Rootless in Seattle

After many years and several continents, students from the '50s find joy in rediscovery

By Charles W. Gordon '58

WE ARE UP IN THE SPACE NEEDLE, Ann Li and I. Ann is talking about her second husband, who works for Barbara Mandrell, the country singer. I am talking about working for newspapers in Canada. Considering we have not seen each other in 41 years, the conversation is going quite well.

Ann's sister, Mei Sun, is there too. Mei Sun, who was called Dorothy in 1956, was two years ahead of us in high school. She dropped the name Dorothy, which she hated, when she was in her 30s. The name had been suggested to her parents by the obstetrician in Columbus, Ohio, a fan of the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope "Road" pictures and Dorothy Lamour. She and Ann both live in California now. Ann teaches elementary school; Mei Sun works for the Bank of America.

It is odd enough to be up in the Space Needle on a Friday night in Seattle, where I have never been. It is odder still to be up here with people I haven't seen since high school. And it is really odd that the high school in question was not in Seattle but in Tokyo &emdash; the American School in Japan. This is billed as a global reunion celebrating the school's 95th anniversary. Anyone who ever attended has been invited.

Waiting at the bottom of the Needle is Sandra MacIver Thompson, Class of '56, who doesn't enjoy heights. Her husband, Lew, is with her, one of the few people with the saintly qualities necessary to attend a spouse's reunion. They have come from Winchester, near Boston, to be here. Sandra was in Mei Sun's class and they were pals.

Amazingly, at least to me, we hit it off instantly, forming a little mid-'50s gang that will hang out during the weekend, through the box lunches and seminars and harbour cruises and gatherings of the decades. Mei Sun has a 1956 yearbook, the last year we were all at the school, and we leaf through it, marvelling at how much everyone but us has changed. Around us, we notice the same thing happening with other groups from other times.

Although our Class of '58 was small, Ann and I did not run in the same crowd. But she had written warmly in my yearbook back then, I noticed when I looked it up before leaving Ottawa. So we were friends. Mei Sun and Sandra were Grade 12s when we were Grade 10s, and therefore of a loftier status. The puzzle now, a pleasant one, is why we are so comfortable with each other after all these years and continents.

The dinner is large, about 500 people attending. We occupy one side of a large table and listen to the speeches. The headmaster &emdash; as he is now called; he was called a principal in our day &emdash; speaks. He uses a term with which I have become familiar recently as he talks about ASIJ graduates; "third culture kids" he calls us. "Our students develop a global perspective that serves them well in future careers," he says. There is a buzz in the room, classmates more interested in rediscovering each other than in the proceedings.

Group photographs are taken. Unfairly, we feel, we are lumped with the '40s and prewar people. That's because there are not that many of us. There are lots of '60s and '70s kids. The dancing starts and our gang decides to get away from the noise and go somewhere else to continue the discussion. Our registration kits contain free passes to the Space Needle, so we leave the party and walk to it, four third culture kids from Tokyo in the '50s, rootless in Seattle.

My first strong Tokyo memory is of being 14 years old and sobbing in a stairwell of the Takashimaya department store. My last Tokyo memory is of being 15 years old and sobbing on an airplane departing from Tokyo. Living overseas does that to you. You are apprehensive about each new place, each new country, and you absorb it so quickly that it is like the end of the world when you leave, even if it is just a year later. Each arrival, each departure changes you in ways that you can't know when you are a teenager. And coming home changes you as much as going away.

We arrived in Tokyo in January of 1955. My father, a Canadian working for the United Nations, had been posted to Korea, and we &emdash; my mother and sister and I &emdash; would live in Tokyo because dependents were not allowed in Seoul so soon after the Korean War.

As an idea, moving to Tokyo was one I, at 14, resisted. After all, I was a starting guard on the junior varsity basketball team in our suburban New York high school. Just when the girls might start to notice me. We had lived in the same small town for five years and I had good friends there. I kept hoping my father wouldn't get the job.

Once he did and we were on the train across the United States to San Francisco it was possible to see the adventure in it. The train ride was fine, San Francisco was warm and beautiful in January and the ocean liner that would take us to Yokohama had a ping-pong tournament and the movie star Jimmy Stewart to hand over the trophy.

