My company has decided to collapse in on itself, much to the surprise of my coworkers, the Japanese salespeople, and the 300 or so factory workers.

Maybe it was more a surprise to us, an ocean away from all the water cooler gossip and dark rumors.

So after only 6 months I’m renewing the process of collecting myself, advertising myself, composing condensed versions of myself. I cringe at the gaps in time and experience on my resume, that the positions seem to be getting less impressive instead of more so as time has gone by. It is a bad thing to be here now, but then there are many things I cannot help.

I have given up a lot for love, but I have received much more in return and cannot complain. Every day I feel lucky, so lucky that I’m terrified of heavy objects falling from the sky and crushing my beloved before we’ve had the long, happy life together we’ve only just started living.

My husband loves Seinfeld and How I Met Your Mother. When I see him chuckling at a show I’ve nearly memorized I am full with happiness and pride at how much of America he has absorbed, and how fast. A year ago he was confused, often annoyed and almost entirely mute. Now I can bring him to a party and lose him in a crowd, knowing that he can find his way back to me.

This crisis doesn’t make me panic like everything did that year in Japan with him in legal limbo and me constantly on the phone with my consulate. Every trip to Shinagawa made me panic, and every relative deported or placed in detention chipped away at our already fragile sense of stability. The best part of our new life is that we’ve forgotten what it is to feel that helpless, too exhausted even to be angry.

Being poor is something we can deal with, gladly.

Let us always remember how we spent our first summer in our bright little apartment on the train-tracks, sitting on the floor and whisking eggs in our wedding china.

The way the room would shake when the 2am freight train passed by,
The way we balanced our HDTV on a wooden cutting board,
The way we filled our storage space with all my junk from childhood, college, and Japan.

How about the way you went through a kilo of Nutella a week and still never gained any weight?
Or watching our Frisbee sail into neighboring soccer games in the park?
Or how are paychecks, combined, just baaarely got us there.

I like how you make me eat fruit and how you feel the need to wash the cars.
You like how I make your lunch and put subtitles on when we watch The Golden Girls.

Eventually we’ll settle in and our little house will lose that new paint smell. Eventually we’ll buy all the furniture we need. Eventually you’ll accumulate enough stuff to need storage as well, and eventually we’ll have to move.

But not too soon I hope. Not too soon.

God, all this Data is so ephemeral.

Today I am doing the Good and Responsible Thing, which is taking all my precious data- my precious pictures, my precious word files- from my horrifically unstable and frighteningly unreliable laptop hard drive, and copying it to my… portable hard drive. Which I generally keep in my nightstand not one foot away from my laptop.

Ah yes its all very secure now. I suppose if I wanted to be really safe I could just pay someone on the Internet dollar amounts a month to hold all my precious things for me. Yes, let me put all my things in the Cloud where no harm can come to them.

I wonder about everyone’s tweets, and facebook status messages, and profile pictures uploaded from cell phones that are broadcast and then trickle lower down on the newsfeed and then disappear. Are these thoughts that we simply would have kept to ourselves had we not been given a particular 140 character platform in which to air them? Or would those little grains or half formed thoughts have eventually grown up into a fully formed blog or essay or thesis if it had been forced to stew and develop before it could be translated into a format suitable for disseminating to all our friends?

Does it seem like no one is writing anymore? Could it possibly be true that we really were just blogging to let friends and family know how we are and now Facebook does that well enough? Or did we somehow outgrow our navel gazing? (at 26?)

Actually, I blame facebook anyway. You can’t have so many sites anymore. Before there were many sites, but now every site needs everyone to be on it to be of any use at all. Who can be bothered to check both myspace and facebook? And why blog on xanga when none of your friends are on xanga? It used to be that people would be willing to go to different sites, but now every site worth its salt can feed you information from every other site. (And indeed, theoretically this xanga entry will be posted to facebook when I am finished with it.)

But facebook is shit for blogging. Sure you get “notes”. “Notes” in their tiny little boxes with their itty bitty titles. Notes that make three sentences feel look like you’ve written a dissertation already. And formatting! Fuck formatting.

