Welcome to the Concrete Rainbow

This will be my final entry in this blog.  Shocking, I know?  After eight months of blogging, Welcome to the Concrete Rainbow is coming to a close.  There's plenty of untold stories left but I'm finally graduating from college and moving on to bigger and better things.

I'm kidding!  The blog will be continuing, albeit in a slightly altered manner.  When blog 2.0 arrives it will include pictures and videos from my trip to Japan for all entries, including the ones published so far. 

But where can you find this new blog, you may ask?

"Well, you see--"

And you didn't do half as much writing and updating the second semester as the first!  So how are you going to get this second blog up and running so fast?

"Ahh, inner monologue, you're back.  I have a very simple answer for you.  It's called..."

Unemployment!

In a matter of days I will have plenty of time to start up this new blog site, which will include not just entries on Japan, but will expand past it to include other observations about my life (most relating to the ongoing trauma my figs seem to take).

The new blog will also be a portal to the short stories I've written and unsuccessfully published!  But in all seriousness, my fiction work will be on display and open for critique and I hope you all read it and enjoy!  Or else...

Finally, I will also be co-hosting a podcast about anything and everything which will be available on the site.  This is all a part of my plan to dominate the world via Devin Faulhaber based media.  And cheap Google pay ads.

So, I'd just like to say thank you to everybody who has read the blog, even if it was one entry or a single sentence, and enjoyed it.  Or didn't enjoy it.  It means a lot to me that you're reading this and for that, you have love.  No, you can't re-gift it to that creepy relative who still thinks you're in high school.

I'd also like to thank Penn State Behrend for giving me the opportunity to write this blog and for giving me a taste of what being an employed writer is like.  I hope this blog helped...somehow.

Adios space cowboys and cowgirls.  It's been a blast.  But don't worry.  I'm not dead.

Just resting my eyes.

I wondered what family meant to Suzie.  Maybe it was something like a broken down car.  With enough time and effort, it could be repaired.  But how long would she wait before she gave up and just admitted that this might be the relationship she'd always have with her family?  Where is that line?

My friends had heard all about Suzie and at first treated her like a curiosity.  They invited both Suzie and I out for drinks and karaoke and with slight hesitation I agreed.  We had a wonderful time and I unfortunately can't forget my duet with Suzie on "Edelweiss."  Neither can my friends.

The next day, Suzie told me how much fun she had and that she wanted to do it again.  My friends said the same but I grumbled because it was like inviting my own mother along.  We all hung out again but with less frequency.  But it never stopped Suzie from asking about my friends with the same genuine interest that she had for me.  How were they doing?  Were they eating enough?  Was the young Canadian couple fighting?  They should both date more.

As my time in Japan neared its end, an old student of Suzie's returned for dinner.  We made small talk until Suzie left the room to grab something from her classroom.  It was then that the student turned towards me and said, "Suzie is a very nice mother."

"Yes, she is," I halfheartedly agreed.

"When I was fighting with my parents, Suzie let me stay here," she said without any provocation on my part. 

At the time, I was confused and put off by her forwardness, but in a way, the student was letting me know how good I had it.  But I didn't understand what her words meant.

"She is my second mother," the student said.  Suzie returned from upstairs and the meal continued, but our private conversation did not.

But was Suzie my second mother?  Was I her son?  I didn't really know what it meant to be a son, a good son, I mean.  I asked before, "what is family?" but I'm still no closer to an answer.  Maybe it's a feeling of warmth and love between two people.  The urge to sacrifice anything for a person.  It's not strictly just related by blood, or a title pushed upon us by birth or circumstance.  Family is a choice each of us make, to belong, to love, or to be on our own.

But I had made my choice.  And I chose to enjoy my time in Japan and move on with my life.  I'm now back where I thought I belonged and Suzie is seven thousand miles away.  Seven thousand miles away and Suzie is now welcoming a new host student into her house.  I am only left with the hope that perhaps this one will be the child she always deserved to have.

Inside my house in Pennsylvania, I tell my mother I love her.  I ponder what those words mean and if I truly mean them.   I think of Suzie on the doorstep, waving at me as I ride my bike to school and an immense wave of sadness and regret washes over me.  She was my second mother. 

And I loved her.

Suzie had only one child, a son named Shigeru.  He was twenty-five and lived in an apartment in the same city.  What he did for a living I did not know.  Suzie talked about him constantly with a mixture of pride and sadness.  He did not come by often.  When he did come by it was for a favor.  He needed her to fill out his passport papers, or help pay for his new car.

I heard him from my room one day.  He entered the house and shouted, "hello!"  Suzie walked to the entranceway.  I heard voices and the door closed.  I walked downstairs and asked her what was going on.