The two-week voyage was magic. We spent a day in Hawaii, where I got a great shirt, the kind Montgomery Clift wore in From Here to Eternity. The last week of the voyage featured a shipboard romance with Caroline Page, who was going to Hong Kong. At times I was capable of convincing myself that it was Caroline for whom I sobbed at the Takashimaya department store.

But it wasn't. It was culture shock of the most massive kind. Our first day in Tokyo, we went for a walk on the Ginza. And I think what brought on the tears was the fact of thousands of Oriental faces, crowding the sidewalk every step of the way. There was a sense of finality about it: No more ocean cruise, no more shipboard romance, thousands of strange people I didn't know and I didn't understand and there I was.

Eventually, everything strange becomes familiar. We moved into half a house, the other half of which was occupied by a Japanese family. We shared their telephone and their small children would come charging into our place to tell us when a call was for one of us. We learned something about Japan from them. But it was the school, the American School in Japan, that was the main entry point for my sister and me. While many of the students were American, many others were Chinese, Korean and Japanese. There were Europeans as well. The parents were diplomats, missionaries, business people.

Informally, the school was called Meguro, after the part of the city in which it was located. The teams were Meguro Mustangs. The school had the sports, activities and democratic feeling of a North American high school, but was much smaller. There were 29 people in my Grade 10 class. The kids knew how to make friends quickly and make room in their circle for one more.

That circle could travel, by train, subway, bus us and trolley, all over the huge city. Tokyo was a safe place and someone in our group could usually speak enough Japanese to avoid getting lost or into any (unplanned) difficulty. We played Japanese billiards, ate noodles in soba houses, went to movies and baseball games.

We absorbed what we could, but we were teenagers. My greatest concerns included whether I had a date for Friday night or whether I was going to let yet another ground ball go through my legs. Tokyo was our playground, the backdrop for our parties and school excursions.

But the school was a part of Tokyo. It was not, like the U.S. army base schools, walled off in an American pseudo-town. ASIJ was on a busy street, near the Naka-Meguro station of the Toyoko line, which we rode home after practice.

If we did not immerse ourselves in the culture, the culture could immerse itself in us. Our slang was peppered with Japanese expressions, not all of them polite. Our meeting places &emdash; the statue of the dog at the Shibuya station, the fountain outside the station at Den-en-chofu, a gate near a shrine &emdash; were the places where Japanese met Japanese. On opening day of the 1956 Japanese baseball season, we felt it was important to attend. This meant leaving school for the afternoon, which meant not telling anybody we were leaving for the afternoon. It also meant getting caught, which meant seeing how the new principal had decorated his office.

We had not become Japanese, but we had become some hybrid nationality, which was not completely North American any more.

This was noticeable on our rare trips into pure America. If everything strange becomes familiar to the expatriate, it is also true that everything familiar becomes strange. Once, answering a newspaper ad for a used car, my father and I ventured into Jefferson Heights, one of the U.S. military compounds. It was full of American cars and American people and American lawns and it seemed foreign.

Meanwhile, the Japanese experience seemed less foreign all the time. Going to the orthodontist meant going to a room as big as a gymnasium in a dental college, where a dentist and five students would poke simultaneously at my gradually improving overbite and exclaim in overbite language that I couldn't understand. After a time, it became just something I did some Saturday afternoons, after a fairly complicated series of train and bus rides.

For a while, I helped to teach English at a huge Japanese high school. This involved going to the class and reading aloud the passages selected by the teacher, or answering questions from the students, who sat there in their black uniforms. They were supposed to learn, from hearing what came out of my orthodontic mouth, how real English speakers spoke the language. Learning English was then, as now, a passion with many Japanese and I received letters at home from some of the students, who wanted to be my friend. One guy came to my house and we played ping-pong. I visited another at his parents' apartment, where we watched fireworks from the balcony and he translated for the parents and for me.

In between such events was the rather North American routine of the school, but the effect was to give us a new set of experiences, a new way of seeing the world.

At the most elementary level, we learned that there was more than one way, the North American way, to live a life. In subsequent years I went to high schools in Cairo, Rome and Beirut, Cairo during the Suez Crisis, and picked up some political ideas about this. The Tokyo lesson was more innocent: Japan was great; the Japanese knew how to live their lives and it seemed just as good as any other way.

