Okinawa 2012, pt. 2

I languished like a castaway for days on the archipelago of military installations that pepper Okinawa before making my first friends off-base. The opportunity came from an American English professor my parents had befriended who invited us to a festival near her university. She introduced me to her students, some of whom were Japanese, but others being from the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, China, South Korea, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina.

The level of friendship we reached was dizzying considering how little we could communicate. Some of the students spoke almost no English and none were higher than an intermediate level. My Japanese, on the other hand, was basically a party trick: people would clap for me when I spoke it like I was a trained seal balancing a ball. Yet we really were friends and cared about each other. We could make each other belly laugh with a funny look and even created inside jokes. When I came down with a stomach virus that sent me to the hospital, they helped me get there and checked on me. When I left for the summer, we could say little more than, “Bye bye,” though we exchanged hugs with a knowing sadness, and I made it clear I would be back the next year.

Always having been a primarily verbal person, this was the first time I consciously decoupled understanding and compassion from language and realized they have little if any relationship. As if punctuating the point, one of my last and most memorable experiences that summer was camping on a remote beach with a group of American friends I made. We stared mutely for hours up at more stars than I could fathom, our common language useless. What do you say of perfect beauty that will not detract from it? Sometimes words fail.

I came back to the US with a renewed, even monomaniacal purpose. I wanted to see as much of the world as possible—to understand what I could and marvel at the rest.