First Prize Short Story 2005
A Visit With Grandma
by Charles, Okinawa/Philippines/America

I stepped out of the car onto the unpaved driveway. It was made from hundreds of rocks and different color sands. My heels kicked up the dirt as I walked, lifting it up, mixing it together, and packing it back down. Yellow sand and brown soil all fused together homogeneously under my soles. These visits always made me stir, always made me a bit uneasy. I had trouble deciphering who I was, whether it be Japanese, Black, Filipino, or American.

My mother stepped out of the passenger seat onto the settling gravel. She was born and raised in the Philippines, and came to America as a young adult. My father opened the driver side door and set his feet down on the driveway. He was born in Okinawa, the son of a black American Air Force mechanic and a young Japanese girl named Eiko.

At the end of the driveway was my grandparents' house. It was an old place, one that hadn't changed outside of wear and weathering from the times my parents were my age. The front of the house was brown, and the walls were sided with different colors. It stood unchanging, unmoving despite its surroundings. As years past, the whole town had changed. What was once a neighborhood had become Americanized. Not with white houses, Cadillacs, and Golden Retrievers; but with garbage dumps, factories, and corporate buildings.

Inside, the house smelled old. The kitchen floor was speckled with dots of paint in all different colors, a design of my do-it-yourself grandpa. The fridge was a teal color, and had also sat in its place since it was brought in by the Sears delivery guys fifty years ago. The walls were covered in an eclectic arrangement of materials: green wallpaper, several layers of off-white paint, and copper tiles in different places.

At dinner we sat and ate a ham decorated with pineapples and cherries. Also on the table was white sticky rice, corn on the cob, and Diet Pepsi. In place of salt and pepper was soy sauce. My grandma cooked this for us every time we visited. My grandpa always said grace, garbling out a string of slurred words, out of which I could only decipher "Thank you" and "God."

In the living room there were quilts and dolls, character sketches done by a dead great-uncle, and an old 1950s TV. on which my father saw the march on Washington when he was eight. "Watch this, it's important," my grandpa told him. I slept with my parents on that same living room floor. The cracks of light that seeped through the doorway from the kitchen always reflected on the dozens of photographs on the wall, all black and white. They showed my grandparents when they were young, my dad growing up, and in color, me. Also shining in the thin rays of light were cabinets filled with little artifacts: dolls, bottles, plates, school degrees, toys.

This room was our history. It was filled with bits and pieces from all of us. I fell asleep lying shoulder to shoulder with my family, not realizing that the answer to my ethnic and cultural ambiguity was literally all around me: in those cabinets, those pictures, and in my family. My culture was in the kitchen on the plates. It was each footstep over that speckled floor. It was in the cabinets and on the shelves. It was as the gravel in the driveway: upheaving, clashing, mixing, and eventually settling and subsiding.

Charles on life between cultures: The most difficult thing about balancing cultures is figuring out exactly who you are and where you stand. Coming from several different cultures, it has been difficult to identify with one without becoming an outcast in another. The best thing about coming from several cultures is the heightened cultural/social awareness received from having multiple perspectives.