Mr. Robert

VIKI RADDEN

“Mr. Robert! We are so surprised! You do not look like the picture you sent. We thought you were a fat Mexican!”

A fat Mexican? Me? I’m 5’9”, weigh 155 on a full stomach. Mexican? OK, I had a tan in the picture I sent in for this “Teach English in the Japanese countryside” job, I admit it. My hair’s dark brown and my mother’s Italian, but that’s as far as I can stretch it. My name’s Robert Rhys, and they thought I was Mexican? I didn’t want to disappoint them; they seemed so set on having their fat Mexican English teacher.

I have to admit that I was caught off guard by Mr. Uno, the school principal’s, greeting. I guess it was the 900-degree August heat and the tropical rain forest humidity. Or maybe it was the seventeen-hour plane trip from New Orleans, and the six-hour train ride out of Tokyo station. Usually I could come up with some witty barb, but my shock at the audacity of his comment left me unable to do more than weakly extend my hand for the upcoming introduction.

“My name is Seiichi Uno,” he said, with a smile that covered half his face. “I am principal of Ube Nishi High School, and this,” he added, turning to face the painfully thin young woman who stood next to him, “is Miss Yamagishi, our new English teacher.”

I shook both their hands, wondering if I should follow their lead and bow. Miss Yamagishi couldn’t seem to stop bowing, up and down she went, like an oiled buoy in deep water. I wondered why she seemed to turn her eyes demurely away from me when I looked at her, and why she always put her wiry hand over her mouth when she talked or laughed. I chalked her strange behavior up to a cultural quirk, a topic on which I already felt like an expert, even though I’d been in Japan less than twelve hours.

So there I was, dazed and sweating on the platform, wishing for a moment that I’d stayed in New Orleans. I mean, how bad could it be, working for a school district so bankrupt they couldn’t guarantee my job for more than one month into the school year? “If this is Japan,” I thought, wiping a torrent of sweat from my forehead. . . . Little did I know at the time that the evening would only get curiouser and curiouser, stranger even than the introduction.

Mr. Uno, who I guessed to be in his late fifties, wore a frumpled plaid jacket at least two sizes too big for his bulky frame. Both his wrinkled shirt and his jacket were soaked through in the stifling, muggy air. His smile was no vision of beauty either: crooked, decaying teeth seemed to gape out of his mouth. It didn’t bother him though; he was always ready with a smile as we headed out of the train station turnstile. Miss Yamagishi, in her pale pink skirt which hung emptily over her nonexistent hips, scurried alongside us, giggling at every possible opportunity.

“Mr. Robert,” said Mr. Uno as he lifted my bags into the trunk of the gray Toyota sedan, “we hope you will like the apartment we choose for you.”

“I’m sure it will be fine.”

“Maybe it is not so big as your American apartment. Japan is small country. You will have VIP seat, Mr. Robert,” he said, opening the door of the passenger seat.

“Thank you,” I told him, wincing as the scorching car seat warmed the back of my thighs as I sat down. “It certainly is hot in Japan,” I said feebly, to no one in particular.

“Yes, Japan is very hot in summer months.” Mr. Uno adjusted the rearview mirror and cautiously backed out onto the street. “I think Japan is more hot than America, isn’t it, Mr. Robert?”

Japan hotter than America? I didn’t know what to say. What part of America? I didn’t know whether he meant Juneau or Jackson, Phoenix or Boston. I hesitated. Mr. Uno turned to wait for my answer. “Yes,” I replied vaguely, “Japan is hotter than America.”

My answer seemed to satisfy him. He nodded his head and drove on.

The Toyota, air conditioning blasting out cool bursts of relief, plodded through the countryside: endless green fields of rice on one side, stands of new bamboo bracing themselves against the firm green hills on the right. A white heron, ignoring the scarecrow flapping its arms in the early evening breeze, landed proudly and stood erect in the center of a ripening paddy. Sensing a sign of life from Miss Yamagishi, I turned to face her. “What’s that smell?” I asked, wondering about the smoke billowing up from a roadside paddy.

Miss Yamagishi cleared her throat quietly. “The farmers,” she said in a near whisper. “They are burning trash for their farms.”