But of course, the worst part is that when you are done the note just shows up as another “item” in your feed, another blip on your activity radar, after the picture you posted of yourself eating great chicago style pizza and before the fact that you became a fan of “Narrating to yourself as you walk down the street”.

Facebook is not a place for art (graffiti non-withstanding). Say what you want about myspace, there was an art to it. Comments, blogs (blogs, not notes), and personal information all had big, wide boxes, and nearly everything on the page could be customized to your liking. Obviously scene kids abused their ability to choose fonts and background images and decorated their space- THEIR space!- to the point of illegibility. Ugh, and the loud music that would begin to play the instant the page loaded- so annoying!

But Goddamn facebook and its wide white open spaces, its tiny stupid boxes everywhere, its total lack of customization. We will have our thoughts in the formats Facebook, in its wisdom, wanted us to have them. We can only be grateful that now we don’t have to have them in the third person anymore. (Remember “Jimmy is taking a shower”, “Jimmy is new in town”?). We will have our thoughts in a way that is as short and as bland as possible, and those thoughts will be disseminated among random (I think) “friends”, to peruse at their leisure, or not. Certainly no one is producing things on facebook that anyone would care to download, print screen, or-god forbid- print on paper. Certainly no one is putting all those endless days of thoughts onto an external hard drive for posterity.

Is paper, in its burnable, tearable fragility really any better for posterity than my portable hard drive or gmail account? And were the things we wrote down on paper any more significant than our tweets and updates? Has quick and dirty communication dumbed down the things we say, or simply allowed us to be less choosy?

Perhaps it is just as well that we are not saying much, since I think it is fairly clear that none of it will be visible to future generations. Even the things that aren’t simply cleared off of far away servers when all the adclick funds dry up may not make any sense to our children and grand children. There is no “interface” for paper. If it survives, you can just look at it and obtain all of its information. But, what are they to do if they don’t have CD drives, USB ports, or even… the Internet?

Currently, in my closet I have a box of very well-preserved cassette tapes of all kinds of things. And no fucking walkman.

It’s hard to imagine how it feels to be utterly moved by the sight of some red, yellow and green crepe paper lining the walls of a modest community center in Burlingame that is filled with strangers. But by the time Selo and I had walked past the unplugged Bingo machine in the corner, and sat at a table covered with a disposable table cloth and cut-out confetti hearts, we were both trembling and felt as though we were close to tears.

Kurdish New Year is coming up this month and I was scouring the internets looking for a local celebration. After finding nothing I sent a longshot email to kurdistan.org, which is based in DC, asking if they knew about any groups in Northern California. I was shocked when he wrote back with a contact at something called the California Kurdish Community Center, and even more shocked that the contact also wrote to me, inviting us to celebrate Women’s day with them. And Selo was almost too afraid to note that the invitation was in Turkish.

Let me just say- we would have been thrilled to find any other Kurds in Northern California. Iraqi, Persian, Syrian, whatever. But Kurdish dialects are different enough to be mutually unintelligible, and the struggles that a Turkish Kurd deals with are different from an Iraqi Kurd, at the end of the day. Anyone who speaks multiple languages and has a community or family that also speaks those same languages knows the fierce sense of belonging that is instilled when you’re surrounded by people that share that same, small, overlapping space.

When I walked into that room and saw the balloons tied to chairs and the dark-haired children chasing each other between tables, I remembered each and every Kurdish wedding in Warabi. I saw the same tightly wound curls on the women, the same smoking patriarchs outside wearing suit coats over sweaters, the same jutting, triangular noses on the young men. The same music playing on the same crackling speakers from the same pirated MP3s.

Selo began greeting people in Turkish or Kurdish as appropriate and by the time we sat down to eat we began to feel more relaxed. When the young girls started the dancing, as they always do, we got up to join. It was an easy one, just three steps forward and back, like I made everyone do at our wedding. The woman next to me asked me “Where did you learn Kurdish dance?” and I told her “I learned in Japan”.

Cat Power does a song called “The Greatest” and she says “Once I wanted to be the Greatest”

I think she might have been talking about a boxer. But I think anybody who did really well in school as a child will feel these things too.

