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this could be called progress? Why then, do they feel dead to me? They’re dragging me down, distorting my story until another day is over and I pick up my boorish American body and my illicit sports drink and go back to my hotel with a single book and a single question: how can I begin to imagine with all these facts in my head?
    I am tired. I am done , that’s what I think to myself, though I still haven’t done an interview let alone found a place to live. The law of the land that insists all foreigners
must have a local sponsor to rent an apartment seems to be incontrovertible. People from countries that do not wield chopsticks apparently cannot be trusted to put wet garbage into paper bags or take their empty shampoo bottles with them when they leave. Kimiko has said she might be able to arrange this later, “when you are ready.” Instead, she suggests I should meet her friend, the director of the Peace Museum, but again this is vague, and since I’ve been spending most of my days in the Museum library, a required hello to the man who runs it is not on the top of my priority list. What I need is housing, a place large enough for my family when they arrive, but every time I ask, Kimiko exhibits mild surprise that the question is still floating between us. It’s clear that I’ve become a bully, the answer is no, and yet, since there’s no one else who can help me, no other way to get a yes, I can’t let it go. I have lost faith in myself, am beginning to dread the way each conversation with Brian opens: “Did you find a place to live?” Every no an agitation. It raises the question of why I am here, and why I should remain if I’m so incapable of something I could have done in New York with one phone call.
     
    I REMEMBER THAT PHONE CALL, the one when I was still in college. I was moving out of the dorm after my junior year and into an apartment with Brian. It was my father’s reaction I dreaded—his role was to object, on upright, moral grounds, and my mother’s was to make peace and deflect tension. So it was a surprise when my mother was the one to fret about how young I was, much too young to live with
a boy, and even more of a surprise when my father shut her up by pointing out that Brian could change the light bulbs, and take care of things . What things those might be, and why he thought I couldn’t take care of them myself, didn’t occur to me. I was delighted to have gotten away with it—that’s how it felt, like sneaking out, rather than growing up. It was not the adulthood I had dreamed of because in no way did I think of myself as adult.
    It is unusual for me to be thinking so much of my mother. There’s been no time during her illness to dredge up memories, and no room in the life of one family to dwell on what might be happening across the ocean. Now the past is coming unbidden. Little hauntings, memories rising and even twisting themselves, elongating into what I might have wished had happened, rather than what actually did. The conversation with my mother now seems longer than it must have been. Once we got beyond my announcement that I was moving in with my boyfriend, it turned to consultations, at least in my memory, about the relative merits of futons and pillows over more structural furniture. My mother would have liked that—the small details, feeling that she’d contributed to some important decision; she would have liked hearing I was safe, being assured by humor and the petering out of every topic of even remote importance. It is still my habit to be funny in the long emails I write home from an internet café near my hotel, regaling Brian and my father and my friends with my abortive attempts at lunch and the girls at the J-phone shop. I get few responses, possibly the effect of having to painstakingly type
in all the addresses each time and the fact that AOL keeps bouncing my mail back, but I do it for myself; it’s my way of feeling not so alone. It takes a while to get