MOMOKO : November 2008

My 7,000 mile driving trip lasted exactly one month. During the trip I turned 40 years old just one day before the Presidential election marked the American history. I was in Taos, New Mexico, on my birthday, hiking alone in a mountain, which made my traumatic event (birthday) more tolerable.

As I drove through Texas listening to my car radio talking about the election, it was interesting to remember that my American life started in Southern States in 1992. So much have happened since that I had forgotten how I fell into a huge crack between “Black and White” when I barely spoke English. I, who was not either black or white, experienced the tremendous frictions and misunderstandings between black and white people in Oklahoma. I grew up in Japanese small towns, never knowing such issues as skin colors, but as soon as I arrived to America, I was in the “American problem.”

I remember myself saying, “But you are not black.” to a black girl with lighter skin, and the whole group of blacks burst out laughing. One of them had to explain to me that the term “black” didn’t correspond to the actual skin color, but it was called so if a person was even partially mixed with a black race. I thought it’s like dripping a little mustard into ketchup and calling the mixed liquid “mustard.” This “black” thing probably was the first American Bullshit I had heard then. I remember blacks defending me from those Southern white red necks. And whites would look down on me when I hang around with blacks.

Perhaps it is a sign of aging, having been in America long enough to see a substantial “improvement” in the “American Bullshit” problem. I was young then, in 1992, when someone like Obama was beyond my imagination. And I never thought I would be 40 years old some day.