Ms. Anderson’s Messages for Penny, Short Crosswalks, and Burritos

Claire Anderson has been living abroad for almost two decades now. “People, it turns out, are all people,” she says.

“Just give me the link, and I’ll do it for you,” Ms. Anderson says, her work-voice activated.

Ms. Amy stands beside the table, holding a pile of PSAT booklets. “Okay. I’m going to email—”

“Send me an image and a link. Is this you and Jamie’s thing? Go faster. The deadline was noon!”

Ms. Amy’s laughter carries down the hallway as she leaves the room. Ms. Anderson turns towards me, chuckling. “What was the rest of the question? Did I finish?”

She looks at me expectantly through her blue glasses, the lenses shining under the Tosabori Office’s bright lights. The soft buzz of the printer, occasional whisper between staff, and typing sounds from students’ Macbooks surround us. This background noise is Ms. Anderson’s most familiar sound—and has been for over a decade. It hasn’t always been this way.

“Nothing took me where I thought it was going to take me,” she said, her voice holding no hint of regret. “I was sure I was going to be a veterinarian because I loved biology and I was good at it. [The] University of Illinois has a great vet school, and so I thought I’m going to do that, I want to be there and I don’t know, fix horses or something, it’s going to be great.”

Things didn’t turn out as she had planned and she did not get to fix horses for a living, though now she gets to fix other people’s typos for the newsletter every week; a minor task amongst all the work she does for the school.

The young Ms. Anderson knew the direction her life was going. She was an Illinois-native, academically excelling, raw vegetable rejecting future vet. Then, she ran head first into organic chemistry.

“I was on the track to be a vet, and I got into organic chemistry, which I assume is some form of torture that they’ve made for people like me who don’t think like that,” she explained. “I hated it. I could not do it. I hated it so much and I was so angry about how much I felt like I was being forced to do this class, that I could not do it. I could not understand why they wanted me to do it, I could not think the way they wanted me to think.”

The branch of chemistry, which studies the structure and properties of carbon compounds, became an unforeseen obstacle for her, both academically and personally. The Marketing and Communications Coordinator and future English teacher grew up in what she described as a privileged, sheltered childhood, and was rarely accustomed to failure until that point. She was an exceptionally good student in high school with “A plus plus plus plus plus plus, you know, that kind of stuff”. Her tone is sure and straightforward. “My teachers…would always tell me how great I was all the time, and then I got to organic chemistry and I was like, wow, I’m really bad at this. And not only am I bad at this, but nobody cares how bad I am at it.” 

In her love for reading, she found a fallback option in majoring in English and minoring in Animal Sciences, and, in the end, said she had a really lovely college experience.

Soon after her last year of university, she moved to South Korea “on a sort of whim”.

After college, Ms. Anderson wanted to travel the world, captivated with a wanderlust that inspires many young people alike. After finding the process to come to Japan, her original intended destination, to be long and slow (“so many times writing my address down, I can’t even tell you”), she moved to Ulsan, South Korea in the summer of 2007. A year later, she and her then-boyfriend, Patrick Anderson, moved to Seoul, and worked at two different schools.

“We really liked it there, but we were very limited,” she said, her tone turning thoughtful and reflective. “We didn’t have a really good way to have a job that was outside of the academy. We just could be these after-school academy teachers with not many opportunities.” 

This is something I’ve noticed living abroad, as well: that international schools can become dangerously comfortable English-speaking bubbles. It can be hard to branch out and can even become lonely as a connectionless stranger to a foreign country.

Due to this, Ms. and Mr. Anderson moved back to the U.S. for a while to improve their degrees—master’s in linguistics and license in teaching, respectively—got married there, and then, though it was unplanned, moved back again to South Korea, to a city called Sacheon. Here, she slowly began to adapt to and learn more about South Korean culture, and in turn, herself.

After adversity turned into opportunity and she strayed onto a different path, Ms. Anderson started to become a more accepting, understanding, and open-minded person. By the time she moved to South Korea for the second time, she was well out of the small bubble of her childhood, challenging a lifestyle far away from familiarity. What drove all this, she said, was curiosity. When she was fresh out of college, she felt there was so much she didn’t know and wanted to know. Her curiosity only grew as she grew older, and she began to realize that there was too much to know that there was an infinite amount she was never going to know. “But it’s also very interesting,” she said. 

She did, however, learn a huge similarity between people across the world, which is that, at the end of the day, people are all people.

“The things that I actually found different were smaller than the things I found the same.”

“It doesn’t really matter if they stand in line or don’t get in line, if they drive like psychopaths or if they don’t drive like psychopaths, if they love spicy food or if they don’t love spicy food,” she said in a fast succession, partly laughing. “Those kinds of things are interesting and fun and they’re really enjoyable to learn and be a part of, but people, for the most part, have the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of happinesses, everywhere.”

Two universal topics we discussed in more detail were sexism and conservatism. In good Ms. Anderson fashion, she shared her perspective very clearly and strongly, and took my initial question into a more insightful light.

“In Korea and Japan, a lot of the gender roles that men and women feel pressured to fulfill are something that I would relate more to the 1950s in the States,” she said. There’s the husband who might “work and go out at night and drink with his buddies and come home and maybe he sees the kids on Sunday, and to them that’s fine”. 

“Um,” she said very loudly, pausing a little, then continuing, “then there’s the traditional housewife who doesn’t work, who stays home, who has children, manages the house, and gets excited about vacuum cleaners”. 