The big culture shock, as every expatriate learns, was in going home, and finding out that home was different. Everything familiar is strange.

I hadn't thought about ASIJ much lately, until a couple of things happened during the past year. First, I discovered ASIJ's website. There I found a list of email addresses, including one person I thought I knew well enough to write. I had no idea where (in the world) he was, since email addresses rarely convey that information. In the 1956 yearbook he was from Kobe, Japan.

I headed the email "Meguro Mustangs," to get Charlie Wu's attention. "You might remember me," I wrote. "We played basketball 40 years ago." In fact, he might not remember me at all. He was the star centre, and I rarely got off the bench.

"Of course I remember you," he replied, a day later. "You wore braces at the time we played basketball together back at ASIJ."

He lived in California, it turned out, in a town near San Jose, working in the high-tech industry. He had news about classmates. Although he didn't get to the reunion, that contact had the sense of archeology.

There is a strange power in the combination of futuristic technology and nostalgia. Many people who spent time overseas had despaired of seeing old friends again and felt deprived of the ability to revisit their past, an ability most North Americans take for granted and exercise at reunions. Rummaging around in the Internet, I discovered a booming business in reconnecting, dozens of websites linking schools and classmates. One that I found helpful was International Schools and Organizations websites, at http:// www.icmall. com/cac/school _ links.html. There are many others.

About the same time I ran into Robin Pascoe in Ottawa. A Canadian writer and diplomatic spouse who is carving out a niche writing columns for English-language newspapers in the Far East, she had written a couple of books on the expatriate experience. We talked a bit about our separate experiences living overseas and she gave me a copy of her 1993 book Culture Shock: Successful Living Abroad, A Parent's Guide (Times Books International). She inscribed it: "You will discover yourself &emdash; particularly in Chapter Seven."

Chapter Seven is called "Third Culture Kids," defined as those who spend significant parts of their lives in foreign countries. "Generally speaking, they are adaptable, globally oriented, multicultural in outlook and, in many cases, multilingual," it said. That sounded pretty good. But the chapter also discussed some of the disorienting facts of expatriate life &emdash; the constant travel, the amount of time spent with adults, the isolation from the local culture &emdash; and, the real killer, the difficulty of returning home.

"Upon re-entry to their own cultures, their vast view of the world can alienate them from the `kids next door' whom they are now trying to befriend. Those new friends have not been out in the world and many could care less about it since it is not part of their experience."

Everybody expects to feel strange and foreign when confronted with thousands of people who don't look and talk the same. What kids don't expect is to feel foreign upon return to the country they left.

My experience was typical, although I didn't know it. A dual citizen, brought up around New York, I came back to the United States for a visit after the Tokyo time was up. It was the late spring of 1956. Elvis Presley was suddenly big. And that's what my friends in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, wanted to talk about. The two main questions I was asked: "Can you say something in Japanese?" and "What do you think of Elvis?"

A couple of months later I was back overseas, in Egypt, and glad to be, even though it meant starting over.

Last winter I revisited the ASIJ website from time to time. It carried news of the global reunion. It would be in Seattle, close, in relative terms, to Japan and convenient for the many graduates on the U.S. West Coast. In addition to the usual social functions were some seminars, one on a research project: "The Challenge of Re-entry to One's Own Culture." I signed up.

Of the 225 former students and teachers who registered early, 24 are from the pre-war period and the '40s; 22 from the '50s; 69 from the '60s; 70 from the '70s; 29 from the '80s and 10 from the '90s. The geographical distribution is, predictably, heavily weighted toward the West Coast. There are eight Canadians. There are 23 from Japan, some of whom are connected with the school. People have also come from Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Australia and more than half from the United States, including New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Alaska.

The day after the reception, we gather in the auditorium at the Overlake School in Redmond, outside Seattle. Our gang takes the back row near the door, because Mei Sun has a bad back and can't sit for long. A nostalgic slide show gets a good reaction. An evening's worth of poking through yearbooks has got us in the proper mind-set for picking faces out of crowds.

