“Suddenly illiterate.”
That’s how one of my students described living in Japan for the past two and a half months. He was reading aloud from an essay he’d written, and when he uttered that phrase, murmurs of agreement rippled around the classroom. Even though some of my students are quite fluent in the language, we’d still all come up against moments here where we didn’t understand.
As we unpacked the phrase, many of us agreed that was why we often avoided ramen shops, because how they work is you step inside, go to the ticket machine, and punch in your order. But that’s hard to do if you can’t read the menu. There are no pictures, so who knows what you might end up with? And who wants to stand there in the door, blocking everyone else from coming in as you try to figure out what to do and all while feeling like an idiot?
Sometimes, people graciously approach and walk you through the process.
Often, folks ignore you, because they are busy slurping their noodles down as fast as they can so they can get back to the office and work (often Monday through Saturday) in a place where it is likely that everyone is dressed the same—dark pants, white shirt.
Which is why there are bibs at ramen places. One rogue flick of a noodle, and the broth goes everywhere.
But you don’t know that until someone offers you a folded, white, papery thing, and when you realize it’s a bib, you think it’s a joke they are playing on the American, but then you see other people wearing them, and you nod and nod again as you put it on and start to slurp and sweat just like everyone else, because it’s always hot and moist in ramen shops, because they shake the excess noodle water out of the strainer straight onto the kitchen floor.
It’s not just the menus you can’t understand. It’s every single conversation going on around you.
And it’s the people, too. Someone took the time to paint this tiny acorn and put it in this rock.
Why this? Why here? Why now?
And what is the emotion that seems to radiate out of almost every single person I meet? It isn’t the tinderbox rage that so many Americans seem to carry around, but what is it?
I don’t know.
Illiterate can mean “showing or marked by a lack of acquaintance with the fundamentals of a particular field of knowledge.” It can also mean “violating approved patterns.”
Like how to be a good human in Japan.
Did you know that about 20 percent of the population in the U.S. is functionally illiterate, which means at least one out of five people might be living like this every day?
And actually, aren’t we all?
Because people back home can be equally as baffling. Strangers, co-workers, even family members. Especially family members. Why do they do what they do?
And how often do we demand of our very own selves, “Why did I do that?”
Being a human anywhere and everywhere is baffling, and therein lies the chance and the challenge. The chance and the challenge to live and act with grace and kindness—toward others and toward ourselves, especially when we are baffling.
The chance and the challenge of putting ourselves out there—to brave what we do not know. To risk feeling like an idiot. Again and again.
The chance and the challenge of living in that liminal space of “don’t know.” Because then we can learn all kinds of amazing lessons, just like I did from my student—who at 20 named a truth I’d been living for the past two months and didn’t understand until he gave me a way to make sense of it.
As the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher appears.