That also kind of sounds like my dog. But only the last one.

“The thing is, although that’s a large pattern in both countries, it’s not true for everybody. I knew plenty of women—I know plenty of women—in both countries who that doesn’t apply to. Not everyone conforms. Exactly. In that way.”

This is something Ms. Anderson herself had to think about in depth, namely when her family was adjusting to her adventurous decisions and eventual move across the globe. “When Patrick and I got married, when we didn’t have kids right away, when we moved to South Korea…when at our wedding we couldn’t take any gifts of appliances because we were moving to Korea two weeks afterwards…I remember that was very disturbing to many of my family members because that’s not what normally happens…even now, I have one child. We decided to have one, and that’s enough.”

All this talk on behind-the-times sexism was the reason I was so surprised when Ms. Anderson shared that with her experience of being a white, female foreigner, it was, in truth, a very privileged position. 

Beauty standards were different and didn’t count to her because she was a foreigner, she said. She was tall, had a small face, and had brown hair—those were pluses in themselves.

She also explained to me her superpower, “foreigner power”, where people of a cultural group excuse the social and cultural blunders of an outsider for their ignorance or stupidity. The foreigner is the stupid one, she explained. They’re the dumb one. People will be kind to them and not get mad and not yell even if they’re acting like a fool. When she was young and first discovering this power, she used to take advantage of it more. Now, she recognizes it as a wonderful amount of grace people give her and knows how lucky she is to have it.

When asked if she wished she didn’t have “foreigner power”, she contemplated in silence for a few moments. It helped her to become a more forgiving person to other people and their stupidity, she finally said. She believes people are almost always trying to be nice, and assumes everyone is doing exactly as she is doing: trying their best and making mistakes while doing so, and that it’s okay.

After living in South Korea for six years, Ms. Anderson knew it was time for a change. She’d visited Japan a couple times before, and knew she liked its food and climate, so, after securing a job, she left behind her loves of soup, kimchi, and spice and moved to the neighboring country with her husband and nine-month-old daughter, Penny.

“Japan and Korea, though near each other, are more different than you’d expect,” she said. “Korea is extremely frenetic. Everyone’s hurrying, people are just doing stuff and they’re going to drive like a crazy person to get there, and they’re going to order quickly and they’re going to throw their trash to the ground because they don’t have time to pick it up…in Japan, there’s a lot of consensus building…everything’s very rule-bound. Everyone has to agree. Everyone has a meeting before they have a meeting, before they have a meeting. In Korea, rule-following is an option. In Japan, it’s expected.”

I asked her about the short crosswalk right beneath our YMCA building, and if she waits for it each morning (“I hate that crosswalk” she muttered, while I asked this).

“No! But I do if there’s students, or a lot of people,” she laughed. “I don’t know why they [Japanese people] do that. No Korean person in all of Korea would ever do that.”

“In Korea, rule-following is an option. In Japan, it’s expected.”

On a more serious note, she shared with me how much she struggled adjusting in the first few months in Japan. She had left her friends and a language she was adequately familiar with and come to a country where people were more reserved and unwilling to reach out. She missed her friendships with other women, like her unnies in Korea. 

There was also the fact that she was taking care of “a very little baby…still at the breastfeeding, just learned how to walk…watching her every second so she doesn’t electrocute herself” age. She wasn’t working for the first few months but was at home, alone, with Penny. “It was very lonely, and that was hard,” she stated simply.

Something she was grateful for was how convenient and easy it was to raise a small child in Japan. It’s very safe, and there are many utilities that are beneficial to mothers, like changing tables and breast-feeding rooms almost anywhere you go. There were still hurdles, like enrolling Penny at preschool, a process that is notoriously difficult in Japan, but now Penny is very, very happy here, and Ms. Anderson’s outlook on her future has changed.

“She’s bilingual, which is so cool. I’m so jealous. You have no idea how jealous I am of my three-year-old. She’s amazing,” she says, beaming. “And she doesn’t know anywhere else…Japan has been her home.”

By this point, our interview had been continuing for fifty minutes, and our conversation was gradually dwindling down. We were now into Mr. Marc’s dark office, and Mr. Baier could be heard singing in the office next door. Yet, besides the Friday energy in the air, Ms. Anderson continues to be as engaged as she was in the beginning, and now her eyes are lit as she talks about her daughter. 

“I’m trying to figure out, for the next couple of years, is this my chance to move again and find something new? Or is this a time to make sure if I found the best of all the worlds and should I just be satisfied with that?”

She doesn’t have any definitive plans to leave within the next year or two. She wants her daughter to be able to retain her Japanese, and to be comfortable and happy growing up in a foreign country.

“I don’t think otherness is necessarily easy, but I do think it’s important. And I want her to know that, because that, in my opinion, makes you a gentler person. It makes you a person who’s more forgiving of others and more tolerant of others and more willing to accept differences. That’s what I hope she can be like, because it took me living overseas for more than a decade to learn it. She can learn it from the very beginning. What a great chance.

“Living overseas is great. I do wish the coronavirus would end so I could go home at some point. I haven’t been home in ages, have you been to the States recently?” 

I shake my head. 

“No, right? It’s been ages.” She sighs. “I just would like a burrito.”

This profile was written for the G10 English L&L Unit “The Artful Interview”.