The Meaning of Michelle Page 11

  A COUNTRY WITHOUT GUNS

  When I moved into that century-old farmhouse on top of a mountain in central Japan, I wondered how our family would adjust. Would I be able to communicate with my neighbors (all three of them)? Was I really going to be able to build a fire to heat the ritual nightly bath? My husband was starting a new job, our daughter a new school. Would she learn Japanese? There was a lot for me to learn. And among that new learning was that the most important thing expected of me in my community was cooperation. Being interdependent is a natural state for families and society. My neighbors accepted me, no doubt because I accepted them.

  As you become a grown-up, in the deepest sense of the word, you discover that every choice involves gains and losses. Everything is a compromise, especially in a country like Japan, where the good of the whole outweighs the good of the individual. For me, the gains were monumental. As America mourns what has become a season of unchecked gun violence, I am most grateful for the fact that I live in a country where it would be front-page news if a policeman even took his gun out of its holster.

  I know you remember (the whole world does) when Barack said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin—implying he would fear for his son’s safety, and his son’s life.

  I have a son. I have never, ever, in all the years we’ve lived in Japan, worried about his or any of our children’s safety. I’m talking about my girls walking home alone from ballet classes in the evenings. I’m talking about Mario, at ten years old, going to visit a friend in Osaka two hours away on a high-speed train, with a note pinned to his T-shirt and $100 in cash in his pocket. I’m forever grateful my children had that kind of childhood. It’s the childhood I’d wish for all children. I loved taking our children on visits to America so they could see that we truly have a rainbow nation. But Michelle, they could not enjoy the freedom they’ve always had in Japan, and I disliked having the role of the admonisher: don’t go there, be careful of that, be sure and check if …

  I’m sure you know that handguns are illegal in Japan. Virtually no one is allowed to possess one. But what you don’t know is that my neighbors ask me, as if I, because I’m American, could somehow produce a reasonable answer: How can it be possible for Americans to have guns? They’re incredulous.

  I can probably recite the Second Amendment by heart. I could explain it to them. But I doubt their question would change. In 2013 Japan recorded 0 gun deaths.

  Michelle, I know you’ve taken a sincere interest in the health and well-being of American children. And I sincerely commend you for the changes you’ve effected. Still, it upsets me, and I bet you too, to think of the danger children face on a daily basis in communities across America. Walking to school, sitting on a porch, lying on a bed reading, going to the store, can all be daily activities that end in a tragic “incident” as a bullet (stray, intended, accidental—does it matter?) tears through kids’ young bodies. If this isn’t a public health crisis I truly don’t know what is.

  Whenever there’s a mass shooting in the States I can see my Japanese neighbors are pained to even mention it. And I assure you mass shootings are the only ones my neighbors know about because they are reported in the Japanese news. They have no idea of the number of people who are killed in Chicago or Omaha or Baltimore on a regular basis. My neighbors are embarrassed for me. Because I’m American.

  The proliferation of and easy accessibility to guns in the United States—factually easier to obtain than many mundane items—is an aberration of a modern society. Here, possession of handguns was banned in 1965 and there are strict penalties for violations. Before you can obtain a rifle for hunting, the police will first interview your family members to find out if there’s any domestic strife. They’ll talk to your neighbors. They will go to your job. You’ll be required to have a physical and mental examination. You will have to go to a firing range to show you know how to use your weapon, and your home will be inspected to see if you know how to store it.

  Yes, these steps are repressive. But here it’s considered common sense to put the well-being of the society first. From this perspective, what we Americans call “rights” could be called irresponsibility. Seeing the daily carnage as a consequence of the proliferation of guns, from Japan, it appears Americans exact a heavy price for their so-called “freedoms.”

  THE THINGS I MISS

  For many years I was a columnist for The Japan Times. My columns covered the challenges of cross-cultural communication, the misunderstandings that may occur, the frustrations that can result. I wrote about food and exchanging recipes, and sometimes actual dishes, with my friends and neighbors. I told readers that when I went to the States I loved that I could eat corn on the cob and black cherries to my heart’s content, because they’re not as expensive as they are here. Readers knew that I returned to Japan like a pack horse, my luggage overweight with black-eyed peas, great northern beans, lima beans, maple syrup. When I wrote about my love for collard greens, and how much I missed them, one reader sent me collard green seeds, and another, writing from Hawaii, told me she would cook me up a pot of greens if I were ever to visit. I did, and she did.

  In several columns I wrote about preparing obento (lunch boxes), which is serious business in Japan. It is expected your child’s school obento is healthy, tasty, and looks attractive. My children held me to a strict standard, and youngest daughter Lila would often draw diagrams for the obento layout!