"Shigeru came," she said happily. 

"Oh, he didn't stay long?"

"He needs me to fill out some paperwork for his job."

"Oh," I said quietly.

"He's very busy, you know.  His job is very important.  He doesn't have much time to stop by," Suzie said with conviction.  Neither one of us looked like we believed it.

Over the four months I was in Japan, my own distance with my family and friends had begun to take its toll.  I was homesick and my long distance relationship was getting more difficult by the day.  I was ready to go home and maybe that's why I treated Suzie the way I did, with the same distance and indifference I showed my own family back home. 

This was only temporary, I told myself.

But for Suzie, the way her family treated her was not temporary and as much as I could lie to myself, I could see the sadness etched into the small wrinkles on her face that could transform her face into a grin when she laughed.

Otoo-san, (Mr. Father) was very high up in a small company and did not come home until 7:30 or 8:00 pm every night.  Sometimes he did not return until four in the morning.  This was one of those nights.

I finished eating dinner and looked around for Suzie.  I looked through the small first floor before heading up into her classroom.  All the lights were off and the sliding door to the next room and balcony were closed.  I knocked and called out her name but there was no response.  Cautiously, I opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

The door to the balcony was open and laundry had been pushed aside on either side, allowing a clear view of the house next door and its own balcony. Suzie stood in the darkness, a lit cigarette in her mouth and her eyes towards the stars.  I didn't know she smoked, I told her.  She told me she didn't.

I was seven thousand miles away from anything familiar and yet it this felt so familiar.  She didn't know me and I didn't really know her, but there was a distance between us formed by lies and choices we couldn't live with.  It seemed like the familiar wall people put up around themselves to protect themselves from themselves.  But Suzie wasn't like anyone I had ever known because for the first time in my life, the wall came down.

"Did you know that my husband slept with another woman once?" her smoke billowed into a hung towel but she didn't seem to care.

"No, I didn't know." I said, my awkward body shifted on the tatami mat floor.

"There was another woman.  He met her at a bar.  Told her he loved her."

"Why--what happened?"

"I found his cell phone and looked through the messages." She took another drag from the cigarette and looked at me.  I couldn't see her eyes in the gloom.  "I told him I knew and he ended it."

I didn't know what to say so I apologized, told her I was so sorry and asked if she was okay, as if that meant anything.  I hesitantly asked her if she was worried it might happen again.

"No, he has the man's disease," she said quietly.  When I asked her to elaborate she said nothing.  I wanted to tell her something that would make her feel better, but the words didn't come.  She tossed the butt of the cigarette out into the small alley between her house and her neighbor's.  I excused myself and walked back to my room.  As my feet echoed on the wooden floor, I could hear the metal click of the lighter and smell the fresh cigarette she had lit.

Suzie was a constant source of humor and revelation, which seemed necessary for surviving in Japanese culture.  If you couldn't laugh at yourself, you wouldn't last long.  This was doubly necessary for me because Suzie ran an English language school out of her house.  She taught everything from elementary to high school students.

I was frequently called in as a speaking partner for her students.  Now, I had only taken two, four week courses of intensive Japanese before I arrived and spoke like an angry and confused preschooler.  They spoke English in much the same way except much more frightened and shy.  Our conversations proceeded like this (presented in universal translation).

"Hello, my name is Faulhaber Devin.  Nice to meet you."

"Hello, my name is...Shinji."

Harsh and unrelenting silence descended upon the room.  Suzie looked at both of us and ushered us forward with her hands pushing the air as if to coax us both forward.

"Do you have hobbies?"

"Huh? What did he say?" the student asked in Japanese to Suzie, which coincidentally, I had just asked him.

Suzie told him in English, "what are your hobbies?"

"Music and gibberish," was what I could understand.  "What are American women like?" he asked.

Not wanting to cause another international incident and with the limited vocabulary I had, I simply said, "All women same.  Difficult, beautiful, don't like me."

He cocked his head and looked at me like I was from Mars.  Then he and Suzie laughed.

I guess some things are universal.

For a time, things in Japan followed a pattern of humor, fun, and cultural embarrassment.  So, it was just like my life in America.  That all changed the night my host father did not come home.

Seven thousand miles away from home I realize that everyone I have ever known in my life is gone.

Seven thousand miles away from the friends I grew up with and the family I struggled to connect with.

Seven thousand miles away in Osaka, Japan, my new mother tells me I'm her son.

It's these first words in Neyagawa City, Osaka that make me wonder what family really is.

Family is something all of us have or had, at one time or another.  But for many, family means related by blood.  To me, family was just a word, an abstract concept, something watched on television or from afar.

