Immigration

Immigration is a theme in this story that shows up in a lot of places, and I want to comment a bit on how I depict it and why.

Start with the fact that the majority of characters in this story are immigrants. It’s not something Kyoko really emphasizes or sees as a significant part of her identity, especially after this long; she’s pretty well assimilated into American culture. But it’s something I do try to keep in mind. She was not raised there. Her early life was primarily spent in Tokyo and its immediate vicinity. When she was very young, she traveled more; she went on some business trips with her father, who was trying to groom her for the same kind of corporate salaryman position he held. She also spent time in Osaka with his family. When she got a bit older, in her teens, those things stopped and she was almost strictly based in Tokyo.

This impacts who she is in some ways. There are things she emphasizes in her attention and things she doesn’t. There are things that will always feel unfamiliar or make her feel homesick, even though she doesn’t really want to go back at all. She’s evaluated that and reached a clear decision on the topic, but homesickness still happens.

Similarly, Saori and Capinera are not native to the U.S. and are in fact not native to Earth at all. They were both born and raised elsewhere. They visited, sure; Capinera went there a fair number of times because her mother was native, and Saori because there are certain kinds of trashy entertainment that happen there. They were both familiar. But neither of them would at all consider it a primary residence until shortly before the series starts.

This shows through in interesting ways. Neither of them experiences jet lag in any particular way; schedules not being synchronized between domains is normal for them, and many domains in the Otherside do not really have a day/night cycle or anything like one. They use language in slightly interesting or unusual ways. Saori drives extremely well, but that’s because street racing was one of those entertainment options she was coming to this world for. Capinera didn’t have a confident idea what cars even were. Seasonal cycles are easy to track and important, for much the same reason as the day/night thing; a domain transitioning through a cyclic pattern is not uncommon, and sometimes that cycle is extremely important to the beings within it. Neither is startled by nonhuman entities. Both are familiar with the need to maintain secrecy in the mortal world, because they were visiting already, but neither is used to the bulk of those around them being humans and being innocent in this way.

Jack is native to the U.S. but spent a while living in Japan; he was a Navy noncommissioned officer who was deployed there for a fair while, and it shows in places. Cassie immigrated a long time ago, as part of the general migration of German workers to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills, and is thoroughly assimilated, but still does remember that immigration process. She is not a native speaker of English; her native language is a dialect of German that is only dubiously mutually intelligible with modern German. This shows in her language patterns.

So as a whole, the idea of immigration and cultural movement is a major part of this story, and a feature that a lot of the characters have, an experience they have had in various ways and which they have various perspectives on. I draw on my own experience for this; I did not migrate internationally, but even just moving from the southwestern U.S. to Pittsburgh was a massive adjustment process and gave me a sense of how the experience might look, and I extrapolate from that to help depict the ways it impacts Kyoko and those around her.

The biggest things I notice are the food, the language, and the climate. Hands down, these are what I think about when I think of the move, and so considering each is something I try to keep in mind while writing.

There are foods here that I had literally never seen before, others that I had seen only rarely. Pepperoni rolls did not exist back in the southwest, and pierogi were rare; I only ate them as the guest of a family that had moved from New York. Pretzels are more common and better here. There are certain pastries that are in the grocery store here as a routine thing that I had never seen or rarely seen before. Some of these new foods are good, others are unpleasant. Some are hard for me to quite conceptualize. The first time I was served noodles with no sauce except butter, I thought it was some kind of twisted joke, and the realization that it was an actual thing was a horrifying and fascinating one.

But there are also food items missing. Mexican food here is hard to find, for me; I grew up much closer to Mexico and with a fair amount of cultural association. I learned a little Spanish as a kid talking to my father’s coworkers, spent summers in New Mexico. I developed a fondness for specific traditional dishes after my brother started working in a kitchen run by a Guadalajaran immigrant. There are foods particular to that region in Mexico that are hard to find in an area where there aren’t as many immigrants. Burrito chains are so much worse I’ve given up on them for the most part. They won’t be what I want them to be, and the impulse to go there will not result in a good experience.

This is in addition to foods that are simply local to that area specifically. I have not seen good green chili since I moved. I have not had decent sopapillas in years. These things are not common here the way they were in New Mexico.

