Evan 田辺 Captain
My grandfather, an American, joined the military and met my grandmother in Yokohama in the 50s. My grandparents moved to the US and gave all their kids English names. Much of the rest of the story is defined by assimilation. I would hear my grandfather and grandmother speaking Japanese to each other, but it always seemed private. Last year, my grandmother taught us how to write 田辺, which is her mother’s family name from Hokkaido. In first grade, I told kids at school I was Japanese and then they insisted over and over as indisputable fact, “you don’t look Asian,” to which I had no response because I hadn’t learned yet that “Asian” was anything other than a continent. Learning about race in this specific way made it unfortunately very easy to stop learning about myself. That habit of self-erasing became stronger into my teens, witnessing the emasculation of Asian men and the fetishization of Asian women all around me. I thought that shrinking myself, silencing my Asian heritage, and defaulting to white masculinity preserved my normalcy. I have recently been feeling a turn towards mending and celebrating my lived experience as a Japanese-American. Much of my childhood and adolescence was shadowed by learning to hide that part of myself because that was easier than just existing in my own truth in a white community.
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