enter the banana

Mom left to go to Japan this morning, after leaving sporadic, disconnected ramblings on my answering machine over the course of the week. She was originally meant to leave on Saturday. Having reached the point of imminent departure in San Francisco, she was turned around and sent back home.

Her green card had expired. "I did not knowing green card, it expire," she announced cheerfully over the phone. "It supposing to be pink."

I had nothing to say to that. Immigration baffles me.

The story that Mom eventually narrated was of one of the great cock-ups of travel history. Usually things go well for Mom when she travels; the gods like her, and spoil her shamelessly. Not for her the experiences of Pepe, the husband of a fellow guest at Tara's dinner on Sunday. By the mutual agreement of all present, he was the most consistently unfortunate traveller ever born. Luggage that ended up in Sarajevo. Hostile airports. Injuries. Misdirected planes. Even an incident in Japan when he fell inexplicably ill after travelling in a subway.

This sort of thing never happens to Mom, partly because she prefers to view everything that goes wrong as a sign that our deity of choice is watching over us. Delayed plane? Divine intervention. If it had left on time, her plane could have sucked in a passing bird that would otherwise have crossed its path. Lost luggage? Erasing bad karma! In a past life she probably set fire to someone's belongings. Illness? Cleansing her body of toxins so they don't build up and cause cancer. Her life is exciting, even if it's only in the reflections of what disasters Might Have Been, were it not for the minor inconveniences that Actually Were.

She relishes going over the mishaps of her day, picking through them hungrily like a miser with his bag of diamonds. Disaster, as I said before, delights her, and never quite so much as when it happens to her. In her cosmic scales, things are slowly being balanced. As far as I can tell, her guardian angel is embodied by a stressed day trader, haggling for commodities with fictional money.

It started with Saturday morning, with her first flight. My cell phone recorded an apologetic message from her on Saturday afternoon, from the airport in Oregon. "Harro? Yuhri? This is Mama. I am in Portland. You are not there. Oh, too bad. I am in Portland. Okay. There is engine trouble on ther ai-ro-plane, and I will having to spend ther night in San Francisco. But I do not knowing how to find you, oh well. I will be in ther Doubletree. Okay. Bye-bye."

All through college Mom would leave me diddly little messages that started with a cheerful, "Harro? Yuhri? This is Mama," as though there could ever be more than one English-slaughtering, chirping Japanese mother in my life. I used to come back from practicing to find the light blinking on my machine, and as was my inveterate practice, switch it to speakerphone. My college dormmates would come dashing around the corner and chant along with her voice the moment they heard the first "Harro?" floating out my door.

"--YUHRI? THIS IS MAMA!"

I got the message late evening on Saturday, and promptly called all the Doubletree Inns I could find in the area. None of them had a Mihoko Hirata. "I have a Misako Hirame," one nice receptionist told me.

I've seen my mother's name spelled in more creative ways. "Oh, that's her," I said confidently . . . and subsequently woke up a bewidered, completely innocent traveller with an accusatory, "You're not my mother. Why aren't you my mother?"

She caught up with me at last on Monday, sounding remarkably cheerful. I assumed she was calling from Japan. "Harro? Yuhri? This is Mama. Guess where I am calling from!"

After being stranded for several hours in Portland because of engine trouble, then being stranded over twelve hours at the San Francisco airport because of more plane difficulties, the immigration officials suddenly informed her that she would be allowed to leave the United States, but she might not be allowed to come back. "You need to renew your green card," they informed her. "Go home."

"Except there were no flights back to Seattle for a long, long time," she explained, "so I wait and wait, and I walk around the airport again and again and again and again--"

I would have gone insane. I would probably have gone postal.

"I didn't want to make a scene, because I feel, there is no point in becoming angry and upset. Why get upset? It does no good. It just makes everybody unhappy. So I walk around the airport again and again and again and again--"

The airline, apologizing for the delay in Portland and the subsequent cock-up that resulted in her overnight in San Francisco, were -- according to her -- very nice. They gave her coupons for food.

Three of them.

$5 each.

"It is so nice of them," she announced, delighted.

That wouldn't have been the word I'd have used.

