(old Weight Watcher recipe card)
Of all matters concerning weight and appearance, I lagged behind all young 14-year-old girls.
Ramblings while on a slow suburban death.
I saw, I wrote.
(old Weight Watcher recipe card)
Of all matters concerning weight and appearance, I lagged behind all young 14-year-old girls.
In the early summer mornings, when the humidity was already on the rise in Kawasaki, I would wake up to the sound of my grandfather working enough spit to aim into the bathroom sink. The sound of this would echo through the little two story home.
There is a little mom and pop restaurant around the corner from the tiny Touring Hotel where our little dinner party would meet most every evening during the Cannes Film Festival.
There was a brief time in my childhood when my father and I rooted for the Oakland A’s. He spent most of my life cheering against any team that I loved, but we were united in our respect for the boys in green and yellow.
I saw the photos of bodies swinging from trees, heard the stories of black men dragged through the streets while tied to a truck and knew of that sentiment that insisted the “South will rise again,” a statement that conjures up images of plantations and old Negro gospels sung while picking cotton.
(Dapper Daddy and just friend)
My father left Ilocos Sur in the Phillippines for Hawaii when he was 14 years old, obtaining forged documents to make it appear that he was old enough to join his older brothers as workers on a pineapple plantation. He followed other Filipinos who made their way to the United States, hoping to find better opportunities away from a home country that offered nothing but poverty.
I once dreamt of being an airline hostess for Japan Airlines, and even wrote them a very complimentary letter as part of a class project.
(Nice nuns from the film “The Sound of Music”)
I suppose there are some teachers out there who realize that, in the throes of their venomous behavior, there might be a student or two who might grow up to write about them. I do not think this occurred to Miss C, who was my grammar and junior high school instructor.
I once left a church in a bit of a ruckus, having had dogma issues that had me feeling as a lost puzzle piece from another picture.
“…you look Chinese!…”
Published by Anna Pirhana on June 16, 2014On a recent job interview with a local bank, the Vice President spent close to five minutes expressing her surprise that I was Japanese. “You look Chinese..,” she kept saying, as if waiting for me to get on my knees and confess that I lied. “Your skin is so white!,” she would continue, “and Japanese are so brown.”