We see a slide of the site of our school, with insurance company buildings on it, as they have been since the school moved in 1962. The statue of the dog at Shibuya station is shown, the one who waited there for his master long after his master's death, and this gets some sighs of recognition from the crowd. It was a meeting place for us as well as the Japanese.

Something called the Hamburger Inn appears on the screen, causing a ripple through the '60s and '70s folks. Apparently this was a big hangout for them. It means nothing to us. A generation gap yawns.

About 75 of us move to the library to hear Ann Gleason talk about her research on reverse culture shock. A member of the ASIJ class of 1972, she teaches English as a second language at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Off and on, she has spent 19 years in Japan. She put questionnaires in the alumni magazine and in reunion information packages. The 149 replies form the basis of her paper.

She defines culture shock as not knowing what to do in a new environment, not knowing the cues, not knowing whether or not to shake hands. In a less striking way, the same thing happens on re-entry. We know when to shake hands in Japan, but we don't know the latest TV shows and dances back home. Perhaps worst of all, we don't know how to drive a car, not having had access to one while overseas.

Those experiencing reverse culture shock will be confused and disoriented in what should be familiar surroundings. The difficulty of the reverse shock, the re-entry, is that it's unexpected. You don't expect the familiar to be unfamiliar, and yet you are not used to it any more.

And nobody wants to hear about your experience in another country, Ms. Gleason says, while the alumni of all ages nod and murmur in agreement. She tells of a typical ASIJ returnee, arriving at a big family dinner, primed and eager to share her experiences in Japan. After seeming hours of chit-chat about other things, somebody finally addresses the subject. "So," the uncle says, "was it hot in China?"

The reaction is common.

Returnees, if they are still in high school, are coping with the pain of being different, perhaps appearing as if they are showing off if they dare talk about Japan. They learn to be quiet about their experience overseas. "It's a hidden life," Ms. Gleason says.

Another element of reverse culture shock is discovering, for the first time, the blemishes on the face of the home country. According to the questionnaires, many American returnees are still bothered by the "I" mentality in the U.S., the lack of trust, the attitude toward the elderly and what one termed "the appalling lack of international perspective."

About a third of the respondents judged it easy or very easy to adjust to life at home, and a slightly lower number found it hard or very hard. Another third were in the middle. Seventy-eight per cent consider themselves fully adjusted, 22 per cent do not. Ms. Gleason says that ease of readjustment has a lot to do with how immersed a person is in the new culture. The less immersed, the easier the adjustment. Another factor in the difficulty of re-entry is the difference between the two cultures.

The questionnaire asked what people missed the most about Japan. The surprising Number One answer was public transportation. People returned to their home culture, mostly the States, and found that the only way to get around was with a car, which, of course, they could not use. Others mentioned the food. Someone even put down earthquakes, which gets a chuckle: All of us had felt a small one; few had experienced a big one, such as the one that destroyed the school in 1923.

Afterward, the discussion continues informally. A Japanese-American gives another variation on culture shock. An Asian-American not fluent in Japanese appears to be at home in a country in which he is not, and appears to be foreign in a country in which he is at home. Life is a continuing re-entry.

Our gang talks about this over box lunches on the grass, while we look at the green hills around the school.

We skip the reminiscence-oriented afternoon sessions in favour of a film by a Swedish graduate of ASIJ. Anja Schmid of the class of 1968, returned to Tokyo to do a documentary on her childhood years, called Moments Turn to Years. In it she talks of being in Japan in the '50s as a little girl and having a close Japanese friend.

Here is another form of culture shock. She is not Japanese and the school she is attending is not Swedish. It is oriented toward American society, with its high school proms, its celebration of holidays such as Thanksgiving and Halloween, which are not marked in her home. "Deeply disappointed, I hear that we will not celebrate Halloween," she says at one point. Then she goes back to Sweden.

"Up to the point of my returning, I think of myself as a Swede. When I return, I find out I'm a stranger," Ms. Schmid says. In the conformist world of teen society, she must pass a test: "Until I change what is evidently different from others, I can't be treated as a friend," she says.

She returns to Japan years later and finds her friend. "Only by returning have I been able to meet the girl within me," she observes. We all wonder now how that return to Japan would be for us.

