I Am An Emigrant Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

I am from a world I never knew,
Hazy in my memory,
Fading into a past
I never had.

When I look back,
I see a TV screen
I feel the carpet beneath me
My dog beside me
I hear canned laughter
And silly jingles.

The world is saccharine and plastic
Safe and stifling
Colorful and yet flat
Everyone smiles
But no one really laughs.

As I lay there, safe in the house my dad built,
Children in Vietnam were being burned and bombed
Students in universities were being shot
Leaders were being martyred
All in the name of justice in my country.

And as I reached my teens
The concerns of my tiny world
Expanded to jeans that would not fit,
Mean girls I could not sit with,
But mostly scores and awards
That would open the door
And release me from that tin cage.

Then on to college
And men and sex
And confusion about my future
And facing the question for the first time
Of who I was and what I should become.

But before any of those conundrums could be riddled out,
I found myself in a foreign reality,
As alone as I would ever be,
With only the barest rudiments of a new language
To graft myself onto the new land.

It felt like shedding a skin
I realized had never fit
I felt sensitive and helpless
But free.

Strangely, the silence forced on me
Until I began to master the language
May have been the key to learning to observe,
To listen, to learn.

All of my confidence gone,
I became the oddity,
The extra weight
With no legitimate place,
Dependent on strangers.

I was a child again.
Struck with wonder.
Dumb.
Humble.

Now decades later,
Neither a native of Japan
Nor an expatriate in temporary exile,
I think and speak in the same accent
I hear on a larger, flatter screen
That brings the world to me
And yet none of it seems
Connected to the dream I have
Of my past.