THIRD CULTURE KID: Multnomah School of the Bible

     I was a seven-month-old baby Christian when I started Multnomah School of the Bible (now Multnomah University). Everything was new to me. We took a Bible knowledge quiz when we enrolled and we took it again at the end of the three-year program to see how much we'd learned. At graduation (39 graduates) I got the prize for "most improved."
     That was the easiest award I ever won. I could hardly have known less when I started. I even flunked the sample question on the cover of the test: "What are the first five books of the Bible called?" I'd never heard of the Pentateuch or the Torah.
     I came to Bible School as a pacifist. I challenged one of my Bible teachers with "I can't see Jesus carrying a bayonet!"
     He shot back, "Ever read the book of Revelation?"
     Before coming to Multnomah, I had given away my two prom dresses, although I would have liked to keep them, and I had my hair cut short, although--because--I felt pretty with it long and wavy. I think I was expecting Bible school to be more of a nunnery. (My future husband, who entered Multnomah the next year, had the same misconceptions. He saw a motorcycle in the college parking lot and judged the rider as "carnal"--only to declare upon getting to know him he was "the most spiritual student in the school.")
     I came to Bible school with the simple, unquestioning faith I talked about in my post, "I prayed for a cat." Most of Multnomah's students came from Christian families and had grown up in Sunday School. The zeal had worn off--or had never been there. Once in our after-dinner devotions, someone called out exultantly, as if making a great discovery, "God is still on the throne!" and I thought, Of course He is. Where else would He be? I judged the solid, long-term faithful believers for not being more emotional and evangelistic about Jesus.
     When we paused for grace before meals it meant--for me--an interruption in the constant dialogue, or at least monologue, I was having with God. It went something like, "Father, please help Marie get over her cold and--excuse me, Lord, time to thank You for our food--and help Jack to master Greek."
     I hung out with other first-generation, newly-saved pagans, like Genie Lombard, who had also become a Christian in Japan, and Dennis Miller, who came to the Lord after breaking his neck in a fall from a trapeze.
     Everyone had to pick a "Christian service assignment." I picked the rescue mission. I'd go with a small team who would present a mini-church service to homeless men slumped in pews before they could have their free meal. (I was so gullible one man talked me out of my own lunch, going off with three of my room-mate's Tupperware bowls which I had to replace.)
     Only guys could do the preaching. (An unofficial motto for Multnomah men was "Be prepared to preach, pray, or die at a moment's notice.") I wasn't interested in becoming a preacher but I did take homiletics and after my first year of Greek the school hastily ruled that girls could not take two years of Greek, lest they end up with a degree making them eligible to preach.) Girls could "give testimonies," help with children, and sing.
     One evening I went with a group which teacher Tom Stanwyck was leading. I was the only girl on the platform with him, the only girl in the room. When the song leader asked everyone to open to hymn whatever-it-was and we started singing, I heard the most beautiful soprano voice--and realized with amazement it was coming out of my mouth! Not only that but I had total control over it. I could vary volume and dynamics, hit notes I was surprised to hit.
     I've never been able to sing well, before or since. I was eliminated during solo try-outs breathed shyly into the ear of my second grade piano teacher. Humiliating. Once while swinging and singing alone on a playground I heard a nearby window slam and thought maybe it was personal. I slunk away ashamed.
     Now I was caroling with the joy and freedom of a lark. I knew it wasn't me. It was God, gifting me temporarily for His own purposes. I heard later that one of the homeless men--a young one who was new to the mission--came to Christ that night. I assume that was God's purpose for the gift. It was not for me; it was for him.
     We also, as a student body, went out once every semester, to take the gospel to our city. We would go door-to-door, two-by-two, with literature. I didn't mind this--I am not saying any of this to criticize the school; I am very grateful for the Bible foundation I received there and have been building on it ever since. I was taking the gospel to every creature I met anyway.
     But one semester, as my partner and I passed a house on our way to the blocks to which we had been assigned, I saw a young mother struggling to carry a basket of wet laundry to the clothesline in her back yard. I wanted so much to forget my assignment, go help her hang up the laundry and be her friend. I didn't but I have never forgotten that tug in my spirit and I have given in to similar tugs many times since then.

Today I am thankful for God's gifts through us to others.

