It's a weird time to live in the South
...in that it still doesn't feel like I'm "living in the South."
I remember, when we first announced that we were moving from New York to Nashville, many of our friends responded with shock and skepticism. It was 2017, and we were about 6 months into the Trump presidency. They didn’t say it in exactly this way, but the sentiment seemed to be: Why would we willingly move to the middle of the South? Why choose the state that was bright red on the election map? What’s out there in the “middle of nowhere”? “You’re gonna get fat,” one friend joked. A former co-worker said, “Maybe you’ll get really into country music.”
I remember working hard to make my case. Even before embarking on our 13-hour road trip, I was already coming to Nashville’s defense.
Looking back, I know that this defensiveness came from recognition of the biases that I, too, had held about the South. Having only known Tokyo, Palo Alto, and New York, what I knew about the region came from Hollywood, some classic texts, and… honestly, that was about it.
Though Jin and I once did take a road trip to New Orleans. It must have been in the early 2010s. The Southern towns we encountered were quaint and touristy. I loved the accents, and the live bluegrass casually spilling out from a restaurant. But when we visited the National World War II Museum and an elderly white man with a veteran cap asked us where we were from, we intuitively blurted out: “New York.” Like me, Jin was also born in Japan but had spent most of his formative years in the States. Our families live in Tokyo, and so do many of our friends. Saying we were from Tokyo or Japan may have led to nothing but a fruitful, empathetic conversation with the veteran man, but our simultaneous response came from a real fear that’s difficult to explain. Was it our aversion to conflict, or even just awkwardness? Maybe even back then, it felt wrong for us to step into this space that was fierce in its patriotic narrative, that dedicated most of its exhibits to Pearl Harbor. Then again, I—a WWII history nut who had taken three college electives just on this topic, for fun—had been looking forward to stepping into this space, maybe more so than the beignets and jazz music. I’m obsessed with the idea of storytelling, and I knew going into it that every museum tells a story, each one with distinct protagonists and arcs, even if they’re all technically trying to tell a story about the same event.
Maybe that’s what living in Nashville still feels like, to me. Like I’ve been lurking around the entrance for a while, studying the things in my view, still smiling at the people coming and going, hesitant to answer when the guard asks me where I’m really from.
We’ve only lived in Nashville for a little over three years, but to me it’s felt longer, maybe because this is the city where our two boys were born, and children warp the sense of time like some strange quantum force. (Disclaimer: I almost failed physics in high school, so know that when I use the word “quantum,” I’m waving my hands in the air, trying to refer to something that basically means “otherworldly.”) Out of these years, the first year was spent exhausting the neighborhoods like a tourist, and the second year was when I couldn’t walk into the grocery store without bumping into people I’d met through orchestra, my job, and other parents from library storytimes and playgrounds. And I’d go on to meet their friends and their friends. Even though Nashville is a city, it has this small-town effect where it’s easy to feel like everyone knows everyone. The third year—well, most of it has been life under quarantine. We’re now in a pod with another family, but aside from that, our sense of living in Nashville is restricted, like many, to our house, our little neighborhood, and parks that, despite their beauty, look almost identical to each other.
Leading up to this year’s elections, I had several friends from New York check in with me about what it felt like to live in a state that, predictably, voted for Trump again.
“Sending warm thoughts,” one friend said, like they were giving their condolences.
Again, I was compelled to explain. “No, no, no. Nashville overwhelmingly voted for Biden. We’re a blue dot in a red state. All of our friends here are liberals.”
Occasionally, yes, I see Trump signs around town (still). I’ve had students who own guns and love them, or those who support “Blue Lives Matter” and stay silent when I teach James Baldwin. A part of me hopes that Baldwin’s words will change their mind, if I can’t. But I’m also not going out of my way to engage in deeper conversations with those who I know represent the the right-wingers, the Trumpians, “the deplorables,” all the things we call them from the other side. A part of me is still scared, like we were at the WWII museum, of an uncomfortable conversation. Maybe, deep down, I’m simply afraid of being disliked.
Still, I don’t know what enacting change would actually look like, on my own individual level. It’s not like, had I had been gutsier, I would have pulled out photos from Hiroshima to show the veteran at the museum, to say: This, sir, is where I’m from. Because it’s also not. Being Japanese doesn’t mean I see the U.S. as an enemy. I chose to live here, didn’t I? I’m obsessed with WWII history because of the various narratives, because it’s so messy.
All of this is to say, I’m still figuring out what it means to live in the South. I still have so many unanswered questions, and I don’t know when the world will be safe enough for me to enter the spaces I need to enter in order to answer them. In the meantime, you can find me most days pushing a double-stroller through an empty park, watching the toddler running around chasing a butterfly while singing the song from “My Neighbor Totoro,” completely oblivious to the pandemic, the elections, the city.