It is odd to be discovering Seattle and rediscovering Tokyo at the same time. Later in the afternoon we go for a walk downtown in this much younger city. The crowded Pike Place Market faintly resembles Tokyo's black market, where we could buy real American candy bars in the '50s. We find a fairly quiet coffee place &emdash; not a Starbucks &emdash; away from the sea of tourists and talk about the film, about coming home and going back.

"In a thousand ways I feel like I'm not that child any more," Mei Sun says. "I'm so changed on the outside in terms of my behaviour and self-acceptance and yet the kernel of who I was is still with me today."

Imagine her, a Chinese-American girl fresh from eight years in Tokyo, arriving at the elite Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. "Debutantes drifted about like hundreds of airborne blossoms," she wrote to Ann Gleason.

"When we all left Japan," Sandra says, "you never knew if you were going to see your friends." She did manage to stay in touch with a few people, however. "Graduating together makes a good beginning."

"We never had that closure," Ann says. She left ASIJ after her second year, 1956, just as I did. She remembers revisiting ASIJ in 1962, the last year it existed in the place we remember. There was just one teacher there she knew and she did not feel at home.

It is beginning to dawn on me, and perhaps others too, that there are a number of different schools being celebrated here, a number of different experiences. That night we go to a party for our decade. The people from the '40s and '30s are there too. The '40s people remember ASIJ as a school appropriated by the U.S. military for the use of its dependents. Three years later, the school passed back to civilian hands, which is where we came in. Mei Sun remembers that as the time when it was no longer necessary to come to attention as the flag was being raised each morning.

Our gang leaves the party early to return to the hotel for more chat, more snapshots to look at. Mei Sun talks, not fondly at all, about the music of her time, the immediate pre-Elvis period, summed up for her in the song Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, "the worst music ever."

The next day, the reunion has a cruise on Elliott Bay and I seek the Canadian perspective. For Sharon Orton-Tweed, class of '85, coming to Canada was kind of a double-reverse culture shock. She was born in the States with a Canadian father and returned from Japan, where she had spent a total of 10 years, to the University of British Columbia. This is close to my experience, even to discovering, as I did, that Canadians were more worldly in their outlook than Americans. She didn't run into any difficulty talking about Japan with her friends. "It was a great, great conversation starter," she says, "and I used it to my advantage. I met guys that way."

Her re-entry problem came when she returned to Japan in the early '90s to work. Where her high school years had featured a nice house and parents to pay the bills, now she was in a tiny apartment, the shower being a hose that could be hooked up to the kitchen sink.

She had always wanted to go back to Japan. When she and her husband went over, it was not the same. "I noticed the crowds more than I did before, and I noticed that everyone smoked," she says.

Still, she values the overseas experience. The widened horizon of the ex-pat is evident when she talks about her job as a teacher of English as a second language in B.C., which is becoming increasingly polarized over the number of immigrants.

"I need them," she says.

Robert J. Morris, a Toronto litigation lawyer, Class of '66, says the Tokyo experience "broadened my horizon." He also attended the talk on reverse culture shock and was impressed. "It was the first time in 30 years that someone has spoken to me about an experience that I'd had and never articulated."

Mr. Morris began at ASIJ in the first year of the new school and left after graduation to attend the University of Western Ontario. There was a four-year gap in common experiences with his new schoolmates, four years of television and advertising and pop culture he did not know. "I would become quickly bored talking about events that were important to these people," he said.

Mr. Morris figures it took him until third year before he readjusted to North American life. "Obviously, I fit in eventually," he says, as we look out over the Seattle skyline. The Space Needle, which was built the same year our school came down, is much taller than anything we saw in Japan. At the time I was there it was thought that nothing taller than six storeys could survive an earthquake.

Mr. Morris's class has been active, with reunions at the 15-, 20- and 25-year marks. Recently he discovered, quite by accident, that a younger colleague in his law firm also attended the school. Despite a five-year difference in graduation years, they learned they had much to talk about.

Which raises the question, what do we have in common? Here we all are, from great distances and at great expense in many cases, and a lot of us would not cross the street to go to a university reunion or, for that matter, the reunion of a North American high school.

