Akemi Kirino:
Evan always called me Tóngyě Míngměi, or just Míngměi, which are the Mandarin readings for the kanji that are used to write my name (桐野明美). Although this is the customary way to pronounce Japanese names in Chinese, he’s the only Chinese I’ve ever permitted that liberty.
Saying my name like that, he told me, allowed him to picture it in those old characters that are the common heritage of China and Japan, and thus keep in mind their meaning. The way he saw it, “the sound of a name doesn’t tell you anything about the person, only the characters do.”
My name was the first thing he loved about me.
“A paulownia tree alone in the field, bright and beautiful,” he said to me, the first time we met at a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences mixer.
That was also how my grandfather explained my name to me, years earlier, when he taught me how to write the characters in my name as a little girl. A paulownia is a pretty, deciduous tree, and in old Japan it was the custom to plant one when a baby girl was born and make a dresser out of the wood for her trousseau when she got married. I remember the first time my grandfather showed me the paulownia that he had planted for me the day I was born, and I told him that I didn’t think it looked very special.
“But a paulownia is the only tree on which a phoenix would land and rest,” my grandfather then said, stroking my hair in that slow, gentle way that he had that I loved. I nodded, and I was glad that I had such a special tree for my name.
Until Evan spoke to me, I hadn’t thought about that day with my grandfather in years.
“Have you found your phoenix yet?” Evan asked, and then he asked me out.
Evan wasn’t shy, not like most Chinese men I knew. I felt at ease listening to him. And he seemed genuinely happy about his life, which was rare among the grad students and made it fun to be around him.
In a way it was natural that we would be drawn to each other. We had both come to America as young children and knew something about the meaning of growing up as outsiders trying hard to become Americans. It made it easy for us to appreciate each other’s foibles, the little corners of our personalities that remained defiantly fresh-off-the-boat.
He wasn’t intimidated by the fact that I had a much better sense about numbers, statistics, the “hard” qualities in life. Some of my old boyfriends used to tell me that my focus on the quantifiable and the logic of mathematics made me seem cold and unfeminine. It didn’t help that I knew my way around power tools better than most of them—a necessary skill for a lab physicist. Evan was the only man I knew who was perfectly happy to defer to me when I told him that I could do something requiring mechanical skills better than he could.
Memories of our courtship have grown hazy with time and are now coated with the smooth, golden glow of sentiment—but they are all that I have left. If ever I am allowed to run my machine again, I would like to go back to those times.
I liked driving with him to bed-and-breakfasts up in New Hampshire in the fall to pick apples. I liked making simple dishes from a book of recipes and seeing that silly grin on his face. I liked waking up next to him in the mornings and feeling happy that I was a woman. I liked that he could argue passionately with me and hold his ground when he was right and back down gracefully when he was wrong. I liked that he always took my side whenever I was in an argument with others and backed me up to the hilt, even when he thought I was wrong.
But the best part was when he talked to me about the history of Japan.
Actually, he gave me an interest in Japan that I never had. Growing up, whenever people found out that I was Japanese, they assumed that I would be interested in anime, love karaoke, and giggle into my cupped hands, and the boys, in particular, thought I would act out their Oriental sex fantasies. It was tiring. As a teenager, I rebelled by refusing to do anything that seemed “Japanese,” including speaking Japanese at home. Just imagine how my poor parents felt.
Evan told the history of Japan to me not as a recitation of dates or myths, but as an illustration of scientific principles embedded in humanity. He showed me that the history of Japan is not a story about emperors and generals, poets and monks. Rather, the history of Japan is a model demonstrating the way all human societies grow and adapt to the natural world as the environment, in turn, adapts to their presence.
As hunter-gatherers, the ancient Jōmon Japanese were the top predators in their environment; as self-sufficient agriculturalists, the Japanese of the Nara and Heian periods began to shape and cultivate the ecology of Japan into a human-centric symbiotic biota, a process that wasn’t completed until the intensive agriculture and population growth that came with feudal Japan; finally, as industrialists and entrepreneurs, the people of Imperial Japan began to exploit not merely the living biota, but also the dead biota of the past: the drive for reliable sources of fossil fuels would dominate the history of modern Japan, as it has the rest of the modern world. We are all now exploiters of the dead.
Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history’s ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life. It was the kind of history that a physicist could love.
Japan was at once universal and unique. Evan made me aware of the connection between me and the people who have called themselves Japanese for millennia.
Yet, history was not merely deep patterns and the long now. There was also a time and a place where individuals could leave an extraordinary impact. Evan’s specialty was the Heian Period, he told me, because that was when Japan first became Japan. A courtly elite of at most a few thousand people transformed continental influences into a uniquely native, Japanese aesthetic ideal that would reverberate throughout the centuries and define what it meant to be Japanese until the present day. Unique among the world’s ancient cultures, the high culture of Heian Japan was made as much by women as by men. It was a golden age as lovely as it was implausible, unrepeatable. That was the kind of surprise that made Evan love history.
Inspired, I took a Japanese history class and asked my father to teach me calligraphy. I took a new interest in advanced Japanese language classes, and I learned to write tanka, the clean, minimalist Japanese poems that follow strict, mathematical metrical requirements. When I was finally satisfied with my first attempt, I was so happy, and I’m certain that I did, for a moment, feel what Murasaki Shikibu felt when she completed her first tanka. More than a millennium in time and more than ten thousand miles in space separated us, but there, in that moment, we would surely have understood each other.
Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him.
Li Jianjian, Manager, Tianjin Sony Store:
The War has been over for a long time, and at some point you have to move on. What is the point of digging up memories like this now? Japanese investment in China has been very important for jobs, and all the young people in China like Japanese culture. I don’t like it that Japan does not want to apologize, but what can we do? If we dwell on it, then only we will be angry and sad.
Song Yuanwu, waitress: