A Japanese child in Jamaica
A wedding and a funeral recently led to me and my five-year-old son visiting Jamaica from Japan for a whopping three days.
As we were about to get off the plane in Kingston, he said to me, “The Japanese flag looks like a grater cake, right?” He had never actually seen the dessert, but he had read Jean Dacosta’s Jamaica In My Tummy, which mentions it. Maybe because I was doing some reckoning of worlds myself, I reasoned the child was saying in his own way, even if these two places are completely different, like I suspect they are, at least they have that one element of design in common.
There was no more guessing for the rest of the trip, though. His demands were straightforward: coconuts, fried dumplings, the Jamaican beach, frogs and, of course, grater cake. He very vocally wanted these things he associated with Jamaica, but I soon realised I had a Japanese child in Jamaica. Or, more accurately, a child in a new place — a tired, jetlagged child. His memories of a trip four years ago long gone, he clung to me at every turn.
On our previous trip, he delightfully ate mangoes. This time, he did, too, but seemed concerned about all the juice running down his hands. I wasn’t about to peel and cut. That’s not the Jamaican way.
Amid the shyness, he still managed to cross everything off his to-do list. He drank coconut water as soon as we came out of the airport; climbed an apple tree, tried to climb a coconut tree; played with coconuts (didn’t want to eat the flesh); saw not one, but two brown frogs in a puddle made bright orange by the Manchester soil; and went to the Jamaican beach twice. The grater cake, however, was a bit of a disappointment. What he had in mind was a white square with a pink dot in the middle. The one we found had two equal layers of pink and white pressed together. And it wasn’t square. Never mind the sugariness, which he’s usually overjoyed about, it didn’t look how it was supposed to. The fried dumpling, he got on the morning we left. For the first time in the three days we were there, he finished all his food, and asked for more.
About a week later, in the departure lounge of an American airport while we waited for a flight back to Japan, bits of pieces of a language we had hardly heard in two weeks (we spent some time in the US too), started flitting through the air. He accurately observed, “There are Japanese people here.”
Some questions he asked me after we had left Jamaica: “Is there mango in all countries where they speak patois?” “Are there English[-speaking] people in Japan too?” Several weeks later at the entrance of his nursery school: “Are there other Jamaican people here?”
Still sometime later, he announced during a meal, “It taste good, yuh know.” I said, “Good,” then proceeded to carry on with what I was doing. Apparently feeling that I hadn’t given the reaction he was expecting, he said, “That was patois.” During the trip he did try some patois without noticing it, sometimes using “mi” to refer to himself, for example.
He might have been shy and overwhelmed but I think he picked up many things during the trip, including things I won’t ever know. In a recent conversation he said, quite suddenly, “Victoria Town is in Jamaica, right? Victoria Town is where I played with the coconuts and the mangoes at your house.”
After all, the child knows Victoria Town. At least that name, the place I’m from, will have a tiny place in his mind before it is pushed out by more present things. But I shall bring him back there before that happens.
Kerry Furukawa, mom to Taiyu and Kaiza, is a Jamaican writer in Japan.
