{"id":322,"date":"2006-11-19T07:33:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-19T07:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/2006\/11\/19\/young-americans\/"},"modified":"2006-11-19T07:33:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-19T07:33:00","slug":"young-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/2006\/11\/19\/young-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Minori and I were dating, back in the old days in Iowa, he and I were taking classes which dealt with an inconceivable concept: diversity<\/span>. Since I couldn’t understand how people had such difficulty getting along with others based on their levels of melanin, I never got to fully adapt to the life in Dubuque.<\/p>\n

Once, we were all asked if we had ever been in an interracial relationship. I said yes, although I never thought it was a matter of races but rather one of countries, cultures. I guess I was just trying to speak in their terms, something which I rarely did while there. Minori was asked the same thing in his class. However, his answer was no. On my question why, he simply replied, “we are the same.”<\/p>\n

I can assure the culture shock in the States was far greater than the one I’ve had so far in Japan. One could say it’s due to the fact I lived with Japanese people for little less than a year, which makes me think of kaitenzushi<\/span> and Yukimi Daifuku<\/span> when remembering Chicago. It’s ridiculous, anyway, knowing that I live 3.5 hours away from Miami by plane, and that my people try to emulate people there.<\/p>\n

The real shock, though, was finding out that the young ones here are very different from the way Minori used to be then. I was very na\u00efve to think this was a country of Minori-tachi<\/span>, just as it was to think that Peru was full of Maladjusted<\/a>-look-alikes<\/span>. And Colombia is certainly not teeming with Himuras<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m deviating.<\/p>\n

The day I understood how to deal with the American people was the very day I left Dubuque. Of course, having eaten kare raisu<\/span> for dinner every night, it’s not like I’m full of memories from the Mississippi riverbank. Or maybe I am… But it’s taken me an awfully long time to digest them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Minori and I were dating, back in the old days in Iowa, he and I were taking classes which dealt with an inconceivable concept: diversity. Since I couldn’t understand how people had such difficulty getting along with others based on their levels of melanin, I never got to fully adapt to the life in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}