I think about this after we all split up and I go for a walk along the waterfront, checking out the aquarium and the shops on the piers. It is a colourful and lively scene, although a far less Asian city, it appears, than Vancouver.

There was key moment &emdash; an epiphany: every reunion should have one &emdash; in a filmed history on ASIJ we watched the day before. We learned that the school began in 1902, as the Tokyo School for Foreign Children, in five rented rooms at the YMCA. By 1922, there were 186 students at the school. An earthquake knocked it down in 1923. The land for the school I attended was purchased in 1927. The school was shut down in 1941, as war between the U.S. and Japan loomed, then used by the Japanese government as a language training facility. It reopened for U.S. military dependents in 1946, then reverted in 1952 to civilians. There were then 450 students and 28 nationalities, kindergarten to Grade 12, and that would be about the size of it when I was there. The new campus began in 1963 and now has an enrolment of more than an 1,200.

Today's American School in Japan has tennis courts, separate buildings for elementary, middle and high schools, two gymnasiums, campus libraries linked by computers.

It suddenly occurred to me that going back to that school would be yet another reverse culture shock, another re-entry problem. Where your old school used to stand is an insurance complex and your school now is a gleaming modern thing in which you can find no trace of yourself. You have returned to Tokyo carrying powerful feelings, powerful loyalties, and you have no place to put them.

By way of contrast, here is the nice chemistry of our little mid-'50s group; we laugh and joke while we wander about Seattle as if we had been doing it together for 40 years, instead of being spread out &emdash; California, Massachusetts, Ontario &emdash; for that time. I think the same thing is happening in other age groups. Rather than hang together in a celebration of school, the people are hanging out separately in little gangs, celebrating the particular school at the particular time they attended it. It could be the prewar school, the Occupation school, the post-Occupation school we knew, or the modern campus with the computers. A reunion is about time and place, place and time, and the time may be more important than the place.

When we walked in Seattle that day after the film, we discussed whether we could identify with this new school. None of us could. Sandra Thompson said, "I feel a connection to the school in that the school brought us together but I don't feel connected to the institution. What we're connected to is the overseas experience."

On the boat, Robert Morris had echoed that sentiment: "To me, the shared experience is simply having been abroad," he said. And after that?

Sharon Orton-Tweed said something that hadn't been heard much in all the gloomy talk of re-entry problems and reverse culture shock. She would go back to Japan in a minute, if she could afford it. And would she wish the ex-pat experience on her children?

"Definitely," she said, adding, in that Class of '85 way, "I think it's awesome."

In our group, everyone feels the same way and Robin Pascoe's book reached a similar conclusion: 90 per cent of third culture kids return to international life, she wrote. "So parents of TCKs agonizing over the childhood they are providing should stop to consider: International life must be a great life if so many children choose it for themselves when they grow up."

That is the pull of this reunion. People are now, as they age, suddenly realizing how much impact those overseas years had on them.

As soon as the reunion was over, the letters and e-mails began, exchanges of snapshots and plans for smaller get-togethers. Former strangers wrote, wanting to share histories. People who were not at the reunion heard about it and wrote to reintroduce themselves. The ASIJ website promises a full report and photographs. Technology and nostalgia meet and the circle widens.

"Like everything else in their lives, home for TCKs is transportable," Robin Pasoe wrote. "It is also cumulative: Home may be a mixture of events and places which come together like a jigsaw puzzle."

So, in a way we're at home in Seattle. The next reunion, the 100th, will probably be in Tokyo.

We may go after all.

(The author is a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, born in New York, and was at ASIJ in 1955 and 1956, before his father was assigned elsewhere with the United Nations. Gordon later attended Queen's University in Ontario, then embarked on a newspaper career. He is now a columnist at the Ottawa Citizen and for Maclean's, Canada's national newsmagazine. He has published four books, the most recent being The Canada Trip, published by McClelland and Stewart. Gordon is married and has two children, both of whom are actors, living in Toronto. Rootless in Seattle first appeared in the Ottowa Citizen, August 22, 1997.)

It is odd enough to be up in the Space Needle on a Friday night in Seattle, where I have never been. It is odder still to be up here with people I haven't seen since high school. And it is really odd that the high school in question was not in Seattle but in Tokyo