November 21, 2002
good names
I've received permission from the Guy to use his real name in this entry, which opens up a whole cache of stories I've never been able to share.
It's no secret that my family has long been worried that I would never find love, or at least marriage, which is presumably more important. The older members of my family are ruthlessly pragmatic about separating the two, choosing to be remorselessly unromantic when applying the requirements of genetic continuance on younger generations. That they themselves married for love is beside the point; surely we, as children of the cold-blooded '70s and '80s, have overcome that confusing mishmash of hormones and neuroses that fueled so much procreation in the grim past.
(In all fairness, I should exempt my sister, my mother and maternal grandmother from this sweeping generalization. My mother has never wanted anything more than my happiness, which considerately included love with marriage. My grandmother has been perfectly happy to go along with my mother on this, adding complacently that I have the perfect, round-faced beauty of the Heian period and should therefore have no trouble ensnaring a nice Japanese boy. Paintings of Heian beauty mostly consist of long hair, long clothes, and dumpling faces. Meanwhile, all Nice Japanese Boys are actually Asshole Japanese Boys unless they're relatives, which necessarily excludes them from consideration. Needless to say, this is a dubious compliment.
I've never really asked, but I suspect my sister just wanted me to get laid.)
My friends haven't been behindhand in this ongoing drive to see Yuhri matched. Anyone will tell you though, that it's impossible to hook two people up when one of the people persists on insisting she is utterly asexual. "I don't need a guy," I kept telling my friends, patiently. "I have no interest. I have other things. I'm busy. Who has time for a guy?"
"Are you gay?" one of my friends asked anxiously.
"I was for a day," I admitted. "But my sex life stayed the same, so I figured there wasn't any benefit to it. I still had to shower."
"You're not asexual. You're obviously female. Christ, Yuhri, you have breasts," I was told in exasperation at another time, by another friend.
I peered down at my breasts and poked, gingerly. They'd always rather baffled me as anatomical appendages. "It's all cosmetic," I explained. "I haven't gone through mental puberty yet."
After 27 years, people were starting to wonder if maybe I weren't serious. Someday, they were thinking, she'll just split in two like a paramecium, and then there'll be two smaller, higher-pitched Yuhris. It'll turn out she was right all along and she never really did need a man.
Boy. She's creepy.
It was around this time that I decided that it was, in fact, time for me to grow a gender. I called my friend Tara, as documented elsewhere in this journal, and informed her of the fact. "You can start setting me up with guys now," I told her kindly.
It was a few months after this that Tara moved into a new house. A gorgeous new house, in Mountain View, a beautiful, lovely, splendid house that she intended to rip to shreds and piece together again in a new, Tara-motif. I didn't help her move, for one reason or another -- I seem to recall the phrase 'Professionals' entering into conversation when I offered -- but a few days later, she called to invite me to a party. A house warming party, I assumed.
"Do you like German potato salad?" she asked over the phone. An odd question.
I answered it anyway. "I love German potato salad," I assured her, trying to sort out what exactly about the potato salads I had sampled before made one more Teutonic than another.
"Good," she said brightly. "K. and M. are bringing German potato salad, and K. and B. are bringing Yan."
Yam? Yams and potato salad? Privately, I considered this an overenthusiastic representation of tubers. However, an evening at Tara's is always good on the taste buds, if hard on the diet. I promised faithfully to come.
I arrived with my ex-roommate, Smurfette, and Smurfette's boyfriend at the time, the Viking, who had just stepped off the plane from Norway a few hours before. Remington let me in, making way for Tara, who greeted me in her kitchen in a massive apron and a hug.
"Happy housewarming!" I saluted, with the perennial moocher's insincere apology: "I didn't bring you a present. I suck."
I unravelled myself to discover that Tara was regarding me with the sweet, hilarious guilty smile she dons when she foresees trouble ahead. I eyed her with foreboding.
"I have a confession to make," she said in a small voice.
She's Catholic. She will admit her faults, no matter how I try to prevent her.
"It's not really a housewarming party," she told me, half holding on to me as though worried I'd turn and run on her. "We're actually trying to set you up, K. and Remington and me. He brought a friend. He's really nice. We were thinking you'd be great together."
There was a small silence.