I read once that women tend to excel in school and fail in business because they expect that the world is a meritocracy. They expect the reward for their talent will be fair, timely, and automatic.

I saw my former next-door neighbor Phil at Target. He was bearded, over-clothed, and pushing a shopping cart that I think was not a Target shopping cart. He was also making a weird, repetitive noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner running over a penny. I’d heard he was homeless, but I’d never seen him in town before.

I don’t have any guilty stories about how I was never nice enough to him as a child. In fact, our other next-door neighbors had two kids as well, so Phil was always sought after as a tie-breaker vote for important disputes between them and my brother and me. We flattered him shamelessly, and often resorted to bribery.

Not that I can say there weren’t any signs. The way he used to pull apart lego men and stack the heads, the dirty comics that he had that he was really too young to be interested in. The weird, lingering hugs in adolescence.

I’ve heard that my pediatrician’s son is also homeless in Hollister. He grew up in one of those homes without sugar, without TV. I have seen a conspicuously shaved young man who asks people for money near Save-Mart, and wonder if it is him. He didn’t ask me and my husband for money. I wonder if he sensed that we have nothing to give.

When I saw Phil at Target, I smiled and half-waved at him. It really was the same him, the same big brown eyes, the same slouching posture. It was only when I remembered his childhood habit of following people around that I cut off my wave and hurried off.

I woke up-
    and a man was serving me chicken or beef. I chose the chicken. Is this supposed to be curry? I ate the plastic-wrapped brownie and felt the ny-quil kicking back in.

I slept-
   against the plastic window slammed shut against the unearthly light or dark above the clouds and the broad wing of the 777. Why do I always end up sitting on the wing?

I dreamed-
   I held in my hand an object, but when I opened my clenched fist it had turned into garbage. Lint, scraps, and loose beads. I dreamed I saw the sharp fall between two skyscrapers, that turned into the green landscape scrolling under the plane. It could have been the rice fields of Japan, or the corn fields of California.

  I woke up-
     against the black of Selo’s H&M polo shirt. Groggy and unsure if he was really there, I pulled his narrow waist closer to mine. His body was cool and warm at the same time.

I slept-
   to the sounds of the Great Lake Swimmers on my ipod, just covering the vacuum grrr of the plane. I wondered if they intended to make music that puts people to sleep.

I dreamed-
   I was a car on a road. I was going fast, but there was nothing discernable up ahead.

I woke up-
   in California.

I dunno why it’s so hard to write.

Most days I see something or hear something or do something that a few years ago would have made it into a blog entry, no problem. Like when I wanted to make a comment to a woman next to me rubbing her bare arms how cold the air conditioning is on the trains, before I remembered that in Japan you never talk to strangers. Or about the t-shirt I saw in Kamata station that, I swear, said “I’m too tired to lie to everyone all the time”.

Maybe Japanese weirdness becomes proportionally less funny with every year that passes. Or there’s such a background level of weirdness that you get used to, so that the exceptional things slip under the radar. Maybe that heightened sense of awareness, that craving for minutia that I had has been dulled with the stimulus of much bigger things like being torn from people I care about, being uncertain about the concrete details in my immediate future, being in love. Or maybe- and this is awful- maybe so much of that analysis, that awareness, that obsessive chronicling of tiny moments was all somehow a part of my single self. Maybe it was all somehow directed at finding someone. How Jr. High.

Its not as though I couldn’t write without that sense; certainly my life is presenting me with much more “material” than I ever had before. But with so much uncertainty, so many audiences, so little resolution, I find it hard to find my way here.

I read about a book a week since I have so much time on the train. The last three, in succession, cut into me deeper than normal. Perhaps the first, “Everything is Illuminated”, left me with so many open wounds that after that anything could find its way in. It’s one of the most unique, most touching, most affecting books I’ve read in a while.

The next, Bitter Sweet was about a lot of things, but I of course glommed on to the story about the giddy young couple in love whose marriage slowly falls apart. Despite the employment of characters named things like “Felicity Trueman” (uh, how about John Everyman, while we’re at it?), I really enjoyed the book, all parts of it.

