Run run

What I talk about when I—blah blah blah

Watanabe! Matsumoto! Onda! Oh my god I can read! Oh wait…OK I see you, 入谷.

A little over a year ago I was standing outside a hotel in Kyoto during peak sakura. I was on the phone with Mamo, and I was crying. “I dunno, I just, what’s, y’know, the point?” I said, referring to everything. I pictured her on the other side of the day, her two cats hanging on her torso. “What about a new hobby?” she said kindly in response to this small, but embarrassingly public, wave of depression. “One at which you can make incremental progress, but that’s totally unrelated to work,” she went on. “Have you tried knitting?” “We’ve been best friends for twenty years, I think you know the answer.” I watched soft pink petals flutter down to the stone path and drew a strong sniffle from behind my mask. “What about running?” “Jesus, that’s so much worse.”

Running is incredibly boring. Why would you take a great thing like walking, and make it harder to look at stuff? But soon after that conversation, a new housemate appeared from the UK. Most days after work JB would lace up his running shoes and chat, unflappable even in the face of rainy season or the pummeling heat. Eventually his can-do attitude and blatant pro-running PR made me the most reluctant convert in the church. He said the same thing Mamo had, that I was probably running too fast and that I should go slowly enough to have a conversation. I’m already having too many conversations with myself, I wanted to say.

I started running and talking to the fronts of houses. If you’ve been following along, reading for meaning and reading for pronunciation are two entirely different functions of Japanese comprehension. When two kanji appear together, the unaccustomed brain will reach for the Chinese pronunciations, because most of the time that’s how they’re read. Except in the case of Japanese names, which are (hopefully it’s obvious), read with the Japanese sounds. That is to say, reading is hard.

But reading the surnames off houses while running is a great game, because you have only one beat to guess, and then it’s gone. It’s impractical to try and remember all the ones you missed, to look them up later. So the shame of your failure is diminished. But as a result there’s also no real way to win.

田中! Tanaka! I am a savant! 宇佐美! No time! Don’t look back!

The first time I saw the house of 富永, I did a double take, though not because of the reading, at which I knew I had no chance. (It’s probably Taninaga.) The kanji for abundance and wealth, then the kanji for forever. Abundance forever. Bushels of wheat, an overgrown forest of unchecked green, piles of thick hair, lascivious flowers laying across my chest and pressing down.

Or was it an abundance of forever?

Isn’t one enough? I thought, the balls of my feet slapping the pavement.

Around the same time I got an email from a traditional Chinese translator from Taiwan, who was working on a book in which I was apparently mentioned in the acknowledgements. She asked if I knew the characters for my name, which I only did because I was studying Japanese and had gone looking. Knowledge of Chinese characters isn’t common in contemporary Vietnam, the French having mandated the use of the roman alphabet at the beginning of the 20th century, and probably less so for a child of the Vietnamese diaspora.

I told her my best guess for my first name: 書香, the characters for book and perfume, which I had found by tracing the component words through Cantonese, which is closer in pronunciation to Vietnamese than Mandarin. But Vietnamese surnames don’t really have meanings, so I didn’t know what Hà could have been, I said. She asked if I would check. “A person's name is a representation of that person. It's best to translate it correctly,” she wrote. I found myself unable to disagree.

(I’m guessing she didn't email my two white Jewish collaborators, also acknowledged in the book. They’re named Adam and David.)

I consulted one of my elders in Hanoi who has studied Chinese, and he sent back some options: 河, river, 哈, school of fish, 荷, baggage. I associate strongly with water and fish, so those were nice options. In the end, though, I chose the kanji at the top of his list, which was also the one suggested by the translator. Perhaps I’m perpetuating dynastic fake news with my arbitrary, rather inelegant choice, but I told her to use 何. It means “what.”

An exclamation, the simplest question, a challenge tossed by an errant teen, the word that comes before “the fuck?” Asked at the very beginning of the universe, the only conceivable answer to the question of “what” might have been “an abundance of forever.” The what-ness of myself, of my family, asked and still not yet answered, as I turn and run to the next house.