When I studied abroad in Japan, I chose to live with a host family, meaning some poor souls would take me in and care for me as if I was their own.  This meant more specifically that they would feed me and allow me to live out the fantasy of living in the basement of my parent's house...in Japan.

The Ishiyama family picked the short straw and took me in.  They were an honest family, much more so that I was used to back home.  They hid little and shared whatever was on their minds.  Well, my host mother Sumako "Suzie" Ishiyama did.  Our first real conversation centered on what I wanted for breakfast my first morning at their house.

"Would you like some milk?" Suzie asked.

"Sure!  Would you like to have breakfast with me?" I foolishly asked.

Suzie leaned her head forward and covered one side of her mouth with a hand, as if she were telling me a grave secret.

"Milk gives me diarrhea," she said plainly and at the same volume as before.

This was my first real conversation with my new mother.  As easy as it would be to make Suzie into some type of comical stereotype, a character representing the stories one might hear of things being lost in translation, she deserves much better than that.

Suzie was many things during my trip, but she was always a mother first.  Often she would ask me how my long distance relationship was going and although I knew she was genuinely interested, the inevitable questions would always begin when I finished.

"How many women have you dated?" she asked in English.

"Still alive or just altogether?" I joked.  Her eyebrows sighed together and her intrigued expression beckoned a real answer.  "Four, Suzie.  I've dated four women seriously in my time and let me tell you--"

Suzie looked at me and laughed hard.  "Four?  That's it?  That's too few!  You need to date more!"

I sized up the five foot tall women with chestnut hair that was nearly half the length of her.  She may have been a head shorter than me but her presence made me cower.  Internally, of course... Through the glare off her round, gold glasses I could see her eyes, clear and happy.  My gangly body and rounded face stared back at me glumly.

"How many people have you dated, Suzie?"

She counted on her fingers once, and then again, checking and rechecking her math.

"Fifteen.  No, twenty-five.  Maybe more."

My jaw dropped.

"Why so many?" I half shouted.

"It's not so many.  I wish I could've dated more," she lamented.

"Oy," which is the Japanese equivalent to 'hey, see what I need' echoed through the small kitchen/living room/bedroom combo.  We both looked over at her husband.  Suzie got up and began fixing dinner for him.  As she began heating up his food, she looked over at me once more.

"You should date more."

I wondered if that advice was for the both of us.

We've reached a nice place to rest in my Seoul sob story, so let's shift gears for a few entries.  Many of you want to know more about Suzie and my complicated relationship with her.  I know I've been sporadic about updating, and for that, I'm very sorry.  I didn't know how many of you followed and enjoyed this blog and this opportunity has been something I have wasted this semester.

I want to make that up to you, dear readers.  I will be putting out a series of articles that go into my relationship with Suzie in a much more personal way.  Entitled, "Second Mothers," these entries are parts of a larger article that I'll break up for the sake of brevity and easier reading online.

After these entries are put up, I will transition back into the adventures in Seoul.

We searched the back alleys for twenty minutes for the hotel, but we could read the road signs like I read Egyptian.  Every few minutes, Suzie would ask me if we were going the right way to which I would respond that I knew no more than she, less, in fact.  Suzie would gleefully smile and laugh at how easily lost I was.

She then asked me if we were going in the right direction.

Nearly forty minutes later we stepped out onto the main road, the road our taxi pulled out onto and our hotel was right there, perhaps fifty feet from where we were dropped off.  The entrance way was a narrow slit between a clothing store and a store that looked like it had gone out of business long ago, but whose stock still remained.  Dust covered the window and the items inside.

A dingy elevator took us from the darkened, excitable streets of Seoul into a low lit lobby.  The night manager was nowhere to be found.  I thumbed through travel brochures, the kind that you never think anyone reads.  I pulled a medium sized guide book to Seoul from the pile and held on to it.  Suzie rang the desk bell once and waited five sections before ringing it three more times.

As if by magic a very tired looking father and his wife and child came into view.  The child instantly ducked back behind a wall while the wife said something in Korean to her husband.  She looked annoyed.  So were we. 

The manager and his family also lived in the hotel.  That much I gathered on my own.  He spoke a little Japanese and a little English, meaning, we could all barely understand each other. 

"Room for two," he said in English.

"That's right.  I have the papers from the internet right here.  It says we have a reservation right here," she said, pointing to her printout.

The night manager gave us our room keys silently.  "Sign here.  Each sign," he pointed to the two of us.  I signed my name and passport number.

"So..." he eyed us, "you two are...?"

Implications hung in the air like stained laundry.  Other analogies were not sought or needed.

"Mother and son," Suzie said matter of fact.

