Studying and Living Abroad

Story · all 20 words

The Year I Was Illiterate

I went abroad for the third year of my degree, to a university in a city about ninety minutes from Nagoya, and the sentence I have used ever since to describe the first month is that I was, for the first time since I was five, illiterate.

Not unable to speak – I expected that, I had two years of classes behind me and I could manage a shop. Unable to read. I stood in front of a laminated menu on the second evening and could not extract one single piece of information from it, and I ordered by pointing at a photograph, and I went back to my room and did not tell anybody.

The red tape came first and nearly finished me before the language did. The visa had taken eleven weeks at home. Then within four days of landing I had to register for a residence permit, open a bank account that required the residence permit, and get a phone that required the bank account, in that order, with no way round it, in offices that closed at four.

I spent my first term with a host family – a couple in their sixties and a son at university in Osaka whose room I had. They were extraordinarily kind and I was extraordinarily hard work, and I have thought many times since about what it costs a family to take in a twenty-year-old who cannot form a sentence.

I was properly homesick in November. Not romantically. It arrived as a physical thing, mostly in the evenings, and it lasted about six weeks and then simply stopped one Tuesday for no reason I could identify.

In January I moved onto campus, into halls of residence, and the accommodation was one room with a sink and a view of a car park, and I was happier there than I had been in a house four times the size, because I could be incompetent in private.

The thing I could not get used to was being looked at. I am six foot two and very obviously not from there, and in that city in that year I did stand out in a way I had never experienced anywhere. Nobody was unkind about it. Small children pointed at me in supermarkets with total innocence and their mothers apologised and I said it was fine, and it was fine, and it was also exhausting in a way I could not explain to anybody at home without sounding ridiculous.

That is the part nobody warns you about: how tiring it is to be visible all day.

I did adapt to it. By March I had stopped noticing, which is a strange thing to be able to say about yourself.

I did not fit in, and I have come to think that was the correct outcome. I was there for nine months. The students who tried hardest to disappear into the culture had, as far as I could see, a worse time than those of us who accepted we were visitors and got on with it.

My Japanese at the end was not fluent, whatever I told people at the airport. It was good enough to have a long conversation and completely inadequate for an argument, a joke, or a doctor.

What I did acquire was something I did not know existed: an understanding of what my own students go through. I teach now. Every autumn I get a class of people operating in their second language at eight in the morning, and I know exactly what it costs them, because for one year I was the least articulate person in every room I entered.

I am not bilingual. English is my mother tongue and always will be, and I am a native speaker of exactly one language, which I now understand is not an achievement but an accident of birth.

I still have a bad accent in Japanese and I no longer apologise for it.

My host mother writes at New Year. Fourteen years. We keep in touch in a mixture of two languages, neither of us confident in the other’s, and it works perfectly well.

People say a year abroad will broaden your horizons and I resented that phrase for a long time because of who says it. It is nevertheless true. It just does not happen the way the brochure suggests. It happens in a bank queue on a Thursday afternoon when you finally understand the third question.