Kartika_Issue15

Platonic knowledge is joyful recollection (because traces don’t disappear)
and how memory loss is morphine and character assassination.
9.
After their mysterious marriage, my grandfather wanted his new Japanese
wife and his hapa daughter to move to American as soon as possible. He
didn’t want them to become Japs, even though both of them already were
and he would never be. Nothing scared him more, in fact. Despite the fact
that he was the foreigner and couldn’t understand my mom and my
grandmother when they spoke to each other in nihongo, my grandfather
banished them from their homeland, sending my mom and then later my
sobo to a small town in Northern Michigan to rid them of their sickness
called nihonjin no atashi (Japanese Me). This is the story of how an
estranged gaijin in Japan (estranged from Yokohama, estranged from his
own family in Washington state) turned his hapa daughter and Japanese wife
into foreigners in America who would remain stuck in the spaces between
cultures forever.
10.
Part of the cultural definition of dementia is predicated on the notion of an
unchanging self. Americans, in particular, have a monolithic view of the
human personality. We pretend that each person has a single overarching
self that controls all ancillary traits and characteristics. When we deviate
from this monolithic personality superimposed on us from the outside, we’re
described as “fake,” “fronting,” “trying too hard,” “phony,” all words used to
described people who aren’t “real.” Sociolinguistically, what is “real” has
become synonymous with what is true, legitimate and authentic, which is
odd considering that humans have never agreed on what reality is for the
simple reason that reality is an interpretation of our subjectivity, so elusive,
so protean and ontologically promiscuous, like a consort of false idols and
imaginary worlds. The binary line separating reality and fantasy is a false
one. But this is exactly how reality is supposed to be—impossible to locate,
impossible to delimit. This is the story of how we oversimplify the war
maps of the self in order to avoid the battlefield of identity, in order to not
step on the landmines of contradiction.
11.
One of sobo’s last conscious projects was an album book of photographs
she’d handpicked herself. Unlike the clean, well-divided and linear picture
albums I’d shown her after reading a hospice pamphlet, my grandmother’s
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