Wandering Hawaii

If I had to pick a time in my life that was the most emotionally and mentally tumultuous, it would have been the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I was going to Hawaii. The plane flight over there was fine. I sat away from my mother and her boyfriend, for the first time in my life. I was next to a middle-aged black woman. I think it was then, sitting next to her, that I realized that in my entire life I’d never been friends with someone who was black or latino. It was strange to think about. It wasn't racism, I just hadn’t met anybody. I always stayed on my computer for plane rides, but there wasn’t a plug-in for my charger where I was sitting (I have a charger that you can plug-in to one of those holes in cars and airplanes). So I ended up dimming my screen to the lowest setting and rather than playing games I just wrote and listened to music the whole time. One of the songs I was listening to had a very clearly “anime” cover art, which kind of embarrassed me when the lady next to me looked over and saw that.

That day and evening I was feeling relaxed. I slept on a futon on the balcony, so the night was hot. I awoke early the next morning and took pictures of the city as the sun peaked over the horizon. Waikiki, for all its tourist-pandering, is beautiful at twilight. Then I checked YouTube and watched a video on anime recommendations. When I heard the description, I knew I had to watch the show Hourou Musuko, Wandering Son. For the past three or four months, a lot of my confidence in my masculinity was starting to crumble, so when one of the shows recommended was about two characters questioning their gender identity, particularly the one assigned male at birth and her experiences through seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, I knew that this would give me an answer.

I finished watching the show and was left uncertain, but before I could begin my soul-searching I was dragged along with my mother and her boyfriend through the hot tourist jungle for the afternoon. That evening I began writing. Writing on the plane there put my journal in my mind, so I turned to it and began to write. Quickly it got late, so I ultimately went to sleep unfulfilled and unsatisfied. The next day I woke early once more and looked over the balcony and thought. The anime hadn’t helped me answer my question, so I searched and tracked down the manga for it. My mother and her boyfriend had plans for that day that didn’t need to involve me, so I spent the full day at Hawaii in hotel room solitude. I read all one-hundred and twenty-three chapter of the manga that day. Now I saw all her experiences, from fifth grade to graduating high school. Now I saw truly, what it meant to be transgender.

In America, the most traditional representation of transgender is “a man in a dress.” Interestingly, in Japan, the most traditional representation of transgender is a girl who lacks a single male feature except the penis. Hourou Musuko is kind of revolutionary from either cultural perspective, since the protagonist, Nitori, is neither “a man in a dress” nor a girl without a single male feature. She struggles with having to shave and her voice deepening after years of being able to don a wig and girl’s school uniform without issue. She struggles when she is taller than her older sister for the first time in her life. Nitori acts like a real person.

I wrote about this. I wrote about how I wished I could have been Nitori. Maybe by the end of the story she had as many masculine traits as I, but I wished I could have been her before puberty. I wished I could have just donned a wig and dress and go shopping with a best friend and have the clerk take me for a girl when I was a child. As I stared over the balcony that evening, I began to wish that the next day I would wake up as a girl. I thought that if I had enough willpower -- if I wished hard enough -- maybe it could actually happen. Really I knew it wasn’t true.

The next day when I went kayaking with my mother and her boyfriend and my muscles were aching I thought if I rowed just a little harder I would become a girl. When we went snorkeling and I accidentally swam far out to sea and panickedly paddled back, barely able to gasp for air, I thought maybe if I survived it I would become a girl. When we got back to the hotel I continued writing. I didn’t want to just be a girl. I wanted to be Nitori. I wanted to have the same life experiences she had. I wanted to roll back the clock to eight years old so I could’ve met a girl who told me I’d look cute in girl’s clothes. If I had had the experiences that Nitori did then maybe I would’ve come to a conclusion about all of this sooner. That evening I asked myself, “Who am I? What am I?” and came to no clear answers.

“Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I see this tall, gangly guy who hasn’t shaved in a few weeks.... Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I see myself. I always see the same person when I look in the mirror. It’s always me that looks back. But sometimes I’m not me…. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t identify with who I see in the mirror.”

I wanted to have more feminine mannerisms. I kept my knees together while sitting and I crossed my legs while standing. I spoke less outside of direct conversation. When nobody was watching I pulled up my wrists while I walked. I became attentive to the flowers in the flower garden we went to. I listened more than I spoke. I stopped running or jumping on curbs and balancing along them. I was self-conscious about everything I did. I wished I had brought a pair of pants. My legs were hairy and toned. I was ashamed to look the way I did. I loathed my body.

Writing became my standard. I wasn’t certain about my gender identity. I wasn’t certain about anything. Writing became the one thing I could point to. The words I had written were objectively me. They weren’t what I showed to the public world. They weren’t any one aspect of my personality. They were all of me. I wanted to show that version of me to my friends one day. I wanted them to read everything and know me truly. Suddenly I felt distant from my friends. Not because they didn’t know about my gender questioning, but because they never questioned my gender. If they really knew me, wouldn’t they have said something more? It was shameful, really. I was once again idolizing Nitori. I was thinking about what could have happened if I had been friends with her friends. I was valuing fictional characters as better than my own, flesh and blood friends.

Every evening and every morning I stood at that balcony and stared over it. If I jumped, would I have flown? If I jumped, would my wish come true and I’d wake up as a girl? If I saw a shooting star, would my wish have come true then? Waikiki was still beautiful at night, when the city lights were on. I wanted to reach out. I wanted to take a leap of faith to make my wish come true. Every morning, every evening I listened to Moonlight Sonata on repeat. I listened to it over two hundred times while in Hawaii.

Wishes don’t come true. With enough perseverance, wishes can be made. But the process is entirely done by yourself. I never woke up much different from how I fell asleep the night before. In Hawaii, I never was a girl. The plane back was somber and unmemorable. I wrote a lot. I worried a lot. On vacation, other people would take care of me, so I could spend all my time thinking and writing and questioning my gender. Back home I had responsibilities. I was psyching myself up by saying I’d do things the way Nitori would do them. Maybe if I acted enough like her, I would be able to decide for absolute whether I was a girl or a boy.

Author's Note

I don't intend to become a memoir writer, but here's my hand at writing something from my real life. Hehe. It makes me kind of nervous, publishing this. I hope it breaks the ice for anyone interested in talking to me. Do let me know how the writing itself is! I'm bad at proofreading my own works, so even checking grammatical errors can help.