Bento Box in the Heartland

My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America

By Linda Furiya

June 29, 2007

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Title

• Bento Box in the Heartland

Author

• Linda Furiya

Publisher

• Avalon Publishing Group

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From the chapter “Mom’s Write Hand”

One afternoon after a shopping trip in Cincinnati, I learned that I couldn’t shelter my parents the way I had hoped. We had stopped at a large supermarket chain on the way home. Mom and Dad headed to the meat department to buy ground pork. Keven and Alvin went to browse the science-fiction and rock-music magazines while I checked out the makeup section to look at the nail polishes and smell the shampoos.

“What?!” a woman’s voice boomed.

My stomach muscles tensed when I distinctly heard Dad stammering and then the woman shouting, “What are you saying?!”

My vision felt acutely bright and clear as I followed the voices as quickly as I could. I arrived just as the woman behind the meat counter threw up her hands as though she were giving up on something broken.

She was the grandmotherly-looking type, with a white apron covering a huge chest that thrust forward like a robin’s and a round Kewpie-doll face with several chins. Beneath a white cotton cap, her Tabasco-red hair was set in tight, shiny ringlets. Thick, candy-smelling cologne sold in the locked glass cabinets in the cosmetics aisle clashed with the gamy smell of raw meat.

Smothering and familiar, jolts of anger and guilt took the place of my stomachache.

“What’s going on?” I asked. A tall glass refrigerated case displaying the cuts of meat stood between us. I made an effort to speak as slowly as I did when dealing with bills over the phone. If I talked too quickly, I’d start to slur my own R’s as L’s, something that often happened when I got nervous or spoke too fast, having grown up listening to my parents’ accents. I worked to fix this tendency by practicing enunciating my words while I watched anchorwoman Jane Pauley on “The Today Show” before school every morning.

Here at the meat counter, the adrenaline pumping in my veins made it difficult to talk slowly. The pained expression I saw on Dad’s face made me angrier. Mom peered out from behind him, her arms crossed as if protecting herself. The way her face softened with gratitude when she saw me pushed up my anger another notch.

Dad turned slightly away from the woman and explained under his breath, in Japanese, what was going on. Hearing him, the woman’s eyes glazed over, and I wished Dad had told me in English.

He waved at the meats in the case. “All he wants is some ground pork. It’s usually in the case, but it’s not here today,” I explained, trying to raise as much nonchalance in my voice as I could muster. There were other customers milling about, waiting to be served.

“I’ll have to grind some up special,” she said, sighing, talking straight to me and ignoring my parents as if they had disappeared into thin air.

As she pushed the meat through the meat grinder, the counterwoman said cheerfully, “Your father kept saying, ‘Poke, poke.’” She laughed. “I had no idea that he was trying to say ‘pork.’”

I didn’t even look at her when she said this, diverting my eyes to the bright redness of the meat and the pale, puckered skin of the headless chicken carcasses. I fought the overpowering urge to reach across the counter to find out how hard I’d have to shake her to make her ringlets jiggle.