"Yan?" I said ominously. "Not yams?" Ah, you see? I caught on. Some dormant intelligence was dissecting the earlier invitation and remembering discrepencies. If I had hackles, they would have risen; I instantly started to curdle with hostility. Yan was not going to have a good first impression. In fact, Yan was not going to have a good night.
"He's really nice," Tara repeated desperately, still clinging to my arm. "He's really funny, too...."
I eventually skulked into the family room to join the others, brooding darkly over the treacheries of my friends. Yan, poor boy, I ignored altogether, glancing at him only long enough to register that he was male -- hope lived eternal in my friends' breasts -- before locking my eyes on his feet. I refused to look any further up than that, going home at the end of the evening with only the vaguest recollection of anything above his knees, but with his shoes committed to memory.
I awoke to the conversation just in time to hear the jet-lagged Viking quip, "Yan Can Cook?"
Yan laughed politely. Even then, complete strangers, I could hear the weariness in his voice. He was a Dolly Parton that's been asked one too many times: "Are those real?"
"Huh?" I remember saying blankly. "Yan can cook what?"
The other guests exchanged glances. "Yan's the name of a television chef with a TV show and a bunch of books," one of them explained. "His slogan is 'Yan Can Cook.'"
I blinked at Yan's toe. "Oh," I said, adding firmly, "Never heard of him."
I like to think the Guy fell in love with me then and there.
I was cautious with the new relationship, never having gone down this road before. I didn't tell my sister or my mother about it, for instance, beyond the initial disparaging news that Tara had tried to set me up with someone and that he "seemed nice."
When we finally established that we were in fact a couple, I broke the news to my mother in a long conversation that was complicated by her current obsession with the moles digging up the garden.
It might have because of that confusing talk that she went away thinking my boyfriend's name was "Yen."
"How is Yen today?" she started asking, when we were chatting on the phone.
"Yan, Mom. His name is Yan."
"Yen."
"Yan."
"Yen?"
"Yan."
I could hear her on the other end of the phone trying to wrap her tongue around the name, and finding the task oddly difficult. There is a 'ya' sound in Japanese. For some reason, it elluded her.
"Ye-an!" she said, triumphantly.
It was close enough. Until the next call.
"How is Yen today?"
Discussions with my grandmother weren't much better. Naturally, such exciting news couldn't be kept secret; though my mother denies it, I suspect she immediately called her mother in Japan the first night I hung up with her, and transmitted all the dirt, complete with the mangled first name.
To add to the confusion, my sister's boyfriend -- a charming boy that I like tremendously, since my sister hasn't called lately to tell me I don't -- is named John. There is no "John" in Japanese. There is a "chon" in Japanese. There is a "chan" in Japanese. If you have your dentures in, there's a "Jan" in Japanese. And then there's the Guy's name.
When my grandmother came to Seattle to visit, she called to ask about my boyfriend. In her typical, straightforward way, she managed to touch very lightly on the subject after a meandering, fifteen minute conversation about what a wonderful child I was, how kind everyone in Seattle was, how she was sorry for being such an inconvenience to my mother, how she missed my piano playing....
"How is your friend?" she asked slyly, in the middle of this dizzying saunter through inconsequentiality-ville.
"Huh?"
"Your mother said you had a very nice friend. His name is...chan?"
"Yan."
"Chan?"
"Yan."
"Chan."
I was starting to feel a little deja vu.
"Yan," I said wearily.
"Oh," said my grandmother, brightly. "Jan."
"Close enough," I sighed.
"His name is like Masako's friend. Jan," my grandmother discovered. She was feeling perky.
"No, not exact--"
"Jan," grandmother repeated, sounding quite pleased with herself. "It is a very nice name, Jan. What does it mean?"
In Japanese, all names mean something. At one point, the Guy had actually told me what his name meant. I'd forgotten. Something about ... gardens? Bad girlfriend. Bad.
I made something up.
"Pretty flower!" I said, obligingly.
There was a small silence on the phone. "How ... interesting," my grandmother said. Unspoken: how very curious the People-Not-Japanese are.
My sister got on the phone a little while later. Her voice was low and cautious. "Yuhri, I think obaa-chama thinks we're dating the same guy."