A wave of memories

Memory is a strange thing. You don’t know when or what it will strike, don’t even know why someone mentions a place and suddenly you are there again, walking into a hotel suite, opening drawers on the desk and liking the stationery.

That’s what happened recently. Someone I really don’t know sent me text saying he had just landed in Japan. Suddenly I went back 36 years. We were born two days apart and this year we were going to celebrate in Hawaii. My birthday came first and it seemed never to end. It followed us out of Manila to Tokyo to Honolulu, dragging slowly backward through different time zones.

I don’t remember much about Tokyo then except I liked the hotel stationery and never went shopping because I was tall and the Japanese were not. Also you have to understand an inner resistance woven into me against the Japanese. At the end of the Second World War the Japanese killed my grandfather, uncle and my father at the eleventh hour. We celebrate the anniversary of the end of that war on Feb. 8. They were killed on Feb. 7. The Japanese took all the men from our house and shot them dead at the Masonic Temple. That act made me the person I am now, a man in a woman’s body.

My mother was most resentful of the Japanese. After all she suffered the biggest loss in the family. While rest lost two, she lost three. She often said as I was growing up: What do you expect of people who take perfectly good trees and make them small (bonsai) and take perfectly small fruit and make them gigantic (strawberries)? She had a point there, I thought.

Many years passed and I was in Japan again, this time at a resort in the mountains where the thing was to make you look Japanese. It was a business trip and I was the only woman among men. That was often my life then, being the lone woman among men. I grew up in the ‘70s, part of the rebellious generation that toppled the Establishment thus giving women the freedom they enjoy now.  It could get quite uncomfortable sometimes.

In the evening a young Japanese lady came in to help me dress in a kimono. She did my hair and brought me the Japanese slippers with two heels — one at the heel and another at the toe. I remember entering the room where we were going to have dinner. You had to go down a few steps to do that and I was very careful because I did not want to fall.

Ohhh, our host said, you look so beautiful. You are like a beautiful Japanese lady.

To my surprise I looked at him and said, “I am not Japanese. You killed my father.”

The man next to me gripped my elbow and walked me away. “Why did you say that? You didn’t have to say that,” he scolded.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It just spilled out.”

“He was complimenting you.”

“I know. But what can I do? These people killed my father, my uncle and my grandfather. You expect me to forget that?”

The wonderful thing about being the only woman in a group of men is you are often ignored and so dinner went on as expected. It was a geisha dinner with young women playing the musical instrument and singing and playing with the napkins and making amusing things. After dinner I excused myself to go to the powder room and didn’t return. Instead I went to sleep on my tatami mat.

 I think that might have been the last I visited Japan. Or maybe not, because I have a separate memory of seeing a highly attractive young lady at the airport smoking a cigar. She looked so chic I decided immediately to follow her example. I began to smoke cigars at my home. I liked Davidoff’s, the short ones that looked like thick cigarettes. My uncle, the priest, would get them for me on his trips to Hong Kong. And sometimes at night when the children had gone to bed I would smoke a cigar and have a glass of French cognac by myself, unwinding after a hard day’s work.

Now I don’t smoke anymore, hardly drink anymore, don’t work anymore, not doing the same thing anymore. But I enjoy that I am old, that now my mind works so well at revisiting old memories. It’s like a movie playing in my head. There I am young again. I look out the Tokyo window and see the rain and rub my arms with my hands because it was so cold in the room.

Memory does strange but beautiful things.

* * *

Please text your comments to 0917-8155570.