there are very few who identify as BIPOC. It’s hard to say how many BIPOC or Asian expats there actually are. There aren’t a lot of reliable statistics about American expats. From my research, the most trustworthy estimate is from The Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO), whose updated figure was 5.4 million as of 2023. They don’t break this figure down further to look at more specific demographics. In my experience of traveling and being an expat, I’ve learned that expats are not a monolith. They are in fact a quite diverse, multi-racial, multi-ethnic group.
My Experiences
Living abroad as an expatriate is a profound journey of self-discovery, cultural immersion, and personal growth. I would not be who I am if I had not spent time living outside the US. My time living abroad has provided me with invaluable lessons that have deeply enriched my perspective on life, identity, and the world. I have been lucky to have such opportunities. And, I have cultivated those opportunities throughout my adult life, sometimes making radical choices I did not see mirrored in my social circle. While my peers were building their careers and saving to buy their first homes, I traveled whenever I could and made it a priority to spend time outside the US. When I decided to pursue a career in mental health, my traveling stopped because I lacked the time and financial resources to make it happen. It was only after graduating and completing training that I was finally able to travel more. Most recently, my partner and I nomaded around Europe for a year from 2022 to 2023.
A Year in Japan
What really started my lifelong relationship with living abroad was my year abroad as a college student. In 2001, I spent the year studying in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, at Tsuda University (aka Tsuda Juku Daigaku). I had a rare opportunity to become an exchange student there as part of a program that was created in honor of the founder Umeko Tsuda’s time at Bryn Mawr College. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity given to me at that time. Here I want to digress a little and share the remarkable history of Umeko Tsuda.
Umeko Tsuda, 1890, Bryn Mawr College.
Umeko Tsuda lived from 1864 to 1929. Although the term did not exist at the time, she was an early Asian woman expat, moving from Japan as a 7 year old child to the US, where she lived and studied until 1882. When she returned to Japan, Japanese language and culture felt alien to her and she was viewed as “an American with a Japanese body.” She eventually returned to the US again for a second stay, which is when she studied at my alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. After returning to Japan, she became an advocate for women’s education in Japan and founded a women’s university just outside of Tokyo that was modeled after Bryn Mawr College. So that is where I studied abroad as an exchange student.
Umeko Tsuda’s identity crisis happened nearly 150 years ago and yet, her story resonates with me deeply. I have wondered if I am an American with a Korean body. I remember the first time I went to a summer language school in Korea and other Koreans called me a “twinkie,” which is an Asian who is white on the inside and yellow on the outside. Could it be that the layers of my identity are so bonded to one another that it’s impossible to separate them? As Vivian Ho wrote of her experience as an expat in the UK,
“I’ve learned that I do not know how to be Asian without being American.”
In my work with expats, we talk about “third culture,” which is the amalgamation culture a child grows up in when their two parents are from different cultures or when a child grows up in a country that is different from the culture of their family. In my experience, it’s a term often used among expats but less used among Asian Americans, which I think is too bad because we miss out on that emphasis on the hybridity of our identities. Rather than feeling “neither/nor,” what if we are “both/and?” Grappling with identity in this way is a lifelong journey made richer and sometimes more complex by my encounters with new cultures and countries.
A little footnote about Umeko Tsuda: she will be featured on the 5000 yen note starting this year. I am thrilled she will get the recognition she has long deserved. I continue to be inspired by her courage. It is not easy to be an Asian American woman now, so the fact that she was an Asian American woman with so many accomplishments in the late 19th century fills me with awe.
Naming Racism and an Identity Crisis
What I first noticed about living in Japan was that I felt so comfortable just being Asian. Maybe some people would feel overwhelmed by huddling with the masses on a crowded subway platform at Shinjuku station during rush hour. But I felt relieved. I blended in. I was anonymous. If some pervy old Japanese man looked at me, I knew it was not because I was Asian and that he was a garden variety pervy old man doing his pervy old man thing. There seemed to be an order to this new universe.
The joy of blending in shed light on something that had been impacting me but could not be named before: racism. Anti-Asian racism is something I talk about all the time now, but this was not a normal topic of conversation in the 90s and certainly not within my family. The only advice I remember getting from my Korean immigrant mother and Caucasian stepfather about racism was, “Just ignore it.” Although I went to an ethnically diverse high school in an area that had a lot of Asian people, I still experienced non-Asian people’s assumptions about me based on racial stereotypes. I did not have the language for expressing how it felt when white Americans mispronounced my name and assumed I didn’t speak English. I now understand that I was not alone in being uncertain about what I was experiencing and why. Asian Americans’ racial experiences are overlooked and dismissed, leading to feelings of erasure and shame (beautifully explored in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings). Upon reflection, the sense of belonging I felt in Japan wasn’t telling me much about Japan. It was telling me so much about how marginalized I felt in the US.
While living in Japan, I also realized I didn’t have the same concerns or perspectives as the white European, Australian, and American expats I met in Tokyo. I sometimes connected with their complaints about cultural differences and I sometimes thought they were being racist. But that feeling of not fully belonging anywhere was salient in many ways throughout my time in Japan. With Korean Japanese, I felt more Korean. With Japanese, I felt very American. With Americans, I felt very Korean. With Australians, I felt very American. With Korean international students, I felt very American. And so on and so on. This was long before the line from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself “I contain multitudes” became a catchall phrase for self-approval. I felt confused a lot of the time. I felt as if I was a chameleon, changing to blend in with my environment. But when I was alone, I wasn’t really sure who or what I was.
A Surreal Homecoming
I returned to the US in the summer of 2002. The whole year I had been in Japan, I had not returned to the US. My reverse culture shock was intense for many reasons. The culture had shifted dramatically as a result of 9/11. Politics was more polarized. Some people were much more cynical. Some people were much more nationalistic. I had not been here for some threshold the whole country crossed together, and I could not connect with what everyone else felt was important. I felt annoyed that Americans were so self-obsessed. I wanted to say, “There’s a whole world outside of here!” I felt like an outsider. But slowly, I went back to college, I took my classes, I finished up my last year. Life moved on but my longing to live elsewhere never left me.
Final Reflections
I am reflecting on my year in Japan almost 22 years later. It was a time in my life that had an outsized impact on who I am today. I continue to grapple with my identity in different ways. At mid-life, I face fear and anxiety around aging. At the same time, I feel empowered to take charge of my life, making the professional and personal choices that are right for me. I had no idea during my year in Japan that I would become a psychologist specializing in Asian American mental health. In retrospect, I can’t help but see the through line. I am continuously working on feeling whole and it’s important to me to help others feel that way.
I have been back to Japan many times since then and every time I land at Narita Airport, I feel grateful and at peace. I feel at home.