And lastly, I read Prep, an excruciatingly long novel about an insecure Midwestern girl who attends Ault boarding school on a scholarship. She’s too shy to talk to anyone and instead obsesses about the popular students and one boy in particular. The pathetic amount of scheming, self deprecation and missed opportunities would make you wonder why anyone should feel any kind of sympathy for the narrator, and moreover, why anyone should care about what goes on at Ault boarding school. Except… except for the fact that her scheming, her analysis, her insecurity ring so damn true. The way she describes feeling like a fish out of water is so honest that anyone who’s ever felt out of place even once can relate to it a little. And anyone who’s ever been an insecure teenage girl can relate to it a lot, a lot, a lot. I found myself being able to relate to it so much that it took me a day away from the book to recall where the narrator ended and where I began. I actually had to remind myself that I always had too much respect for myself for what happened to her to happen to me, and I was never without friends in high school, which itself was never as cliquey as high schools are made out to be.

But its probably because of Prep that I’m writing again. I always tend to take on the “voice” of whatever I’m reading at the moment (and if you read “Everything is Illuminated”, you’ll know what kind of acrobatics that would take), and I realized that if I ever wanted to rid myself of Prep’s Lee Fiora, I’d have to do a little writing of my own.

I wonder if my sense of self even exists if I don’t write. My life now is mostly coasting in a place I was finished with, and that dulls me. And Selo and I are too stable to write about, although I wouldn’t post that on line anyway. Falling in love or out of love would engender writing but yesterday we took a break from me lying around coughing and sniffling from my yearly cold to get some fresh air and buy him some shirts. We walked along the glass-lined walkways of Shiodome, jarred by the sight of other gaijin, and waited in line for the dressing rooms at H&M. They wouldn’t let us both into the room at the same time (to prevent theft? tomfoolery?), so I watched him through the small crack between the unlockable doors. In the bright lights I could see his graham cracker skin, the gold glint of his necklace and the blinding white of his undershirt rippling and shifting as he moved. He opened the doors to show me a fitted black polo shirt that made even his ratty zip-off leg khakis look more grown up. I undid his top button and folded down the collar smooth. He looked good.

There are still five toothbrushes in the toothbrush holder.

There are still six pillows lying around.

The ashtray is still full.

But in the house, only me and him are left.

The disarray the rooms are in reflect the haste in which they were abandoned. Photos, clothes, and notebooks full of Turkish to Japanese vocabulary are spilling out of drawers that were themselves pulled out of plastic rolling cabinets.

I knew that when Suzan left things would be different. I knew there would be no one to cook meals or dust the TV or talk to when the boys weren’t home from work yet. I didn’t expect to feel the absence of Yasar so quickly though, considering he mostly just smoked and watched streaming Turkish dramas. But even he performed useful functions in the house, like refilling the water bottles at the supermarket when he was thirsty or eating the cheese before it went bad in the fridge.

Selo and I have lived alone before, in my closet in Uguisudani and our comically oblong rented apartment in Aoi. But remembering how, just a few months ago, this house was full with five, sometimes six people, it just makes us sad.

I remember helping Suzan set the table (er… floor) for dinner. We needed stacks of plates and bowls, a tray full of cups, and we had to wait for people to get home from work to set out the silverware, since we needed the spoons and forks from their lunchboxes in order for everyone to have a set. Suzan would pile rice onto plates and I would get to work on heating bread in the toaster, since as a group we needed more carbs than the mere 6 cups of rice the ricecooker could offer up. When everything was ready, Suzan would have me spread the sofra in the main room (where Selo and I sleep). Kemal and Selo would pull up to it immediately and would begin working on the food before I’d even poured the water for everyone. Yasar would need to be called once or twice before finally setting aside his computer but not without turning on some Kurdish music for the background. Vakkas would stay at his desk, working, until Suzan called Dayir!! five or six times. I remember it was noisy, fragrant, crowded, and mostly incomprehensible.