  I loved reading about the vegetable garden you planted in the White House, the first garden on those grounds since the Victory Gardens of World War 2. I truly admired the fact that you made it a quest to make healthier foods more accessible to all Americans. I have long appreciated the connection between good nutrition and good health, and indeed it was part of what built the bridge between America and Japan for me and my husband. Billy was one of the early members of the health foods movement in America in the mid-60s, and concern for our children’s and all children’s health was central to our lives. The summer before we left the U.S. Billy was asked to be head chef at a camp for disadvantaged children from New York City. Preparing healthy, simple food, based on the macriobiotic diet, we (I was his sous-chef) introduced the children (some clearly malnourished) to healthy foods. Ever curious, we were delighted the children would come into the kitchen to ask questions about what we were preparing, or have a new taste experience, sampling things like Japanese seaweed, burdock root, fresh tofu. We taught them the Japanese concept of hara hachibu—meaning that one should only eat until the stomach is 80 percent full, and stop. Everyone in Japan is familiar with this saying, and no doubt it contributes to the fact that obesity is still rare here.

  YOUR JAPANESE COUNTERPART, CROWN PRINCESS MASAKO

  Like women everywhere, women in Japan need role models. You’ve probably met Crown Princess Masako, and I’m sure you found her to be a remarkable woman. Raised internationally, she is multilingual, received a fine education and had a rising career as a diplomat. Just like you were able to bring your professional experience and accomplishments to enhance your role as First Lady, Masako Owada definitely represented a model of success for women in Japan (and that includes my daughters) who genuinely admired and respected her. But once she entered the Imperial Household, she was reduced to the pressures of providing the country with not just an heir, but a male heir. It was unthinkable that she should play any role on the international stage other than consort to the Crown Prince. The Imperial Household is an ancient and thoroughly fossilized institution. No one expects it to change. There is an expression in Japanese, shouganai, that could be translated as “it can’t be helped” or “it’s inevitable.” This pretty much sums up the national attitude toward unfortunate situations. When it had been made abundantly clear that Crown Princess Masako would not be permitted to step out of her antiquated and rigidly prescribed centuries-old role, I’m sure I heard, not a collective shouganai, but a national sigh of disappointment.

  At the same time, my daughters have found
powerful role models in the women of Japan. I was hardly surprised when I was once asked point-blank: “Aren’t you worried your daughters will become like Japanese women?” The American woman who put that question to me clearly thought that was the worst thing that could happen to them. I didn’t.

  You see, Michelle, I didn’t share this woman’s view that my daughters—Nanao, Mie, and Lila—might be lesser women, somehow, if indeed they acquired whatever might be considered typical characteristics of whatever might be the typical “Japanese woman.” Just as you, and of course many black women, have suffered prejudice and bias for being who you are and having assumptions made about you, there are an abundance of stereotypes about Japanese women that don’t ring true. The qualities that characterize the Japanese women I know are intelligence, competence, selflessness, grace, perseverance, generosity, modesty, humility. I always thought my daughters could have worse examples to emulate. So could I.

  THE FREEDOM TO BE YOURSELF

  I remember once telephoning a store, here in Japan, to say that I’d be coming in to pick up an item I’d ordered. To refresh the salesperson’s memory, I said “I’m the kokujin”—which means black person. The salesperson responded: “Oh yes, you’re the foreign woman from Tenryu. We’ll hold your item for you.” I realized then and there that I could drop the baggage of labeling myself as a color.

  Although Barack Obama becoming president was truly historic, I can’t help but think what it would have been like, and how it would have been different, for you to be able to enter the White House just as the First Lady—and not the qualifying “first African American First Lady.”

  Living in Japan all these years, I’ve found that I could let go of the “yoke of color” and what a relief that is. To just be a human being. Here our family is referred to as foreigners. Specifically, Americans. The minute we land in America and go through passport control Billy and I are looked on as an “interracial couple” and our children become an abridged “Black.”

  The last time you visited Japan, I actually thought I might be invited to meet you. It wasn’t just wishful thinking, or delusions of self-importance. A good friend was an advisor to the United States ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy. He told me that when she was confirmed as ambassador, he’d given her my name as a person in Japan she might find valuable to contact.

  Well, I didn’t make it on the guest list of dignitaries and distinguished expats you surely met while she was here. But, oh, Michelle, I would have loved to talk to you. I wish I could have invited you to our home. It’s not in super-hip Tokyo or don’t-miss Kyoto, but in the countryside of Shizuoka. Like all Japanese welcoming visitors, I would have been happy to share with you the best our region has to offer: green tea, shiitake, mikan—and magnificent views of Mt. Fuji. From our home we can see bamboo groves, pine forests, and the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. I would have liked you to meet my family. You’d see that just like you, I have strived to create a family that is harmonious, loving, caring, and achieving. I would have liked to have shared a pot of tea with you and talked about the art of composing a life.

  Michelle, what I really like about you is that you did not settle for an assigned role. I imagine you saw early on the potential of the position of First Lady, and determined to use it to full advantage. I guess you also saw the risks, but went for it anyhow. Wow.

