I actually lied about the origin of my screen name on the ReadMe page. Terribly sorry.
Its true origin lies in the names of Shirasu Masako and Shirasu Jiro (English-only readers: kindly please google, as they’re not on the English Wikipedia – I regret the inconvenience). I’ve been watching a TV drama series about them on NHK the past few days, and I found myself identifying with them on many levels, so in a spur of arrogance, I decided to adopt their last name. The rice part, derived from a memorable bowl of shirasu-and-veggie rice I had during a recent trip to Niigata, is purely extra.
What struck me was the way the Shirasu couple (as portrayed in this series) frequently switched to English when conversing with each other, apparently for no reason other than to reaffirm their identity as people who had significant experience abroad. I imagine that until sometime after WW2, both of them felt frustrated and alienated, unable to find much point in their lives: Jiro because he couldn’t act on his liberal political views, and Masako because she hadn’t found anything to do with her life other than to be Jiro’s wife (she would later go on to become a moderately prominent cultural critic).
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I happen to be a Japanese person who lived outside of Japan for a few years as a kid, and who speaks and writes okay English (or so I think). Until very recently, I used to think that it was shameful and stupid to try to use this part of my background as my main source of sense of belonging, or as my main edge over competitors.
First of all, I believe that neither multilingualism nor the ability to speak English is a huge asset in itself. There are people with little substance who think they’re special only because they speak more than one language, or because they speak English - I would hate to be among them. (And as most readers would probably agree, it’s not that special to be multilingual, anyway.) The same goes for the experience of having lived in more than one country. And I have little esteem for jobs that don’t require much outside of basic business manners and sheer linguistic ability.
At the same time, I feel that I don’t have what it would take if I were to live on my multi-locational background. For any combination of the languages that I command, there are quite a few people out there who speak and write all of them more elegantly than I. And since I lived outside of Japan only up to my early teens, and because I didn’t live in each place for long, I only got very limited experiences. The most I can do is to use them as little vignettes in my self-introductions and corporate “entry sheets” (company-specific CV formats used by Japanese corporations).
However, lately I’m starting to realize that, for better or for worse, extra language skills and the experience of having lived in various places have given me much more than just interesting details on my resume. I’m finding that I have actually gained much of my current knowledge through a process of going back and forth between different languages, and that my ideas cannot quite be separated from that background(I intend to explore this topic further in this blog). Furthermore, I find myself empathizing with people who have lived between different parts of the world.
In short, I’m not particularly special because of my background, but I’m finding that the skills and experiences I’ve ended up with are more important to me than I previously thought. Why feel embarrassed about giving importance to what’s important?
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So what do I make of the Shirasus’ episode? In a seemingly endless undergraduate moratorium (now in its fifth year, with 1.5 more still left), and with no clear plans as to what I’ll do when it’s over, I’m now a bit like how the couple were during WW2: struggling to figure out how to do something meaningful with themselves. The vital role that their language skills and extensive overseas experiences apparently played in their lifework (especially for Jiro) encourages me to see my betweenness as a core resource, and not as an empty status symbol to avoid.
Whether or not I can do anything interesting with this resource, only time will tell.
An undergraduate student interested in culture and semantics and stuff.
It seems as if your worry is about being identified as “the one who is multilingual/multicultural”. You don’t want this to define you.
At the same time you are realizing that these experiences are useful and important to you. I guess the important thing for you would be to emphasize the other things you are, in addition to being this.
As for labeling issues, you’re right. I was thinking more along the lines of career options, though.
Basically, I’d started to feel that work based on “overseas” experience and language skills isn’t all that bad. It seemed that Shirasu Jiro did just that – his first job involved translating an encyclopedia(!), and his political role was mostly that of an intermediary between Japan and Anglophone countries – and yet he managed to be so influential. Why don’t I begin my career with a translating job, too?
I’ve thought about this again though, and realized that I can’t make that decision based on Shirasu’s life. First, it’s not nearly as special nowadays to have the level of skills/experience he did, and I don’t even have his level in either. Second, he had some crazy connections. Third, Shirasu’s main job was actually as a business manager.
So maybe encyclopedia translation is not such a great starting point, after all. Dammit, I thought I could get away with less work…
(Now, some people might find my comment a bit offensive. I personally think that translating is like playing a piece of classical music, and I don’t deny that there’s a lot of creativity and skill involved – it’s just that I can’t help holding the composer in higher regard. Call me anachronistic.)
I agree, why don’t you begin with a translating job, too?
Also, I think it’s a slight hubris to presuppose what things in life will turn out to be interesting and what will not. Maybe as you age, you accumulate the experience to judge this. But I think many people with “experience” are fooling themselves too when they assume something will be uninteresting.
You can choose to make that decision based on Shirasu’s life, or to make it based on something else, or not to make it. Evaluating such a decision in advance is incredibly hard. I just think it makes sense sometimes to take what’s available to you and examine it from the inside, see what it turns out to be.
Much of my life has been spent living out a radical version of the never-judge-anything-till-you’ve-tried-it-out approach – one where I blindly jump into whatever turns up in front of me, and desperately try to get something out of it until I realize there’s something I fundamentally find uninteresting about it. Now, I find that this is too time-consuming. I need to filter out some of the more intuitively unsuitable-looking options, so I have more time to try the promising ones.
I feel that translation is something I don’t want to be doing unless my main focus is somewhere else. Whenever I translate, I draw on a lot of intellectual resources to interpret and re-express what’s being said. Nevertheless, I always feel empty, because the ideas being exchanged aren’t mine, and I don’t get to present my ideas while I’m translating. Though based only on my own experience, I think this feeling touches on something fundamental about translation and my values, and thus will not be overturned through more experience.
Granted, original thought is mostly a re-assemblage of existing ideas, and in that sense it’s not that different from translation. It also often happens that one finds one’s voice in another’s text. However, when you translate, your expression – no matter how creative – is bound to the original text or speech, and there’s very little room within the translation for you to attach and mix in other ideas to make it your own (if you do it, people will just call it a bad translation, unless you’re a world-renowned author). For your more original ideas, you need to create your own channels.
I briefly thought I found a different model in Shirasu, because he seemed to have led an interesting life by only translating and conveying messages between people. But then I realized that he, too, had other channels for his own ideas, and that these were what ultimately made him so respected.
Whether I’ll take up a translating job would depend on how much prospect I’d have of creating a respected, heavily referenced idea outlet outside of it.
I still haven’t abandoned the idea of positioning myself between different countries, though.