This burst of English speaking gave her the courage to go on. Leaning forward in the seat, she inched closer to me and spoke again.

“Mr. Robert-san, I have once been to America.”

“Is that so? Where did you go?”

She began counting on her fingers. “In 1987.”

“Isn’t that nice,” I crooned. “How long were you there?”

“By airplane. Package tour.”

“Oh?” I replied, stretching the vowel sound as far as it would go, sensing I’d better slow my speaking down a bit. Enunciating clearly, at a snail’s pace, I asked, “And which cities did you see?”

Mission accomplished. “San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, New York, Niagara Falls, and Hawaii.”

“Oh, my,” I said, raising my eyebrows, truly impressed. How did a hardworking Japanese schoolteacher take enough time off for a vacation like that? I’d heard the Japanese felt lucky if they got a week off each year. “Did you do a homestay on a summer holiday?”

“Eh?” Her head was tilted to one side, while her hand rose almost instinctively to cover her mouth. She hadn’t understood my question and was becoming nervous. I’d slipped back into my natural speaking speed.

“Homestay?” I repeated.

She shook her head. “Vacation. Vacation only.”

I was thoroughly impressed: all those cities, all those cultural interchanges. . . .

“Eight days,” Miss Yamagishi added finally.

“Eight days!” I said. “You saw the west coast, the east coast, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Hawaii, all in eight days?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very busy. We Japanese must work hard, even on holiday. We have not much time to travel, so we must see many things in only a few days.”

“Yes, I understand.” One thing I did not understand, I realized after we’d been on the road a few minutes, was where we were going. I thought it would be rude to ask, so I didn’t. We were on a small two-lane freeway; finally Mr. Uno turned the car and headed down a narrow road.

“Mr. Robert,” he began, “we will have welcoming party, small welcome party at our school. After that we will go to my home for eating dinner.”

“Thank you.” I couldn’t help being disappointed about the evening’s schedule. The last thing I wanted to do was go to a school reception where chances were I’d feel even more self-conscious than I felt then; I just wanted to go to my new apartment, take a bath, and go to sleep, that is if I could actually sleep, in the heat. I wondered how the other teachers were going to react to me. Did they all expect me to be this “fat Mexican”? “Is the school near here?” I asked.

“Yes, very near.”

“Mr. Robert?” he began again, turning his head at an angle so that the last rays of sunlight flashed wildly on his protruding gold tooth, “You are thirty-four years old?”

“Yes.”

“And you are from New Orleans, in Louisiana state?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“New Orleans is the home of American jazz.”

“Yes. You’re right.”

“And are there many Mexicans in New Orleans?”

I sensed trouble. “Uh . . . no, not so many, I don’t think.”

“Do you have the, what do you call it, discrimination? Discrimination of Mexican?”

“Well, yes, I suppose. I mean . . . I guess. I-I don’t know exactly, since I’m not Mexican.”

A shriek of disbelief from both of them, in unison. “You are not Mexican, Mr. Robert?”

“No, I’m not. I mean, well, my mother’s Italian, so that makes me one-half Italian, and sometimes they have dark hair, but no. I’m not Mexican.”

Mr. Uno turned to face the startled Miss Yamagishi. They mumbled something quickly in Japanese. Then Miss Yamagishi giggled again and said, “Oh, Mr. Robert-san, when we receive your picture about the English teacher, almost all of the teachers said, So, Mr. Robert Riley-san is fat. He has dark skin, with moustache. We think you are Mexican man. They have moustache. And we think you are very fat. In your picture your face looks very big. But Mr. Robert-san is not fat,” she finished, suppressing a giggle. “You are very thin. Oh, Mr. Robert-san, teachers will be very surprised. They think you are fat Mexican with long moustache.”

“Yes, Mr. Robert, we Japanese think American man is tall and big, like Cary Grant,” said Mr. Uno, turning to regard me intently. “You are small like Japanese man.”

“Yes,” I replied. I felt deflated; my heat-logged, humidity-riddled, jet-lagged brain failed to come up with any other polite way to respond. “I’m not very big.”