  Michelle, I know your father was an important and beloved figure in your life, and that his memory serves as daily motivation for you. My father too was the center of my life. He was born into a poor family in Mississippi; I don’t have to tell you he faced adversity. But he prevailed, raising my brother, sister, and me as a single father. When we were growing up, he’d gather children in our neighborhood and teach penmanship, at a time in America when it was considered an accomplishment to have a “fine hand.” His love of transferring words to paper with pen and ink led me straight to my 30-year study of Japanese calligraphy with a sensei (master, literally “you who were born before me”). Pursuing this art is a discipline that teaches one to be diligent, not to search for an illusory “perfection,” but rather to endeavor to do one’s best. And so I say to you, yoku gambarimashita. You really did your best.

  My favorite saying in Japanese is in a calligraphy I did that hangs on the wall in our living room:

  Ichi go ichi e. Treasure this moment, it will never come again.

  Wherever your life takes you after the White House, I hope every moment will be treasured.

  She Loves Herself When She Is Laughing: Michelle Obama, Taking Down a Stereotype and Co-Creating a Presidency

  REBECCA CARROLL

  The minute Michelle Obama rolled up to the podium at the 2008 Democratic National Convention wearing that cool mint-green dress, hair laid to the gods, demonstrating what would become her trademark unflinching poise and ineffable ease, it was quite clear that she did not come to play. And some months later, as televised footage of the inauguration of President Barack Obama captures instances when Obama appears more taken with his wife than with the fact that he has just become the country’s first Black president, her magnific influence and his gratitude for it is all but palpable.

  Michelle Obama is everything a Black man raised by a white single mother in Hawaii needed. She is everything a country with an utterly disgraceful history of emotional and physical violence against Black women should champion and elevate. And I would argue that she represents at least 60 percent of what America will miss most about the Obama presidency.

  It would be easy here, and a thousand other times over the past eight years, to trot out the “behind every great man is a great woman” trope, or the “strong Black woman” and “Black superwoman” stereotypes. In truth, though, what Michelle Obama did as First Lady of the United States was take the strong Black woman stereotype and laugh, then kick its ass and tell it to move on out of her way. You see, as she and the President like to say, Michelle Obama has no use for stereotypes or tropes—because they stunt intellectual growth, leave no room for imagination, and are antithetical to the power of hard work, individual strength and self-determination. And if FLOTUS and the President are about anything, it’s about the platform of self-determination.

  As indomitable as she is today, as a young girl, like most girls and perhaps in particular most young black girls, Michelle did not always lead with confidence. She has admitted to feeling “tangled up in fears and doubts that were entirely of my own creation” when she was a student in high school, and spending too much time worried about her hair and her looks, and what other kids might be saying about her. She has mentioned teachers who openly underestimated her intelligence and prospects to succeed. The beauty, though, of having created her own fears and doubts, is the way in which she has effectively, even casually, decimated them along her path to Princeton, then Harvard Law School, as a successful corporate lawyer, and as a prominent badass in the public sector.

  Self-determination is not a mysterious thing—but Michelle makes it seem like it is. For a kid who grew up on the South Side of Chicago with a big brother to trail behind and working-class parents to make proud for their sacrifices, her will and character and complete lack of cynicism are woven throughout her life like threads of magical realism. We can all imagine little girl Michelle in school, working hard and being brave, as the notion evokes almost on cue images of Ruby Bridges and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, alone in the white world of newly integrated schools. But it gets harder to envision when you think about young woman Michelle at Princeton and Harvard in the 1980s—set in between the Black Is Beautiful 70s and the Living Single era of the 90s. Somewhere along the line, she walked into the light and got the hell over.

  I marvel at the thought of how my own little brown self would have been influenced growing up with Michelle Obama in the White House. The little brown me, adopted into a white family, surrounded by anti-reflections, inundated by unremitting standards of white beauty, acceptance, worth. Exoticized for my caramel skin and praised for my talents as a d
ancer and a storyteller early on, when I hit fifth grade, it was as if my skin had somehow suddenly taken on a darker hue—scorched for flying too close to freedom. I wore an afro and sometimes handkerchiefs around my head leaving just a lion’s mane ring around my face. I smiled and smiled and laughed and wrote stories and played with friends and felt free. I was free. Until I was not. My fifth-grade teacher, who was mean anyway, made sure to let me know that I was less than all the others—lucky, but in a defying nature sort of way: “very pretty … for a black girl. Most black girls aren’t very pretty.” And with that, I turned inward and lost a faith in my blackness that I never even knew I had until it turned into pride years later.

  In middle school I delighted and felt special, somehow redeemed, when one of the most popular boys bought me for the school’s annual “Slave Day”—a tradition since quietly phased out, but back then at my regional middle school in rural New England it was a highly anticipated barometer of popularity. Boys would bid on girls, and girls would bid on boys with fake money, even though all the most popular kids were wealthy. The slave you purchased belonged to you as property for an entire day, and you could make them wear and do whatever you wanted. The boy who bought me was, at 12 years old, a competitive ski racer. He dressed me in his tightest fitting racing suit, and I had to wear his heavy ski boots and tinted goggles too.