Resident as Foreigner: Assimilation, Alienation, and the Limits of Empathy (Part 2)
Yudai Chiba is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Princeton Theological Seminary.
This is the second installation of a two-part essay. To start at the beginning:
In the movie Didi, one of the key themes is the relationship between the main character Wang Wang and his immigrant mother. With puberty, his childhood friends have left him behind as relationships realigned according to new regimes of coolness. Wang Wang tells some older skateboarders that he has “experience” making videos and offers to make highlight videos for them. Along the way, he leads them to believe that he is “half Asian.”
In reality, he has little to no camera or editing skills, which gets exposed when the skateboarders visit his house to see the videos. Strike one. To make things worse, his mom walks in and starts chatting with the guys, revealing that Wang Wang is fully Asian. Strike two. Exposed, Wang Wang explodes on his mom and the skateboarders are put off by this irrational rage. Strike three. “Dude, don’t talk to your mom like that.”
I’ve yelled at my mom in front of my white friends. My best friend would say things like “No offense, but you should treat your mom better.” He was right, of course. But this just amplified my frustration. There are things you should and shouldn’t do, and treating your parents well is something you should do. I just felt crazy. I didn’t know why I was so angry. But I was, and no one had the right to tell me that it was illegitimate.
In my teenage years and well into my twenties, I got angrier and angrier and at some point, I started to get sadder and sadder. Watching Didi, I finally realized why I had been so angry. It was quite simple: I was ashamed of myself. I didn’t want to be me. I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t attractive. I was “slow” and didn’t “get it.” I felt lonely. “And I blame you, my parents! Why are you so foreign? Why can’t you help me? Why am I like this?” And yet, I knew I was the one to blame for my own sense of failure. I needed to excel to get over all this, but I wasn’t trying hard enough. I let anger cloud my judgment. I made too many mistakes. A cloud of witnesses testifies against me.
After college, I left the US to work in Japan. Work was hard and all-consuming. For the first time in my life, I was part of a clear social hierarchy with strong vestiges of seniority. I worked for a small company that expected me to obey orders but also exercise my own agency. I felt that I didn’t know how to do either.
“You went to such an elite college; but you don’t know anything!”
“I admit, you’re so intelligent, yet you know so little about Japan!”
It’s true that my memory failed me quite often. I had difficulty remembering the details of the numerous contracts I read. I was terrified without notes; I couldn’t trust myself to recall crucial tasks and deadlines.
“Your Japanese is wrong in this email!”
“We were here on time; his mistake made us late.”
At the company I worked for longest, pointing out mistakes was the primary means of “educating” employees. Rather than try to explain myself, it was faster to apologize. I felt terrible about all the mistakes I was making. But I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I was set up to fail. I hated how the company treated me and I hated myself.
In hindsight, I realize that I had developed what psychologists call learned helplessness. I disliked my situation, but I believed that I had little ability to do anything substantial about it. Although I exercised my voice very minimally at work, I had one outlet—the church. I attended a small, evangelical, nondenominational church in Tokyo, and to my own surprise, I discovered a hunger to learn there. The pastor was a brilliant man with a wide array of knowledge and a strong grasp of Greek and Hebrew. I began reading more in my free time, and I developed a taste for Christian apologetics. I felt that I finally had a language to express myself and what I believed.
In hindsight, I realize that I had developed what psychologists call learned helplessness. I disliked my situation, but I believed that I had little ability to do anything substantial about it.
My family and I finally had “the talk.” When my mom was visiting Japan, we went to my grandmother’s house, where we had dinner with both her and my great uncle’s family. My great uncle is an important figure in our family. Despite being the youngest of my grandmother’s siblings, he is the one who looks after the family. Concern over my religious involvement had been growing, and I needed to explain myself.
I prepared for this conversation very intentionally. I built my argument and reviewed the facts necessary for it. I poured all of my passion and frustration into this conversation. I channeled all of my voice, the voice I so rarely exercised elsewhere in society, into an explanation for why I was Christian, and why Christianity was true. This was the one place, the one avenue that I had found that gave me something to say, something to contribute, some way of speaking into the world.
