On Being Snake-bitten

Few of my Japan Times columns about life as an expat are as earnest and accurate as that below. I am indeed snake-bitten.

Some quick notes:

Recently retired, I have remodeled my office and, while the snake of renown still holds the same location, the books I mention are now gone – except for the Mays’ biography.

Quirk and Greenbaum’s I bought at the insistence of a grad school prof who assured me I would consult its contents often. When I handed it to the recyclers, 43 years later, I hadn’t opened it once.

The Bloom work I acquired as background for a chocolate feature I wrote for ANA’s inflight magazine, twenty years ago. This book I would open just to drool at the photos. I bet the recyclers are doing so too.

Mays, I kept because one must never cast aside his/her heroes. For that same reason, I still keep R2 too.

Forty-five centimeters equals about eighteen inches. Narita is the name of one of Tokyo’s international airports.

Now… On being snake-bitten, with the Japan Times title below:

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The Venom of the Expatriate's Choice

Feb 7, 2009

In a corner of my office, next to a bookshelf containing such diverse items as a biography of Willie Mays, Quirk and Greenbaum's A Grammar of Contemporary English, and Carole

My grandmother's snake

Bloom's All About Chocolate, sits a polyethylene snake, 45 cm tall.

To be precise, it's a golden cobra poised for attack, with fangs bared, hood flared, and ruby eyes glowing with demonic intent.

"Holy Jeee... hosaphat! What's that!?"

So saying, my guest hotfoots it to the other side of my office. Where the bookshelf there is protected by a model of R2D2.

"That," I tell my guest, "is my grandmother's snake."

The snake is perhaps more tacky than menacing. To others, it shows only my poor taste in decoration. To me, however, the snake symbolizes something beyond.

It signifies the choice I made in opting to live my life in Japan. An eternal reminder that I am snake-bitten.

"Get rid of it," says my son.

I can't. The snake, in its evil coil, is a scaly link between my two homes, one here and one in the States. Which of these is "abroad," I can no longer say.

My grandmother was pretty much typical. She crocheted doilies. She kept knickknacks. She circled her favorite programs in the TV Guide.

Idiosyncrasies? Well… she chain-smoked. And she loved snakes.

She kept a few around her Lazy-Boy. Some were slithery rubber. Others were slinky contraptions of hollowed wood. But the king cobra ruled them all.

When we returned for a visit, some months after my grandmother's death, my older son, around 10 then, saw the snake and said…

"Cool!"

The response from my mother and sisters, who had boxed away all my grandmother's stuff?

"If you want it, it's yours."

In profile

So we brought the snake across the sea. It was pre 9/11 and a plastic viper the size of a dog drew nary a blink as a carry-on.

The son discarded the snake as his aesthetic sense improved. His little brother thus had a hand-me-down serpent that he too one day placed in the trash. But there was no way I would let it go.

I didn't make it for my grandmother's funeral. The call came in the dead of night and already everything was arranged. If I rushed to the airport and if all connections were razor sharp, I might be lucky and arrive in time for internment. I gnawed on that until the first light of morning and decided not to try.

And so it has gone. Important days for my Stateside family have come and passed and, in rare exception, I have missed them all.

Funerals? They hit too soon. Weddings and graduations? They always occur right when my Japanese work schedule says they shouldn't.

Oh, three times I have made the shock trip to Narita. When I jammed clothes in a bag, withdrew a wad of money from an ATM, and took whatever flight I could get. Once came when my stepdad hovered near death and twice came when a son was suddenly hospitalized.

Each time my bag of clothes held mostly underwear. Post 9/11 these were picked through by airport security, as if they cloaked some sort of dirty bomb. Meanwhile I shuffled my feet and worried whether I would make it… "in time."

I did. The emergencies passed without disaster. But my grandmother's snake knows that time is not measured by emergencies but by minutes, hours and days. Moments gained here but lost there.

It is the lonely venom that somehow poisons every expatriate. By selecting this world, I have relinquished hold on the other. I miss the high points, I miss the low points, and I miss the all-important in-between points. And no amount of phone calls, e-mail or occasional journeys back can make up the difference.

The snake is always poised to strike. Reminding me that I am too often on the short end of a compromised life. That I have been repeatedly remiss on familial matters. And that there will always be another dead of night phone call, when once more I will be too late.

"You have to look at all you have gained as well. The equation is not full until you balance it out."

The speaker could be my wife or my Stateside family. Or even my own wracked conscience.

But it couldn’t be the snake, whose gleaming red eyes forever dare me to be a better son, brother and father.

Get rid of it? How could I? It’s my grandmother's gift. A cunning remembrance of not where I am, but from where I am from.

So what it lends my office a dash of chintz? It's a seasoning I appreciate.

If I want sugar and spice, I can always turn to R2.

© Thomas Noah Wood

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