Imported foods, even, are not the same, and this is particularly interesting to me. As I understand it, what usually happens is that the first immigrants to open a restaurant serving a specific ethnic cuisine tend to define for the locals what that means. And that is kind of an issue later on. Northern China is a long way from southern China, and there are numerous distinctions, details in cuisine and history, different traditional ingredients, different traditional dishes. But here, they’re all just Chinese food. If the first Chinese restaurant opens serving northern cuisine, the next immigrant who wants to open a Chinese restaurant serving southern dishes will struggle. The locals will find that not to be Chinese from what they have picked up based on the first person’s work, and they will find the southern cuisine to feel inauthentic as a result.

This is simplifying things a lot, of course. But it’s why I haven’t eaten falafel in years. Every single falafel source I have found in Pittsburgh uses the green falafel variant, made with a large amount of parsley. I am seriously allergic to parsley. It’s frustrating that this is what came to define Middle Eastern food here, because it wasn’t the case in my life before, and there are actually several dishes I do not have access to anymore as a result. Here, Pakistani food is more common than Iraqi or Syrian, which is what I was more accustomed to, but all of them will in the U.S. often be sold as “Middle Eastern” without further clarity. Pakistani cuisine uses a lot more spices my body cannot handle, and I cannot generally eat it without being sick.

This is why Kyoko specifically misses Japanese food. She can find it here, she can find decent examples of some of her old favorites. But they are not going to be the same as she remembers, between memory changing things and certain elements not happening here. It’s hard to even find soy sauce that isn’t one of the darkest variants, where in Japan there are numerous kinds. Asian-specific grocery stores work better for this, but are not always convenient, and restaurants will typically not use those ingredients. I model her experience on my own in this respect, and more than anything else, food is what I think of when I feel wistful about societal details.

Language is the other big one. Even moving across a single country, the language shift is so pronounced that I sometimes cannot understand people here. The accent some people have is so different, the sound so shifted, that while I recognize it as English, I can’t make out enough words to understand what someone is telling me. If someone with those accents is speaking softly or I’m not in an alert state of mind, I tend to just nod and smile because I have no clue what they’re saying. Regional dialects like that are easy to not recognize when you’re immersed in them, you don’t think about it. It feels weird to Kyoko still to hear certain sounds or words used in specific ways that she didn’t use while learning the language. This is particularly the case because her study of English happened mostly in Japanese schools or at home, with occasional time in both England and the U.S. This kind of inconsistent learning largely in a milieu where English is not a primary language impacts how she understands the language to work.

The forest here is different. I like it. But there are different trees, with far less conifers. The squirrels are a different species and sound different. The air is so much more humid that it extensively changes the nature of the undergrowth, and in the summer it feels like soup. The birds are mostly different species. The mountains are far older and more tame here, they don’t feel like mountains should. The snow is wet and heavy, nothing like the powder snow I was more used to.

I like it here, and don’t plan to go back. This is home, now. But I miss the forests I grew up in and called home before.

The supernatural elements change the experience for the others, but similar themes are happening, even if it’s not always obvious. They miss things about living primarily in the Otherside, about spending the bulk of their time outside this world. Capinera doesn’t talk about it, but she really feels wistful about the kinds of social event she used to attend with the Courts. Saori doesn’t spend much time with old friends in large part because they no longer frequent the same places; she can go back more readily than Capinera, but it’s not the same when she’s visiting rather than immersed.

Cassie misses things about a Germany that no longer even exists. Her native language is not spoken anymore; the geographic, cultural, and sociopolitical landscape has changed immensely. She predates so many details of Germanic history that there are basic concepts she simply doesn’t share. When Kassandra Antigone von Weiße Elster feels homesick, it is for a time when that name only sounded odd because it mixed Greek and German, when Saxony was its own power within the Holy Roman Empire, when she could still relate to the human world she had left behind when she became a werewolf.

You can’t fix that with a plane ticket. It’s not the same kind of homesick at all. It’s a different feeling entirely, when the home you miss is one that does not and can not exist.

Because the story is narrated from Kyoko’s perspective it’s not always easy to see these themes. Like I said, she doesn’t think of her status as a Japanese-American first-generation immigrant as a central part of her identity. It is a topic of relevance sometimes and she thinks or talks about it then, but it’s not being called out in the narration every time that these themes are involved. That’s why I wanted to take a moment to explore these facets of the different characters’ experiences of migration, of being transplanted into a different life and learning to thrive there. It’s easy to miss, and I particularly worry that it makes Kyoko’s national origin feel like an informed attribute rather than one that actually impacts her life and thinking.

It is, if anything, the opposite, a factor which she is so accustomed to that she no longer consciously notices it, simply incorporates it into her perception without thinking. I hope this clarifies that this doesn’t mean I am not thinking about it.