Entanglement in a Stage 9 Play

Stage 9 is a theater group in Hutchinson that performs plays for a public audience.  In the near future, they will perform Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.  The person in charge at Stage 9 is Lynsey, who was a Leadership Reno County classmate.  As part of the lead-in publicity activities for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Lynsey invited Hiromi and me to participate in a public question and answer or panel-style event featuring individuals involved in inter-racial marriages, since that is one of the central issues in the drama being performed.  Hiromi was not interested in participating and I was not interested in doing it without him. I did offer, however, to write something in answer to questions if that would be helpful.  Lynsey kindly accepted that offer.

 I wasn't sure either that the inter-racial aspect of our marriage was the most significant challenge in our relationship.  Lynsey assured me that what I had to say would be appreciated even if it didn't directly pertain to being an inter-racial couple.  She gave me a bit of direction on what I might write about, and I'm not sure that I did a very good job of following those directions.  Furthermore, it's much longer than they can use.  I'm giving Lynsey permission to excerpt whatever is desired, and offering to do some re-writing if that is needed.  Posting it here was the easiest way I could think of to give her easy access.  Below is what I wrote.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a movie that was released in 1967.  I watched it for the first time early this week.  As a rule, I don't watch movies, but I made an exception here.

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Hiromi and I got married with my parents’ blessing.  Getting there was not free of challenges, however, and I realize in looking back that the reservations that my parents expressed were realistic and well-founded.  I believe this “on-target” assessment on their part was possible because their perspective was largely one of openness gained from the wisdom of life experience based on a strong foundation of Christian faith.  They truly were accepting of those who were different from themselves.  Having adopted two Salvadoran children after they had ten children born to them provides evidence of this.

The only identities that would have disqualified a potential spouse in my parents’ eyes is if that person were not a Christian or if that person had been married previously, with the first spouse still living.  Since I felt the same way, this was never a source of conflict.  Hiromi was a Christian and still single by the time I met him, although he had come from a Buddhist background.  At one time, he wanted to be a Buddhist priest.  When he came to the United States, however, with papers that allowed him to begin immediately to work toward citizenship, he set out to learn something about Christian faith.  It was part of his effort to settle into American life.  In that pursuit, he attended various churches occasionally.  These experiences were not entirely satisfying, since he felt that he was hearing very little that answered questions about the basics of Christianity that piqued his interest.

Those who introduced Hiromi to Christian faith in a way that made sense to him and prompted him to embrace it for himself were people from our Amish Mennonite church near Pleasantview.  Even so, Hiromi resisted the idea of becoming a member of any specific congregation–because the idea of having different denominations never made sense to him.  He usually attended our church during this time.  I met him there for the first time during one of the summers when I left Ohio where I was teaching and returned to my family’s home in Kansas.  Others in my family had learned to know him earlier and enjoyed interacting with him.  He was always welcome at church and was never pressured to become a member.

Things intensified considerably when I returned home to attend college and I learned that Hiromi was waiting for me here.  By that time I had a very clear sense, a calling from God even, that my future lay in serving my people.  At that time, I believed it would be through teaching.  I had not quite had the nerve to pray that the Lord would keep all interference at bay, but I was really excited about the opportunity for learning and service on which I was embarking.  I saw marriage as an interference since  I was convinced that if I married I would have a career as a homemaker and not as a teacher.  Being a homemaker only was not an unwelcome prospect, but it brought into question what I should be doing “now.”  Obviously I could be a homemaker without finishing college, but I knew that if I kept alive the teaching vision in any form, I should stay in school.

At this point, Hiromi’s not being committed to any church fellowship became a major issue, given the fact that I had a growing commitment to serving my people, and he wanted a future with me.  I found rest in making it very clear to Hiromi that my future would be “here” and he was free to do whatever he wanted with that information.  I would have grieved, but I was willing to give up the relationship and the prospect of marriage rather than to give up a future of serving my people.  If I was to serve them, I would need to continue to be part of the church fellowship, and simply setting out to follow Hiromi to who-knows-where was not an option.

Long story short, Hiromi eventually joined the church I was part of, after also doing his best to allay any fears I had that he might eventually “get tired of this” and want to leave.  I did really like Hiromi and saw early on that combining our lives would nicely fill in gaps that each of us had in our ability to live well and make a worthwhile contribution to those around us.  We got married during the summer just before I finished a semester of student teaching, the final requirement before graduating from college.  I was 29 and Hiromi was 36.  We soon started a family, and I never taught school away from home again until 21 years later, and then I was involved in teaching high school for 16 years.  In the meantime, Hiromi and I homeschooled our children, and mothering and homemaking was, in general, a rewarding endeavor.  Hiromi worked hard to make a living for the family, and he never nudged me toward seeking employment outside our home.  Nevertheless, he was my biggest cheerleader when I began teaching again.