Now I realize how little light we need when we only use one room at a time. The house is lit up in quadrants. Leave one room, turn off one light, turn on another. I made lahmajun, Turkish pizza, chopping up the vegetables and mixing them with ground lamb and spreading the mixture over the naan I made this weekend. They each get individually fire roasted in the gas stove, which takes about 4 minutes each. I made fourteen since I thought Yasar would still be here by the time we would eat them, but I guess Selo and I will have extra for lunch. It must have taken Suzan forever when she was making enough for a small army.

When Selo got home from work we ate in the kitchen without silverware and discussed the toothbrushes. They’ll stay where they are for now.

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Sometime after New Year’s, Selo’s older brother Yusuf came to our house with a new pair of shiny black shoes and announced that he was heading back to Turkey.

I’ve known Yusuf for about 5 months now. Selo introduced me to his family after we decided to get engaged, which coincided nicely with the marriage of his next oldest brother Kemal and his wife Suzan. I know that Yusuf is Selo’s oldest brother in Japan, that he always wears a suit no matter how hot or cold it is, and that he carries a Muslim rosary, which I always imagine he uses because he’s away from his wife and two young kids.

Yusuf calls me “Buka male Sanagawre”, which means “daughter-in-law of White Sana” (White Sana being Selo’s mother’s nickname). Whether this is a flattering way of including me in the family or a diversionary tactic to conceal how long it took him to learn my name is still a point of debate with me. Yusuf speaks to me exclusively in Kurdish, even if there is no one around to interpret. He does nothing but work and only buys an occasional second-hand watch as an indulgence. This lead to Selo’s nickname for him- “the bank of Yusuf”.

At the McDonald’s at the airport, I asked Yusuf how long he’s been in Japan. I was under the impression that he came about a year ago, just before Suzan. So when he answered “6 years”, I thought he was either teasing me or was unclear about the meaning of my question. I didn’t believe him until he showed me his passport, and the only stamp in the midst of all those blank pages clearly said Narita, 2002.

I thought of the times Yusuf came and sat on our couch, twirling his rosary and calling for “chai” and I thought of myself wondering what his wife thought about him being away for so long. I know he originally intended to bring his wife and children here, but he must of realized that was impossible fairly quickly. I wonder if she gave him permission to go, or if she was always begging him to return. Then I thought about what it must be like to prosper or flounder based on the health of a flock of sheep, or the skyrocketing price of food in Turkey. About having to send your sons away to the city to live with relatives just so they can go to middle school. And being a Kurd in Turkey is no picnic either. But 6 years.

The mixed feelings are palpable in the van ride to the airport. I am with Suzan and Kemal and Yusuf, and another cousin who is driving us there. I’m sure they feel what I feel, only in different proportions: relief that he is going home, that he managed to spend so much time in Japan without being shut into a detention center, happiness that he will be reunited with his family, sadness that he is leaving, and then the wondering. When it is our turn to go- and go we must, for we all know that unless you have married a Japanese woman, as our driver has, there is no future in Japan- how will we leave? Will Kemal and Suzan be able to stay here unmolested for years, as other couples have, or will Kemal be refused his visa and be taken to Shinagawa, leaving Suzan to fend for herself? Will they eventually get sick of it all and leave, even knowing that once Kemal goes back to Turkey he owes the government a year or more of military service, and possibly some prison time for trying to get out of it? Will Selo and I arrive at this airport with bags carefully packed, visa documents in order with a bank account full enough to establish our life together in the states? Or will we be rushed out, or carted out, long before we planned? We all know what it took for Yusuf to arrive at Narita. He had to go to the Turkish embassy and extend his expired passport (Turkish passports are only good for 2 years), then he went to Shinagawa and told them he was giving up on his refugee application and that he was prepared to leave in February.

They gave him a temporary visa and told him to be out by the end of the week.

We know this, and we know that for Yusuf things are simple, because he has done his military service already. For the rest of us, it will not be so easy.