THIRD CULTURE KID: Champon (no, not "champion") and Chambara

     Seven years in Ohio, 6 years in Japan, 4 years of miscellaneous international travel, 3 years in Hawaii. By the time I got to the mainland United States again, I felt like a gaijin.
     It's called being a "third-culture kid"-- a person raised in a culture not his/r own. They have distinctive traits, strengths, and weaknesses. Often they're bilingual. And adaptable. They can feel at home anywhere--yet not really feel at home anywhere.
     For me, my first impressions of my own country after having been raised for 13 years outside it (if you include the Territory of Hawaii) were negative. They call it reverse culture shock.
     It was too much. Everything was too loud, too fast, too artificial, too bright, too brittle, too in-your-face. Japanese women in their sixties wore drab colors, walked or knelt gently, arms and legs together, spoke softly. At LAX, I cringed from permed seniors bulging in hot pink jogging suits, showing too much cleavage and too many teeth, talking too much, gesturing too much. Sugoi deshita.
     For some reason I noted that every container, every box, soda can, bottle, had to have specific directions on it explaining how to open it: "Lift here. Slide tab A under Tab B. Pull out. Fold under." Dooshite ka na? I wondered. As if Americans were all small children and couldn't figure these things out for themselves.
     I missed Japan. "Hoh-oh-moo-sheek-oo," as my Japanese friends would have laughed sympathetically, fitting the English word into the distinctive cages of pronunciation provided by katakana, their alphabet for foreign words.  I had missed more than a decade of American culture. References to I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, and James Dean didn't have any context for me. My favorite movie star was dashing chambara hero Kinnosuke Nakamura, who battled other samurai (each of whom politely waited his turn to fight him) on behalf of his lady love. Their love-making consisted of intense, yearning looks.  
     When I set foot on campus, I instantly lost half my vocabulary. In Japan and even in Hawaii, we young adults spoke what we called "champon" (in Hawaii, pidgin is thrown into the mix, too). Now I could not exclaim "kirei des' ne?" when I saw a pretty sunset or "tsukareta" when I was tired.
     Not and be understood. I had to stop, sort mentally through the available descriptives and pick one in English. When I stubbed my toe and "itai" came out of my mouth I had to translate: "Ouch."
If I didn't know something, "shiranai" would leave the person I was talking to just as blank as I was.
     There were words for which I could not come up with an English equivalent: muchakucha, onegaishimasu, genkan, tokonoma, and others which were English to start with but came out Japanized, like "homesick" above.
     I was so homesick I would stop any Asian-appearing stranger on the street and ask, "Nihon-jin des' ka?" But they hardly ever were. Sometimes they were part Japanese or second or third generation Japanese but more remote from the culture than I was. I addressed what turned out to be my last desperate attempt to a teenager filling his gas tank.
     "Nihon-jin des' ka?" I asked.
     He looked at me blankly so I translated. "Are you Japanese?"
     "I'm Mexican," he said.
     I never dared try again.
     But just becoming acclimatized to American culture was not my only challenge. I was also trying to acclimatize to Christian culture.


Today I am thankful for Squeak, a little startled mouse we found in our garage, although I will be more thankful if he took advantage of our leaving the garage door up for several hours to find his way out.

THIRD CULTURE KID: Two girls and a Greyhound

     America was a foreign country to me when I flew alone from Japan to Los Angeles at the age of twenty. Even though I am an American citizen and had grown up in an American family, I hadn't lived in the United States for well over half my life. The only person I knew on the mainland lived in Ohio. 
     I boarded a Greyhound bound for Portland, Oregon, sitting toward the back of the bus on the left. Just before we pulled out of Union Station, a girl my age (we called them girls then, not women) climbed on and took a seat a couple of rows from the front on the right. She's alone, too, I thought as the bus hissed and began backing out. I wonder where she's going. 
      Burbank. Bakersfield. Fresno. Modesto.The girl was short, like me. She had curly brown hair and a sweet face.
     I wonder what her name is, I thought. I'd like to get to know her.
     Every hour we stopped but couldn't get off, every two hours we stopped and could get off to stretch and buy snacks out of a machine. Every four hours we stopped and were forced to get off, to mill sluggishly around a featureless bus station until our bus had been serviced.
     At the next stop I'm going to try to catch her eye and smile. I did. She smiled back. Then we both looked away, embarrassed.
     Hour after hour we rode. Like me, she read, she looked out the window, she dozed. We crossed the border. She was still there.
     Maybe the girl was going to be starting Multnomah School of the Bible, too! I was disappointed when, only about an hour from Portland, she got off the bus and didn't get on again. We'd ridden almost 27 hours "together" and never said a word to each other. I didn't even know her name.
     In Portland I found a phone booth and telephoned the Bible school. "I'm here," I said. I expected them to send a car for me. Instead they suggested several city bus routes.
     Suitcases and all, I found my way to 8435 N.E. Glisan Street and into two-story, white-columned Sutcliffe Hall, the administrative building fronting the street. There I registered and was assigned to my dorm room upstairs, one of the dozen or so providing overflow space for the new women's dorm.
     I went into the room, unpacked and met my roommate. Then it was time for dinner. I emerged from my room just as the occupant of the one next to me emerged from hers. We glanced at each other.
     We were both too shy to stare or let ourselves look startled. We blushed and said hi and that was it. Nothing about, "Wow, what a coincidence!" or "Oh my gosh, you were on the bus from LA!" I think that single "Hi" may have been all we said to each other for the entire year we were classmates. Then she got off the bus and disappeared again. Rumor had it she was leaving to marry a Brit.
     At least I knew her name now. Judy.
     Years passed. I graduated, moved to LA, married, had two children. It was time for my 25th college reunion. I wrote the alumni office asking if they knew of anyone who wanted to carpool from Southern California. They said someone from Arizona did.
     Judy.
     This time we drove. This time it was just the two of us. This time we talked. We  reminisced about Bible college, compared notes about what people we had known there were doing now--about what we were doing now. Judy had become a nurse. She and her Brit lived on the border between Arizona and Utah. Judy worked with WIC, providing nutritional care for women and children, many of them families of polygamous Mormons.
     She said the wives were undernourished from so much child-bearing but they didn't seem to mind all having the same husband or the fact that he was principal of the one elementary school and father of all the children in it. They liked being able to split up the chores of cooking and childcare according to their own skills and interests. 
     When the state of Arizona tried to make them obey the laws of Arizona, they claimed residency in Utah. When the state of Utah tried to get tough with them, they claimed residency in Arizona.
      I would liked to have helped Judy write a book about her life among the Mormons. She loved these women.
     I kept thinking about it and wanting to but it wasn't until the trip was half over (we must have stopped and spent the night in a motel, I don't remember) that I found the courage to bring it up.
     "Can you believe we rode 27 hours on the same bus to end up at the same school, right next door to each other?"
     "I know," she said.
     "And we didn't even mention it the whole year we were at Multnomah together? We didn't even talk to each other?"
     We laughed.
     "We were both so shy!"

Today I am thankful for spring, especially in winter.