It's useless to puncture Mom's bubble however, and unkind to boot; she admitted that she was so disappointed about not making it to Japan in time that she was near tears in Portland, but that it was a passing thing. She had had a vacation planned with her younger sister and her mother, a trip to some hot springs or bed and breakfast that had to be cancelled. "But it is oh-kay," she said. "Maybe something would have happened on the vacation, so we did not go, so we do not have anything bad happen."

Monday night she called back, wanting help with the INS application for a new card. On Tuesday she got approved. In one of those sudden reversals that the travel gods are notorious for, she managed to find new tickets to Japan that cost less than her original tickets had, even on three days' notice.

So anyway, she's in Japan now. "Bring me back stories," I told her before she left. "Lots and lots of stories."

"INS is so nice people," she enthused.

I've updated my journal links, now that my daily early-morning website checking has finally settled into a consistent handful. Every so often I go through a phase when I add willy-nilly to my browser's bookmarks, only to discover that as time wears on, some of the links simply don't get clicked on as often or, in the case of some, ever. Yesterday I went through and deleted my unused bookmarks, then pasted the survivors wholesale into my journal. You can now be assured that my list of links accurately reflect my pre-work procrastination.

Looking down my list of links, I notice that there's very little here that's really shocking, provocative, or particularly enraging. In general my tastes are mainstream: I like writers who make me laugh, writers who occasionally make me think, and writers who write well. Like many intellectually lazy people, I avoid writers who actively infuriate me, or go yin to my yang; while there's a certain There-But-for-the-Grace-of fascination to reading Ann Coulter, for instance, I avoid reading her articles for the same reason I avoid watching Jerry Springer. There are only so many hours in the day. The minutes I waste reading the surreal rantings of a self-aggrandizing, halo-polishing red-bottomed monkey could be better spent watching rabid dung beetle sex on Tivo.

What is worth noting is that few of my regularly visited links could be considered Asian, so to speak. I appear to be culturally bereft, or at the very least, out of touch with the Asian-American experience. Blatherings and Medea Sin are exceptions to this, to be sure. However, much as I'd like to point to the talented Debbie Ohi as my window to Asian-American Power, the fact is I read Blatherings because I like it, not because she writes feverish, Malcolm X-ish demands for racial recognition. As for the fascinating Dr. Scott, the fact is that his experiences of being hapa aren't going to be my experiences of being banana, and it would be hubris on my part to think that they could be.

Where we do overlap is in being the odd man--or woman--out in a society that dedicates its appeal to two-and-a-half racial demographics. That's a pretty crowded pool of leftover people, and I'm not sure that the three of us share even that. After all, you're only left out if you feel left out, and I can be as oblivious as the next minority woman who occasionally forgets she's not white.

So, anyway. The whole point of this is so I can segue into this link for Rice Bowl Journals, a community of Asian journalers. It's interesting skimming through some of them. You know. Asians. Writing.

Ever watch TV and scream "ASIAN! ASIAN!" at the top of your lungs whenever you see an Asian actor? It's awfully quiet at our house during primetime.

You'll probably also have noticed that the icon for Nanowrimo--the increasingly inaccurately named National Novel Writing Month--is also featured on my list of links. In a burst of optimism not supported by any of my accomplishments over the last two nanowrimos, I've gone and signed up again.

We'll see whether this goes somewhere, or if it simply shrivels up and dies a piteous, dessicated little death. The first year I managed to write 15,000 words before tumbling into a deep pit of I-Don't-Care-And-You-Can't-Make-Me-ism, if I recall correctly. The second year, I reached the 30,000 word marker before surrendering the keyboard to my better urges. The dreck that was bled from my nasal cavities onto the page deserved little better than the eventual deletion I mercifully bestowed on it. If this is an ongoing trend, this year I should be able to get to 60,000 of utter garbage.

Meanwhile, in the three days leading up to Nanowrimo, I've been trying to figure out what to do with a nearly full vial of vicodin currently sitting in my medicine chest. I can't use it. I took maybe a total of four pills during my recovery. Surely there's some charity I can donate it to, for redistribution as needed? I've tried calling my HMO's pharmacy, and can't get a human being on the line. The office of one of my doctors said they didn't think it could be done. Anybody else know? Have any ideas?

I suppose I could keep it, for the days after nanowrimo when I actually get around to reading my great masterpiece. Nausea and vomiting wouldn't be half so bad if I also didn't have any feeling in my extremities.