I hardly remember the details of this conversation. This is a defense mechanism. I argued aggressively with my great uncle. He positioned himself as a Buddhist and was pointing out what he saw as Christianity’s flaws and dangers.
I argued that Christianity was the pursuit of truth and that the truth of the cross was visible even in Japanese culture. I succeeded in impressing my family members with my rhetorical skill and (carefully prepared) knowledge, yet I did not convince anyone. I gave a vulnerable account of my own guilt, how I felt I had mistreated my mom, how I knew of the sin I carried in my life. This didn’t seem to resonate. To this day I have no idea what sort of impression it left on my hearers.
My family members quickly moved on to other matters, and I immediately felt embarrassed. Nothing really changed after this, and seasoned evangelists would quickly remind me that the work of evangelism was an ongoing conversation that met people where they were, never a one-time punch.
I think I had made one thing clear: My great uncle had no say in my life. I had shut him down. What strikes me in hindsight is not the content of our disagreement, nor even the aggressiveness of our argumentation (my great uncle was quite argumentative as well, to be clear). It was how rude I was.
…seasoned evangelists would quickly remind me that the work of evangelism was an ongoing conversation that met people where they were, never a one-time punch.
I returned to the United States in my early 30’s to attend seminary. By that time, I had found a job I enjoyed and I was making more friends outside of the church. I was getting used to life in Japan. But my relationship with my pastor fell apart, and it was high time to leave. When I returned to America, I realized that both I and America had changed in the nine years I had been in Japan, and I was beset with culture shock. I obviously spoke English, but somehow I felt I had no idea how to communicate. It was as if I had never lived here before.
A few months ago, a colleague and I went to see The Brutalist. As many critics have pointed out, the film resonates with current anxieties around immigration, capitalist greed, the collapse of the “American dream,” and the legacy of the Holocaust. I could see all of this in the film. It depicts the life of László Tóth, a fictional Jewish-Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the US as a refugee. Yet somehow, few films have engendered less empathy in me for its characters or for its overall project. I did find the film’s title appropriate: beyond its obvious reference to László’s brutalist architecture, it was truly brutal to subject and selfhood. It felt like a satirical mockery of individual liberty, where only release—through drugs, sex, or the movie ending—was relief.
However, at its base, it was a story about the struggle to assimilate. I think I remember this film because it represents an impulse that I do resonate with. Both László and the film have an impulse to collapse inwards on themselves, yet both have too much self-respect to not speak coherently on behalf of themselves. In this film, the individual life feels both serious and charlatan.
I view myself as quite sane, and again, quite privileged. Others have struggled with their identities and their mental health much more than I have. I’ve received too much love to become too cynical. Ministers have pointed out that I appear to be a “divided person,” perhaps that my “soul is restless,” recalling Augustine’s famous dictum that “our heart is restless until they rest in Thee.” Perhaps so.
I don’t know where you’re at in all of this. As for me, I just ask that I may be permitted to keep going for now. As much as the past still lives in the present, I want to dream that it lives not simply to be litigated, but also to whisper wisdom and good into my ear. The Brutalist may be a rather dark lens through which to reflect on this. Perhaps a brighter version may be found in folk singer Dar Williams’ song called “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?”
And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say, well I'm lucky, 'cause I am like East Berlin!
I had this wall; and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that, if we met, I would only start confessing.
And they'd know that I was scared;
They would know that I was guessing.
But the wall came down, and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me, and…
You won’t hear the sounds if you don’t know the song. But it’s in a major key, and somehow, I feel both alone and happy.
Does any of this make sense?
Yudai Chiba is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research concerns the reception of the Bible in modern Japan and what it means to "receive" a text. He is also interested in teaching about Christianity in secular contexts and has been featured as a guest in the Japanese history podcast COTEN Radio.