La Vie En Rose

The Honeymoon is Over

Since everyone is going to blog about the country they will be spending their semester in, I feel the need to blog about the country I am studying abroad in: the United States.

Combined with my international school education and the metastatic spread of Hollywood, American (pop) culture is not too unfamiliar to me, despite growing up in Japan. However, it was not until I started going to college here that I realized how much I didn’t know about America.

I love America. I want to make that clear before I continue. Generally, people are friendlier, food portions are bigger, I feel skinnier (I wear an S or XS here but an M in Asia), and there’s a better chance for women to succeed career-wise. I knew from the day I was told in Kindergarten that I should acquire good knife skills so I can cook for my husband that I needed to get the hell out of a country where the “glass” ceiling is not actually glass but rather, earthquake proof concrete. After all, Japan is sandwiched between two tectonic plates.

Anyhow, I don’t mean for this post to become an America Love Fest. There’s something about Americans that have boggled me since my arrival in 2006, and no one has given me an adequate explanation as of now. (I’ve discussed this with a couple of friends already, and each time, he or she will shrug and say “That’s the way we are.”) What bothers me is this: The American Goodbye.

In Japan, when you part, you say goodbye, bow, and leave. This is normal.

In America, it goes something like this:

Me: Okay, I have to go home now. Bye!
American: Okay! Take Care!
Me: Thanks, you too! (moves toward door)
American: See you tomorrow!
Me: See you!
American: Take it easy!
(I hurriedly leave before he or she says anything else)

It’s not the “Take Care” or “See you tomorrow” or even the prolonged goodbye that bothers me—in fact, it’s kind of nice—but it’s the “Take it easy!” that bothers me to no end. Some times ‘Take it easy” is replaced by other phrases like “Stay Black” or “Keep it Real.” (Okay, so I never had anyone tell me to “Stay Black” but I’ve heard people say it before.)

What am I supposed to take easy?! I don’t get it. The first thing I learned in my English class was that you should always make clear what “it” refers to. (I also learned that you should avoid ending sentences with prepositions… but no matter.)

I don’t know what “Stay Black” means, but I ignore that because I know that this particular piece of advice is not something applicable to me. What I really don’t understand is the advice to “Keep it Real.” So, like a good scholar that I am, I decided to ask an expert to clarify. In this case, I asked the average American—the expert on American cultural miscellanea. “What does ‘keep it real’ mean?” I asked.

The answer, believe it or not, was even more confusing.

“It mean, you know, don’t be frontin’*”

*“Fronting” means “putting on a front” (just in case you didn’t know that already).

I was offended. I mean, “Keep it Real” implies that the advisor thinks that I might not, keep it real that is, that I might slip into being “unreal” like some silly ghost or something. I mean, this is coming from the country where they make their kids dress up as ghosts on October 31^st to go beg candy from their neighbors. Do these advisors think they have a better idea of whether I want to be real or not? Do they think that I don’t want to “keep it real?” How do they even know that I’m not putting on a front now, and what they think is real actually isn’t? That’s just absurd.

So America isn’t without her flaws, but I’m okay with that. I view our relationship like a marriage. I can come up with two lists of pros and cons for her but everything on the pros list makes everything on the other list seem bearable (I heard it has to do with a hormone that runs through your body when you’re in love). Like any international marriage (and I would know because I’m the product of one), we fight some times over cultural differences, wonder why the hell we’re still together (it’s for the kids), but we usually kiss and make up. After all, they say, love is blind.

But if we see another Republican president in the White House, I’m filing a divorce.

Keep it real.