—–

I lead them through Narita’s many floors, counters, and escalators. The cousin brags that he has taken someone to the airport before and therefore knows the way. But I have been in and out of this place more than twenty times in the past 3 years. Leaving for Shanghai, leaving for Hong Kong, leaving for Paris. Arriving here for he first time to study, and going home for Christmas. I met Sean Lennon here, and I said two tearful goodbye’s to Selo here. When we pass the security gates, I feel the last memory more acutely, and I wish Selo could have gotten the day off to come with us. As I am stewing in this, Suzan puts her hand to her forehead. She arrived in Narita with her entire family, thinking she was going to get married. Instead, she spent five months in a detention center. Narita gives her a headache.

Suddenly, Yusuf frowns and begins digging in his carryon. He pulls out a small video camera and takes out the tape. Kemal informs me that the tape contains a video of their Nevroz celebration this year, and footage of Yusuf dancing in front of Kurdish flags is enough to get him arrested right in the airport.

We say our goodbyes inside the security gates. Suzan cries a little, and Kemal reminds me that he has no idea when they will see each other next. But we are happy for him, and when he finally makes it through security we wave him down the escalator to immigration through a plexiglass partition. Downstairs, something else is happening. We meet another cousin comforting a sobbing Japanese woman, and see two more Turkish people whom I have never met. They are both wearing shiny gray suits over sweater vests. The woman is sobbing because the two men had trouble getting through immigration. But they did, and now Japan has two more Kurds on their hands.

Their presence perplexed me the entire ride back. I had assumed that Yusuf’s departure, and the departure of another cousin tomorrow represents a general resignation, an acceptance of Japan’s dead ends. Japan is too chummy with Turkey to admit to any human rights abuses against anyone there, and even if they did, Japan has granted refugee status to only about 400 people in the past 20 years. Not exactly terrific odds. Why does anyone come here? Is it enough to stay here for a few years, to save up some money, to feel the odd refreshment of being marginalized as a gaijin, rather than discriminated against as a Kurd, and then go home? Do they expect to marry a Japanese woman, open a kebab shop and live the easy life? Or are they just taking their chances, willing to live from residence permit to residence permit, willing to jump through immigration’s hoops and maybe serve a term in Shinagawa, until Japan gives up on them and lets them stay?

Selo says the Kurds are an impatient people, but I have only seen the opposite. I have only seen people willing to live for years half settled, half legal, half happy. I’ve seen brides talk to their mothers on their wedding day over a web cam and housewives try to beat Japanese flour and milk into passable Turkish bread and yogurt. I have seen forty people cram into a two room tatami apartment and do dances they should be doing outdoors, in a field.

And I see in the stormy hazel eyes of my love how guilty, and how angry he feels that he doesn’t feel at home in the only place that feels like home.

Yusuf called this morning to let us know that he arrived safely in Gaziantep, that he was with his wife and Sanagawre on a bus back to their village. I know they have been busy planning a welcome party and have killed a lamb as part of the preparations. Selo says Yusuf may try and take his family someplace else, maybe Europe, and may he have better luck. But for now, tonight, I know he is happy.

Selo and I were walking into Uniqlo, trying to figure out how much we could afford to augment his winter wardrobe of exactly 3 shirts. He mentioned he might have to lend some money to one of his brothers and I had to stop walking in order to calculte exactly how much that left us for monochromatic fleece hoodies.
“Daijoubu” He said, pulling me by the hand to keep me walking.
“What’s daijoubu?” I sputtered, still running the numbers.
“Daijoubu dakara. It’s all right, baby. Come on.”
Sighing, I shut off my calculator and kept walking.

There’s something about Selo that makes me laugh when I don’t feel like it, and keeps me calm whether or not the situation merits it. This year has brought heretofore unfathomable levels of stress and complication, but at every brick wall Selo shrugs and says “daijoubu” and we just keep going.

To be honest, I’m not sure if Selo’s optimism is the result of an impressive resilliency to stress or a total disconnect with the realities of the situation. Either way, theres something about him that makes me believe what he says.

So, here’s to passport copies, applications, photos, embassies, and birth certificates. Here’s to fucking Shinagawa, the Turkish military service, and kari houmen. Here’s to closing your eyes and just going forward. If 2009 is only twice the trouble I think its going to be, we’ll be just fine.