Published July 6, 2007
Just this past June, I finally graduated from UCLA. At the Asian Pacific Islander graduation ceremony, one commencement speaker, a UCLA alum actively involved with worker rights, spoke of the legacy that is bestowed upon us young APIs who have come this far due to the hard work of our parents and community.
While she acknowledged the students who have already received their letters of acceptance from medical school, law school and business school, she encouraged the undecided seniors in the crowd to follow the less financially certain path of getting involved in the community. That is, political activist work. Non-profit organizations. Community outreach.
I wonder if working part-time at a Japanese-owned restaurant can count as community outreach.
Two days after graduation, I signed my soul to a certain, unnamed sushi restaurant in West L.A. I have officially joined the ranks of struggling actors, artists, and recent college graduates with useless degrees who work in the seedy underbelly of the food service industry to financially get by, postpone their impeding quarter-life crisis, or all of the above.
I swear to God, this is a temporary thing.
My Asian American Studies professors would still be proud, though. I have come to realize that being a part-time waitress at a sushi restaurant allows me to continue my ongoing exploration of my JA identity even though my undergrad days are long over.
Thanks to my nine years of slacking off at a Saturday language school, I have built the confidence to communicate in broken mother tongue with my fellow Japanese co-workers and kiss up to the Japanese patrons who give me a cold, soul-shriveling look when their tea runs out. I now know that Santa Monica College has a lot of hip, young, Japanese people who moved from Japan when they graduated from high school and ended up working part-time at sushi restaurants.
My manager, who was born in Japan but moved to America over a decade ago to study hotel management in college, occasionally drops tidbits of advice that further expands my growing knowledge of what it means to be an individual of Japanese descent in America.
Such as: Japanese people like their tea to be really hot. Non-Japanese people just want their tea to taste Asian. Real Japanese people eat their miso soup with their chopsticks. Non-Japanese people need a freaking soupspoon. Japanese people eat their sushi with soy sauce, wasabi and ginger. Non-Japanese people eat their sushi with soy sauce, wasabi and ginger, but may also need a compartmentalized, small side dish with individual spicy sauces of various flavors to jazz up their sushi palette.
These are some of the valuable things that we learn outside of the classroom.
Three weeks into my job, though, I realize that while I feel fortunate to work in an environment where I have to talk nihongo to people other than my parents and eat free sashimi five days a week, serving platters of sushi probably is not my lifelong calling.
I would like to think that during my four years of education at UCLA, I was a good Asian American girl. I got involved with campus ethnic organizations, participated in a community internship in Little Tokyo, and took a lot of Asian American Studies classes.
I made a lot of socially conscious, Black Lava T-shirt-wearing AA friends who volunteered at the VC Film Fest, rallied for Korean immigrant rights and organized collegiate conferences for Taiwanese Americans.
Now that I am floating adrift in the real world, I question why I did get involved with all those activities in college in the first place, and whether or not I will even continue to do so now.
I hope I do. I'm just not sure how - at least not yet.
Whatever means I end up deciding upon, I am almost certain that it wouldn't involve coming home every night smelling of soy sauce and tempura batter.
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