With one turn of the steering wheel we headed through the massive iron gates into the schoolyard and parked close to the door. I glanced in the window and saw three pairs of eyes gazing out at me. I stepped from the car, wondering what was going to happen next.

“So, so, so,” Mr. Uno said, chuckling as he opened the front doors of the school. “A fat Mexican.”

I stepped into the teacher’s room as Mr. Uno and Miss Yamagishi held the doors wide for me. I suppose, in light of the day’s events up to that point, I should have been prepared for the sight that greeted my astonished eyes.

The teacher’s room wasn’t too large: there were about twenty desks arranged in rows, and four of the teachers stood at a desk in the center, bowing at me. What made me return their gap-mouthed stare was the decorations shouting at me from every corner of the room.

The room was done in a Mexican motif. It was Grade A tacky. A flag of Mexico hung on the center wall; red, white, and green streamers adorned every corner. In the center of the room, hanging from a string, was a huge piñata, a yellow donkey with twinkling red eyes. The three teachers at the desk were all wearing black velveteen sombreros and serapes. “Buenos dias, Señor Robert,” they all said in unison, bowing again.

“Thank you,” I said, wiping a fresh stream of sweat from my brow. Not wanting to appear completely ungrateful, I turned to Mr. Uno for support, some hint of what to do. They had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to set up the whole show. . . .

The same toothy grin covered his face as he approached to do the introductions: There was Mrs. Ebisu, a short, round-faced woman in her fifties, in a red plaid straight skirt with white slippers. This woman had to be someone’s grandmother. From the look on her face, I thought what she wanted to do was hug me, but she bowed deeply instead. “Mrs. Ebisu is our school servant,” Mr. Uno explained. Next was Mr. Abe, a tall lanky fellow wearing blue Adidas sweat pants and a T-shirt with Japanese writing. His eyes focused on me only for a moment; they seemed to be everywhere in the room at once. He did everything quickly, the blink of his eyes, the short crisp bows. He said, “I am English teacher and Physical Education teacher.” Last was Mr. Ikeda, an English teacher whose cool relentless gaze left me wondering if he would be friend or foe during the coming school year. “Pleased to meet you,” he said with an almost imperceptible nod.

I went over their names in my head: Mr. Abe, Mrs. Ebisu, Mr. Ikeda, Mr. Uno, and Miss Yamagishi.

An awkward silence descended on the room, though only for a moment, after the introductions. Mr. Uno looked across to Mrs. Ebisu, said a few sentences to her in Japanese. She and Miss Yamagishi said in unison, “Hai!” They both excused themselves and scurried off in their white plastic slippers, with Mrs. Abe leading the way.

I was left alone with the men. I cast a quick glance at the garish decorations, wondering what was waiting for me, hoping it was innocuous.

Mr. Ikeda, so smooth in his blue pin-striped suit, lit a Marlboro and directed a few sentences to Mr. Uno, in Japanese.

“Yes,” Mr. Uno soon replied. He turned to me. “Mr. Ikeda says you do not resemble your picture.”

Mr. Ikeda, directing his gaze toward his boss, once again fired off an even longer string of unintelligible sentences. At first, I thought he was shy about speaking English to me, but Mr. Abe, the P.E. teacher whose eyes roved so quickly around the room, set me straight after several exchanges in Japanese between the surly Mr. Ikeda and the principal. He showed not a speck of shame as he announced, “Mr. Ikeda does not like Americans. And,” he went on, smiling like he was about to let us in on a juicy secret, “Mr. Ikeda wanted a girl teacher.” He laughed and directed a few words in Japanese to Mr. Uno.

Mr. Uno laughed. “That is right, Mr. Robert.” He moved a little closer to me and said in a quieter voice, so the women wouldn’t hear, “Mr. Ikeda is very happy about English teacher program from America. He told me, ‘get a beauty’—he wants beautiful, young girl English teacher. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Long legs. Tall. So maybe he is disappointed.”

Great, I thought, looking at the man who refused to direct any comments to me. I had an urge to punch him, or better yet, take the piñata and break it over his head.