"Really?" the manager looked from me to her.  I think he noticed my distinct lack of Asian features.

Suzie saw his confusion and with some hesitation said, "Host mother and son. He is a student, from America."

"Oh," he replied, as if that explained everything.

We secured our keys and headed to our room.  I remember this notion of being American, being foreign that could clear up almost any question asked of me.  If I didn't understand the culture or was seemingly rude, or if I was checking into a seedy motel in the middle of the night with a middle aged (don't tell Suzie) Japanese woman, simply saying that I was an American student made everything okay. 

There was my life story for the four months I lived abroad.  I was American, but here at home, we don't define ourselves as American.  We're workers, writers, cry babies, whiners, heart breakers, hopeless romantics, patrons of Mexican restaurants, and openly hypocritical of each other.  But in Asia, I was an American first, a student second, and a child of the world.

Suddenly, I felt the burden of my birthplace weigh heavily upon me.  The more I traveled the more I saw how the world sees us: as arrogant, democracy spreading cowboys, rich tourists with little common sense or intelligence, interesting specimens for which to study, or ignorant foreigners that are too far gone to ever learn of another culture's ways.

But it was far too late and I was too tired.  I knew I needed sleep before I generalized the entire population of Latin America too. 

And so we slept and waited for another sunrise to break over a city that was neither of our homes.

 

Our taxi drifted to a stop in an alley lit by gold, neon light.  It was our stop.  We were at our destination, the Metro Hotel. 

Only we weren't.

The driver, not speaking either Japanese or English only knew the rough approximation of our final destination.  Suzie, endlessly questioning the man's sense of direction, intelligence, and willingness to give us a foreigner's discount, was ready to get out of the car.  And so, in an alleyway that was the intersection for three streets and two crowded and rundown restaurants, we disembarked.

The driver pulled our luggage from the trunk and placed in on the wet concrete before looking at our surroundings and demanding payment.  It was here that his language skills seemed to remarkably improve. Suzie paid the sixty dollar fee and asked where our hotel was located.  The driver, money in hand, swatted his hand towards the road behind us, grumbled something in Korean, and stepped back into his car.

I watched a rundown restaurant nearby through its open door.  Through the front door I could see into the kitchen and the cook watched me for a moment before returning to his work.  The taxi door slammed shut and the wheels gained traction over the rocky grit of the alley.  When I turned to look back at Suzie, she was nearly out of sight, walking in the direction of our supposed hotel. 

Both pieces of luggage stood next to me.  My birthday gift had a caveat, it seemed.  Bending down, I shifted the weight of my backpack and grabbed the handles of the luggage.  As I caught up with Suzie, I looked back towards the restaurant, with its wide windows that let anyone stare in or out of it.  A few patrons stared at the gangly American and the strong willed Japanese woman.

It was easy to forget that I wasn't the only foreigner there.

Suzie and I walked past infrared scanners that monitored the heat our bodies were giving off.  If the picture on the monitor was too bright, a security officer would pull the passenger aside and take them to a medical station.  Swine flu prevention, signs said.  I held my breath as I passed through the checkpoint and we proceeded to pick up our luggage.

Luggage in tow, we hailed a taxi and were off to our hotel.  That is, if our driver understood Japanese. 

Or English.

Suzie handed him the address and we began to drive, wheeling through the Korean nightlife without further adieu.  It resembled Japan's with tall, thin buildings lit in neon lights and adorned with colorful signs.  The buildings seemed to sprout from the ground, planted by a careless farmer.  Visions of Blade Runner filled my mind as giant televisions ran Coke-Cola ads from fifty foot skyscrapers.

Our car turned away from the glowing center of Seoul's downtown and disappeared along the river, winding down side streets and into the residential area.  Here, little bars and restaurants jutted out from buildings as if to shout "come in!" to passerbys.  The streets were dirty and cramped and our taxi jerked from one empty lane to another. 

Suzie asked the driver if he knew he was going.  Then she asked me if I knew where we were going.  No one said anything.

The streetlights were growing dimmer like a piece of cold coal and it seemed like we were at the edge of the residential section.  It felt like we were at the edge of the world.  Anyone I loved or knew was 7,000 miles away.  But when you're away from the people you care about, that number means nothing.  All it meant was that I would not be running into any old ghosts from the past or past acquaintances.  There would be no awkward small talk over drinks our eyes looking everywhere but each other. 

Nothing but a lost man, a mother yearning for a child's love, and a silent taxi driver.

"Are we there yet?" Suzie asked.

Maybe he couldn't understand her or maybe he was tired of her questions, but in the silence of that taxi, I wondered how any of us would ever know when we would "get there."