I’ve referred several times to serving my people.  After 38 years of marriage they are still my people, but they are not in every respect Hiromi’s people.  Hiromi no longer regularly attends church with us, preferring instead to attend a nearby community church.  While he did not find our distinctive lifestyle onerous, he became disillusioned with our disinterest in abandoning centuries of tradition regarding the practice of women wearing a headcovering.  While this practice is deeply rooted in Scripture as we understand it, and living by brotherhood agreements is also an important understanding in our tradition, to Hiromi it seems that superior scholarship (his, specifically) should carry the day.  Simply put, our own level of scholarship seems to us to provide sufficient justification for our practice, and, bolstered by having experienced many years of blessing in it, we see no need to abandon it.  I believe this scenario is close to what my parents imagined as a possibility when they felt some caution about our marriage.  Both my parents and I, however, proceeded in trust that the future was safe in God’s hand, and that our lives should not be ordered by fears of the unknown.

In the drama, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the prospective groom John was portrayed as a perfect young man whose only “problem” was being black.  From John’s parents’ perspective, Joanna’s only problem was being white.  In real life, most people have more than one “problem,” and it may not be the most obvious surface “problem” that ends up being the biggest challenge.

Hiromi grew up in a culture that generally places a high priority on abiding by group expectations, as did I, halfway around the world.    Gender roles are as unambiguous there as they are in Amish Mennonite society, and intact family structures, even across generations, are very common in both societies. Before we married, Hiromi’s mother had told Hiromi after one brief meeting between us that she thinks it’s wise for him to marry an American if he plans to live in America.  When we visited Japan later, with one child in tow, their hardworking habits, yet quiet, gentle, deferential ways of relating to each other seemed very familiar and endearing.  Hiromi’s mother told her sister-in-law while we were there that she is very comfortable with me as the mother of her grandchildren. Our cultures seemed like a good fit–better, in fact, than either of our cultures meshed with American society in general.

Over time, however, I learned that Hiromi was in many ways an outlier in his culture of origin. Hiromi was known as a “lone wolf” when he was a child.  Yet in school he was often at or near the top of his classes academically, and he often led the way in student government in high school and college.  His mother and her five siblings grew up with a mother who had never been married.  Yet Hiromi grew up in an intact family.  I began also to realize that on some counts I was an outlier in my culture of origin, chiefly in that I was a woman who graduated from college and already had family members born in a foreign country. Between the two of us, finding common ground was easier because of some of these things.   For example, having a spouse with a college education was important to Hiromi.  If I was going to marry someone as unlike me as Hiromi was, I was glad it was someone who was as adventuresome and willing to take on new identities as Hiromi was.  He did, in fact, merge almost seamlessly into our faith-informed culture initially.  Because we lived near where I grew up, marrying Hiromi allowed me to carry on much as I always had.

In my outlier pursuits, I had always carefully maintained my connections with my people, just as my father had done.  He went on to become a trusted leader in our group.  Hiromi obviously could not manage this as an immigrant with no community of Japanese people here to become part of.  He had language barriers to overcome.  Although English was not my first language, no language barriers were present for me by the time we met.  In Japan Hiromi was recognized for having superior academic and communication skills.  Not so in America.  My outlier status gave me communication skills and opportunities that were atypical for most Amish Mennonite women.  This situation gave our marriage similar outlier status in terms of expected gender roles for both of our cultures.

In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, one of the major concerns of John’s and Joanna’s parents was for their future children. Discrimination against us or our children was never a problem to my knowledge, perhaps because we lived in a different time than 1967, but more likely because we lived in a generous, accepting family and community environment.  Our children, and now our grandchildren, are a delight to us, and they are making their own good contribution to life where they reside.

I attribute Hiromi and I having an intact marriage with many good years of life together to the blessing of God.  The glitches we’ve encountered I attribute to our being human beings who are still far from perfect and who are, in some respects, actually deeply flawed.  I believe the challenges we face are not unique to couples with significant cultural background differences.  Yet, I imagine sometimes that most of our challenges would disappear if we had both grown up in my culture.  But what would be the fun in that?  Much of the richness that we enjoy in our relationship could hardly have happened if Hiromi’s Japanese identity were missing from his persona.

Both my parents’ caution and their optimism about our marriage were well-founded.  Nothing about acknowledging that keeps me from feeling grateful for 38 years of a shared life.