Pursuing an American Accent (3)

“Where are you from?” One Japanese lawyer complains that her clients and other lawyers curiously ask her, having noticed her accent. Some openly express doubt about the ability of the Asian woman lawyer. She is keenly aware of struggles that lie ahead as she competes for a partnership. In her office overlooking the Manhattan skyline, she ponders her future.

One Japanese saleswoman takes frequent business trips while suffering from severe morning sickness. But she isn’t allowed to complain. “If you want equal treatment,” her male boss told her, “don’t expect special treatment.” Gender equality can be attained only when women meet the male standards of work, she concludes. “America is a land of opportunity,” she says, “but once you have been given the opportunity, it’s now your responsibility to prove yourself.”

Lacking marketable skills, many Japanese women in America endure low-status jobs. Many nonetheless refuse to return to Japan. Harsher realities await them back home. Their parents would waste no time in contacting matchmakers for their “aging” daughters. Some employers refuse to hire them; they tend to view Western-educated women as self-described cosmopolitans who may disrupt the workplace harmony. Eager to remain in America, some women look for Caucasian husbands –for both pragmatic and symbolic reasons. Marrying a U.S. citizen remains the easiest way to obtain a green card. Moreover, it is considered a status symbol (among Japanese women) to be married to a white person.

Yumiko Hayashi, a Ph.D candidate in linguistics, married a bus driver who took her Japanese class at a community college. Getting her doctorate from an obscure university, Yumiko had been dismayed at the bleak prospect of obtaining a tenured professorship. But she refused to go back to Japan, where she would have less difficulty landing a job. Feeling as if she had been struggling in a sinking ship, she saw marriage as a lifeboat. Back home, her parents were stunned to hear about her marriage. Their daughter had once turned down an arranged marriage with a sober-suited businessman in Tokyo.

Without hope of independence, Masami Terao (*see “Pursuing an American Accent #1"), too, sought shelter in marriage. Even after finishing her English-as-a-Second-Language course, she accumulated a pile of rejection letters from various business schools including NYU. Not knowing what to do, she began to work as a clerk at a sourvenir shop for Japanese tourists. She finally married an American she had met at a friend’s party. Now a mother of a two-year-old, she stays at home.

Here lies the irony: Seemingly tough-minded women who have once disdained the sentimentalized role of wife and mother ultimately escape into marriage as a way out of their confused self-search in a foreign country.