darth rabbit

Back in 1977 -- the year that my sister was born, year of the Snake for all those who care -- I suffered an epiphany of life-changing proportions.

That was the year that my father took me to see Star Wars.

The movie, what little I remember of it, was probably bad. As a grown-up, I definitely find it bad; I'm not sure how good I was at critical thinking back in 1977, but come on. I was three at the time. I have some distinct memories of the back of theatre seats which, let's face it, is pretty much all a three-year old can see in a flat floor movie theatre. Even today I look at the backs of theatre chairs with a distinct sense of nostalgia. In fact, the only thing that I do remember out of that entire movie is monochrome.

I think my father must have momentarily lifted me into his lap during the scene where Darth Vader and his troops blow their way into Princess Leia's ship, because that image stayed with me through the rest of my media-cloistered childhood. Darth Vader in his flowing black cloak and that heavy breathing, the ominous clanking of stormtrooper boots on the metal floor, the smoke billowing around them as they stalk down the corridor, and the dramatic music of his own personal leitmotif.

I decided then and there that I would grow up to be evil.

Being evil, to a three year old, meant being able to wear cloaks. I tied a baby blanket around my throat and goose-stepped around the house, strangling stuffed animals. For months. My parents, vaguely worried about this warning sign of latent sociopathic tendencies, replaced my stuffed animals with Barbie dolls and things sort of deteriorated from there.

I dimly recall making up a list of things that evil people could do, somewhere around age seven. Evil people got to stay up late. Evil people didn't have to practice the piano. Evil people didn't have to do homework. Evil people didn't have to eat fish with the heads attached. Evil people got to be mean to people who were mean to them. Sometimes, evil people even got to wave their hands and have mean people taken away and kill in creative fashions that didn't involve mussed make-up or body fluids.

And, most disasterous of all to the future of my social life: evil people got to wear cool costumes.

A seven year old child's definition of "cool costume" is a far cry from a grown-up's version of acceptable attire. Conan the Barbarian came out when I was nine, and even before then there was a plethora of poor costuming choices in assorted Wizard and Warrior flicks hitting the television and movie screen. My parents would send me off to school in the morning, little knowing that midway to the bus stop, the neatly dressed angel would make a miraculous transformation to creatively dressed Princess Maleficentitis wearing a tiara cut and pasted from a J.C. Penney catalog.

Once I reached school, I would use the classroom scotch tape dispenser to make long fake fingernail claws and threaten to scratch the eyes out of classmates I didn't like. I would walk on my tiptoes, pretending I had high heels. Once I even braided myself a little whip out of construction paper, and wielded it with triumph over the alarmed shrieks of my imagined peons.

In retrospect, it's sort of surprising I never got beat up as a child.

Wanting to be evil sort of set me up for disappointment as an adult. I must have realized that fairly early on. Evil people don't really get to have many friends; this is because they're evil. Evil people also have short lives; they always get blown up by the good people at the end, something I always resented because usually the good people were boring and blond.

Worst of all, at the age of ten, I learned about shades of grey. I learned that not everybody fits into the good category or the evil category, just somewhere in the middle, and that despite all the best efforts to the contrary, the world isn't really worth ruling.

So at the age of eleven, I decided I wanted to be a bunny rabbit instead.

I told my friends. The male ones blinked. The female friends were appalled. "You want to be what?"

"That's so . . . that's just wrong," some of them said, earnestly.

"I don't see why," I said, patiently. "It's not like I'm expecting to turn into a rabbit or anything. I just sort of wish I'd been born one. Sometimes. You know, round, happy, bouncy," -- the boys glazed over, -- "furry, floppy ears, little tail. . . "

"We like bunnies," the boys told me, as a group. 'Go for it, Yuhri. Follow your dreams."

"Don't be stupid," said the girls. "Don't you dare."

Mystified by my friends' responses, I never mentioned it again. I locked the thought away as one of those wistful, I-wish-I-coulds, and ate carrots obsessively for two years until my fingernails turned yellow.

***

Seattle is one of, if not the, home of the Japanese-American intelligentsia. My parents, who enthusiastically mutilated the English language even then, were far more comfortable in the Japanese community. The Japanese Consul-General would come and hang out with their little gang; there would be game nights and wine drinking nights and dinner nights and sushi nights, centered around a small group of young, energetic, sometimes brilliant men: Paul Watanabe, George Tsutakawa, my father, Shiro-san, Kashiwaya-kun, Mr. Nakamura. Judge Sho. The Doctors Kurachi, now researching gene therapy at University of Michigan. There were more men and women, but I don't remember all their names; my mother would, maybe. There are old pictures I can't decipher.

Back when I was in Seattle for Christmas, my mom explained to me why they'd never tried to teach me English.

"We thought it would be unfair to you," she said, simply. "Our English isn't so good, and we were afraid that you would learn our poor English and end up not making any friends. So instead, we only spoke Japanese."

For all the America I was exposed to, I might as well have been born and raised in Japan for the first few years of my life. I ate Japanese food, babbled Japanese baby talk, played Japanese games, and broke a Japanese loom.

I really met my first blond Caucasian when I was two and a half.

"You were so surprised," my mother said, laughing. "I think you must have actually looked at her for the first time. You tried to pull her hair out because you must have thought it was fake. And then you tried to eat it because you thought it was candy. Then you tried to touch her eyes because they were blue."

I was friends with Tara, blue-eyed Tara, five years before I could let go of the nagging fear that she wasn't able to see. Surrounded by black-haired, brown-eyed Asians, I was morbidly convinced that pale eyes were somehow broken, that the difference in pigmentation -- what seemed to me lack of pigmentation -- meant that they couldn't see as well.

I can't count the number of times I involuntarily put out a hand to guide Tara around lampposts or across streets, worried that she would somehow miss seeing something dangerous out of those big, blue eyes.

"Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!"

***

I went to lunch today with my ex-coworkers. I persist on thinking of them in my head as coworkers, sans the "ex"; if there is any justice in the universe, we'll eventually work together again somewhere.

It was the last day for College Boy and Indian Mom, who were laid off that morning.

"So the only real difference is that now you won't have to come in to check your email anymore," I supposed.

I would say that it was nice seeing them again, but for the fact that I'd somehow managed to lose my glasses between last night and this morning. As a result, gathered as we were around a large circular Chinese restaurant table, I was only able to distinguish vague outlines of faces. What little I saw of them proved to be satisfactory, as it was.

Conveniently enough, my fortune cookie fortune read: "That which the eye cannot see, the heart cannot grieve for."

That pretty much covered everything.

My favorite fortune cookie fortune yet was the one I got in Bellevue one day, dining with my aunt and uncle and my entire as-yet-undead family during one of my vacations from college.

It read as follows: "The person next to you will pay for your meal."

"What did you get?" my uncle asked, next to me. On the other side of me, my sister -- still going through her vegetarian phase -- was doing obscene things with a piece of kelp. She was still in high school, ergo, poor.

I therefore handed it willingly over to my uncle.

Who did, in case you're wondering, pay for my meal.

This is a relevent story in that we ended up ordering rabbit for that meal; as a second year college student, I finally gave up my dream of being a bunny.

In college, I learned about Playboy for the first time.

I was, shall we say, a late bloomer.

Posted by yhirata at January 15, 2002 09:53 PM