Soon I heard the scuffling of slippers on the ancient gray tiled floor. Mrs. Ebisu and Miss Yamagishi, her skinny legs protruding like toothpicks from beneath her pink skirt, had come back, carrying trays with snacks. Miss Yamagishi set the trays of drinks, short glasses filled with ice and cold brown rice tea, on the table in front of us. Mrs. Ebisu cut the tiny chocolate cake and gave us all a piece. The cake was good, in an ultimately unsatisfying kind of way. Just so. It was sweet. It was also chocolate, and so beautifully adorned, wearing its white chocolate shavings like a diamond tiara. But it had no substance. Like eating tiny bites of chocolate-flavored air.

After she served the cake, Mrs. Ebisu pulled out a small 35mm camera, and shot a roll of film. I’m serious. Not five or six shots. An entire roll of film. Me in the sombrero. Me without the sombrero. Me with the sombrero and the serape. Me holding the piñata. Me with the women teachers. Me with the men teachers.

Seemingly on cue, as soon as the cake was eaten and the tea drunk, the two women leapt up, stacked the dirty dishes neatly on their trays and took off. The three men stood talking to each other for a while, leaving me free to explore the room, look at the chalkboards, with their cryptic messages scrawled in Japanese hand, the little kitchen just off the teachers’ room, where Mrs. Ebisu and Miss Yamagishi were drying the last few glasses. It was an old country school, with no modern amenities: no carpet, no air conditioning. I wandered the room slowly, taking in my new office for the coming year. It looked almost like the teachers’ room back home, I couldn’t help thinking—books stacked too high on overcrowded desks, leaning dangerously, like the Tower of Pisa, cups overflowing with pens, a saucer on one teacher’s desk, dotted with a few bread crumbs. The collective din of the cicadas was almost deafening when I passed by the large open window. The sight of me startled one resting on the windowsill; it flew into the room, heading for the light, crashing into it time and again.

Miss Yamagishi and Mrs. Ebisu were back, tidying the room. Mr. Abe ambled over and said to me, “Do you have cicadas in America, Mr. Robert?”

I smiled at him. “Yes, we do. I used to play with them when I was a boy.”

“I also did that,” he told me.

Mr. Uno’s staff instinctively gathered around him as he said to me, “We will go now, Mr. Robert. We will go now to my home for eating dinner. Mr. Ikeda is busy tonight, and he cannot eat with us. Are you OK?” he asked me.

I gathered he meant, “Are you ready?”

“Yes, I’m ready.” At least there was one thing to be thankful for. Mr. Ikeda would not be joining us.

“Oh, Mr. Robert,” said the P.E. teacher, as he bounded away, “do not forget your piñata.”

“Thank you,” I called after him. I wondered if any of them knew that a piñata was supposed to be broken, by someone wearing a blindfold. I cradled the yellow donkey in my arms after he lifted it from its perch. The papier-mâché covering scratched my arms, but I held it tight, looking into its red eyes. It seemed almost animate to me, and I felt a pang of pity, thinking of the poor piñata, trapped in a box on its long trip across the Pacific, then locked in a dark room of a musty old schoolhouse, waiting. Waiting. And finally on its big day, its coming out party, to be carried home in the arms of a foreigner, an American in Japan, a foreigner carrying a foreigner, the metaphors of Mexico still locked tight inside its muzzle. Metaphors of Mexico trapped in yellow papier-mâché.

“Let’s go now,” Mr. Uno said, as the teachers began walking to the door. Mr. Abe with his long legs was the first outside. I followed him; the sun was going down; the darkness of my first night in Japan was descending. The cicadas hummed, more quietly now, in the oleander.

“Mr. Robert,” said Mr. Abe, looking at me with the wide eyes of a young man just out of college. “Do you have fish in America?”

I smiled, more to myself than to him, then looked again into the donkey’s shining red eyes. I ran my fingers lightly over its rough skin. “Yes,” I answered him. “We do have fish in America.”

Mr. Uno unlocked the doors and we climbed into the car, with me once again in the seat of honor. He eased the car onto a road lit by the flashing neon of a pachinko parlor, and we drove off into the night.

[1993]